Warsaw Mommy Blog

I think I’d better (a) enjoy this while it lasts and (b) document it as evidence. After all, the day will soon come when it will require a forklift to just get Max off the sofa – let alone enjoying housework.

When Max was about four months old I went back to work, so we hired the World’s Best Nanny to take care of his yelling demonic butt. No lie: this woman was the Polish Mary Poppins – which I guess by rights should make her Maria Popińska, but she wasn’t. Her name was Helena.

Helena was just about the only person on the planet who did not get freaked out and practically suicidal at Max’s incessant screaming. At first I took this as a further rebuke of my mothering skills (or lack thereof), but then I figured out that she only had to spend seven hours a day with the kid, as opposed to my 17. And she got paid to be here for those hours, whereas I was experiencing all that screaming for free (well actually, if you figure that I was springing for diapers and baby wipes and food and clothes, I was actually paying Max for the privilege of being shouted at by him). AND she got a full night’s sleep in between, whereas I considered myself lucky as all heck if I got two whole hours of sleep in a row. So I stopped feeling bad about how she could handle the screaming and started looking to her for coping ideas.

By far the best was this little trick she had to make him calm down: she would say to him, “Wąż robi ’ssssss’” (which translates to ‘a snake says, ’ssssss’”) and “Krówka robi ‘moo’” (I bet you can figure that one out, right? Look at how good your Polish is!). She would go on and on, listing animals and making their noises and Max would go all quiet and interested and Helena would scoop mashed banana into his gaping mouth or get his diaper changed or cut his toenails. It was amazing. I totally stole her trick one night during bath time (also known at that point in my life as ‘the ten minutes of wet hell’) and was delighted when it actually worked. He’d stop hollering and writhing like someone in the throes of a death seizure and would just sit totally still and stare at me, waiting for more.

(Just worth noting: it also works on Alex when he’s not interested in lying still during diaper and clothing changes. I have no idea what the deal is but this is magical: with my kids it’s like invoking a deity. Try it on your own rug rats at home the next time they act up. And then get back to me if it was successful or not).

Anyway. The time eventually came for her to ask Max what a snake says and what a cow says, and he’d tell her in his little baby voice, and the adorableness of those exchanges used to make me want to burst into laughter and tears at the same time… there is nothing sweeter and funnier than hearing your child hiss and moo in a teeny, tiny voice. But I noticed that he was making some noises that I did not recognise at all, so one day I came out of the office to listen to the Q&A period of their day. It was then I found out that in Poland, animals make weird sounds. For example, a dog doesn’t say ‘woof’ or ‘ruff’; it says ‘how‘ (I’ll just write this semi-phonetically, rather than writing using the Polish alphabet, OK?). And a duck says ‘kva’ and a frog says ‘koom’ and a rooster says ‘koo koo ree koo’ and a bird says ‘ree ree’. And so on.

By this point, I’d already introduced ‘Old McDonald Had A Farm’ to Max and he was in love with the song, though he had started to protest at the animal sounds I was making, saying they were wrong. So Helena and I explained that animals make different sounds, depending if they are Polish- or English-speaking animals and he accepted this completely. SO completely, in fact, that from that point on when we sang ‘Old McDonald’, the animals had to be bilingual.

This is a sample of how our daily and oh-so-numerous renditions of the song went: “Old McDonald had a farm. Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh. And on that farm he had a dog. Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh. With a ‘woof woof’ here and a ‘how how’ there. Here a ‘woof’, there a ‘how’, everywhere a ‘woof how’. Old McDonald had a farm. Ee-eye-ee-eye-ohhhhhhh!”

And by about the fourth animal, my brain would explode.

As you can well imagine, I was ever-so relieved to learn that in Poland, cats say ‘meow’ and sheep say ‘baaa’ and owls say ‘hoo’.

Oh, what a tough decision to make:

“Hmmmm. Do I dip my finger – yet again – into Mommy’s (oh-so-desperately-needed) latte or do I go for the candy?”

I watch as Max reaches for the candy and I say, “Smart move, kid.”

I know I’m Canadian and I have seen my share of harsh winters, but this year, winter in Warsaw seems to be going on forever… it snows every night, it snows at some point every day. When we wake up, the thermometer reads -12 degrees on a GOOD day (by ‘good’ I mean ‘today is mildly chilly’ not ‘today is f’ing cold’).

