Cleaning House

This past week was been all about cleaning house, literally and figuratively. My rampage started with two seemingly unrelated events: I lost my house keys and Manika stopped sleeping through the night.

The house keys wouldn’t have been such a big deal except our neighbors said they saw them on the floor outside our apartment around seven in the evening on the day they went missing, but didn’t bother to knock or pick them. That night, they disappeared. The next day, a stranger came to the house with some story about laundry falling from an upstairs apartment (the number of which she’d wouldn’t provide). She stood at the door peering in to see what the apartment looked like / had. The ayi and I later deduced she was there to see if we were home, and if not, probably would’ve let herself in. I had the locks changed that night. But the whole experience reminded me that it’s every man for himself here in China, especially when you’re an expat.

It’s often the same when you’re a mom. Manika’s new night wakings were a follow-on to her illness. While she was sick, she and I slept in the same bed, and I indulged every bottle and snack request she wanted, regardless of the hour. She is better now, but has decided having me on twenty-four hour call is much more fun than sleeping by herself uninterrupted. So she’s been waking up at two to four hour intervals, and making me feel like my whole world is out of my control (or more like in hers).

So I took back my life this week, or at least tried. I cleaned every corner of the house, bought a larger than life key chain and a hook to hang it on, organized, catalogued, shopped to fill in gaps, cleaned out email accounts, cleaned out my calendar and eliminated all sorts of waste, cancelled events I knew I wouldn’t enjoy, and prepped for the new baby. All of that gave me a vague sense of stability, security, and order during the day.

But nights were a different story. It didn’t help that I discovered my ayi has been bribing Manika to pee in the potty with chocolate chips, about seven to ten a day (far more than my two to three allowance), and one night she confused pumpkin pie filling for pumpkin soup and double-sugared my daughter up at dinner time. At nine pm this week, Manika just wanted to do laps around the apartment. So, all peacefulness earned during the day was spent in the hour and a half it took her to go bed. It was a miserable cycle.

Last night was the last straw. My house was clean, everything was where I could find it, and I was ready for a final standoff with Manika. I took her out all day, gave her a one hour nap only, read her five of her favorite books, and kissed her about a dozen times to emphasize I loved her. Then I closed the lights, and per supernanny’s expert advice, sat down on the floor facing her bed, and tilted my face down to the floor so we wouldn’t make eye contact. Then I waited.

At first, she yawned hard. I thought maybe, just maybe, she would finally comply, close her eyes and I could quickly tiptoe out. But no such luck. The nightly requests went as follows: “Bottle” (said repeatedly in escalating fervor and volume), “rock please” (followed same pattern of bottle but with the added drama of tears, “mommy’s bed” (accompanied by a chorus of screams and tears), “daddy” (emphasized with a few tugs to my hair and fists to my shoulders), and finally, the heart killer, “mommy hold you” (which means mommy hold me, but she doesn’t have her me’s and you’s down yet). To each request, I gently said no, hugged and kissed her and said “mommy loves you but you have to sleep now. Then I sat quietly until the temper tantrum ended. It was hell, especially because it was like the sixth time I’d done it and I was functioning on less sleep than a mother with a newborn.

So finally, in desperation, I did what I should’ve done much earlier – I prayed. Lately, I’ve been lax in praying for parenting strength and wisdom. In the beginning, it seemed I was on my knees almost every night, begging for the colicky torture to end. But I think my expectations were too high – my child never miraculously stopped crying until the books said she would, and pretty much everything else followed in the same internet-searchable fashion, which made me feel as if parenting was just some script you had to follow. Everyone took the same steps so prayer or no prayer, I’d go forward the same way regardless.

But last night was different. I was following a script, I had a rational plan in my head, but it was my heart that was faltering. I was tired, I was alone, and I was acutely aware that I was also alone in Shanghai. I couldn’t call my mother for help, I couldn’t count on a like-minded nanny to let me sleep in the morning the way I could in New York, and I certainly couldn’t lose my own temper the way Manika was because that would’ve just escalated everything. So I asked for God to help Manika sleep and then, when that was met with even louder shrieks from her bed, I prayed that God would keep me from strangling her. I tried to say the Lord’s prayer to myself, but that was simply too long to remember against the background noise, so finally I hummed in my head on old song, “Our God is an Awesome God.”

