The plan for after I’m done with my maternity leave has been to have my mom come and watch the baby. To be fair, my mom hasn’t been 100% on board with this arrangement for a variety of reasons but she’s been open to it mainly for the reason that I wanted it this way to begin with: reluctance to leave a newborn in daycare or with an unknown nanny.<\/p>\n
But now I’m starting to have second thoughts about this too, mainly because I don’t want to have to cede my control as a mother or to have my mom threaten me with not watching the baby anymore every time I make a decision contrary to what she would make.<\/p>\n
I didn’t think this would be a huge problem considering that my mom isn’t generally a huge control freak. Our house growing up was always fairly messy, our food wasn’t particularly fussy, and rules generally negotiable. <\/p>\n
But I realize now that more and more frequently things are presented to me as a suggestion only for me to find myself being yelled at when I decide not to follow said suggestion. <\/p>\n
Example, my mom and I were having a conversation just now and she casually brings up that I should stop wearing skirts. The genesis of this being that I wore a dress to my family baby shower on Sunday and apparently my grandmother’s helper, her sister-in-law and her all thought that I would make the baby “cold” by having an “open space” down there. <\/p>\n
First of all, WTF? <\/p>\n
Second of all, I don’t give a crap what “the helper” says. Who is she? She has met me exactly two times now. <\/p>\n
I tell her okay, okay, since I generally don’t wear dresses anymore anyway, I wear my yoga pants 99% of the time as she herself should know since that’s what I’ve worn EVERY other time I’ve seen her in the past 3 months. She then lays in with the thing that completely set me off (also remember, eight months pregnant with hormones), she tells me, that I better<\/i> not show up in a skirt at my next baby shower on January 12. <\/p>\n
I probably should have stayed calm and just said okay, but instead I said (and I admit, with attitude), “OKAY, I was planning to wear a dress I had picked out but since you’ve COMMANDED me not to, I won’t.” <\/p>\n
Then we hung up and I started crying in anger while poor Paul listened to me scream about how, I DON’T GIVE A FUCKING SHIT WHAT THE HELPER SAYS and SHE SHOULD MIND HER OWN FUCKING BUSINESS. <\/p>\n
Am I overreacting? I know, I am. But if this is a sign of things to come. Of me being COMMANDED what I can and can’t do for the good and health of my own baby then I’m not okay with that. I’m sorry, I get it. I’m her child. But I’m not A child. And I’m about to have MY OWN child. As in MY child. That I get to make decisions for. That I<\/i> get to be the mommy to. And she is allowed to give me her opinions but she is not allowed to make me feel bad because she throws out the “experience” or the “other people agree with me” card. <\/p>\n
Paul said she was probably just flustered. Completely unrelated to our conversation she was having a bad day, I know this. And she was annoyed in part because she attributed her bad day with the fact that I asked her not to come visit today (she felt like the bad things that happened wouldn’t have if she had come here instead like she wanted). So that was probably part of it.<\/p>\n
But now I’m<\/i> upset, and my blood pressure is undoubtedly raised and I’m not happy or relaxed. And this is actually why I didn’t want them to come visit today! Because since Christmas I’ve seen them almost every single day and it’s been more stressful than not. <\/p>\n
Bah-humbug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The plan for after I’m done with my maternity leave has been to have my mom come and watch the baby. To be fair, my mom hasn’t been 100% on board with this arrangement for a variety of reasons but she’s been open to it mainly for the reason that I wanted it this way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-talk","category-navel-gazing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/transcended.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}