You gotta have fuel for the baby factory...

Let me be Debbie Downer for just a minute. If you haven't heard it from a pregnancy book or from your doctor or from some snarky mom in the park who is convinced you're "not doing the best for your children" by having so many so close together, let me say it:

Closely-spaced pregnancies can be dangerous. There is a higher likelihood of complications during pregnancy and labor. Also, there is a higher risk of premature delivery and of delivering low-birthweight babies.

Those are real medical facts. Whether you hear them said in some snarky way or written in a book... that's just what it is.

But wait! There is something else the pregnancy books say... that these risk factors can be largely overcome by *EXCELLENT NUTRITION*.

Excellent nutrition is tricky for me. If I had spare cash, I would be the paragon of excellent nutrition. I would hire a raw food chef and buy organic produce and sprout my own grains and I would be skinny like Gwyneth Paltrow and my skin would glow. Totally true. But until I can follow Gwyneth's diet, I do the best I can to eat healthy, but I am also honest with myself. I KNOW that I am in nutritional overdraft.

I think excellent nutrition is tricky for any mom, so here is my lifehack.. I take silly amounts of vitamins.

Some people don't believe in vitamins. And some people only think they need prenatals and some folic acid when they're pregnant, but I am convinced that women having several children (close together or not) are seriously jeopardizing their health by not taking some kind of supplements. Under normal circumstances, I think most people can get the majority of their nutritional needs from diet alone... I'm not a pill pusher. But when you're talking about *REPEATEDLY FORMING A HUMAN BEING IN YOUR BODY*, you need some back-up.

Eating nutritious food is great, but it's not enough to replenish the vitamin stores in your body that you depleted during pregnancy.... plus building up stores for the next pregnancy... plus healing from childbirth... and all this while you produce breastmilk. That's a whole lot of kale and techina you'll need to eat! Can you look me straight in the eye and tell me that you've never had pasta with ketchup for dinner because that's what the kids were eating and it looked yummy and you were too tired to go soak quinoa?

So yeah, I take some silly amount of vitamins every day. I do it when I'm pregnant. I do it when I'm not pregnant. This is my soapbox.

I take a multivitamin/multimineral which has a bit of everything except the kitchen sink. It isn't synthetic chemical vitamins but it's mostly concentrated fruit and vegetable compounds. (it's 3 separate pills) You can find stuff like this in healthfood stores... naturally-sources multivitamins or food concentrates. There are even liquid multivitamin syrups, which are more easily absorbed and digested than a pill. Even if all you can afford is a cheap multivitamin, you are still better off than someone who isn't taking anything at all. If you are missing nutrients, the various processes in your body will not work as efficiently as they're meant to.

The other thing I take is iron. I take Spatone (mineral water that's super-rich in iron) and also Floradix (an herbal syrup with iron and vitamins)... you dump both into a glass of juice (which has vitamin c helps iron absorb) and drink. Iron is crucial during pregnancy... you are making liters and liters of new blood.

Although I eat loads of dairy, I take a calcium supplement too. Remember that old wives tale about how a woman loses a tooth with each baby? It's not entirely accurate... if a mother's diet is deficient in calcium, the growing baby takes calcium out of her bones. Yes, seriously. I think I might need my bones for when I'm old, so I try to take care of them.

The other obvious thing is folic acid, which is always in my cocktail of supplements. Also, a b-complex supplement because I am vegetarian. And also vitamin C for the immune system.

Don't get me wrong, I eat piles of fresh produce and make vegetable soups all the time, but since I know that I am pushing my body to its limits, I try to respect my body by taking care of it.

Let's say you are pregnant for the first time... but you don't get all your nutrients because you're nauseaous or uninterested in food or because the baby squishes your tummy. It's OK... the baby uses up the nutrient stores in your body. If you wait 2+ years like everyone recommends, then you have probably been eating normally for 2+ years and have gradually built up those nutrients once again. *BUT* if you become pregnant when your new baby is 6 months old, it's like you're staring a road trip with an empty gas tank. So yeah... that's where those warnings about premature babies and low-birthweight babies come in. Every pregnancy book says it.

Apart from taking care of the baby, good nutrition helps you heal from childbirth. I won't share TMI, but my C-section scar is healing quite nicely because I made an effort to take piles of vitamin C after the birth. Scars heal from the inside... no magic cream can replace your body's natural cell repair mechanisms, which are helped by antioxidants (like vitamin c) and beta carotene and also vitamin e.

