It's just a phase - #142

And how to navigate it.

It’s hard to remember now how bad the gas was. Every hour we were pumping his legs, massaging his belly, contorting him in all the ways imaginable and some not to try to coerce the bubbles out his butt. We had to! He was inconsolable. He could not sleep, he was ravenously attempting to shove the bubbles out by shoving more milk in, and this gulping only created more bubbles.

We had songs that we sang old western style about harboring bubbles and how we didn’t allow bubbles in this town, the only place for bubbles to go was down. We had chants that paired with massages: wabada wabada wabada, ah woomba woomba woomba. We had funny descriptions of pulling his legs straight being akin to taking the ladle from the drawer, bringing his knees to his chest in a circular motion imitating stirring the ingredients settled at the bottom of the pot, and then pressing those knees up to his chest, the ladle scooping the soup out. And all of these would relieve some gas, but the gas always came back again.

It had to be my diet according to the internet, or it was merely his developing digestive system, but the Sisyphean horror of it was relentless. My doctor said trying to change what I ate was pointless. The baby wasn’t showing signs of an actual allergy, so it would be a wild good chase to figure out what was bothering him. (You haven’t been eating goose, have you?) 

Every hour through the night he would growl into a full body flex, making rigid every muscle attempting to push gas from somewhere to somewhere else. We slept with my knee hooked under his knees to keep them elevated, putting him into a near squat position while he slept to help alleviate some of the pressure. We held him upright after every feed for 15 minutes, and every feed was upright in itself. New positions were formed as I plunked the not-yet-sitting baby into a sitting position on the countertop so he was at approximately nipple height so he could drink sitting up, only it wasn’t nipple height, so I had to be on my tippy toes for the whole 15 minutes he got his fill. My calves! (You haven’t been eating calves, have you?) 

I abandoned the spicy, the rich, the decadent, eating the most banal things. I burped him relentlessly to try to get air to come up instead of out. I sat with him in the bath in hopes his little body would relax enough to move things around. Any half-baked idea, any idea at all, was attempted. (You haven’t been eating half-baked things, have you?)

And then, on a day when we were too tired to notice, the gas problem just… stopped. We were no longer pressing the brakes in the student driver car. He was driving all on his own, tossing his legs into the air and letting out a foghorn of noise followed by a cheeky little smile, his nose scrunching like mine. The boy had learned to fart. The gas phase was over. 

Phases are what every parent lauds as the bane and boon of parenting. Yes, they are torture, but the torture always ends, or at the very least, is replaced by some other novel type of torture. As the marauding bubbles became a memory, a new villain rode into town: teeth. But teeth have an enemies to lovers arc. They’re a real pain in the ass when they show up, but eventually you go out to dinner together and blah blah blah, you know the rest. 

But if you attempted to bundle teething, gas, nursing woes, sleepless nights, blowouts, and the rest all into one season, into mere infancy, you would lose your mind. You have to segment what you can into phases lest the lot of them clobber you into a curdled defeat. Phases are really how we get through anything. Monday and Tuesday are a phase. You get through them before the next phase which is “the middle of the week” and then voila, it’s the days leading into the weekend, the best phase of all. 

Months, semesters, quarters, grade levels, elementary to middle to high school, the stages of grief, the acts of a play, writing to editing to publishing, everything has its phases, including the natural world. Every deciduous tree native to this valley has lost its leaves. Snow lingers in patches on the warm ground after not the first, but the second snowstorm of the season. November here typically welcomes the cold, but not yet the deadening blanket of snow. I’m hard pressed to call a 14°F morning fall. But without the eye-straining albedo off the deep winter snow, it’s not winter.

Or… it’s not deep winter. We readily bucket the seasons into their four quadrants, but are there only four? Even now, I’ve illustrated a fifth. Deep winter is not the same as winter. So, if this is not fall, and it is not deep winter, when is winter? 

