As if I don’t have enough to do what with the child rearing and house maintaining and such, I went and bought a fish tank for Áine’s room a few months ago. I had read that the sound of a bubbling fish tank could help soothe her and help her sleep, so I thought why not. We started out with four minnows and a very handsome bright red betta, who we named Fishes 1-4 and Mr. Fish, respectively. Thinking I was being a responsible fish mom, I cleaned their little tank every week.
The first fish tragedy occurred when one of the minnows committed fishy suicide while I was cleaning his tank. Mid-clean, I looked into the bowl where I was keeping them in the meantime – one fish, two fish, three fish…WHERE THE FUCK IS FISH #4?? Well fish #4 was on the fucking floor. He had jumped out of the bowl and plunged to his doom. RIP Fish #4.
A week or so later, Mr. Fish started looking not so hot. His color dulled and his fins started to look kind of shredded. I kept an eye on him, kind of concerned, and then one day I looked in on him and he was covered head to tail in white fuzz. ”Well that,” I told myself, “CAN’T be good”.
I poked around online and was bombarded with a dizzying amount of information on fish diseases. I thought, screw this, and went back to the store where we bought him and asked what was up. I told the guy how I’d been religiously cleaning the tank and he told me that was exactly the wrong thing to do. Apparently when you’re first setting up a tank, you have to let it get good and dirty (to an acceptable degree) to let good bacteria build up that will process fishy waste. If you clean the tank too often, you don’t let the bacteria build up and basically your fish are eaten alive by toxins that would normally have been digested by bacteria. By the time I learned this, it was too late for Mr. Fish and he died a horrible HORRIBLE fishy death.
I was wracked with guilt. I’m usually not one to feel too badly for fish, but he was my pet and by trying to do what I thought was the right thing, I caused him to die and die painfully. I think Mr. Fish will haunt me the rest of my days.
But that didn’t stop me from going out and buying another fish. This time I did it right and waited for a month – didn’t clean the tank (the three remaining minnows didn’t seem to mind) to make sure all the good bacteria were built up – and I bought a lovely fantail goldfish, named Fatty Bo-Batty:
I brought him home and put him in the little one and a half gallon tank with the three minnows and all seemed happy as can be.
Then I started poking around online to find information on caring for fantail goldfish and everywhere I read that at a minimum fantail goldfish need to be in a ten gallon tank in order to be healthy and happy. Usually I would have been like, whatever, it’s a fucking fish. But I was still suffering from Mr. Fish Guilt and was convinced that if I left Fatty in the little tank that he would be miserable. So I went out and bought a goddamn ten gallon tank. I put the minnows in it for three weeks to get it “ready” for Fatty while he stayed in the little tank by himself.
Today was the day and Fatty moved into his new home. Áine and I also took a trip back to the fish store and bought him a little calico girlfriend (or maybe a boyfriend? It’s hard to tell with fish). Turns out Fatty is kind of a douchebag and has been relentlessly chasing his new buddy all over the tank. I figure they’ll work it out. Here’s a photo of Fatty in pursuit of Gato (named in honor of the cat that Pepe Le Peu was always chasing):
We also got a little freshwater eel (named Pinky) to hang out on the bottom. He’s camera shy though, so no pics of him.
The overall moral to this story? I am a sucker. I guess it’s worth it though:
One of the biggest challenges of parenting for me so far (I mean besides the normal lack of sleep stuff) has been learning to take things in stride. Case in point, a few weeks ago we transitioned her from the co-sleeper next to our bed to her crib in her room, and one night a little while after putting her to bed we hear her screaming. Turns out she had inadvertently flipped over onto her stomach in her sleep and woke up: “OHMYGODI’MONMYTUMMYHOWDIDTHATHAPPENWAAAAAAAAAAH!!!” She was like a turtle in reverse – on her belly, not quite sure how she’d gotten there, and not quite sure what to do about it.
Now, one of the greatest fears for any new parent is the threat of SIDS, and actually having known someone who lost a family member to SIDS, I was particularly concerned about it. Everything I read prior to giving birth said that one of the risk factors is stomach sleeping, so we should always put her on her back to sleep. We even had a little wedge thing that she slept with when she was tiny to prevent her from turning over. So when she started turning over on her own, we were pretty uneasy. I tried putting her in the wedge thing, but she managed to turn over anyway and got herself stuck between the wedge and the crib rail. The wedge was history. I checked on her a million times that night. The next night she didn’t cry after we put her down, but every time I checked on her she would be on her tummy. At first I would just flip her back over every time. We agonized about what to do about it, and again I got up countless times to check on her, and every time she would just be slumbering away, sweet as can be.
