Blank pages scare me. Well, not scare, but intimidate. I used to be an avid blogger, but in the last couple of years I have not made writing a priority. On days like today, I drive around writing things in my head, talking to myself about my day and about things that are important for me to say, but when I get home and I look at this blank page, it all suddenly seems fairly unimportant.

So, let me tell you about my day and see if that gets my juices flowing.

Beatrice turned 3 months last Saturday, the 23rd.

(Trying to stand on her own)

(rare moment of shy while hanging with Auntie Kim)

(favorite pastime, eating mama's hand)

She has so much personality already, this tiny little girl. She's not so tiny for her age anymore, though. At 3 months, she already weighs 13 pounds 6 ounces and is over 24 inches long. She's kind of an Amazon. We're okay with that. I have always been a tall and solid girl, and with John and I for parents, this kid stood zero chance of being a skinny little minnie. She is already trying so hard to stand and to move her feet forward, and to pull herself up. We wonder if she intends to just skip crawling altogether... we have no clue. Every day is a new adventure, and most of it is really rewarding, even while it's frustrating.

That's the kicker, though. It IS frustrating. It's so maddeningly frustrating. Both John and I have had our moments in the last few months where we have to put our screaming, crying, incredibly pukey, turning purple, refusing to nurse or sleep or quiet or calm daughter down (safely) in her crib and walk away from her. When John went away for 4 days to his gamer convention and left me alone with her, I thought I was going to lose my shit. I ended up calling Courtney and asking if she could just COMEOVEROHMYGOD because I was ready to just leave my beautiful, screaming, purple faced daughter on the porch in the rain. She did, and I got a shower and a trip to the store in, and things were better.

Then came the nursing strike. While John was gone, Bea decided that she wouldn't nurse. At all. She would latch on and eat when she was half awake, but that was it. With no obvious physical impediments, she would go to latch during the day, and then arch her back away violently, flailing and hitting me and slamming her tiny fists into her face, and scream scream scream. If I put her down, she would instantly quiet and smile and coo, watching me pump into a bottle and give it to her. Seriously. I got so frustrated. I cried and cried and cried. I read everything I could find on the internet and asked my mama's group online and called my doula and my mama friends and sobbed and sobbed. Then we'd try again and have the same result and it would get worse and worse. I was miserable, Bea was miserable, and I felt like a completely heartbroken failure. I mean, this is, like, the ONLY thing I'm actually biologically programmed to do, and I couldn't do it. There is nothing wrong with me, there isn't anything obviously wrong with Bea. It just wasn't working. So I kept pumping and giving her bottles. And then my supply started to disappear. I was at the end of what I could figure out, even with the several lactation consultants I talked to and the Leche League people I talked to.. everyone wanted to talk on the phone instead of being HERE, seeing what was going on, and I had to keep explaining the situation over and over. It was so frustrating that I finally just decided I was going to call her pediatrician the next week, and give it one more week, and if it didn't work, I would just give up.

We have been taking her in to her pediatrician about her obvious discomfort sometimes while nursing and her INSANE amount of puke (like, eats and then ends up soaking through an entire burp rag, my shirt and pants, her clothes, and all over the chair and most likely the dog as well.) Her pediatrician thinks she has some reflux, so we have some mild antacids we give her. They seemed to work pretty well for a few weeks, but we're back to where we were when we started the meds. I don't really want the answer to be more meds, so we're about resigned to just dealing through it and knowing that her system will eventually develop and it will stop. 

In any case, for the mean time we are still dealing with her nursing strike. I spent most of the weekend after John came back hanging out at home, shirtless, with the baby naked and crawling all over me, while I flat out refused to give her bottles. It seemed to fix it for a few days. During the day we still had some fuss but it was much better. Then, it started again with no obvious cause. 

So, there's where we are, currently. I still refuse to give her bottles unless I absolutely have to, so we have a couple good sessions in the morning, but by 9 am, she is done and for the rest of the day the only way I can get her to nurse is to rock her to sleep with her pacifier in her mouth and then do a quick switch by taking the paci out and slipping boob in. It's an insane pain in the ass and makes feeding her anywhere but home a real challenge. I am really hoping that she grows out of it soon.

So today was my day to open the shop. I got up at 4, fed the baby and got her back to bed about 40 minutes later, pumped for 25 minutes, then showered and went to work by 6. Very first thing, I couldn't get the door to the shop locked again after I unlocked it. Having to pee really urgently at the same time, I decided to just run to the bathroom and leave the bathroom door open to hear the unlikely event of someone entering the shop with the lights off and the door sign saying closed. Sure enough, someone did. Not just any someone. A special someone. A CRACKHEAD someone. A CRACKHEAD someone who was LEANING OVER THE COUNTER AND TRYING TO GET INTO MY CASH REGISTER WHEN I CAME BACK OUT. I started screaming "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SHOP, GET OUT RIGHT NOW GET OUT GET OUT I WILL CALL THE FUCKING COPS RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!!" Crackhead raised his stringy brown head and froze with wide eyes, staring at me coming towards him, holding a chair in front of me and screaming like a banshee. Crackhead immediately turned and RAN out the door, which I then fought with until I got it locked again. 