But here’s the up side: Alex looks positively adorable in his hat with little cat ears…

You know, I was always really bad at party games. I was fantastic at partying (oh, boy do I have stories to tell about my partying days!  But not here. Ahem. That’s a whole other blog topic. An anonymous one. Anyway).

So. Party games. Charades, Pictionary, Twister, Scrabble, Spin the Bottle. Actually, hold on. I was pretty good at Spin the Bottle, I think. But again, other blog. That one that my husband has no access to. Moving on!

The point is, when enough alcohol had been consumed by all involved and some person would say brightly, “Hey! How ’bout a game of charades?” and everyone would cheer and scramble around for paper and pens and start dividing the group up into teams, I’d be the one off in the corner downing two shots of tequila and wondering if I could hide in the washroom for the duration. I was also that pathetic person who would look at the scrap of paper on which something was scrawled like, ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ or ‘East of Eden’ and I’d just despair. I’d shake my head and be at a total loss and then I’d just stand there, looking gormless. I mean I’d make an effort, but just how the hell do you pretend to be a bridge, really? I’d, like, raise my arms overhead and touch my fingertips together to make a bridge with my arms and there would be a volley of “Dancer? Ballerina? Rising? Sweating?” Like, NO! I’m a bridge, dammit! And ‘Madison’? I can look mad, ’cause I am quite furious about this stupid game, and I can pretend to pat my son on the head or rock a baby in my arms, but I generally just sucked. At the time, it was my most fervent wish to never play charades ever again.

Unless the choice on offer was Pictionary, in which case, stab me between the eyes with a pen. I am bad at drawing – really bad. Even my stick people are dire. I am thrilled beyond all rational explanation that my husband is quite handy with a crayon, because he’s the one who draws with our son. His wolves don’t look like cats; his cars and trains and airplanes all look different; his people are more than stick figures with bubbles for hands and feet. Max prefers to draw with Daddy, since even my three-year-old acknowledges kindly that Mommy is just ‘not very good’. Ah, out of the mouths of babes. And art critics.

So now look at my life today, living in a country where I am constantly stumbling and stuttering over words, trying to make myself understood at the grocery store or the pharmacy. My day-to-day Polish is pretty good, but when confronted by really specific language (like ‘parsley’ or ‘ear drops”) I end up standing there with my hands at my sides, looking at the other person, and just willing them to understand what I need. When will thought osmosis be invented, do you think? ‘Cause I would really find it useful at times. In the meantime, I have a few tools at my disposal and I know that you will share in my delight at the brutal irony that my life is now one long game of Charades and Pictionary.

This is how it goes: last week I entered a pharmacy. Max is seeing an allergist next week – we’ve been on the waiting list for 6 months – and so he needs to have blood tests (that was a joy, I can assure you) and we also need to bring some of his urine to be tested. Which necessitated the purchase of a plastic container in which to bring the pee, which was how I found myself standing in the apteka, staring at the nice woman behind the plexi-glass barrier and trying to come up with the Polish words to explain ‘pee container’. Since I had none, I mentally went to Plan B (charades), but decided against it when I considered how I’d have to ‘pee’ in public whilst holding a pretend plastic container, which I’d have to ’screw closed’ and raise with a flourish, to wave triumphantly in her startled face.

OK, then; Plan C: “Ma pani długopis i notatki?” (“Have you got a pen and some notepaper?”) and I embarked on a round of Pictionary. I started by drawing a kind of square thing with a rounded thing on top, which was supposed to be the container itself. Ummmm. Not helpful. I doodled some liquid inside and toyed with the idea of asking for a yellow marker. Uh, no. Then I had a brainwave: I drew a little penis peeing (I can draw those), and aimed the pee at the square/round thing and pointed at the penis and said “Szuszak mojego syna” (“This is my son’s penis”) and then I added, “Ma badanie na lekarze” (“He has some tests at the doctor”) and then I circled the square/round thing and added “I potrzebuję ten… coś” (“And I need this… thing”). Oh, glorious dawning of comprehension on the woman’s face! Oh, the joy of her smiling at me and saying, “Rozumiem!” (“I understand!”) and producing a little pee jar in a plastic bag. Oh, how we beamed at each other with delight! Oh, the applause of the people behind me in line, who had observed this little drama with amusement! I sailed out of that pharmacy proudly, and thought of the equally-successful quest of Ulysses. Though I do admit his was probably harder.