I’ve been thinking about this since reading Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter. Leibowitz is a Stanford-trained PhD and expert at leveraging mindset to improve health and well-being. While that line is pulled from her bio, it was also abundantly true upon reading the book. I like winter! But Leibowitz made me love winter. She made me so obsessed with the approaching season that I read the book with an infant in under a week. In addition to being very smart and offering a lot of wisdom and actionable advice, Leibowitz is also a very good writer. 

In the book, Leibowitz introduces the reader to the Sami, the Indigenous people of Northern Europe. The Sami lived (and still live) throughout the Arctic region of Sámpi, now Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. They have a deep familiarity with the region, and instead of breaking the seasons into four, they have eight seasons: the traditional four and then four bridge seasons, all triggered by natural events like the arrival of certain migratory birds or when a lake finally freezes over. While a season called “spring-summer” made me chuckle imagining the brunch of seasons, there’s also a reason we call it brunch instead of breakfast or lunch. Because it isn’t breakfast, and it isn’t lunch. 

It had me wondering about our seasons here. If this doesn’t really feel like fall, but clearly isn’t winter, what is it? And if I loathed what the Sami would call my spring-winter, would finding a way to delineate that time make it pass more pleasantly? Could I categorize it as a phase instead of lumping it into broader winter and tainting the whole experience?

These specialty seasons aren’t unique to the Arctic. I lived in LA for eight years, and specialty seasons were aplenty in a town that most people consider perpetual summer. When I lived in Topanga Canyon, I had three weather stations saved on my phone: Topanga, Santa Monica, and Woodland Hills. A lovely day in Topanga, sun high and 75° could be 62° with fog in Santa Monica and closing in on 90° in Woodland Hills. Each town had its own seasons, and the county more broadly had others like: spider season, jacaranda season, smoke season, dead grass season, rainy season, when is it going to stop raining season, and more. Where tourists saw a distinct lack of nuance, locals branded themselves as such by seeing, noting, and categorizing the minutiae. And you had to. If you dressed for fog on the wrong day, you’d be fogging up your windshield with sweat.

We could map out the baby’s next seasons: some mix of sitting up, solids, crawling. Of course even in those there’s sitting up with assistance, getting into the sitting position on his own, sitting up independently. Then there’s purees, mashed fruit, all the way to a chicken wing. Then we have spinning on the belly and army crawling before full-fledged crawling. 

So too do we have the micro-seasons. 

The first hard frost 

The day there are no more leaves

The first snowfall

The first snowfall that sticks 

The time your car window freezes shut

The morning the house falls under 60°

The first ski

The day the tourists arrive

The morning you have to shovel yourself out

The first morning shoveling yourself out seems pointless, you might as well wait until the storm stops

The day the dust begins to coat the snow

The day the tourists leave 

The day you come inside somehow covered in mud

The first bud

When I lay them out, just those few, there seems like there is so much ahead, so much to experience and to acknowledge and to enjoy. Winter does not lay out before me like a behemoth, but like a path to amble through. Some days there will be sweat on the brow, carrying the baby on my back into the mountains. Some days there will be a chill in the air fixed only by cocoa and blankets and logs on the fire. Some days there will be a dance, and shoveling and shoveling and shoveling will feel reminiscent of chasing persistent bubbles out of town. Winter will bare her teeth, but just like with the baby, winter’s teeth have an arc straight to the heart.

This is why we chunk things out, not only to get through them, but to be able to enjoy them. Having a baby sounds hard. Winter, in general, sounds hard. But they are what we make them, and if we always make them out to be hard, that’s how they’ll stay. 

I love winter, but I’ve always loved winter from November to about the end of February. When winter persists through March, April, and May (which it does here), I start to slowly unravel. I do this sometimes with breastfeeding. You mean there are another eight months until my body is mine again? But that misses the magic. It misses the chance to enjoy all the smaller steps between. And so it is with winter. 

Difficult seasons, of all kinds, are made better through effort. Lucky for me, this book outlined exactly how to do it.  

How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days by Kari Leibowitz PhD is available where you get your books.