Light and Momentary

On Childbearing and Christian Womanhood

"Women will be saved through childbearing," wrote the Apostle Paul in his first letter to Timothy. I puzzled over that verse as a college student, ultimately dismissing it as irrelevant in this culture. If it even made sense -- and my soteriology as a Protestant left me skeptical on that score -- surely it was just a relic of a time when few women had a choice about motherhood.

On a September morning eight years ago I was six months pregnant with my oldest son and I was grumpy. I was tired of eating spinach, tired of avoiding chocolate, tired of Kegel exercises, tired of night leg cramps. I had a constant backache and a tender vein in one leg that had been bothering me more and more often. Driving to work that morning I flung back my head and bellowed, "I'm too young to have varicose veins!"

And out of nowhere that verse from 1 Timothy smacked me right between the eyes. My views on salvation had changed (Catholics see it as a process rather than an event), and I realized that pregnancy and childbirth offered a unique opportunity to follow the example of Christ. With my own body, I could give life to another person. Instead of complaining, I could say, "Here is my body, offered for you." When I learned that mother's milk is synthesized from a mother's blood, it completed the picture: here is my blood, given for you.

This post began in response to a recent post of Summer's about how pregnancy changes a woman's body. (I'm running in a completely different direction here, Summer; hope you don't mind!) One of my sons left a web of silver lines on my belly. Another left a small blue spider on the back of my thigh. Some days I wonder if my breasts are taking the direct route to the antipodes without the rest of me.

But here's the thing: most of what I know about patience and generosity I have learned as a mother. The "opening of the womb" was also an opening of the heart, an initiation into a kind of love I could not have imagined before I experienced it.

A friend of mine went to confession once and said, "You know, every time I'm here I'm talking about how selfish I am. Why can't I get past it?" The priest (who knew her very well -- he would not have said this to a random penitent so don't freak out) said, "You know what the cure for selfishness is, don't you?" "What?" my friend asked eagerly. He told her: have a baby.

When my first son was born I was transformed into a person who would instantly dive in front of a bus if it could save his life. I suddenly knew with my heart and my gut, not just my head, that someone else's needs took precedence over mine. I don't look or sound much like a mama bear. But there it was: I would gladly have done anything for that little boy.

The defining moment of motherhood for me is stomach virus time. When one of my children climbs into my lap and says, "Mama, I don't feel good," seconds before he pukes all over both of us, my first reaction is, "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry you feel bad." Only after the child is more comfortable do I think about starting the laundry and washing the vomit out of my hair. I'm not saying this boastfully because it's not something I've cultivated. It's a gift, a gift that has challenged my whole Weltanschauung. When I think of the greatest commandment I have to ask myself: do I love my neighbor as I love my children?

Mothering my children pushes me constantly to be more of a grown-up: to moderate my tendency to be dramatic, remembering that my children need me to set a peaceful example; to be willing to see the best in a child who is pushing my buttons more adroitly than anyone else on the planet can; to respond wisely to the octotrigintillionth sibling conflict of the day. (Oops -- what was I just saying about drama?)

I don't mean to make it sound like motherhood is all about self-sacrifice, though; my children make me laugh out loud every day. And when I see my youngest one wiping the oldest one's tears, or when the oldest offers unbidden to share the last granola bar with the four-year-old, they give me hope that they will grow into men who make the world a gentler place. Because of my children, I have seen more of the brightness and beauty and breadth of this world than I ever knew I could. If a saggy belly is the price I pay, I say it's a bargain.

(Candor compels me to note that I would never have done all those thousands of elevator Kegels if I had never been pregnant. Some might argue that a toned pubococcygeus muscle more than compensates for saggy abs, but let us not linger in TMI territory. While we're on the subject of pleasant pregnancy surprises I should add that my subsequent pregnancies have been way more comfortable than the one in '96. I remember wondering at the time how many children I could hope to have if pregnancy was going to be so miserable. I shouldn't have borrowed trouble; it's been easier ever since.)

A few disclaimers are probably needed here: some of the women who find their way here are infertile, and I do not mean for it to sound as if I think bearing children is the one route to holiness, or the surest route to holiness, or the preferred route to holiness. Many women have vocations other than motherhood; some mothers choose not to answer the call to grow along with their children. Also: I am no theologian and I am not equipped to debate Paul's views on women. And: my selfishness has not been cured; I am in that confessional regularly seeking grace to be more patient with my boys. Finally: I do not mean to suggest that mothers who adopt or mothers who bottle-feed are somehow less than mothers who birth and breastfeed their babies.

