A Fresh Start

The recent Atlantic article on breastfeeding annoys me to no end, and yet raises some really good questions about our culture, breastfeeding and feminism. Loosely, the author is a breastfeeding mother of 3 who says that breastfeeding is considered the ultimate linch-pin in being a good mother among pretentious middle class mothers, is not as amazing as science headlines and breastfeeding advocates would have us believe, and is, when she gets right down to it, annoying. But she's going to keep breastfeeding her last child. There's something obnoxious about the tone of this article, even though I think she captures the ambivalence that I, and I'm guessing many other modern women, experience being a bio mother.
( Cut for kindness )

I'm wide awake at 2 am. Hi world! Hello full moon!

I'm wired and making plans. I think I want to do bootcamp in May and June. I need more exercise, that's all there is to it. I'm also going to get my teeth cleaned and check out (gotta use the dental insurance before I quit!) and I'm going to get the scars on my chest looked at - they're starting to itch all the time. Bennett has been poking them, trying to play with them like buttons. I'd like to see if they can go away somehow. Like I need *more* stuff to be stared at on my chest.

I think I'm going to make myself a moon icon.
ETA: Done!

I'm feeling tired and spacey today. Bennett is full of energy and I feel like the most boring mama on the planet. B is 9 months old today. We were supposed to have his well baby check up today, but it's been postponed for 2 weeks. I'm just itching to find out how much he weighs. My guess is between 20 and 22 lbs. That little guy is such a delight. If only he'd quit being a squirmy worm at night.

***

Lent starts on Monday. With the exception of last year (I was pregnant) I've gone dry and vegan for Lent for the last.... 8 years? Something like that. It's a practice I really enjoy - even though I am not 100% successful at sticking to it. I have a hard time going with out dairy. I used to be strict Monday - Friday and allow myself a little dairy on weekends and that seemed to be the best way to actually stick to the spirit of the fast.

This year I'm not sure how much meaning the practice has for me any more. I still like the idea of a "spring cleaning." But it's a lot of work, going vegan. Do I really want to work on changing my habits for a full 6 weeks? Saying it that way makes me feel like changing up my habitual nature just might be the biggest benefit to the whole practice! I am reluctant to give it up, but I am equally unsure I have the energy for the effort it takes.

I remain undecided.

***

I've been waiting to hear back from my adviser before getting really set on this whole moving to Wales plan. Yesterday I contacted my secondary adviser. He said my main adviser is on sabbatical this term (she generally goes to Spain to work on translating a particular theologian's work), but could he do anything to help with the move? I feel silly waiting like this. I'm in the program - just go! Part of me feels like I'm doing the smart and cautious thing before packing up my family and moving continents. But there's a big chunk of me that wants an email from my adviser stating how excited she is - I want her approval and enthusiasm! Again, her enthusiasm would be helpful in our working relationship, but mostly I want it because I'm scared and want her approval. There it is.

Lately I'm noticing the many people from whom and situations in which I want approval. I feel icky and little bit surprised by it. I like to think of myself as some one who doesn't crave the approval of others, but.... that's not always so. In fact, I think I'm so used to generally getting along with people and generally being liked that when I sense some one might *not* like me I'm a little surprised. Which makes fucking up extremely difficult for me, because that's something other people do, not me. Sigh.

Maybe this is why I'm moody today. Too much change kicking off too much damn navel gazing.

I'm also a wee bit paralysed by the idea of moving to Wales. I occasionally have these "holy crap, what have I set in motion??" moments.

***

What else?

Fruit flies annoy me to no end and are so dreadfully difficult to eradicate.

I have to do a gratitude post. More stuff discovered missing - $15 worth of quarters for laundry. I have 3 days of diaper laundry ready to be washed and no quarters. Gah.

This morning I am grateful for:
*Bennett - he is healthy, strong, and a complete delight
*Adam - what an amazing person, partner, and father!
*a day of rain yesterday
*friends, far and near
*one again, that the apartment wasn't trashed in the break-in
*for bosses that care about me
*for the wonderful relationship with my sister
*being able to spend a full three weeks with my whole family in January
*not having to pay for the trip that allows the above to happen
*boobies that make milk
*and so much more, mostly intangible things, that I won't run on and on

I hope all of you have a SAFE and tasty Thanksgiving! Please remember to lock all of your doors and close your windows when you go out and about today. And drive safely.

