writing – Saranity Now!

Hey all!

So I know I haven’t posted in… way too long. But I’m here to fix that.

And in case you don’t already follow me on social media, I have a LOT of news.

Last summer, I wrote a new book. Which sounds like such a humble brag. Like what did you do over your summer vacation, Mrs. Confino? Oh, I wrote a novel. NBD.

Of course, that was back in the before times—you know, when the world was still functioning. I also got pregnant in the before times too.

Then the pandemic hit and two wonderful things happened along with all of the horrors that this absolute nightmare of a year dumps upon us daily.

Number one, my goddess of an agent (who was also pregnant and due nine days before me) sold my book.

Then, just days later, she and I both went into labor and had our babies on the same day, a couple hours apart, though on opposite coasts.

So I’m now the proud mother of baby Max and the even prouder owner of a two-book deal with Lake Union Publishing.

That’s right. They loved my book so much that they outbid two other houses and offered to take the next UNWRITTEN book as well.

Which is insane.

Especially because I now have to write a second book while teaching online and wearing a baby in a pandemic with a deadline of next summer.

No pressure or anything.

So what does it feel like when your lifelong dream comes true?

Honestly, I have no freaking idea yet. It still doesn’t feel real even with book advance money sitting in a bank account. Granted, that money doesn’t feel real either because I’m far too superstitious to spend any of it before I see how the book does. So instead I’m basically just crouching over it like an egg to see if it hatches. Which also speaks to my overwhelming sense of imposter syndrome because there’s a tiny, little, itty bitty fine print clause in my contract stating that if I can’t produce a high enough quality book for the second one, I have to give half of the money back. After taxes.

Again, no pressure.

But having that second baby in a pandemic, while full time momming AND full time teaching has also been so all consuming that I haven’t had time to feel feelings about the book yet.

Because teaching while caring for a baby is hard on a level that I never dreamed of before. Like being a working mom on its own is insanely hard. There’s the guilt of leaving your baby. And the even stronger guilt of KIND OF, SORT OF, JUST A LITTLE BIT not minding that you get a break from being a 24/7 mom and get to be something else for eight hours a day.

And teachers get to experience both worlds—I’ve had a few full-time moms tell me that I don’t understand how hard it is for them, and to an extent they’re right, especially because my husband is also a teacher and is home while I am over the summer. But I AM a full-time mom two months of the year in a normal year. And I know from my summers that that is also insanely hard.

This year, however, I don’t even know what I am. Except tired. Oh god, I’m so tired.

We made the gut wrenching decision to send Jacob back to preschool. Which he’s hating. But he needs the socialization after nearly five months of hard quarantine because of the new baby and his doctor was unequivocal about that. I feel like the world’s worst mom daily though because he’s having separation anxiety both because of the pandemic and because he knows Max is staying with me all day and he doesn’t understand why he can’t too.

Additionally, I’m not back out in the world. I JUST started grocery shopping instead of using Instacart, but I did wait until after Max was three months old just in case. I’m terrified of them sending us back to school. But I’m sending Jacob in, at three, in a mask, and hoping for the best.

World’s. Worst. Mom.

I keep joking that I’m providing free birth control to the kids in my online classes because they’re seeing how much trouble I’m having juggling everything. Max is a really good baby and most days he goes to sleep in his Ergobaby and I can just teach at my standing desk with him. And my mom comes to help a couple hours most days. But some days he screams for a significant portion of my class. A kid the other day asked if I could mute my baby.

Literally what teaching looks like. On a good day. Side note: if you’re on Zoom all day, get a ring light. You can thank me when it comes. I do NOT look this good in real life!

He was kidding, but I was close to crying. Because there are some days when Max’s naps coincide perfectly with my classes and I feel like I’ve got this mostly under control. And there are other days when I feel like I’m managing none of it at all.

But there are extreme highs as well. I’m such a psycho about Max’s head after Jacob needing a helmet that he is literally only on his back to sleep. Our pediatrician said he has the roundest head she’s seen on a four month old since Back to Sleep started. That was quite the win!

And Jacob, despite the hiccups with school, is so sweet with him. He comes in every morning, peers in Max’s crib and says, “Hey buddy. Nice outfit!”