But I know that in the physical work of bearing and rearing my children, too often disparaged as just diapers and dirty noses, there are transcendent moments mixed with the mundane. A comparison: in 1996 my mother-in-law gave me a small ceramic dish she had purchased for use in a Mass. As a Catholic I believe that in the Eucharist Jesus is physically present, body and blood, soul and divinity. That dish is now a sacred vessel because in it the One who contains the whole of creation, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, chose to be contained. In those eight years we have never had a home Mass, but with each of our moves I have kissed it reverently and packed it carefully. Before our last move I was pruning our belongings recklessly, feeling hurried and harried. When I came to the shower curtain I had used in Joe's birth, I stopped in my tracks. I pressed it to my cheek -- and I do not say this lightly -- with an echo of the same feeling I have about that sacred vessel: right here, love incarnate -- enfleshed -- appeared. This ordinary object was the scene of a breathtaking transformation.

Summer's post about a plastic surgeon's wife who was afraid her second pregnancy would wreck her body put me in mind of something Scott Hahn said to his wife Kimberly. He told her, "Your body says you have loved me enough to bear my children." Put that in your pipette and ponder it, Dr. 90210. It made me realize something important: if you could stand the 17-year-old me next to the 34-year-old me there would be no question about which one of us looked better in a bathing suit.

There would also be no question about which one I'd rather be.

Huh?

--said my husband, when he thought I asked him what he knew about the sex lives of cannibals.

I had actually asked him what he knew about The Sex Lives of Cannibals, a newish book by J. Maarten Troost describing his two years in Kiribati, in the Equatorial Pacific.  The miscommunication caused me to wish briefly for a set of handheld HTML flags -- like the ones a runway signalman uses, only mine would say <i> (for the right hand) and </i> (for the left).  But then I rolled my eyes and said to myself, "You have been spending way too much time on that computer."

The Sex Lives of Cannibals caught my eye recently in a bookstore, where I flipped through the first chapter and found it funny and well-written.  I got it from the library and dug in enthusiastically.  It is a riotously funny book:  I read a lot of it while I was nursing Joe to sleep in the evenings and I was afraid I would wake him up laughing.  Troost writes perceptively about his gradual acclimation to life in the developing world and his subsequent re-entry into the US.

Soon, though, I found myself checking each chapter to see how long it was.  I kept flipping to the back -- how many pages in this book again?  That's never a good sign.  Troost's writing reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace's, which might be part of the trouble.  I enjoy the first few thousand words of a David Foster Wallace piece, but then I begin to find it laborious.  The copy editing in SLOC is sloppy -- many typos and scattered solecisms -- and perhaps Troost needed more big-picture blue pencil too.

Oddly (since I read very little travel writing), this was the second book I had read this year about the region; the first was The Island of the Colorblind, in which Oliver Sacks writes about his journeys to Pingelap and Guam to see islanders with unusual neurological disorders.  Sacks and Troost seem like very different men and it shows in their books:  Sacks writes careful narratives with extensive footnotes; Troost is more haphazard and uproariously funny.  Sacks is unmistakably an outsider, but Troost begins to shuck off some of his Western-ness and think like an islander.

So I guess my verdict on SLOC is that it's flawed but worth reading.  I'm glad I read about Troost's changing perspective:  his initial dismay at the squalor on the island, his ultimate dismay at US consumer culture on their return home.  And his description of the colors and pleasures of life on a tropical atoll -- well, it makes me wonder, now and again, what's in the "help wanted" ads from Fiji.

Uninvited Guests

Providentially, my husband finished a big project yesterday.  I say providentially because last night he came home at 7:30 instead of 11:30.  This meant that he was the one who discovered the four-legged furry vector of various viruses under our portable dishwasher.

Did you hear me shriek?  I'm sorry if it disrupted your evening.  All I can say is I will be grateful to God for a long time to come that Elwood wrapped up his project yesterday, because if I had found that mouse myself on the evening of yet another day of the solo dinner/bedtime gig -- well, I think it might have sent me right over the edge.