It became clear after those first couple nights that she really liked to sleep that way, so eventually we figured that a) if she was big enough to get herself onto her belly, she was probably big enough to sleep that way if she wanted, and b) she has a really strong neck and can hold her upper body up really well, so if she needed help because she was stuck, we would be sure to hear about it.
I guess what I learned from this little exercise is that I can’t totally control the world that my daughter lives in, or what she does in it. She’s already, at the tender age of five months old, making decisions for herself. After going through everything we went through to bring Áine into our lives, I just want things to be perfect for her, to keep her safe and happy, but I can’t live in terror that something bad is going to happen or I’m going to miss all the good stuff. Not only that, but I need to set a good a example for her and teach her to be independent and resilient. I don’t want her to grow up afraid of the world, afraid that something bad lurks around every turn. I can try my best to be vigilant and do what I think is right for her, but even now there are things that I need to learn to trust her on. I need to trust that she is healthy and strong, and that, for the most part, the world works as it should. It’s going to be a constant struggle, since letting go of control is not something that comes easily to me. But I have a long life of mothering ahead of me, and it will be easier if I can learn to stop holding my breath.
Now, a couple weeks later, we’ve got ourselves a little stomach sleeper. At bedtime, we put her down on her back, and she promptly sticks a thumb in her mouth and flips over, asleep almost immediately. And this sweet girl sleeps aaaaaaaaaall night long.
I realize once again that I have been neglecting this space that used to be so integral to my life. My blog started out as just a way for me to let off some steam, where I posted about bullshit, links to news stories or something funny I found online, pictures from our travels.
But then we started trying to get pregnant and my blog took on a whole new importance in my life. It became the way that I processed my thoughts. For a couple years, I had so much going on in my head that I needed to get it all out onto a page on a regular basis in order to maintain any kind of sanity. I found that I could write about my feelings surrounding the sixteen months it took to get pregnant the first time, the devastation that was my first miscarriage, the failed IUI, and the year it took me to recover SO much more clearly than I could express them verbally.
Even more profoundly, the support I received from the people whose blogs I found, or who found mine, was really my saving grace. In my dark times I knew I was not alone in my crushed hope, the ache in my heart, and the empty feeling in my womb. That there were women out there who knew how I felt because they had suffered it themselves made the pain a bit less acute. Seeing how strong other women were after their losses inspired me to pick myself back up off the floor and try again.
And then I got pregnant with Áine and I let my blogging duties slide. I wrote a bit about why a few weeks before she was born. And since she was born I’ve been so elated and dazed and harried that blogging has been the LAST thing on my mind. I’ve posted a couple updates, a handful of pictures for the folks who have stuck with me over the past few years and sent their good wishes for Áine’s safe arrival. But for the most part I’ve been pretty lax about blogging, and about visiting the blogs of my friends in the online infertility community.
Today I was perusing some old posts and read some old comments and found myself thinking, “oh yeah, I wonder whatever happened to…” So I visited some blogs I haven’t been to in a while and was reminded that some people are still trying, still fighting for what I have now been so blessed with. I read their words and it broke my heart all over again because I remember what it felt like to get bad news from my doctor. I remember curling up onto the couch in a ball and crying harder than I’ve ever cried in my life.
And it made me feel like an asshole for all but abandoning this space and for not being a better support to the people who supported me. I still hesitate to write about how happy I am with my brand new daughter, because I don’t want to rub salt in the wounds of anyone who is hurting. But I also feel like disappearing, or not being honest about the joy I have now, would be an even bigger insult.
So I’m going to write about my life like I did before. The subject matter will be a little different and the posts may be a bit sporadic, but I am going to make the effort. If I don’t post writing, I’ll post pictures (more about my photography later). It’ll be good for me as well, give me a chance to write again, to sharpen my mind back up (I hope – being really tired for months on end tends to turn the brain into mush). I also have a whole new headful of thoughts and feelings to process: about being a mom, a wife, and a woman who is not quite sure where to go from here, but is looking forward to the journey.