And the book IS becoming more and more real every day. I somehow made my way through my edits this summer with a newborn and we’re now at the copy editing stage. Granted, sometimes my editor emails me with a request for something and I have to Google what it is (some things don’t change) because this is all new to me, but what a great reason to use Google instead of for anxiety-relief!

I’ll wrap this up because I’ve rambled enough, but I’m still here and I promise to be better about keeping at the blog—even when I’m trying to find time to write book #2 of this contract!

Walking, ER visits, and liquid dinners: the mommy milestones

October 10, 2018 Sara Confino

Hey guys! We’re going to completely ignore the time jump here and pretend I’ve been blogging regularly all along, okay?

Awesome.

So we had some great milestones and one crappy milestone in the last couple of weeks.

I’ll start with the good.

Jacob is 18 months old! How did THAT happen? He’s walking, he’s running, he’s climbing, he’s dancing, he’s destroying entire cities, the works. And even more exciting, he graduated from physical therapy!

I could lie and say that working on my book (I have a new agent and I adore her–she’s had fantastic insight and I DID work my butt off over the summer on it to transform the manuscript into something I’m truly proud of) was why I stopped blogging, but the real reason was Jacob wasn’t walking yet. And that felt like a huge red flag that I just didn’t want to put out there on top of all of our other gross motor issues.

He started walking at 15.5 months, which technically isn’t even late; anything before 18 months is considered normal. But social media is absolutely soul crushing when you feel like your child isn’t achieving a milestone and everyone you’ve ever known is posting videos of their babies, who are months younger than your babies, walking, running marathons, and speedskating in the Olympics at 11 months old.

I did a lot of soul searching while I worried if Jacob would ever walk. On a rational level, I knew he would because you don’t see people crawling down the aisle at the supermarket. But I realized what an insensitive jerk I had frequently been to other new parents. I honestly never meant to be (except to Karen* from fifth grade. I still hate you Karen.), but because I walked at nine months, I assumed that any baby who didn’t walk that early was behind.

*Karen is not her real name. But I can’t print her real name because then she’ll know how much I hate her.

So as we crawled further and further past Jacob’s first birthday without any independent footsteps, I mentally kicked myself for asking my hair stylist (I adore her–she’s no Karen!) if her nine-month-old twins were walking yet. It doesn’t seem like it would be a loaded question–until you have a kid, at which point it feels judgmental and like it’s pointing out a flaw. Sorry, Christy, I’m a monster.

Our physical therapist also pointed out that Jacob’s feet were overpronating and therefore still not normal, so it felt like there would never be an end to our days of physical therapy. That was really hard, and I started making Hubby take Jacob to his appointments largely because I couldn’t handle the emotional toll of being told the next thing that was going to be an issue.

But then, one day, as we tried to coax him to take a couple of steps between us, Jacob did it! Those couple of steps spread to across the room by the end of the day. And soon enough, he was walking everywhere. And now? God help you if you try to pick him up when he wants to be walking (as he made clear when I took him to TJ Maxx and let him get down from the cart to walk around. When it was time to leave, I definitely looked like I was abducting him as I carried him out of the store, screaming bloody murder and thrashing like a dying fish.

So hearing that he was finally caught up on all of his motor skills felt like the untying of a heavy stone around my neck. Or like a really drastic haircut (seriously, I have a LOT of hair. It’s heavy. There’s a reason I love my stylist!) when your head feels lighter and all of that neck tension just melts away.

Of course, we’ve also had less happy milestones like our first SUPER FUN emergency room visit because Jacob banged his forehead on the ONLY table in our entire house that wasn’t covered in protective foam. We literally had ten inches of unprotected furniture in the house and that one span of table edge acted as a siren, luring Jacob’s perfect, unblemished forehead to crash upon it.

I was peeing at the time (ah the life of a mother, when the bathroom feels like a refreshing break) and heard Hubby screaming for me at the top of his lungs.

When I scream like that, it means there’s a spider. But Hubby is the spider-killer, so I didn’t know what to expect. I did NOT expect to see the two of them looking like the pig-blood scene in Carrie, but thankfully Jacob did not begin using his blood-soaked powers to destroy the entire town.