Tired. Really tired. Did not make it to the Bluegrass Festival this weekend. I couldn't face the crowds and public transport with baby and diaper bag and no back support for breast feeding all day long.

I leave for Alaska on Sunday. It started snowing in Anchorage. Crap. I have no cold weather clothing anymore. And Bennett has none. Our first task upon landing will be to get ourselves to a consignment store.

The other night I had a dream that I was going to get a facial and when I looked in the mirror afterward my face was wrinkled and lined like a woman in her 70s. I think I feel old and I don't like it. My hair is thinning/falling out/turning grey. I have enormous matronly boobs. I miss my flat stomach. I'm always tired and I have little focus. Ah well.

Bennett is a delight, but he is so tiny. When I see other babies I get worried. He's starting to reach out for things. He puked down my cleavage tonight.

I have a lot of thoughts about the election and the issues at stake. Perhaps I'll write about them later. For right now I'll say that both candidates continue to lose my enthusiasm. I think the government/current administration/congress is a bunch of greedy corrupt insiders. I don't think Obama is much better than most of them. Maybe I'm just cynical.

My job is tedious. My executive director is a gigantic baby. He's a big ol' Eeyore. I'm tired of it. I want a leader who leads. I'm tired of trying to boost an organization that increasingly feels irrelevant, out moded and unwilling to do what it takes to be awesome, or pay the salaries necessary to get people who can make it fabulous. I stick around because it's been great for my resume, and I can get away with whatever I want. Like bringing the baby to work, showing up when I feel like it, and being the bossiest person in the organization. I like being bossy.

It is as I suspected: Bennett's UTI was just a fluke. He caught it in the NICU. No valve issues at all. I want to scrunch up my face and be all cynical about this. Be all "hospitals are for sick people! See! This is why I wanted to birth in a birthing center!" But you know.... better a fluke than a valve issue.

B had a follow up ultrasound this morning that showed his kidneys and bladder in perfect working condition. No need for a far more invasive VCUG test (in which dye is inserted up through the penis to watch his urine flow) and we can stop giving him the antibiotics. Yay!

Little B was supposed to come home Saturday morning, but he bradied again. (Bradycardia) The earliest released date, as of yesterday morning, is Thursday. But whatever. I haven't been to the hospital for two days. After finding out Thursday night that he wasn't coming home I had a bit of a breakdown and decided I needed a break from the 9 hour days at the hospital. I feel like a bad mom - I know babies heal, grow and develop best when curled up on their parents' chests, but I cannot handle the hospital anymore. I have spent more time at the hospital in the last two weeks than I have at my own home. I am exhausted from the constant platitudes of the nurses and the constant checking in when I'm there:

"How's everything going? Is he latching? How many minutes [of breastfeeding] has it been? You know, this is just his way of saying he's not ready to go home. You wouldn't want your baby to go home if it's not safe, would you? It'll just be a few more days. Any day now he'll grow out of this. It's just a developmental issue common to premies." Seriously, I get those statements EVERY time I'm there.

I am going to go in today for one feeding and to hold him for a couple of hours. And that's it. No more. Just one feeding a day. For my own sanity. I am so grateful that he'll never remember this time, although I fear his time in the hospital, time mostly left on his own, swaddled up and left to sleep in a crib by himself, will be imprinting on him. I don't want him to feel or perceive to be abandoned. He is used to hearing my heartbeat every moment of his life - then he gets born and is whisked off to a plastic bed without me.

Another reason to be pissed at Kaiser: Adam went the day before yesterday and I gave him a big swatch of fabric from a t-shirt I wear to bed, a t-shirt I've had since I was 12 (I haven't grown very much since then). Cut up for a good cause. I was hoping Benn could snuggle up with it. Yesterday it was no where to be seen. What nurse didn't give it to him? I'm so disappointed.

Actually, it's just days on end of disappointment.

I have decided that when I go in today I am going to tell the nurses I do not want them to talk to me, that I will get them if I have questions. I do not want any information about him. All I want is a 12 hour heads up that he is coming home. I can read his chart if I want to know what is going on. I'm tired of getting my hopes up. As far as I'm concerned, Kaiser has custody of my child and I've only got visitation rights.