Part of me thinks I should be made of sterner stuff.  I should be like a pioneer woman, taking out mice with a cast-iron skillet -- whack! -- in between batches of corn pone.  Although remember that scene in Little Town on the Prairie when the mouse wakes Pa up in the night, nibbling away at his hair?  It's a good thing Ma didn't rely on the cast-iron skillet extermination method, or we would have had Epidural Hematoma on the Prairie and Trepanation by the Shores of Silver Lake. 

(We interrupt this post to tell you that there are some powerfully odd people in this world.  I was googling to see if there were two n's or three in trepanation and discovered that there is a movement touting trepanation as a route to higher consciousness.  "It's safer than LSD!" one says.  Personally, I would not expect DIY cranial surgery and higher consciousness to go hand in hand, but I suppose one never knows.)

But back to the subject at hand, which is these creatures who have no higher consciousness but do possess an unerring instinct for pricey comestibles.  The last time we had mice they spurned the one-pound bag of bleached white flour but had a party in my bulk-purchased organic grains.  I tried hiding my bulk foods in the oven at night while we were working on mouse eradication.  Did you know mice can get into your oven easily?  My efforts at starving them out resulted only in mouse droppings all over the oven floor.  Nothing says home like the smell of roasting rodent excreta.

Last time we tried to trap them before we called in the big guns.  This time, remembering the quivering live mice in glue traps and the stiffened-in-their-death-throes mice in spring traps, I wanted to go right to the pros.  So I pulled out the phone book.  (Let your fingers do the whacking, so to speak.)  I called our downstairs neighbor, and sure enough she spotted a mouse yesterday.  I called our old landlord and got the name of the exterminator he used.  I called our new landlord and explained. 

He doesn't want to call an exterminator.  He wants me to poison them myself.

I have a two-year-old, though, who hasn't quite learned that pretty blue things on the floor are not for eating, and the warnings on the bait-tray packages alarm me.  I am going to look today for tamper-proof containers and single-dose bait cookies, but I am doing it grumpily.  I want them dead.

Part of me also wonders if "I want them dead" is inconsistent with the "we are gentle with living things" line that I am forever spouting to my children.  Should I say, "We are gentle with living things although we have no qualms about inducing fatal hemorrhages in disease-carrying vermin that invade our pantry"?  What would St. Francis do?  Did he have feeding stations in his refectory?  (Do mendicant friars even have refectories?) (I've seen the humane traps.  They give me the heebie-jeebies.  Not very Franciscan of me, I suppose.)

I am going now to put my bulk-purchased nuts in the freezer (they can't get into the freezer, can they?) and my big bags of oats and rice in a plastic tub with a tight-fitting lid.  I will leave you with the Gladly family's version of Hop on Pop:

MOUSE HOUSE mouse in house MOM CALM mom was not calm SHRIEK! EEK! mom did freak OUT! OUT! mom did shout FIE! DIE! mom did cry BAIT! GREAT! and now we wait

No Place Like Home

When I tell people that my youngest son was born at home, I usually get one of two reactions:  either there is a sudden flash of enthusiasm, or there is a sudden flare of horror.  For many people, it's as if I'd said, "I gave birth in the middle of an eight-lane freeway" or, "I gave birth hanging by my knees from a hot-air balloon in flight."  In their view home birth is the bailiwick of hippies seeking an Experience-with-a-capital-E at the expense of their child's safety.

On the last day of May I woke up at three in the morning, unable to sleep through the contractions any longer.  I prayed the rosary in the quiet house, girding up for the day ahead.

If I say to skeptics that the research doesn't support the idea of home birth as dangerous, that planned assisted home birth is as safe for low-risk women as hospital birth -- it often just doesn't compute.  Usually they assume that I'm quoting voodoo science.  Even after I sent my mother a list of references on home birth safety -- references of the British Medical Journal sort -- she said, "I know you think it's as safe as hospital birth."  When I asked her what she found objectionable in the studies cited, she said, "I think you should go to the hospital."  Other people, less polite than my mother, have said bluntly, "You can't possibly be right."

When the boys woke up, my mother took them out to my in-laws' house for the day.  I kissed them goodbye knowing that if all went well I would be the one to tuck them in that night.  I called my friend Mrs. Organized and the doctor to tell them both I thought I'd have the baby around dinnertime.