It was miraculous. Manika only fought me for thirty five minutes – a big reduction from the previous hour to an hour and a half, I walked away feeling less charred and beaten up, and my husband seemed to instinctively know I needed a hug (never happens!). Most importantly, Manika didn’t wake up through the night at all, and I felt internally cleansed this morning with rest, which was ultimately what I really needed.

I learned my lesson. I may be (or at least feel) alone in Shanghai at times and in motherhood, but I was reminded last night that, no matter what, I still always have God. He is truly everywhere, including my small block apartment in China.

Now if He could just help me get Manika to eat her vegetables.

Manika and I are famous!

Manika and I are on the cover of this month's Shanghai Family!

http://www.shfamily.com/bin/view/magazine/main

Sick in (of?) Shanghai

This week was another butt-kicking seven-day marathon of mommydom. Manika got a small cough on Sunday that accelerated to a respiratory infection and led to a complete bodily shutdown on Wednesday. She woke up over ten times that night, and couldn’t fall back asleep over the fever and cough. So, after a night of no sleep, I took her out in the stroller to help her sleep. We walked to Thumb Plaza (about half a mile away) and I sat and had a coffee while she slept. 

Unfortunately, she woke up midway through my moment of peace, and then proceeded to flip out like I was poking her skin with needles. She screamed at me in the restaurant for daring to take her out, screamed outside for trying to put her back in the stroller, and after I finally agreed to carry her home (balancing her on my twenty-week large pregnant stomach and pushing a not-small jogger stroller with the remainder of my energy), she screamed to every Chinese passerby how awful she felt and how useless her mother was because she was unable to make her feel better.

People stared, and I mean stared. I was in makeshift pajamas. My hair was sticking out above a grey sports headband. My glasses were lopsided from Manika pressing her head against my face. Manika had no pants on and was thrashing around like her legs were on fire. I missed New York where crazy people walk around reciting the Koran in loud speakers and no one even looks at them, and if someone does stare, you can respond back to them in English, glorious English!! So in an effort to conjure up some sense of power so I could to finish what fast became one of the longest walks of my life, I yelled back to every staring, well-meaning, trying to help me with my screaming child, morning walker / commuter / off-to-work-goer, “What the hell are you looking at!” Most didn’t understand me. One Italian man looked like he wanted to hug me. I wanted to cry louder than Manika.

Then I got home and my ayi, who is a truly lovely lady but not so smart, told me that maybe Manika had been watching too much Elmo on Sesame Street (who occasionally scares her with talking window shades and larger than life puppet bugs), and had some “heise de” stuff on her mind, which is the equivalent of saying some grey matter had possessed her little soul.

I went into hibernation. For the next two days, Manika and I slept off dueling coughs (she generously shared hers with me). We slept curled up together, we slept on opposite ends of the floor of her room, we slept in her small bed, we slept on a queen sized air mattress, we slept with my back to her and her hand lodged under my sweaty armpit, we slept on the couch in front of the television. Of course, at moments there was a certain motherly magic to the whole thing - two female spirits, suffering together, that sort of thing. But most of the time, I smelled like stale milk vomit and wanted to do nothing but check into a five star hotel room with room service and no one else.

On Friday, Manika and I finally went outside. Maybe we were just so starved for outside interaction, maybe we’d been shut-in for so long that we’d forgotten the world existed outside of us, but it was as if Shanghai was trying to cheer us up; it really felt that way. There was sunshine, a perfect breeze, people smiled at us, called Manika beautiful. A shopping trip to the mall actually went efficiently. We passed a group of old ladies practicing a part foxtrot, part tai chi dance routine to Jingle Bells outside (in the tail end of October). Saturday went even better. We went to a Halloween party, and in the evening my husband took me out to a lovely Thai restaurant in a beautiful old French style villa. Afterwards, he and I walked down this long street filled with clothing shops and I got to window shop, sans screaming baby, sans fever, sans cough. I felt almost normal, and like a prisoner who starts to fall for its captor, the rollercoaster experience almost made me love Shanghai – for once, I did not feel abused by it during a crisis and I was so grateful, I almost dared say to my husband, “Maybe I could learn to really like it here.

But I ultimately kept my mouth shut.