{"id":2359,"date":"2016-07-22T16:01:28","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T21:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2359"},"modified":"2016-07-22T16:01:46","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T21:01:46","slug":"as-it-was-in-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/as-it-was-in-the-beginning\/","title":{"rendered":"As It Was in the Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0229<\/a><\/p>\n

Our newborn son sat in my lap as I waited at the hospital entrance for my husband to bring the car around to take us home for the first time. I thought about all the surprising professions that required a license \u2013 beauticians, private eyes, and even interior designers.\u00a0 Basically,\u00a0any profession where incompetency may result in public harm requires a license.\u00a0 If anything cried out for a license, it was a new mother taking home her baby.\u00a0 I knew nothing about infants. My husband pulled up, the nurses bundled us in the car, noting that the car seat should be rear-facing, and off we went.\u00a0 The next day Nick went back to work. Ned\u2019s big brown eyes fluttered open and I said to him, \u201cOkay little man, we\u2019re in this together.\u00a0 Be patient with me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had certainly read about how my heart was supposed to explode with love, how motherhood would transform me into an improved and ennobled person.\u00a0 There were moments when I could believe it\u00a0\u2013 the first smile or laugh, the moment when I felt a small hand grasp my neck in the first hug.\u00a0 But in those early days, I could not quite grasp how these sublime feelings would play out in everyday life, in particular every night life.\u00a0 I remember my stomach churning when I heard Ned fuss in the dark, the exact same feeling I had when my beeper went off when I was on call in my medical residency.\u00a0 I never knew what sort of emergency I might be confronted with, if or when I would ever get back to sleep.\u00a0 I had those same fears as I threw off the covers and padded down the hall to Ned\u2019s room.<\/p>\n

After about a month, we got our first babysitter, a high school student who described her first aid courses and babysitting training.\u00a0 This fourteen-year-old was far more qualified than I.\u00a0 As we were leaving, I added one more contact number to her list.\u00a0 \u201cIf you run into any trouble, if you can\u2019t get Ned to sleep or stop crying, don\u2019t call me, call\u00a0your\u00a0mother.\u00a0 She\u2019ll know what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some days stretched out forever.\u00a0 It was too cold for walks.\u00a0 I was trapped inside, taking naps while Ned napped.\u00a0 The bulk of my waking hours were consumed with infant care, and I could not expect him to smile and hug all day long.\u00a0 I categorized his development into the four \u201cp\u2019s”:\u00a0the in-utero\u00a0protoplasm, to the current\u00a0project, \u00a0eagerly awaiting\u00a0the final\u00a0transitions\u00a0to\u00a0personality and actual\u00a0person.\u00a0 In the meantime, my own identity as a physician was ebbing away.<\/p>\n

Spring finally came and we ventured to the park.\u00a0 I snugged Ned into a swing and started pushing.\u00a0 This pre-cellphone ear of the 1980s offered few multitasking opportunities and I noticed bored women on either side of me robotically pushed their children. I turned to the woman next to me.\u00a0\u201cWhen do children learn to pump?\u201d I asked, anticipating the joyous day when Ned could entertain himself and I could quietly watch while doing a crossword puzzle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell this is my third child, so I\u2019ve logged a lot of pushing hours.\u00a0 It usually takes about five years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWHAT!\u00a0\u00a0Five years?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, and then guess what? Once they can pump, they don\u2019t want to swing anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

At home, I had found some success in entertaining Ned with a jack-in-the-box, numbly cranking that creepy clown,\u00a0hoping to coax a smile or even laugh when it popped open. \u00a0 I suspected the situation was similar to pumping. Once Ned learned how to crank the damn thing, he would lose interest.<\/p>\n

Was I missing something? \u00a0Was I the only one left to discover that early motherhood was boring?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t my mother warn me?\u00a0\u00a0After all she had six children within ten years.\u00a0\u00a0She must have known.\u00a0\u00a0But by the time I was old enough to appreciate my mother as an individual, her children had become self-sufficient, allowing her the freedom to pursue her passions of music and sports.\u00a0\u00a0I never saw my mother in the diapered trenches, never saw her sweeping Cheerios off the floor, corralling kids into baths and beds or rushing them to an emergency room on Saturday night with an earache.\u00a0\u00a0Every week I lugged a straining bag of sodden diapers that bumped down the stairs behind me, often just missing the diaper service pick up.\u00a0\u00a0My mother must have done the same.\u00a0\u00a0What impact did that have on her identity as a bright, well-educated woman?<\/p>\n

She must have had dark days in those early years.\u00a0 Maybe selective amnesia was her savior or maybe it was just too difficult to talk about \u2013 if the joy of early motherhood was a sham, what did that say about her children?\u00a0\u00a0Did she regret it? Yes, I would agree that the overarching theme of those early days was one of undiluted love and fierceness to do anything to protect my child, but on an every-day basis there were many moments of identity-sapping boredom.\u00a0 Seared inot by brain are those rainy mornings where I had totally exhausted all indoor activities by\u00a09 AM.<\/p>\n