So, I guess there may be some hope for my party games skills after all… especially if I ever need to draw a little boy peeing into a jar.

When we found out we were having boys – no, we didn’t want to be surprised, and we got the low-down during the ultrasound at the earliest opportunity – Piotr and I sat and stared at each other as we desperately searched for names. With Polish grandparents here and my Mom in Canada, we wanted to find names that (a) would travel well, for when we decide to go back to Canada (that ruled out Polish names like Zbigniew and Michołaj, which is too bad since ‘Michołaj’ is ‘Nicholas’ and I love that name) and (b) that everyone in both families could actually pronounce (which ruled out Krzysztof and Grzegorz and Jacob and William and James).

Let me just say, as an aside, that if we’d only had girls, life would have been easier by a whole heck of a lot. With easy-t0-get-your-tongue-around names like Anna and Kasia and Asia (Kasha, Asha) and Maja (Maya) and Julita (she would have been Lita in English) and Oktawia (Octavia, but we’d have called her Vivi), the possibilities were literally endless. But when I was pregnant with Max and the ultrasound showed his little member waving around in there, we headed to the book store, we got on the internet and we started looking through a Polish day planner (in Poland, every name has a special ‘Name Day’, and they are listed right in the calendar. Yeah, I know it’s cool). And we just couldn’t find a boy’s name that worked linguistically and which we liked. Because let’s face it: if I am going to be hollering a name up the stairs as his 10-year-old ass lounges in bed not getting ready for school, or Piotr is going to be hassling him about clearing the table before watching TV for the umpteenth time, and we have to sing Happy Birthday every year, it had better be a name we like saying over and over again.

Finally, we decided on Maksymilian, which is the Polish version of Maximilian; obviously he is called Max for short and in Polish his nickname is Maksiu (pronounced ‘Mak-shoo’. It’s so cute it hurts me sometimes). We chose it for all kinds of reasons: international name, easy to pronounce, easy to shorten and – very important to me – a strong name, one to grow into as he enters manhood. I hope it will give him the strength of his convictions since I named him after St. Maksymilian Kolbe, a very honourable man, a Polish Franciscan friar who gave himself up to save another prisoner in Auschwitz. The fact that he is now the patron saint of drug addicts and prisoners and journalists and the pro-life movement kind of smudges up and confuses the name, for me, but I think that what he did in his life is far greater than any role which may be assigned to him by others in his death, so my choice stands.

Max is now at playschool and he draws and paints with enthusiasm and with a blinding selection of colours; his teacher always writes his name on his artwork and for months and months, she wrote it as ‘Maks’. Which drove me nuts. I have no idea why – it just looked so WRONG somehow, without the ‘x’. So I reminded his teacher that actually, his name has an ‘x’ and she forgot and so my husband reminded her and she forgot and I wrote her a note and this went on for ages and the first day that he came home with ‘Max’ written above his blobby green painted picture of a zły wilk (angry wolf), there was much rejoicing and celebrating in our house.

Then I got pregnant with another boy and we were in despair as we honestly felt that we had used up the only boy’s name out there which worked for us on all the levels. Piotr did suggest Aleksander very early on, but I just wasn’t feeling it and was pulling for Tymon (he’d be Timmy or Tim in English). But then he was born and he didn’t look like a Tymon – whatever a Tymon looks like – and we agreed he did, indeed, look like an Alex. Plus we had so recently won the ‘x’ war at Max’s playschool and so we were feeling giddy and daring and thought, what the hell, let’s dare them in three years to write his name as ‘Aleks’ on his play-doh snail or papier-machee turkey head.

What I did not foresee was that in Poland, Aleksander is often shortened to ‘Olo’. Which I dislike. The first time it happened was at the doctor when we took Alex for his vaccination; she kept saying ‘Olo’ and I had no idea what she was on about. I finally got with the program and asked that she call him Alex, and then I went one step farther and requested that they write it with an ‘x’. I got quite a look – but hey. Respect the ‘x’, folks.

I guess a legitimate question would be, if I had such terrible postpartum depression after Max, why on earth would I have another baby (if you haven’t read about the whole PPD thing, just hop down one blog entry and come on back here. I’ll wait for you).