Here are the facts:  approximately as many problems arise in hospitals as are solved in hospitals.  Some of those problems are iatrogenic, caused by hospital staff who may not have the freedom or the philosophical orientation to let the birth process unfold naturally; some problems occur spontaneously when you take a woman doing the hardest work of her life and put her in an alien place with strangers coming and going and demanding that she sign consent forms mid-contraction.  Home birth presents a slightly different set of risks, and you might lose a baby at home who could have made it in the hospital.  But the flip side of that truth is never stated:  some hospital births result in injuries or deaths that could have been avoided at home.

I spent part of the morning getting ready.  Pausing with the contractions, I laundered a load of towels.  I spread a shower curtain on the bed and covered it with layers of newspaper and an old sheet.  M and I started to do the crossword puzzle together, but the Times Friday puzzle was a little too complicated for me at that point.  In the late morning the doctor stopped by on his way to the office.  "I think I'm at about three cm," I said.  He concurred.  "See you later."

Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has found that women give birth in a way that reflects the values of their culture.  In a culture that prizes technology, then, it makes sense that birth would become a technological event.  There's a problem with making techno-birth the norm, though:  while birth interventions can be lifesaving, their routine use is unjustified.  Continuous fetal monitoring, for instance, does not lead to healthier babies.  In most cases, babies delivered surgically aren't better off than babies delivered vaginally.  If you can find valid studies showing worse outcomes for planned home births with trained attendants using a reasonable standard of care, I'll -- I'll eat my next placenta.  (Kidding!  I'm only joking, folks.)

Mrs. O came in the mid-afternoon and held my hand while I labored in the bathtub.  The doctor came back and said, "Whenever you're ready, can you get out of the tub for a few minutes so I can examine you?"  When I moved to the bed I told him, "I think I'm at about six cm."  "A very generous six -- almost seven," he answered.  I was elated.

This is supposed to be the era of evidence-based medicine, but the resistance to this particular set of data is considerable.  It seems to me that in this fearsomely litigious country with its skyrocketing medical costs, an option which is cheaper than hospital birth with no reduction in safety -- especially an option where patient satisfaction is through the roof -- would be a winner all around.  But the misperception that home birthers are willfully imperiling their babies persists.  I imagine a Temple of Technology, or a Church of the Divine Motherboard, in which votaries lay their oblations before the altar in hopes of finding a way to cut out the risk and pain associated with birth.  The servos whir and the screen flickers and up comes the message -- 404: Not found.  And some of us say, "Hm. Why are we sitting in this uncomfortable pew again?"

Soon I needed to get out of the tub so I could move more freely.  I paced.  I groaned.  I swayed on Mrs. O's birth ball.  The sensations were huge, but not exactly painful.  The doctor rocked in my nursing chair, reading a family practice journal.  "Careful not to overbreathe," he said mildly at one point.  Soon he checked my dilatation one last time.  "Just a little rim of cervix left," he said. 

Today's home birth is not your grandma's home birth.  Home birth attendants carry equipment and medications that allow them to respond effectively to common difficulties.  The first few steps for halting a hemorrhage or resuscitating a baby who is slow to breathe can happen as easily at home as in the hospital, and most of the time those first steps are all that's needed.  If you do need additional resources at any point, you can transfer to the hospital.  It's worth noting that most transfers from home to hospital are non-emergency situations.  Home birth attendants say that most problems arise slowly, allowing ample time for good decision-making about the safest way to continue.

After three more contractions I started pushing.  Now I hate pushing.  If I could, I would dilate to fifteen and skip pushing altogether.  God, however, did not seek my input when he was designing the birth process.  My babies have huge heads, and I appear to have an average-sized pelvis.  They fit, but it's a tight squeeze and the squeezing is no fun.  Some women prefer pushing to transition; I find it the most difficult part of the process.  At this stage of Joe's birth I was being hammered by enormous contractions, with hardly a minute to rest in between.  When I opened my eyes, the room spun.
 
Just in case we ran into complications, I pre-registered at the hospital and took a tour with my husband.  The nurse proudly showed us how a panel in the ceiling opened to let a huge suspended light buzz down into the room, like a SMERSH laser cannon aimed at the laboring woman's perineum.  "James Bond gives birth," I muttered to M.  Back at home I tried to draft a birth plan in case we ended up at the hospital, but all I really wanted it to say was "Please leave me alone and let me have my baby."

