Light and Momentary

Out of Darkness

I'm not sure how to start this story because it doesn't have a clear beginning and the middle is a little fuzzy.  With my other births I could say, "I woke up having contractions at x time and they were y minutes apart and z hours later etc." but on Sunday I had decided that my uterus and I were no longer on speaking terms.  I'd feel a contraction and think, "Tell it to somebody else, girlfriend, because I am not listening, do you hear me?  Not listening.  Talk to me when you've got something worth my time."

So all I know is that there was a change in the contractions in the small hours of Wednesday morning, because I remember thinking vaguely as I went to answer Joe's call that it finally felt like we might be getting somewhere, but la la la I was pointedly not listening.  And I remember feeling not quite myself on Wednesday morning -- I knew that I just wasn't up for the half-mile walk to the library -- but I thought I might just be tired from finishing that poultry post the night before.  My husband says I called him around eleven to say I was suspicious that this pregnancy might actually be a temporary condition, but this puzzles me because I was at the library at eleven, resolutely not listening.  (Maybe he got a call from my uterus -- "She won't listen to me!  Will somebody listen to me?!")

After lunch I took a nap, thinking that it might be wise to get some rest, and a couple of times I had to roll out of bed to stand up and move with a contraction.  (By the way:  does anyone else hate lying down for contractions?  The Bradley books recommend sidelying for maximum relaxation but ouch does that make it more painful for me.  With my first labor I got panicky because it hurt so much lying down.  "This is supposed to be the most comfortable position and I'm miserable!" I thought fretfully.  I wish I had known to go wash the dishes instead of lying in bed trying to pretend it didn't hurt.)  When I woke up I called the midwife.  "What do you say to a Thursday baby?" I asked her.

At that point, I thought we might have a baby sometime after midnight, or maybe the next morning.  In the next 24 hours is my guess, I said.  I told her I was going to pick up my husband and drop off the kids at a friend's house, and I'd get back to her in a couple of hours about how things were progressing.  All right, she said.

Snag A:  the friend who lives right by my husband's office wasn't home.  Snag B:  my neighbor had class Wednesday night and I couldn't see asking her husband to watch my three in addition to his four.  Snag C:  the other friend I was going to call lives in a subdivision I've never been to and the thought of trying to navigate twisty subdivision streets with rhyming names made me a little queasy.  Snag D:  Joe fell asleep in the car on the way home from picking up my husband.  We decided we'd just keep the kids at home until my mother-in-law arrived to take them to her house for the night.  She left for PCT at 4.

I had thought a lot about how I hoped the birth would go, and the verse that kept coming to me was "in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, which is the Church."  It has always struck me as a rather audacious claim, but I figure the Apostle Paul knew whereof he spoke.  I had envisioned myself beatifically offering up the sufferings of labor for the needs of the world, but beatific proved to be a lofty goal.  For one, the kids were grating on me.  In the car they had been fighting about the baby's name.  "It's going to be a girl and we'll call her Rayquaza," said the oldest.  "No! A boy! Peter-the-pickup-driver George Spider!" insisted the youngest.  "Rayquaza and that's final!" shouted the oldest.  Oh, my word, it gives me a headache just remembering.  "Listen!" I burst in.  "I am IN LABOR.  I am trying to drive and I am already distracted.  Stop it right now."  Usually, that would have done the trick -- my oldest is a compassionate kid who listens reasonably well.  Not on Wednesday, though.  "Rayquaza!" he interjected once more, sullenly, prompting shouts of "Peter-the-pickup-driver George Spider!" from the 2yo and lobbying for "Starfire!" from their brother.  Thankfully, my husband was waiting out front for us and he drove us home before I could cause any property damage.

They continued to squabble at home, and I continued to be exasperated with them.  I remember thinking, "Boy, am I edgy.  I skipped right over that happy excited part of labor this time."  I was also getting more uncomfortable physically.  I wondered if the baby was posterior, because the contractions required more of my attention than I expected them to at that point.  Maybe some music will help, I thought.

I put in a CD I hadn't listened to in years, a recording of Newman Center choirs from ten years ago.  I put on our little choir's first song and suddenly flashed on a memory.  The months after our first miscarriage took a heavy toll on our marriage, and I remembered leaving the recording session and complaining bitterly about my husband to my friend Kate -- the same Kate who has given me so much long-distance love and encouragement this last month.  Then as now, she patiently encouraged me that things would get better.  And she was right both times, as it turns out.