So. Baby #2. Let me preface this by saying that Max was almost an only child; that first year with him damn near killed us with stress and exhaustion, and when things finally got OK, then good, then really good, we didn’t want to even think about introducing any new elements into our lives: Max was bright and funny and we adored him and we were having such a good time in our little family of three, that we didn’t want to risk going through any of THAT ever again. I may be a bit nuts at times, but even I could see that going down that painful, traumatic road again was a non-starter.

But time passed, and Max got bigger. I gained perspective on my PPD and realised that I could have and should have talked to Maria, my midwife. I called her after I felt OK again and asked her about the chances of getting PPD again with a second baby and she was horrified that I had not asked for help (I told her that, actually, I HAD but had got none in response). Upon hearing this, she was warm and supportive and told me that if the fear of PPD was the main thing keeping me from having another baby, that I should know she’d be there this time if I needed her.  And so Piotr and I started dancing around the idea of another baby – cautiously at first, kind of placing our big toes on the dance floor before retreating to the bar to load up on liquid courage – then placing both feet on the wooden parquet with some enthusiasm and verve and arm-waving, before finally just downing four tequila shots in a row, whipping off our shoes (hitting our bartender in the head as we did so) and heading out to the dance floor for full-on body contact, hot and heavy, ‘who cares who is watching us, anyway?’ kind of dancing. We talked and we talked and we thought of every possible (and impossible) scenario and in the end we just decided to have another baby. Let the fun begin!

I think we went into it smarter, wiser, more prepared – as do most second-time parents. But most importantly for me, I went into it knowing what PPD looks like and feels like, and I promised myself and my husband that I WAS NOT going to do it again, all alone. We were prepared for it to happen, and Maria was my midwife again and she had her eye on me too. And guess what? When Alex was about 3 weeks old and I began to feel those oh-so-familiar bad things – tense and stressed and weepy and overwhelmed and hopeless – I called Maria and she talked to me. After an hour of conversation, she told me to go and get some non-prescription anti-depressants from the chemist. Within 3 days of taking just one pill a day, I felt different. I know the pills help, but it also helps that Alex has been so different from Max, right from the get-go: he did not cry when he was born, he rarely cries even now at 10 months, he sleeps well, he is a calmer personality. I look at him sometimes and finally understand what all those other women were talking about when they said their babies were not like Max – now I am the woman with the ‘easy’ baby and I see other mothers in the grocery store looking at me with envy and exhaustion, as their babies holler and scream and Alex just sits in his stroller and smiles at everyone without a murmur.

I am grateful for this easier experience: I am grateful that I can enjoy my beautiful 3-year-old son at the same time that I can enjoy my beautiful 10-month-old son. I am grateful that I can cope with Alex’s occasional crying (when teething, when hungry, when overtired) in a way that I could not cope with Max’s. I am grateful that I asked for help this time, even before anything started to happen, and I’m grateful that this time someone listened to what I was saying and took me seriously.

I am grateful for all of this now – and I don’t think I’ll ever stop being grateful for any of it. After all, I know all too well how it could be, how I could be living and feeling. I’ve been there, held tightly in the grip of depression and self-hatred and hopelessness, and I never want to go back. Not ever.

This is something that I’ve wanted to write about for awhile, and I have finally screwed up enough courage to do it – maybe enough time and distance have passed for me to have the courage.

Max was such a wanted child: 6 months before we started trying to get pregnant, I lost some weight, started taking folic acid, did loads of reading and looked at hospitals in Warsaw. When I got pregnant – basically on the first try – we were delighted, and spent hours planning our lives with a baby, and going to prenatal classes, and talking to an English-speaking midwife about a water birth and being amazed almost daily at the changes in my body. We could not wait to meet Max, we were so excited. We bought a bigger flat. We bought bedroom furniture. We bought sweet little clothes and toys. We had grandparents-to-be on two continents, waiting with bated breath. Then Max came – and my whole life fell apart.

I remember in the birthing classes, the midwife told us that the baby born screaming is a myth; most babies come into the world calmly and lay quietly on the mother’s breasts, blinking and squinting. Max came into this world screaming and he did not really stop for the first 14 months that he lived on this planet. He screamed when he was hungry, then he screamed while he was trying to eat, then he screamed after he’d finished eating. He screamed when he was tired, but he wouldn’t sleep for longer than 30 minutes at a time – and he’d wake up screaming. He screamed when we picked him up and rocked him, he screamed when we put him down. He went through one stage for about 3 weeks where the only way he’d sleep was in my arms, when I was walking around in circles; if he fell asleep and I put him down, he’d wake up and scream.