Even with the colossal contractions, Joe's heartrate was just fine and I was still cracking jokes (bad ones, but hey).  I told my husband, "Next time, you do the pushing.  I'll do the puking; I'll do the pregnancy.  But you have to push, okay?"  The doctor chimed in:  "If men had to go through childbirth, the species would have died out long ago."  Mrs. O had been watching me struggle, and she said quietly, "You know, Jamie, sometimes it helps if you tuck your chin."

I didn't opt for home birth because I am a Luddite or because I am phobic about hospitals.  I used to work happily in a hospital; I love my broadband connection.  But I was intrigued by the way women talked about their home births.  In a world where delivering a baby is usually either terrifying or comic, they were talking about birth as profound.

With the next push, I tucked my chin.  Suddenly, there was a baby sliding out of my body -- my baby, the baby I had waited so long to see.  Joe was born in the caul.  I wish I could tell you what it was like in that moment when the doctor slit the membrane and I saw his precious face for the first time.  I wish I had words for that moment when I first held him, slippery with amniotic fluid, crying and wriggling and beautifully alive.

When I talk about my home birth I wish I had never used the word joy before, because then I would have a word for what it was like.  Of course the aftermath of a healthy birth is always joyful, but with my home birth there was joy in the process, joy in the laboring.  It brings to mind a word I use shyly because it is so far from the way most women talk about birth:  it was a day of glory, refulgent glory.

When we lived in the UK, I used to go to a playgroup in an upscale neighborhood.  One woman came back after having a new baby, and they asked her how the birth went.  "Oh, let's face it," she snorted (you have to imagine the upper-crust accent), "childbirth is disgusting."

"Disgusting" is not the word that comes to my mind when I think of Joe's birth.  It was messy, sure -- there was blood and sweat and meconium and amniotic fluid in abundance.  But all of that was cleaned up in minutes, absorbed by newspapers and rolled up in the shower curtain I had spread on the living room floor.  Joe and I hopped in bed and he nursed for the first time, wide-eyed and eager.  While he nursed all of us sat in the bedroom and laughed and talked and told stories.  "This was very civilized," said my husband (who had initially been quite skeptical about home birth).  "People should do this more often."

Joe's birth, that first big letting-go in our relationship, has become a metaphor for me.  Yes, motherhood can be messy and painful.  But here's what you do when you birth a baby:  you listen patiently for your child to tell you it's time, you open the door even when it hurts, and then you welcome him gladly to a new place.  That's what I aim to do for my children for as long as they need me to do it.  And in the listening, in the opening, in the welcoming -- there is tremendous joy.

_________________

Home birth is a hot topic, and I admit freely that I have not read the primary literature but have relied on abstracts and commentaries in making my own decisions and in writing this post.  Some home birth advocates cite studies that show lower complication rates in the home birth population; it is my understanding that these findings can't always be duplicated, and that "as safe as" is more accurate than "safer than" when comparing home and hospital birth.  Jump right in and comment if you have a different point of view.

Old Enough To Ask

My high school best friend called me up after my last post about nursing.  "I agree with 99% of what you said," she told me.  The one percent?  Joe's getting pretty big to be nursing in public.  He's two.  How old is too old?

I remember walking from the train to work one day with my boss, my first year out of college.  For some reason she was talking about friends of hers whose daughters nursed until they were three or four years old.  In her estimation this bordered on child abuse.  "If they're old enough to ask," she announced, "they're too old."

Here's the thing, though:  they're born asking.  Within days of my oldest child's birth I knew just when he was saying he needed to nurse -- he would turn his head toward me and snuffle in a distinctive way.  With the younger two, who did not have the bleeps and warbles of NICU equipment interfering with their earliest communication efforts, I could tell within hours when they were saying, "Nurse me, please."  The asking takes different forms as they get bigger, but where, I'd like to ask my former boss, would you draw the line?  For Alex the snuffling turned into diving which became reaching toward me with a grin of anticipation and then his "ah-ah-ah" turned into "nana."  "Nana" became "nuss" and by the time he weaned he would ask "Can I please n-u-r-s-e?" which never failed to make me laugh.

