On looking back and looking ahead
A look back at 2023 and our first year as a family of four, and a look ahead to 2024
I last posted on here at the beginning of December 2022. It’s hard to get my head around the fact that we are now in 2024. So many of the last few years have been dominated by big milestones, both globally and for us as a family. 2020: the pandemic and C’s first year. 2021: moving into our first house and trying for a second baby. 2022: my pregnancy and the arrival of baby number two, baby J! 2023: baby J’s first year. It feels like surely 2024 will be boring and nondescript, but who knows?
In my last post I wrote about Christmases past and my hopes for a more relaxed, less pressured Christmas in 2022. Re-reading that post now, I had to laugh because Christmas 2022 ended up being anything but relaxing. Baby J was born a few days before Christmas, and we had a bit of a rough start. The birth itself was fast (just one and a half hours—we almost didn’t make it to the hospital) and well timed (between two snowstorms). But J didn’t go down to sleep at all in the hospital. She started breastfeeding almost immediately after she was born and would fall asleep on me after each feed. But as soon as I put her down in the hospital bassinet, she woke again and started sucking on her hand—newborn for, I’m hungry! In contrast, C slept for about five hours in her hospital bassinet after she was born.
This pattern of back-to-back feeding continued for the next two days. By the morning of day three, I had only slept about four broken hours. Breastfeeding J was also becoming incredibly painful. My nipples were bleeding, and every time she latched on I silently howled in agony. It became so painful and I was so addled by exhaustion that I decided to stop breastfeeding and switch to formula. I hoped my nipples would heal up and I’d be able to get back to breastfeeding, but I ended up developing mastitis on Christmas Day and ultimately had to take antibiotics (after a lovely fourteen hours in the emergency room). After two weeks of not breastfeeding, I was surprised when J took the breast again, but we were never able to get back to exclusively breastfeeding, and I stopped breastfeeding altogether when J was around three months.
I’ll be sharing more about my experience with breastfeeding and formula feeding in a post later in the year! But suffice to say, it was not the tranquil first week of life with baby number two that I had been hoping for. I’d had visions of me lying in bed, bedsheets scrunched around me, a sleepy baby in my arms, and my exposed breasts leaking milk. Instead, the house was a mess, we were exhausted, and we had an active three year old and a dog, both of whom need daily trips out of the house. And on top of all that, both of my in-laws got stuck in Vancouver for two nights (a few days apart from each other because my mother-in-law stayed with us a few extra days to be here for the baby who was keeping us all waiting). Oh, and did I mention our basement flooded on Christmas Day and we spent the next few weeks having our yard dug up and a new storm drain system installed?
Even though I wouldn’t want anyone to end up in hospital a week after giving birth, there were glimmers of goodness in among the (literal) muck of that week. I felt immense gratitude for the kindness of strangers. For the Canadian Iranian woman who put my mother-in-law up for the night in her Vancouver apartment after they both had their flights cancelled. For Nancy, the porter who wheeled me around the hospital to various scans and was so friendly she made me smile despite the circumstances. For all the nurses and doctors who were working in an already overstretched healthcare system during the busiest week of the year and yet gave me the most kind, patient, and thorough care I could have hoped for (though of course the fact that I am white, middle class, and relatively thin plays a significant role in the way I am treated by medical professionals).
I felt gratitude too for my family. I was messaging with my mum and sister the whole time I was at the hospital, and later, after I was released, my husband told me his mum (who had only just arrived home after her travel ordeal) had started googling flights in case I had to spend longer in the hospital (at first the doctors thought I might have appendicitis because I was having intense abdominal pain. Fun times!). Even though my family was far away, I felt held from afar.
And of course, there was baby J. My sweet, smiling (really, she was smiling at two weeks old), and beautiful blue-eyed girl. I can honestly say, meeting her for the first time was one of the most joyous and profound moments of my life (along with meeting C for the first time).
Fast forward to Christmas 2023 and I found myself resisting the festive season. As the end of November approached and people around me started to talk about Christmas, neighbours put out lights and decorations, and my husband insisted on playing Christmas music, I found myself recoiling. It all brought back memories of the previous year. But as the month progressed, I had to admit some of it was actually quite lovely. I enjoyed seeing all the Christmas light displays around town and attending the town’s Christmas tree lighting. We also got a tree and it was fun to see C’s enthusiasm and to decorate the house with her.
I also felt good about the things we decided not do to or simply didn’t have time for. We didn’t bake cookies or mince pies. We didn’t visit Santa at the mall. We don’t have an Elf on the Shelf. And although I found Christmas shopping stressful and never ending, it brought me great joy to wrap up gifts I knew loved ones would enjoy. All this to say, as the weeks before Christmas crept by, I actually started to look forward to the holidays and spending time together as a family.
Christmas Day itself unfolded slowly. We spent hours opening presents because the girls wanted to play with each toy or gift as they opened it. We didn’t get dressed until the afternoon and didn’t end up doing a full English for breakfast—perhaps that tradition has finally fallen by the wayside, even though it felt like an integral part of Christmas growing up. We video called with grandparents and it was lovely. It rained all morning and afternoon, but we didn’t mind since everyone was happy inside playing with new toys or flicking through new books.