My husband left the house every day at 8:00 and returned at 6:00 in the evening so I was alone with Max for about 10 hours a day, 50 hours a week, for the first 4 months of his life. He was born in early October and Warsaw autumns are grey and rainy, and Warsaw winters are miserably cold and snowy, so taking Max out for long walks was impossible. This meant that I was quite literally trapped for 10 hours a day, in a flat, alone with a screaming baby. If I wanted to take a shower or make a cup of coffee or go to the washroom or eat some toast, I had to mentally brace myself for the screaming. I remember psyching myself up, saying things like, “OK. I need to brush my teeth. I will put him in his crib and run to the sink and talk to him the whole time I’m brushing so he knows I’m still here and then I’ll spit and rinse and be back here in about 30 seconds. Here we go….” and I’d place him in his crib and run out of the room, the screams following me the whole way.

I was a wreck, but I thought that I was a wreck because of the constant screaming and the sleep deprivation; it never occurred to me that something more was going on. I never thought that I had postpartum depression, because I was so overwhelmed by motherhood, and by the fact that I hated being a mother to a child that I had wanted so badly. And then I began to have these kinds of thoughts: that I hated being a mother, that I was a terrible mother, that my baby knew I was a terrible mother and that was why he was screaming, that I could not ever stop him screaming because I was a terrible mother, being a bad mother made me a bad person, I hated feeling this way, I hated myself, I hated my baby. I began to wish he would just shut up, for Christ’s sake, just SHUT UP for five fucking minutes, can you do that, you little shit? I began to dream about walking out of the flat one day, just leaving Max alone in his crib screaming, and Piotr could come home from work in 2 hours, or 6 hours, or 10 hours and HE could just deal with this fucking nightmare child because I’D be on a plane going anywhere but here. If I’d been in Canada I would have talked to my mother or my friends, but I just couldn’t talk about any of this on the phone and it was too awful to try to write it all down in an e-mail, even though I tried more than once. None of my close friends in Warsaw have kids, so I couldn’t talk to them, and everyone else I asked told me to be happy to have a healthy baby. They were actually offended that I was spitting in the face of the whole ‘Matka Polka’ (Polish Earth-Mother/ Goddess) cultural protocol and was so ungrateful for my baby, when so many Polish women would love to have a child and couldn’t. How dare I complain about a little bit of crying? My role in life was to have children, and I should accept that role without question, without complaint. This plunged me into a deeper sense of worthlessness, of failure, of guilt. Who was I to complain?

This was when I began to realise that my feelings were not just sleep deprivation – this was something else and I needed to get some help. I asked some other non-Polish mothers from my prenatal class – for some reason, a bunch of us all had our first kids within 2 months of each other – and I’d call some other Warsaw mommies and describe Max’s behaviour and ask for advice. Unfortunately for me, these women had angel babies who rarely cried and who slept 5 or 6 hours a night almost from the get-go and they all loved being mothers SO MUCH that they all got pregnant before their firstborn was a year old – because for them, being a mother was such a fantastic, amazing, perfect experience. Hearing this made me feel much, much worse (of course), and my feelings of being inadequate and a failure as a mother were reinforced by one of my so-called friends saying to me, “Huh. My baby doesn’t do any of the things that Max does. I just don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” What I should have said was, “I am doing nothing wrong, you bitch.” But I didn’t; I couldn’t. I was so sure that my baby was miserable because of a huge number of things I was doing (and not doing) and it was all my fault and if I could just become a good mother somehow, Max would stop screaming. He did not stop screaming, and so I did not become a good mother.

I then turned to the medical profession for help: I went to see my doctor and started to tell her about how I was feeling. She cut me off and told me not to hold Max the way that I was; also, I shouldn’t let him get too dependent on the soother. I tried again to talk to her, she told me I had to make way for her next patient. I tried to explain about PPD, but she told me it didn’t really exist, and if I took a long walk every day I’d feel better. It turns out that I could have called Maria, my midwife, but that information was written in Polish only on the hospital website and so I didn’t understand it.