I surprised myself by staying calm, throwing snacks in my bag (it was close to dinner time), grabbing shoes for Jacob and myself, and hustling us all off to the closest emergency room, only 83 percent sure that the ER was going to call Child Protective Services on us for allowing this to happen to our child.

After some frantic texting to my brother (the ER doctor), my best friend (the ER mom veteran), and my parents (the jackasses who made jokes when my poor baby was bleeding from the head–not you mom, you were fine. It was dad!), we opted to let the ER doctor glue his wound closed instead of calling for a plastic surgeon. It was pretty superficial with very clean lines and, worst case scenario, he could be Harry Potter for Halloween.

The ER staff couldn’t have been sweeter. Not only did they NOT report us to CPS, they reassured us that this happens to their own children as well, and the doctor and nurse sang to Jacob as they glued his forehead (he was screaming because they had to swaddle him in a papoose to keep him still. Neither Jacob nor I enjoyed that part of the experience as I huddled in the corner weeping as soon as I no longer had to be the responsible adult), and we were back home an hour and a half after the incident.

Where I put the baby to bed, then poured myself a GIGANTIC glass of wine and called it dinner. But when I texted a friend a picture of my dinner, he replied with a picture of his own liquid dinner. He has four kids. So apparently it doesn’t get easier and there’s a reason that the Olney Safeway has such a large wine selection.

Cheers to all of you other parents! We kept our kids alive to ram their heads into a table another day!

Mom Life

Jacob is a year old already–here’s what I’ve learned this year

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018 Sara Confino

I must have blinked sometime recently (blinking counts as sleep when you’re a parent, right?) because, suddenly, my little baby is a year old.

How did THAT happen?

I swear I was pregnant like last week and he was born yesterday, wasn’t he?

My best friend (and mommy guru, oracle of all things motherhood) told me when I felt like I was drowning in the early days of maternity leave that, when you have kids, “the days are long, but the years are short.” Boy, is that accurate!

So what have I learned this year?

I’m not going to list everything because I’d be writing that list until he was two, then need to start the list of things I learned in that year. But there are some big ones worth mentioning.

One of the first things I learned: I don’t know that I could be a stay-at-home mom. Maybe when kids are a little older, but those first couple months when the hubby went back to work before summer started were ROUGH. Don’t get me wrong: being a working mom is ridiculously hard. I miss Jacob all day and wish I were with him, but if I were home with him all day every day with no breaks, I think I’d go insane and start writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on the walls.

stay at home mom crazy

With that said, I have TERRIBLE SAHM FOMO (Stay-at-home mom fear of missing out). I 100 percent WISH I had the means to be a stay at home mom and I’m DESPERATELY looking forward to my summer home with him. DESPERATELY. I absolutely NEVER want to go back to work when it’s time. But I also recognize that having some adult time is good for me. (Granted, I’m not sure teaching in a high school counts as “adult time,” but I’ll take what I can get.)

However, I also could never afford to be a stay-at-home mom either. So maybe some of this is my brain tricking me so I don’t spend all day crying. But in one sense I’m a better mom to Jacob when I’m absolutely dying to see him at the end of the work day. (Like literally. When they spring a meeting on me at the end of the day, I will cut someone to get home to my baby!)

I could, however, be a stay-at-home dog mom quite happily. But I’d be able to go to the gym, go shopping, shower, pee with the door closed, etc with just dogs. Despite what I thought prior to having a child, babies are a different ballgame altogether.

I learned to try to sweat the small stuff less. I know that everything feels catastrophic in the moment, but the reality is, we’ll get through whatever it is. Whether it’s the baby not gaining enough weight or a flat head or physical therapy or whatever pain in the ass is coming next. Is it going to suck at the time? Yes. But we’ll figure it out and come through on the other side.

I learned that I can’t be perfect. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up and stop trying, but it’s okay if people see the flaws. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to hide all of my imperfections from everyone, but that stupid helmet taught me that I can’t do that anymore because I’m no longer just me. I’m a mom. So there are going to be times when I get to school with scrambled egg in my hair (happened yesterday) or spit-up on my shirt (thank god we’re past that phase!) or other general less than perfectisms. And that’s okay. And if anyone judges me for that, they’ll understand when they have kids. Or not. Who cares?

