Pounds & Ounces

* warning...this blogpost contains thoughts pertaining to breastfeeding...if this makes you squeamish you need not read further *

Well, hello again blog. The darling human being above has left me neglecting the blog, along with just about everything else other than her, for the better part of the past month. I am not sure where the minutes, hours and days have gone, but somehow it's mid-June. Adah is over a month old, we close on our new house tomorrow (and luckily rent back our condo from our buyers for another month while renovation madness ensues...), and somehow summer is upon us. I haven't even been to the farmer's market, I have yet to take a summer run, and I am drastically behind on "life," but I have cuddled the heck out of a little person for the past 33 days, and that has been sufficient. More than sufficient. What an indescribable journey.

I have also been consumed with my boobs. And when I say consumed, I mean consumed. Due to being so early, and some other complications that need not be outlined in detail on a blog, we have had our fair share of feeding challenges. And then, just when we thought we were rounding a corner...I was hit up with a nasty case of mastitis. Ew, and I mean nasty. The tears have been flowing, and I have such a new-found sensitivity to all of those people out there plagued by the "breast is best" slogan - those who want desperately to breastfeed and just can't make it happen, despite valiant efforts. And, as I have many times throughout this process, I've thought "how come people never told me how HARD this is?!?" Alas, we will make it. And be better for it.

This experience, like so many in my life, has brought me to a point where, like it or not, I can see God's hand in teaching me a lesson. This whole feeding saga has been filled with lessons already...about patience, expectations, judgment, humility and on and on. But there has been some irony in it as well, some irony that cuts pretty deep.

Yet again, and yet so differently, I've come to a point in my life where I'm obsessed with weight. Each day the focus is on making sure that Adah gains an ounce...little tiny peanut that she is. My whole purpose seems focused on producing enough good food to help the little lady grow, and each day (hour...) I am thinking about how many pounds and how many ounces make up her little body, dreaming of the day when she has deliciously chubby and squeezable baby thighs.

And so enters the irony. A darker part of my self, one that I don't talk about lightly or often in settings such as this, has cared about pounds and ounces much too much in my own life. As a woman, as a dancer, and as a human being subject to media and culture in today's world, I have suffered the expectations of obtaining the "perfect body." At points in my life it has been an obsession that far exceeds that of what I am experiencing at the moment, and those were dark times. At other times, I have found ways to regulate myself and my emotions and my relationship to my body. And at all times, for honestly as long as I can remember, pounds and ounces have been more of a focus of my energy than I am proud to admit.

When my dad was sick I was forced to come face to face with the sadness of my own obsession. Here was a man who had never counted a calorie for a minute in his life, and his own obsession became eating enough to gain (or at least maintain) weight. We'd sit down for a meal, and I'd be able to give him the calorie count of his plate within seconds...he would sit in shock, disbelief that I could rattle off the information with such speed and accuracy. I would be equally surprised (and somewhat jealous) that he really had no idea that lettuce had a significantly lesser calorie count than a brownie. And so we'd work together, my sickness and his, in some strange collaboration.

This period of my life passed. I no longer have any need to count calories for anyone else, and after the need passed for me to do so for my dad, I just resumed my own self-consumed ways of worrying about the likes for myself, for my own self-obsession with body and weight and pounds. And such has been for the last several years.

Enter Adah. Enter a little person who has already taught me too many lessons to begin to count them in her tiny, one month of life. And here I am, exposed to myself once again - to something that has dominated the better part of my life, that now needs to be transformed and seen in a different way. Again I come to a place where I think all day about pounds and ounces, but because instead of worrying about myself, I am thinking about a little life that I want to fill with health, that I want to see thrive. And in some strange, convoluted, makes sense in my brain as I put the puzzle of life lessons together way, I see God yet again teaching me a lesson. A lesson about perspective, about what it really means to seek health, about how I want to raise and influence my little girl thinking about all of the above.

So I don't know if that makes any sense to anyone but me, and frankly, it doesn't really need to. She is changing my life and transforming my thinking, and the hope is, getting bigger and stronger the whole time. Here's to babes and boobs and milk and the unexpected lessons they teach us about ourselves...