In desperation, I looked for a therapist or psychologist. There were only three English-speaking psychologists I could find: one was my friend and would not treat me; the second had a four-month waiting period; the last was someone I knew professionally, and he refused to treat me. I wrote an e-mail to a large private clinic with an English-language website – they only accepted e-mail queries and promised to get in touch after reading the e-mails – and I wrote, ‘I think I have postpartum depression. I am afraid that I will hurt myself, and my baby. Please help me.’ Nobody responded; when I called, nobody spoke English and when I tried to explain in Polish what was happening to me, the person at the other end was rude and dismissive and put me on hold and forgot about me, and eventually hung up. I couldn’t bring myself to call back.

I kept trying, I kept hitting walls, I was totally alone; I know that the language barrier and the cultural refusal to accept PPD as something real and devastating made my isolation more complete. If I had been back in Canada, I would have had so many other options – I would have been able to express myself fully and clearly in my native tongue and I’d have kept talking until someone listened. I would have had emergency hotlines, and crisis centers and access to clinics and doctors and I would have screamed until someone heard me. But I was here, in Poland, and I did not know what to do.

In the end, we hired a nanny and I went back to work. These two things helped. Max began to eat formula from a bottle and he started to sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch, and that helped. I finally talked to my husband and even though he was not a professional, that helped. A friend took Max for the occasional weekend, and that helped. Spring came and the sun came out, and that helped. Max’s funny, sweet and utterly charming personality began to emerge, and that really helped. I found Heather Armstrong’s website and her personal journey through PPD and out the other side showed me that I was not alone and not crazy and that I could survive this. But the sad truth is that I did not start to enjoy my firstborn son until he was about 14 months old. I think another truth is that my PPD was something that I just gritted my teeth about and got through, all by myself. It passed. It ended. It went away – but I still wonder what that 14 months would have been like if I’d found a doctor’s sympathetic ear, or talked to a psychologist, or taken medication, or found just one other woman who would admit to the same experience, the same feelings. Maybe I would not have thought about throwing Max against the wall to just make it all stop – the fact that I did not hit him or hurt him or kill us both still amazes me, to this day.

I wish I’d been back in Canada when all this happened. I know things would have been different. It’s my one regret about moving to Poland – that I had PPD in a country where I could not get any help, no matter how many times I asked. The one thing I’d say to any woman who is thinking about hurting herself or her baby is: ask for help, start talking, start to scream. And don’t stop until someone listens to you. You don’t have to do this the way that I did – you don’t have to suffer through it and survive it. You don’t.

Max is three and although he fully understands everything being said to him in both English and Polish, he does tend to mix the languages sometimes, particularly when he only knows a certain word in one language.  Instead of asking what the word is in Polish or English – which we encourage him to do – he simply switches languages halfway through a sentence, uses the word he knows, and switches back. For this reason, we have some handy-dandy language shortcuts which are incomprehensible to outsiders. I sometimes think that we are in the process of developing our own secret language in our house – we are on the verge of naming our own country. I get to be Empress Of All For All Time.

Anyway, most of the time we follow his conversational meandering through languages, but sometimes we get seriously stumped. The most recent case was when he came back from playschool one day and started playing with his race cars on the sofa. He was singing away and talking to himself and his cars – as usual – and he kept saying “Zigzag ma green”. I asked him what that meant, and he was unable to explain – he just kept showing me his cars and driving them around and crashing them on the floor. So I figured he was calling his racing cars ‘Zigzag’ (maybe because he is unable to drive them in a straight line and zigzags them all over the road?) and ‘ma green’ was one of his little mixed-up language things. ‘Ma’ in Polish means ‘to have’, and he was just starting to learn about cars going when the light is green, and being able to cross the road when the green walk signal was on. So – in my adult logic – I guessed he was basically saying, “The criss-crossing race car has the green light and can go.” Makes sense, right?

So for about four months, Piotr and I went along with this and we called all his cars ‘Zigzag ma green’ and Max often told us we were WRONG, that this car was NOT ‘Zigzag ma green’, so we smiled at each other and laughed that THIS poor little car was stuck at the red light for some reason. So cuuuute!

For Christmas, my mother bought a copy of the ‘Cars’ DVD for Max; if you have kids you’ll know this Pixar movie. Owen Wilson is the voice of the hero, a red racing car named Lightning McQueen, and Paul Newman is the voice of the Hudson Hornet and the whole story is actually rather sweet. I should know: I’ve watched the DVD with Max about 800 times since Christmas. If you have kids, you’ll believe me when I say that.