What about the nine years I had invested in my medical school training?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The truth was that I had\u00a0plopped into the safety net of motherhood as a place-holder until I figured out what I wanted to do next.\u00a0\u00a0I also realized that this safety net had supplanted the alternative safety net of dual incomes of both my husband and myself.\u00a0\u00a0I was giving up too much.<\/p>\n

I began to explore the oxymoronic concept of \u201cworking from home\u201d as a medical journalist.\u00a0\u00a0The American Medical News, the newspaper of the American Medical Association, accepted my offer to write a column on new medical technologies. Each month I would indulge in the services of a daytime babysitter\u00a0and\u00a0go to the medical library\u00a0to\u00a0scour journals for any medical technology that caught my eye \u2013 perhaps a new cardiac stent or a bloodless vasectomy. I gathered up ancillary research and digested it at home while Ned napped.<\/p>\n

For most columns I attempted to wrangle an interview with a key opinion leader, or a KOL,\u00a0as I began to grasp the jargon.\u00a0 I swelled with pride as I quipped with a KOL and asked deeply probing questions full of fresh insight.\u00a0\u00a0Okay, I was\u00a0delusional on those points, but it didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 I imagined that I was holding my own in discussions with physicians who were tops in their field.\u00a0 I relished my columns.<\/p>\n

There was only one little glitch. \u00a0Physicians would return my calls at odd moments when I was deep into my role as a mother.\u00a0 I always dropped everything for these calls because I knew a busy physician would give me only one chance.\u00a0 One time I left Ned screaming in his crib and trembled outside in a snow storm attempting to sound calm and intellectual; I hoped\u00a0the\u00a0doctor\u00a0did not hear Ned\u2019s muffled cries.\u00a0 Another time I instinctively answered the phone as I got out of the shower and was immediately plunged into a detailed conversation about heart transplants.\u00a0 My caller\u00a0was blissfully unaware that he was having a cerebral discussion with someone who was stark naked and dripping wet.<\/p>\n

One elusive physician called when I was in the midst of a particularly grimy diaper change, but I could only forge ahead; there was no work-around.\u00a0 I balanced Ned on the changing table with my left elbow and wedged the phone under my ear.\u00a0\u00a0I fished a pen out of my pocket, but there was no paper within reach.\u00a0\u00a0I wrote my interview notes on the wallpaper as I hovered over the steaming pile, madly flicking the pen to overcome the effects of gravity.\u00a0 The notes were still there years later when we moved.<\/p>\n

That episode swung the balance.\u00a0\u00a0I learned that you cannot multitask a\u00a0top-level\u00a0diaper change with an intellectual discussion, and I preferred the latter.\u00a0 I needed a full time job, an office, a room of my own and a regular babysitter.\u00a0\u00a0I took a position as a\u00a0scientific writer and medical policy analyst for health insurance companies.\u00a0\u00a0This job had a limited career path, but the regular hours and no travel made the compromise easy.\u00a0\u00a0Without an endless day stretching ahead of me, I could spend the evenings and weekends enjoying the park, the little wading pool in the\u00a0back\u00a0yard, and\u00a0strings of Play-Doh oozing out of a sausage maker.\u00a0 Four years later we welcomed our daughter.<\/p>\n

I would tell my children that those first years are very tough, but I did it, plowed through like my mother before me and discovered her same the profound joy of motherhood. It’s been 30 years and I wouldn’t change a thing. \u00a0However, my identity would have crumbled without the additional dimension of a job. \u00a0My admiration for my mother grows when I think of the limited identities available to her in the 1950s.\u00a0\u00a0She had to go it alone.\u00a0\u00a0I had options, she did not.\u00a0\u00a0As I head into retirement and look back at the pivotal moments in my working life, I would like to give full and grateful\u00a0credit to that that\u00a0happy convergence of a pile of pooh, a physician calling, and no writing paper.\u00a0 It was the tipping point I needed.<\/p>\n

The missing words in the following poems are a set of anagrams (i.e. share letter like post, stop, spot, etc) and the number of asterisks indicate the number of letters. \u00a0One of the missing words will rhyme with the word above or below, giving you a big hint. \u00a0Your job is to solve the missing words based on the rules above and the context of the poem. \u00a0Scroll down for answers.<\/em><\/code><\/p>\n

As a first time mother my heart fluttered and ******<\/p>\n

But this quickly soured when I became frustrated and bored.<\/p>\n

Was it an open secret that not every young mother ****** her role?<\/p>\n

That diapers, drool and other smeared body fluids will suck dry your soul?<\/p>\n

But I reclaimed my identity with a new job that gave me a fresh start.<\/p>\n

Inspired by a simple pile of pooh that I forever hold ** **** to my heart<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*soared, adores so dear<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our newborn son sat in my lap as I waited at the hospital entrance for my husband to bring the car around to take us home for the first time. I thought about all the surprising professions that required a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-such-is-life","category-what-i-did"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-C3","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2359"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2362,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions\/2362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}