Some of you, far from laughing, are horrified at the idea of nursing a child able to spell.  So before I get into the reasons why I have nursed my children past infancy (and into early literacy), let me make it clear that I am not on a soapbox here.  I find the empirical and experiential evidence in favor of long-term nursing to be persuasive.  You may not.  You're welcome to your opinion, and I would never presume to tell you what to do in your own family.  My aim here is to offer you a glimpse of life in our family, where nursing is more than just nutrition, and to explain why we do what we do. 

To begin with, there's the science in favor of long-term breastfeeding.  The anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler researched weaning ages in other mammals, particularly other hominids, to see what might emerge as a natural age of weaning for humans.  She looked at a number of factors:  age at immune system maturation, age at which permanent teeth erupt, age at which birthweight quadruples, and some others I can't remember that are spelled out in her book Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives.  She found that the evidence unconditionally supported long-term breastfeeding.  More specifically, she says that the range of natural weaning ages falls between 2.5 and 7 years. 

Both archaeological and anthropological data support Dettwyler's contention.  Last year the New York Times reported on weaning ages in ancient Egypt:  scientists determined that the Egyptian children they studied nursed until about age three.  In the Bible, the deuterocanonical book of 2 Maccabees also talks about nursing until age three.  In many of the Maria Lactans paintings, the Child in Mary's lap is clearly past infancy.  Only in the developed world, where replacement foods are available, affordable, and relatively safe, can we measure the duration of breastfeeding in weeks rather than years without widespread serious consequences to children.  We have to ask ourselves:  just because children can wean early in our part of the world, does that mean they should?

I haven't made my choices about breastfeeding because of archaeological data; my reasons have mostly been practical. Nursing is the 17-blade Swiss Army knife in my mothering toolkit.  It is a versatile and mutually agreeable way to deal with a host of problems.  Hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Sick? Teething? Bored? Hurt? Sad? Frustated? Having a nightmare? Having a tantrum? Having a hard day?  Climb up in my lap and nurse, and know that things are going to be okay.  Of course I have many other tools to choose from -- I'd be a lousy carpenter if I only had a Swiss Army knife -- but none as flexible or as well-loved as nursing.  (Totally unrelated to toddler nursing:  did you know you can buy a Swiss Army knife with an attached USB memory key?  You can also buy one without the knife blades for air travel.  At first I thought it had to be a joke, but apparently it's not.  That's one of those things I'd be hard-pressed to explain to a person from 40 years ago -- a knifeless knife case capable of holding what used to be a roomful of data.  But I digress.)

So why, if toddler nursing is a magic cure for toddler ills, do people find it objectionable?  I think the first reason is the degree to which breasts are sexualized in this culture.  For some people it's as if a nursing mother is performing a sex act with her child, and it can only be acceptable if he's too small to understand.  A child old enough to reason and remember -- now that's disgraceful.  This logic is faulty for two reasons, the first being that breasts are not inherently sexual (see previous post on nursing, esp. the bit about overlay functions).  I also think that if something is morally iffy for a mother to do with a child, it's worse if the child is too small and vulnerable to have language and long-term memory.  But there is not an iota of evidence to suggest that long-term nursing causes harm -- not to a child's developing sexual identity and not in any other domain -- and there is ample research in support of the practice.

Another factor militating against long-term breastfeeding in this culture is the way Americans prize independence.  How early can they sleep through the night in their own rooms?  How early can they go to preschool?  In many eyes, toddler nursing equals inappropriate dependence -- it's like a six-year-old in diapers.  In my view, small children are naturally needy and nursing is one good way to meet those needs.  If you opt not to nurse beyond the first year, you'll need to find another way to deal with stomach viruses, picky eating, night waking, and tantrums.  Weaning won't eliminate any of those things.  And not many of the alternative approaches allow you to read The New Yorker simultaneously the way nursing does. 

I do my best not to infantilize my children; I expect them to contribute as much as they can to household happiness and efficiency.  Around here four-year-olds put away clean dishes and folded laundry.  They make their beds in the morning and pick up their toys at night with a little help.  They clean the bathroom sink while someone bigger cleans the toilet.  Four-year-olds here are expected to respond politely if they're served food they don't like, and to ask for what they need without whining.  At the same time I also recognize that four-year-olds are much closer to babyhood than to adulthood.  It's fine with me if my sons want to nurse at age four.  It works for our family.  It works well.