So one day we’re watching the movie, and I notice that one of the little red racing cars that I bought him for his birthday in October is actually Lightning McQueen! I point this out to him, all excited, and he looks up at me like I’m the world’s biggest idiot and he says, “Yes, I know. This is Zigzag ma green. I said this!” And he huffs at me and goes back to crashing the car into the sofa cushions.

Aha. ‘Zigzag’ is the cute Polish word kids use for lightning (obviously inspired by the jagged shapes made by lightning as it flashes across the sky); ‘ma green’ is ‘McQueen’.

Zigzag ma green = Lightning McQueen.

It really took me six months to figure this out… I’m not that bright sometimes.

The first childcare battleground I found myself on was the medical one. Specifically, vaccinating my first-born son, Max.

When we went to the English-language maternity classes here in Warsaw, we were all told by the midwife that our babies would be vaccinated within 3 hours of their birth. All of the Poles looked quite relaxed at this announcement, the foreigners – and we were from Canada, the US, Germany, Ireland and England – all looked like we had swallowed our eyeballs. Hands flew up, including mine. We all wanted to know: did we HAVE to vaccinate our children so early? Like, if we refused, would they, like, KEEP our babies, or call the child-protection services, or something? This is crazy paranoia, I know, but factor in pregnancy hormones, plus a former Communist system, plus the famously-corrupt medical system in Poland (not so much now, but ten years ago, oh boy!) and you can see why we were good and freaked. The midwife was very cool, though, and had dealt with non-Poles before and she told us that no, we did not have to. As the parents, we had the right to refuse the vaccination at any time, and we could even choose to not vaccinate our children at all. The ‘anti-vaccination’ trend which has swept through North America is slowly starting to appear in Poland (my husband has a friend whose son has never had a vaccination. The kid is three years old).

Anyway, the point is that none of us were refusing to vaccinate our kids EVER EVER – just not 3 hours after birth. And my husband and I agreed that since I was so vehemently dead-set against it, we’d wait and do it when Max was 3 months old. So, the two most important parties involved – the Polish Daddy and the Canadian Mommy – had made a joint decision, and when Max came into the world, healthy and screaming like a maniac, and the nurses said they were going to take him away now to be vaccinated, Piotr explained that we were going to wait. We had Max at a public/private hospital in Warsaw, and they had many foreigners delivering there, and so nobody even raised an eyebrow. It was like, “Yeah, no problem. Here’s your screaming bundle of joy. Goodnight!”

Fast-forward 3 months, to the state-run public clinic near our flat. I was there alone with Max. I was sleep-deprived, I had crippling postpartum depression, I was snowbound and alone in the flat with him for 10 hours a day. Nobody spoke any English, so I was dealing with a health issue in Polish, I was a new mother, I was lost and confused. I brought him to the nurse and explained that it was his first vaccination. She. Freaked. Out. She asked why he hadn’t been vaccinated right after his birth; I explained. She asked me why I had endangered his life so badly; I told her I hadn’t. She said I was a terrible mother; I said I wasn’t (though I spent most of my time in a postpartum depressive state, convinced that I was the worst mother the world had ever seen. Hearing her say it made me lose any confidence I had whatsoever). She said that in her 18 years of nursing, she had never seen a mother as irresponsible as I was; I had no response. But I imagined various ‘Screw you, bitch’ scenarios in my head. I was ready to stick that damn needle in her neck, leave my screaming bundle of joy on the table and make a run for the airport to fly to a country without babies or nurses or snow or people.

In the end, a kind doctor intervened and told the nurse to just give Max the damn shot, already, and that she had met many parents who had not vaccinated their child at birth. But I had already had my first truly harsh learning experience to do with kids in Poland… and to this day, I remember the taste in my mouth as that bitch of a nurse and I went back and forth: it was salty and metallic. The taste of pure, teary rage. I’ve tasted it a few times since, when what I feel is best for my child has been in direct offensive opposition to what is the norm here, and I have been accused of blatant neglect. But as I’ve entered further into this world of motherhood, and I’ve gained confidence and really gotten to know my sons, I have become better at handling it: I simply tell the busybody that it is none of their sprawa (business). Then I crinkle my eyes at them: when I do this, I may be half-smiling or I may be mentally drawing a bull’s-eye on their forehead. It really depends on my mood.