These mothering hormones are crazy. I feel like I have been taken over, reprogrammed, invaded. I am not my own person anymore. Adam cannot relate to how I feel. This is the first time I felt a huge biological gap between me and him - or between women and men. This Mama Bear urge in me is powerful. It would be amazing if I wasn't in a position to have my heart broken every two days.

Not very articulate today. I am TOTALLY procrastinating working on some staffing reports. Argh, staffing. Bane of my existence these days.

My weekend yoga retreat was wonderful. Only 12 of us, 13 if you count lil' Bennett-in-the-belly, and many people were quite kind to him! One lady (hot, so hot. Do I ever miss the ladies sometimes!) even knitted him a beautiful green hat one night! The yoga was great. I feel better than I've felt in months - my hips feel normal, I'm not waddling. Just amazing. It was also great to hear birds and bugs. I saw toads and hawks, and heard wild pigs and horses. AND, I saw the biggest butterfly I've ever seen! It was horribly incredible. Body the size of both my thumbs together plus some and wings the size of my hand. I really miss nature.

( Thoughts on yoga and pregnancy )

But, I had to come home. What did I do? I immediately went to the movies with Adam and alizarin71, and concurrently with hrafntinna. We saw Iron Man. So fun! Totally not a feminist movie, but what the hell. Robert Downey Jr was everything I'd hoped he be, by which I mean fabulous. Gwyneth Paltrow played her part well and I loved the chemistry between her and RD Jr. My only criticism was that after wonderfully detailed and engrossing first and second acts, the third act felt like the director all of a sudden realized he was running long and had a Holy Shit! moment, cutting out stuff and speeding things along to the rather anticlimactic Fight Scene. I would have happily hung around for another 20 minutes for a more cohesive third act. But still. Good fun. Recommended for a good summer flick.

Okay, that's it for now.

I stayed home today. For several reasons. One is I work part time so I can take which ever two days off I need to. Another reason is that I have pulled a muscle in my side/stomach area which is incredibly painful. Sitting all day is just fine, but the jiggling of the muscles when I walk or stand for very long makes the pain really bad. I think this occurred the other night while getting out of bed. This belly and lack of ab control makes it difficult to get out of bed 4 times during the night. Or at all, really.

The last reason is that today was that coworker's review. I was not part of the formal review. A little birdy told me that the meeting was three hours long. I realize that I'm so stressed out about this that I've made myself slightly nauseated. My pulse is racing a bit, I'm having a bit of a hard time focusing. Sort of the tiniest beginning of an anxiety attack. Did she talk her way into staying? Would she really want to?

I have spent my day off on line ALL DAY. I caught up on a week's worth of email and I bought some maternity clothes. It's getting too hot for my jeans. I'm tired of wearing jeans and tshirts to the office. Time to upgrade. But why, oh why, are maternity clothes either really frikkin' expensive or so cheaply constructed? Most of what was out there did not scream out "Wear me!" I dropped a pretty penny. But I figure that, like last time, I'll have to send most of it back because it won't fit right. I bought another belly band/huggalug. I love my blue one. I bought a black skirt with a sparkly skull and cross bones on it (I just couldn't find a sundress that I wanted to wear!). I bought a light weight sweater and a pair of capris from Old Navy and three super gorgeous tops from Isabella Oliver. Beautiful clothing, but none of the pants are in short inseams and everything is priced at $120. I don't get it.

Maybe I feel so bad because I've mainly eaten strawberries, chocolate, tea, and ice cream today. Time for some real food and some pleasant distraction.

I'm currently reading Pushed: The Painful Truth About Chilbirth and Modern Maternity Care by Jennifer Block. I'm only a few chapters in, but it is already confirming both my limited experiences in the pregnant world and the reading I've been doing. Before getting pregnant I was already wary of the medical world and leaning more toward the side of natural childbirth. Now 6 months into this pregnancy I am more than ever convinced that natural - and by that I mean as little medical intervention as possible, even outside of a hospital - birth is the best way to go. Each medical intervention isn't a bad thing on its own. I'm glad we have many tools to help women birth healthy babies. However, it's the attitude of the hospitals and the messages sent to women that bother me the most.