About 8 am, a guy came in that has been coming around quite a bit lately. He doesn't buy anything, and he's obviously homeless. He has a really coiled and tight, violent air about him. It's really disturbing. That alone isn't reason enough to refuse him service, but he's been getting more and more aggressive. Today, he sat at a table, loudly cursing and harassing one of our other Downtown down and out cases (a man who has an obvious mental handicap and is one crappy apartment away from being truly homeless.) I finally decided enough was enough. Still riled up from my crackhead encounter earlier, I said loudly "Sir, you're going to have to leave." He argued with me and kept arguing, and then started yelling back about how I needed to show some proper respect and called me some names I couldn't understand (other than whore and dog.) I yelled at him that he needed to leave immediately and that I was calling the police and he stormed out in a huge slamming huff. 

Such is the fun of working downtown. 

The rest of my day consisted of waiting in the back of my Jetta for the AAA guy to come pick up our truck that is dead and tow it about 8 blocks to the repair shop. It was uncomfortably warm but with a cold breeze that didn't allow me to leave the door open while sitting in the back seat, trying to feed my famously fussy and upset baby. When she finally did eat I looked in the diaper bag that John had packed and brought down with her, and saw that there were no large burp cloths in it, just two small squares the size of cocktail napkins. Dear little Bea proceeded to puke all over me for about 20 minutes, and the car, and herself, until I finally just took my sweatshirt off and started using it as a rag to wipe up some of the insane mess. The AAA guy finally came right as she was working herself into the finest frenzy you have ever, ever seen. We're talking lip frothing, full on tears, choking on her own spittle and all of her turning purple. I thought she might be choking. 

I still had errands I had to run, like putting money in our bank account so we can do things like eat and buy toilet paper. I had no choice but to do those errands with Bea having a full on meltdown in the back of the car. I finally pulled over on a side street, pulled her out of her car seat, and rocked her while she screamed, until I could finally get her to eat. 

I walked back into my house with the constant mess and dog hair and puking animals, and the roses that are literally eating our front porch, and sat on our broken couch, feeling totally defeated.

I want to be one of those moms who blogs about their cute craft projects, and what they're cooking, complete with beautiful pictures of food and snapshots of their happy children and perfectly clean houses and  craft projects that turn out looking like Martha Fucking Stewart came over and left them as a present. I was crying to my friend Libby about how hard this is, and how no one tells you that breastfeeding is such a heartbreaking pain the ass. I cried about how much Bea cries, about how the doctors just keep saying she's "colicy" and shrug when I tell them we're at our wits' end. I cried about how I constantly have puke down my back and I can't poop by myself and I found thow-up in my hair. Libby said no one blogs about those things because it would be depressing as shit and that even the mamas with the perfect blogs have days where they realize two hours too late that their kid sat on their own poopy diaper and then sat on the couch. She reminded me that people don't want to hear "I almost left my 10 week old daughter on the porch for coyotes to get because she refused to stop crying" or about how I sobbed, broken hearted, drinking a beer on our back porch while my little girl FINALLY was getting some sleep inside. No one wants to read that I feel like my childless friends are abandoning me and that the one person besides John who I know for a fact loves me here can't seem to make time for me. 

Well, I would want to read that. I would want to read the blog of a mama who is going through the same shit as me and swears about it and loses her everloving mind. I want to read the blog of the woman who put her shirt on backwards this morning like I did, and then came home and tripped over the blackberry bush that her husband swore he was FINALLY going to take to the compost "later" and flailingly threw herself down on her back so that the car seat landed on her and not the ground. I want to read the blog of the woman who can't seem to keep her friends and thinks that it might be because she can't think before she speaks and is pretty unrelentingly negative, even though she's trying hard to be a more positive person. 

So, this is that blog. It's not pretty all the time. I am not going to put the best face on what I'm doing. My mistakes will be here for everyone to see, just like they always have been. My stupid broken brain is currently trying to convince me that people don't actually love me because I'm such a difficult person to be friends with, and that losing people who say they care about me is inevitable. I am going to go spend a couple of days in Seattle with my friend who once told me (while I was in the middle of a heartbroken sob fest in the middle of her bed) she had figured out long ago that the only way she would ever convince me that not everyone who loves me will leave is just never to leave me. Kat's little (almost one year old!) boy and my sweet little screamy girl are going to get some quality time in while Kat and I see how this works with kids in tow. Maybe that will give me the space I need to set things right back home again. Maybe it won't. I don't know. 

All I know is that Bea and I need to get out of town for a little bit and I need to find some lives to read that mirror my own and don't make me feel like I will always be broken and disposable. I want to be able to look at pictures I took like this one, and forget all the other things that are weighing on my chest, and just be incredibly happy that this is my little girl.

(She isn't approved for away missions until we find her a onesie that doesn't make her a redshirt)