Can nursing be misused?  Sure -- anything can be misused.  Are there creepy mothers out there, breastfeeding their children inappropriately?  There might be a few.  I have known dozens of older nurslings and their mothers, none of whom ever set off my "something's weird here" radar, but I acknowledge that the possibility exists.  In the US today, though, we have a definition of normal nursing behavior that conflicts with what was considered normal for most of human history.  I am not persuaded that the current US majority view rests on anything other than formula company marketing strategies.  I respectfully suggest that people who object to long-term nursing reconsider their objections -- not because everyone ought to do things the way we do, but because nursing families should be free to make their own decisions about what works for them.

In lieu of artificial cutoffs for "appropriate" weaning ages, I propose that we view weaning as we view learning the /l/ sound.  A few kids learn to say /l/ very early in the game, just as a few cue-fed babies will wean in the first year.  No one thinks it's weird to hear a four-year-old say, "Yook at the yion!" -- similarly, in my ideal world no one would think it odd for a four-year-old to nurse.  A first-grader who is still talking about "yazy yeopards" is on the older end of the spectrum, but not extraordinary.  Some kids need more help than others to get their /l/ nailed down, and some keep nursing more enthusiastically than others.  But who can tell, listening to a roomful of normal eighth-graders talking, which ones figured out /l/ at two and which ones didn't get it until age seven?

When my oldest child was born I was surprised to see how many people came up to us and said things like, "I wish somebody'd carry me around like that."  I never said what I really thought, which was, "Well, you see, the reason I'm carrying him around is that he can't walk.  Personally, I'd rather be ambulatory."  There is a misperception that childhood is nothing but easy -- a carefree time to kick back in the sandbox and play to your heart's content.  While I hope my children remember childhood as carefree, it certainly has its difficulties.  They hear "no" so often:  no, you must not be unkind to your brother; no, you may not jump off the radiator; no, Nutella from a spoon is not a nutritious lunch.

Nursing my children past infancy is one way that I can offer a consistent yes in a world full of no.  Yes, it's frustrating when your Lego castle falls over -- would you like to nurse and try again in fifteen minutes?  Yes, nightmares are awful -- you can nurse and fall asleep here next to me.  Yes, I will be a safe place for you.  Yes, it's okay to nurse until you're ready to wean.

When my oldest son was three I was frustrated with his continued nursing.  One day I said to him, "You know, you could pick a special toy to be a weaning present if you wanted."  His face fell and he said, "I would rather have nana than any toy."  I asked him, "What is it that you love so much about nursing?  Is it the milk?  Is it the closeness?  Why is it so important to you?"  He said sadly, "It's just -- it's just everything."

I decided that I was better equipped to deal with my frustrations than he was, and he kept nursing.  (Which is not to say you should just suck it up if you're unhappy in your nursing relationship.)  The next year he weaned peacefully.  It was a lesson to me in many ways.  It taught me not to be so dramatic about things that are bothering me as a mother.  (Mama-drama may rhyme, but it is far from poetic.)  It reminded me that kids do grow up, in their own time.  And most important:  it showed me conclusively that "old enough to ask" doesn't mean too old to nurse.

You Kneel Amidst a Multitude of Holy Angels

That quote is talking about the Mass.  The more immediate reality for me at Mass is that I kneel amidst a bevy of busy boys.

We had a great weekend away.  I know that when I visit these friends we will laugh and eat until our sides ache.  (Al is the best cook I know and Kate is my funniest friend.)  We go to Mass at their church on Sunday morning.  Because of the many charismatic Catholics in the parish, the Mass is memorable for its exuberant spirit of praise.  It's also memorable for its perplexing proportion of preternaturally placid preschoolers.  Where do these kids come from, and how do they sit so still?

When my first son was a baby, the crusty old pastor of our church saw us coming in one morning and said, "You're sitting in the back, right?"  I could tell similar stories about my younger sons, but it gets too embarrassing.  One of my ongoing questions as a mother is  how to impart a love of the Mass to my children.  I view it as one of my most important responsibilities, but I'm a long, long way away from the goal.  In fact, if birth were Boston and joyful participation in Mass were San Diego, we would be in ugly traffic on the Garden State Parkway right now.