By the late afternoon the wind had started to pick up and I glanced nervously at the power lines from time to time. As we sat down to eat dinner, I said, “Well, this year’s Christmas has definitely been more of a success than last year’s, but there’s still time for the power to go out.” And immediately after I uttered those words, the power went out. We ate dinner by lantern light and felt grateful that we had actually managed to cook the food before the outage. We even had Christmas music on a battery powered radio and put battery powered lights on the Christmas tree. When the power eventually came back on, the sump pump alarm was going off. Reader: our basement flooded for the second Christmas in a row. Fortunately, it wasn’t anything like the last time, when Spencer spent almost the entire day hauling boxes from the basement and vacuuming up water—while I was out for the count with a raging fever and my mother-in-law looked after the three-year-old and the baby. Still, you don’t really ever want your basement to be flooding.
By Boxing Day, the basement was dry and we were ready to get on with enjoying Betwixtmas. Except, I’d had a sore throat since Christmas Eve. It had gotten worse during Christmas Day, and I’d spent large parts of the night coughing. The next morning I felt groggy and decided to take a COVID-19 test. Yep, it came back positive. We tested the rest of the family, and C’s test came back positive too. I also then got an email to say our daycare provider had tested positive, along with one of the other daycare families. We debated whether it made sense for C and I to isolate from Spencer and J, since they had probably already been heavily exposed, and ultimately decided it made sense to do so while testing everyone daily.
So, instead of a week together, we spent the week with half the family on one side of the house and the other half on the other side. It was not how I had envisioned the week going. But it actually wasn’t that bad. I knew from the beginning that it would be hard for me because getting out of the house at least once, ideally twice, per day is vital for my mental health. The fact that it rained for a week solid made not going out slightly easier. I also had to be clear with my boundaries. C likes to do a lot of imaginative play that can sometimes get quite boisterous and noisy, which I find quite mentally overstimulating after a while. I had to be good about acknowledging to myself, nope, that’s enough for me, and redirecting her to activities that felt more soothing to my nervous system. So, we did a lot of colouring. We did lots of crafting too. And we also watched a lot of television, which gave me the chance to sleep since I was feeling pretty wiped for the first few days.
Honestly, it was hard to feel too put out. We were warm and dry and fed and safe. It’s hard to read the news these days without feeling a lot of things, but among the soup of anxiety and sadness and fear: deep, deep gratitude for the simple fact of hearing my children breathe, warm and safe in their beds at night. That gratitude feels wrong somehow, but it exists nonetheless.
Since my last post, besides some slightly disastrous Christmases, we’ve had a mostly quiet and good year. If you asked me how my 2023 went, I might say, “I survived.” And I feel proud of that fact. Going from one kiddo to two was a lot at times. I didn’t get enough sleep, and I sometimes felt pushed to my limit. I went to the doctor, I checked in with my counsellor, somehow I weathered the difficult bits. But maybe I also thrived? There were times when baby number two felt easy, and I had to remind myself, it’s okay if it feels easy, this doesn’t have to be hard. There were times when I spiralled into catastrophizing, and I had to remind myself, it might all be okay. That’s also an option.
There were times when I found myself enjoying the simple rhythms of a day spent alone with a baby. That enjoyment felt like a precious gift, but it also felt bittersweet. It’s hard for me to say that I didn’t enjoy C’s early years. She, of course, was nothing but goodness and light. But I can see now that I really struggled to adjust to parenthood. I had wildly unrealistic expectations about what life with a baby would look like. I thought that our life would look essentially the same, but with the addition of a cute baby. Instead, we moved country, I changed careers, we had a baby, and nothing about our lives looked the same as it had a few years before.
Even my expectations of parenthood that were somewhat realistic—going to mum and baby groups, making mum friends, singing nursery rhymes at the library with the baby on my lap, and taking baby swim classes—were thwarted when C was five months old and Ontario (where we were living at the time) went into lockdown. Over the next year I continued to study for a diploma and put together a literary magazine, my grandmother passed away, and we moved house twice, including a big move across Canada to British Columbia. I can almost feel the whiplash. If it were anyone else in my shoes I would feel nothing but compassion. But of course, I look back and feel guilt that I wasn’t enjoying every moment.
This first year with baby J has been so different to C’s first year. It helps that I’m no longer overdoing and overachieving. It also helps that we are in a more settled place in our lives. We own a house, and we live in a place we love, surrounded by forests and mountains. It also helps that we’re no longer officially living through a pandemic. This year I got to go to mum and baby groups and make mum friends. I got to go to baby song time at the library. I could have done baby swim classes, but I chose not to. During the pandemic and during every difficult phase of life with a first baby, I simply couldn’t see the end in sight. This year, I at least knew that the sleepless nights would probably end at some point (and they did). I knew teething wouldn’t be forever. I knew she would eventually learn to eat solids and not just gag and throw up every time she tried to eat. And I know that all the faltering steps she is taking now will eventually turn to walking.
Besides having a freshly minted toddler in our lives, I’m not sure what 2024 will have in store for me and my family. I think living through a pandemic I did not expect has left me with the permanent sense that nothing, even the most basic assumption, is a given. I can assume we’ll spend the next year in our home here on Vancouver Island. That C will start school this year and that we will, at some point, get to spend time with extended family. I’d like to do work I enjoy and for time with my children to feel fun and breezy. I’d like to get my very rough first draft of a book into a less rough state. And I’d like to have time this spring and summer to tackle the yard. But I’ve had many such goals in the past, so I’m holding onto these goals very lightly. Some things have already fallen by the wayside and many more will follow. I’m excited by all the possibility, but if I’m sat here next year typing, well, I survived, then that will be okay too.