I take crazy amounts of vitamins. Unless you are me, you don't have to take crazy amounts. If you can look at yourself and honestly say that you have an impeccable diet, then I will leave you alone. But otherwise, this is my advice to all new moms, old moms, soon-to-be moms and wannabee-moms. The baby factory needs fuel to run on.

Dealing with the hardest thing about my life, as faaabulous as it is.

Do you want to know what is the hardest thing about my life is?

 

It's not waking up at strange hours of the night. It's not all the spit-up on my clothes or even the tragically lamentable fact that my "skinny coat" hung in my closet all last winter unworn. It's the fact that my parents are all the way across the ocean. They can't pop over for dinner. They can't babysit at a moment's notice. They can't just show up for a gan graduation party and take a million photos. They. are. halfway. across. the. world.

 

I'm not alone. It's a common complaint I have heard from mommy friends here in Israel... and much more tragic than an unworn jacket. I could always buy a larger coat, but it is unlikely that my parents will live closeby. Like ever.

What to do? I hear lot of people suggest finding friends who are in a similar predicament...  to move to a community that is warm and welcoming and pulls together in times of crisis. The idea is to create a new extended family-of-sorts; to have people to share good time and bad times with, to get help when you need it and to commiserate about the lack of Target and Pumpkin Spice lattes. I think this is good and true and right, but there's something crucial that's missing.

I think the first thing a mom whose parents are overseas needs to do is to ACCEPT. This is a decidedly unoriginal thought that the 12-step support group people have patented.... accepting the things you cannot change.

 

In my opinion, this is HUGE. You will be in suuuuch a better mental space if you decide to accept your life situation as it really is... instead of wishing and hoping that things will be different. Unless you can pay a kidnapper to bring your parents to Israel, you can't force them to come here, so why waste your mental energy on wishing things were different. Of course, we can always pray... but that's different... I'm talking about plain old complaining.... I wish my parents lived closeby. I would be happier if my parents lived closeby. Why don't my parents live closeby?

 

Imagine that a cat woke up one day and decided that he wanted to be a dog. If he spent his time moping about and dwelling on how much he wished he was a dog... well, he would miss out on some good catnaps and tasty chicken bones from the dumpster... and at the end of the day he would remain a cat. Even worse, an unhappy cat.
 

The other HUGE thing is a mental re-direction. Instead of focusing on what you are lacking, strive to be AWESOME at what you do. In my case, it means doing my best to become really really independent. You heard me, I said really really independent. As in, supermommy. Find a way to handle everything by yourself. All, by. yourself.

 

You may have a great hubby that pitches in. You might have helpful friends and neighbors. You might live in a community where people jump over themselves to put your stroller on the bus and hold your baby so you can pay the bus driver. Call me a cynic, but I believe that at some point, people will fail you. Humans are fallible. There is a massive calmness and self-confidence that comes from knowing that you could hold the fort alone, if need be.
 

What this translates to, in practical terms, is figuring out a way to take the kids to the park all by yourself, taking the kids on the bus all by yourself, getting the kids ready for school all by yourself...etc. The logistics are up to you, but the point is to build yourself up into a supermommy by knowing that you actually could do everything without help. When you do get help, be happy and grateful *but* when people invariably flake out, smile and be confident in the knowledge that you can do it!

 

This is precisely why I bought my big clunky triple stroller. It was my secret weapon to take all of my 3 little kids out on a trip all by myself. Your secret weapon could be some super-easy dinner that everyone can eat by themselves. Or some cool activity that keeps all the kids occupied so you can take a break. But yeah... arm yourself. In the same way you would walk with confidence if you had a gun hidden away somewhere, you should walk with confidence knowing that you have strategies to cope with whatever life throws at you.

 

Let me say it again, just in case anyone missed it. I am*not* advocating going at it alone. I totally think that moms whose parents are overseas should find one another and kibitz and help one another out. I totally think that moms whose parents are overseas should seek out warm and supportive communities to live in....but in the end, it's all up to you.

 

This isn't just a coping strategy for moms with parents who are overseas, it's life skills 101.

 

1) Accept what you are

2) Embrace it

3) Become awesome at it.

 

For real, don't be that cat wishing he was a dog. Be a freakin' awesome cat!