With my oldest son, we tried rewards after Mass when he behaved well.  They didn't work.  I was on the verge of introducing a complicated earn-a-sticker system when I read Barbara Coloroso's Kids Are Worth It.  I decided instead to do my best to set a reverent, prayerful example, and see what happened.  I said, feeling ridiculous, "The reward for behaving appropriately in Mass is the satisfaction of having done it."  It worked.  It was a turning point.

But it was only a beginning.  In spite of my determination not to get caught up in the Bad Spiral, in which I get angry and they figure, Hey, negative attention is better than no attention, and I get angrier and they think, Wow, Mom's really red in the face here -- who knew I could do that? and I approach the boiling point and they think -- I don't know what they think because by then coherent thought is beyond me.  Mostly I have learned to hop off that ride before the G-forces (G for grouchy) throw me back in my seat and compel me to stay on for the duration.  But not always.

There are three things complicating my efforts here.  One is that I grew up in a mainline Protestant denomination, where kids were always in the nursery during church.  Small children were not welcome until they could be quiet throughout the service.  As a result, I have struggled with developing good standards for my kids.  How noisy is too noisy?  How close to the front do you sit, keeping in mind both that they behave better when they can see and that the aisle gets very long when you are escorting a shrieking child to the entryway during the consecration?  (It's always during the consecration, isn't it?)  What's the right balance between helping them to settle down in the pew and whisking them out so they don't distract others, especially once they learn that Making Noise = Going to the Back Where I Can Run Around and Entertain the Ushers?

Second:  I try not to rely on snacks or toys as diversions during Mass.  The bigger boys are old enough not to need them -- I want them to recognize the Mass as a feast, and who brings Cheetos to a king's feast? -- but they can't ignore them if they're available in the pew.  Sometimes this raises issues with other families, like the day of my miscarriage when I was crying and distracted and didn't notice Joe moving in on another boy's raisins.  "My raisins," shouted the boy.  "MO! Mah wah!" Joe replied.  [In case it wasn't clear, that's "No, my raisins," and not a plea to go to godforsaken northern New Jersey.]  (The next day we were having coffee with the priest after Dominic's burial and he asked us how our kids did during Mass.  "Did you hear those kids in the second row yesterday?" he asked.  "Well, Father, that was our kid in the second row yesterday."  He quickly backpedaled and said that he was glad to see families in Mass, even noisy families, but I'm not convinced that was his original intent.)

Third:  I find that church services can be public mothering at its most brutal.  Sometimes it feels like everybody's got an opinion on what your kid should be able to do and how you should make him do it if he can't manage independently.  I hate that.  If someone mutters under his breath, "That kid needs a good spanking," I want to say, "Hey, I am not going to teach my kid about the love of God by whacking him for acting his age," but I also want to curl up in a ball and cry.  Because I am trying to get us to San Diego, honestly I am.  There is traffic and construction and my kids hate long drives, but I am plugging along the best I can.  One way or another we are going to get there, and I would really appreciate your patience on the days when it seems like we're lost in Bergen County.

Some weeks I sit in Mass and pray for humility because my children are frustrating me so much that I can't imagine anything else good coming from the experience.  And sometimes there are surprises.  Two weeks ago in Mass I was sure that I was an awful mother.  I felt that I was failing conspicuously at the most important thing I wanted to do, and I couldn't even look my neighbor in the eye at the sign of peace.  She smiled and said gently, "It's okay.  We had seven children."  She assures me they can all sit still at Mass these days.

***

While we were at our friends' house, Joe figured out how to put /k/ at the ends of words.  He's so pleased with himself.  I am, too, but I have one tiny regret.  It used to be that when I asked him during the week where Daddy was he would say, "Yurt."  (You might remember he has no /w/ and he used to substitute /t/ for /k/.)  I imagined my husband telling me that he was heading downtown into his world of market analyses and hedging formulae but secretly slipping off to Mongolia to herd yaks.  No wonder his hours are so long!  That's a nasty commute right there!  These days, though, Daddy leaves for yurk in the mornings -- no more yak-herding for him.

I started this post with angels and ended with yaks.  Too bad my husband wasn't herding zebras -- we could have gone from A to Z.  I guess A to Y will have to do.