The cool thing is that I DO care a little less about that now. I laughed about the hair eggs and asked if the kid who pointed them out was hungry. And on a serious note, I have to admit that the responses that I got when I posted about Jacob’s helmet helped me realize that, despite what you see on social media, no one’s life is perfect. Everyone has all kinds of crap, most more serious than mine, that they’re dealing with. They’re not all broadcasting theirs in a blog, but I’m not broadcasting ALL of mine either. (Yes, dear reader, I keep secrets from you. #sorrynotsorry.)

I’ve learned that being a mom is one of the hardest things in the world. I was NOT sympathetic enough to my friends with kids before Jacob was born. Like oh my god, this is HARD. I’m feeling a lot of delayed-reaction guilt that I made my best friend drop everything and come to the Jersey shore for my bachelorette party when she had a four month old and an almost three year old at home. She fell asleep pumping at the kitchen table after we went out one night. Now that I’ve been there and get it, I can’t believe she loves me enough to have dropped everything for me that weekend and I can’t believe I was a big enough jerk to ask her to. I also have NO idea how people do this with two or more kids. How does that even work? I’m exhausted just THINKING about a second baby!

I’ve learned that planning doesn’t work. I’m a big planner. And prior to pregnancy, those plans were beautifully executed because I was good at planning. Babies, however, are plan kryptonite. Breakfast yesterday? I planned to be on time for work with food-free hair, but I was late with hair eggs instead. If I plan to go somewhere, I can virtually guarantee that Jacob will poop right when I’m about to leave, or refuse to eat, or find some new way to prevent that from happening. But I keep making those plans, beating on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the hands of a plan-destroying baby (toddler? I guess he’s not TECHNICALLY a baby anymore. BRB crying forever).

I’ve learned nothing is THAT gross. Okay, maybe that’s not technically true, as lots of things are REALLY FREAKING GROSS when you have a baby. But you deal with it. My mother loves to tell the story (no really, she LOVES to tell this story. Like in front of my friends, boss, cashier at TJ Maxx, you name it) of the time she took me to the grocery store in a primitive 1980s baby carrier and I pooped down her shirt and she didn’t even notice until she went to put me back in the car. As Forrest Gump and the shirts say, it happens. And you clean it up and you deal with it. And if you make fake gagging noises when you’re cleaning something super gross, Jacob will laugh hysterically. (My brother and sister-in-law were horrified when we were trying to get Jacob to smile for a picture with his new cousin and we started gagging at him. It worked though!)

I’ve learned that I need to find time for myself. There are three main components to keeping Sara happy and sane. Reading, writing, and exercise. All three of which are INSANELY difficult to find time to do when you’re a new mom. The exercise part was fine when it was warm out because I would take long walks with Jacob, but once it got cold out, that got much harder. I can’t work out at night because I’ll never sleep if I do it that close to bedtime (I’m the world’s worst insomniac). Mornings are out because I already have to get up an hour earlier this year than I did pre-baby to get him ready and I’m not yet getting enough sleep at night to get up at 4am to work out. So I am HEAVILY (no pun intended when I’m not exercising) anticipating the return of warm weather.

Reading wasn’t that hard to reinstate because I just added in 20 minutes at bedtime. I love my Kindle because it tells me how long it’ll take me to read the chapter that I’m on, but it gets hard when I’m reading something that I love because I’m always like, well, I could read ONE more chapter. And then suddenly it’s midnight and I want to die. But that’s only happened a couple of times so far because the desire to sleep still wins out most nights.

Writing has been a challenge, but that’s why I started this blog. I also just signed with a new agent for my new book and she seems awesome, so I need to start revisions ASAP. That’s going to be tricky because I don’t work well in short chunks of time. I work best when I have a couple of solid weeks of time to sit down and focus. But it’s important enough to me that I’ll find a way.

And finally, I’ve learned that motherhood is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I love Jacob more than I ever thought possible and I’ve learned that THAT makes all of the rest of it worth it.

Tag: writing

I’m back! With a baby! And a book deal!

Jacob is a year old already–here’s what I’ve learned this year

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*Karen is not her real name. But I can’t print her real name because then she’ll know how much I hate her.

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