Women are increasingly "choosing" (there is some debate over this word - are they actually choosing? being strongly suggested to choose it by their doctor? choosing it when all of the other interventions aren't "progressing"?) elective cesareans. Some are choosing it because they fear the damages caused by vaginal birth. Birth is treated as this problem waiting to happen, rather than a bodily function that we are evolutionary designed for. Of course birth is hard and scary, but when left to progress in its own time, births do not have to cause damage to the vagina and other parts of the female body.

And that's the problem. Left to progress in its own time, monitored by patient and knowledgeable staff. There is no patience in the hospital. OB/GYNs have to get a lot of stuff done before their shift is over and make enough money to cover their incredibly high malpractice insurance costs. Hospitals don't have the time or the staff to let a woman labor for 24 hrs - or more. And one intervention inevitably leads to another. Once women are hooked up to IVs, monitors, catheters, etc she has to labor on her back - which is the WORST position for a laboring woman. This position is for the convenience of the doctor, not the mother. No woman left to her own devices labors this way.

The more I learn about the history of childbirth the more I see how it's developed out a deep misogyny and disrespect for the female form. Modern obstetrics does not come from the centuries old practice of midwifery, but from the developing field of medicine in the 19th century. In the Victorian era middle and upper class women wore corsets, were encouraged to be inactive and undernourished (being small and helpless was a woman's natural form), basically causing all kinds of problems for pregnancy and delivery. Women needed to deliver on their backs, as it was unladylike for a woman to be on all fours, ass naked, in front of a man/doctor. The bodily restrictions of the Victorian age led to the development of ways to speed along awkward deliveries - induction. The mentality that womens' bodies were ill adapted to vaginal birth underpins our modern medicalization of the birth process.

I read a quote in Pushed explaining why one sex therapist had elected a cesarean. "Why ruin a perfectly good vagina?" she said. This to me reveals the deep anti-woman mindset of our birth culture that women are absorbing. What does this woman mean by "ruin"? I'm guessing she fears tearing (so do I, but when birth progresses at it's own speed this is less likely to happen), incontinence (occurs after 2% of births, most female incontinence is old-age related), and the ol' saggy vagina. Complications to the vaginal area occur in c-sections too, but these get less press. This woman probably doesn't want to "ruin" her vagina FOR HER MAN. I may be putting words in her mouth, but this attitude that vaginas just won't be as good after vaginal birth is nonsense and is driven by patriarchal ideals of women - all vaginas should feel like 15 yr old virgin vaginas, all 40 year old women should be as tight and firm and fit as 25 year olds. Puh-leeze.

I also think this anti-woman attitude toward birth is fear of the female form. Pregnancy and birth are the two things the male body cannot do. While I do feel quite vulnerable in a new and profound way being pregnant (I find that I do not jaywalk anymore, that I cover my belly in unfamiliar busy places, that I move more slowly, etc), I am also amazed at the capacity my body has to carry this life, to grow it and sustain it and me. I may be moving more slowly, be not quite as sharp mentally, but I am in no way compromised. The female form is powerful. We'll see how I feel once I've birthed this little guy, but knowing that I will be medically and emotionally supported makes me EXCITED to see what this body can do. Women's bodies are completely capable of delivering babies into this world. I think men and the patriarchal medical establishment fear this. Births are messy and all parties are out of control. To help get doctors home to dinner and to control the unknown factors, and perhaps even to keep women in their place, birth has been put on a time table and contained by tubes and meters and drugs. Women expect this to be part of birth. Without realizing it they are being told that they can't handle it; they are told that they should be scared.

The more I read the more I am deeply relieved that I will not be birthing in a hospital. My baby is not an "outcome," another statistic for hospitals and doctors to put into one column or another. I don't want my physical integrity compromised for the efficiency of the hospital staff. I am not a problem waiting to happen. And I don't desire my care to be mandated by statistics and litigious ass-covering. I don't want my care based on a fear of their being sued. I want my care based on my actual health. I'm scared enough as it is about the whole birthing process and I don't need doctors I don't know to tell me what my body "should" be doing, to infer that my body and my baby don't know what to do.