So I was thinking about this as the song changed, to John Michael Talbot's "Magnificat."  Kate had started us out with a solo, and it was so comforting to me to hear her voice, clear and true, singing, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my savior."  The other women's voices joined hers, and I thought about my friend who delivered a daughter last week, down on the alto part, and another friend, also a mother now, who sang soprano with me.  I remembered gathering around the piano with them, working out the harmonies, and I felt comforted again thinking about my women friends around the country praying for me.

I was pacing around our downstairs and trying to pray:  a contraction in the kitchen, offered for the conversion of Robert Mugabe and peace in Zimbabwe; one in the music room, for an end to abortion; one in the living room, for the souls in purgatory.  I thought about the saints who were mothers, like Monica and Elizabeth Seton, and about saints who had no children but offered their physical suffering for the glory of God, like Perpetua and Felicity.  And I thought one more time of Kate, who gets a giggle out of that particular pair of names, and smiled to myself. 

I headed into the dining room, knowing I needed to eat between contractions to fuel up for what I thought would be a long night.  I nibbled at some cottage cheese and a slice of toast, but I wasn't very hungry.  In the kitchen I happened to notice the clock:  contraction at 5:11, one at 5:13, one at 5:16.  After the third one I called the midwife again.

We're having a baby tonight, I said.  Oh? she asked.  Not right now, I told her, not in the kitchen floor as we speak.  But with my other labors I've known things were cooking when I started getting flushed after a contraction, like my uterus was hogging all the blood it could during the contraction, and that's where we are now.  It's probably better if you come sooner rather than later.  She had a couple of quick things to take care of, she said, and then she'd head right down.

I wanted to write what should have been a quick post, but the interruptions kept coming.  I would get up to sway through a contraction and the boys would say, "Can't we use the computer now?"  As soon as I hit "publish," I started looking out the window for my mother-in-law.  I needed the boys to go.  At 6:15 I called her.  "Where are you?" I asked curtly.  "Oh, about 15 or 20 miles away," she said.  I asked M to start a bath for me so I could hop in once the kids were out the door.

The midwife's assistant got there soon afterward and we chatted for a few minutes.  She told me a little bit about herself (she's a mother of four sons), but I had to ask her to tell me most of it again afterward because I seemed to have Teflon ears at that point.  I don't think I'm very far along, I told her, but I'm pretty uncomfortable.  I'm worried about pushing, I said, and I don't want to make this stage of labor harder than it needs to be because I'm thinking ahead.  Can you help me stay where we are?  Sure, she said.  She asked if she could rub my back while I rocked on my hands and knees, and I said yes gratefully. 

Finally my mother-in-law pulled in.  I said a quick hello to her and hugged and kissed the boys goodbye.  I had tried to get them to help me make a labor nest a little earlier, but they wanted to play Darth Vader instead, with the shower curtains as cloaks.  Penny and I double-made the bed, and spread a shower curtain over the living room floor.  I headed for the tub.

I had labored in a tub twice before and found that it made an immediate difference for me, so I was surprised that I was still uncomfortable in the water.  It was too hot at first, and even when the temperature was right I just didn't feel the relief I expected.  My husband joked gently, "If you have the baby tonight, we'll have to have another so we can hit the 28th." [The three oldest boys have birthdays on the 29th, the 30th, and the 31st.]  "Don' t talk to me about that right now," I snapped at him.  "Wow," I thought to myself, "you are awfully cranky."

The midwife arrived and I climbed out of the water.  "Can we see how things are going?" I asked.  Baby sounded great, but I was more curious about my cervix.  She checked me and said, "Jamie, how did you get that Studebaker in your uterus?"

Okay, okay, she said nothing of the sort.  But I could not have been more surprised by a Studebaker than by what she actually said, which was this:  "My fingers are stretching, stretching [I interpreted this as "you're not very far along but at least your cervix is stretchy" so imagine my shock when she concluded by saying] --I'd say eight, almost nine."

Can we have a moment of collective jaw-dropped-ness?  Can we laugh out loud with relief and surprise?  I spent the next ten minutes trying to get my mind around that number.  I wanted to say, Are you sure?  What units are you using?  Does the baby have such a big head that I have to dilate to 17?  How can I possibly be almost complete?  I said, Okay, God, I asked for a gentle birth but I never imagined it would be this easy to get here.

My husband came down the stairs with the pair of sweats I'd asked him to bring me.  "How far along do you think I am?" I demanded.  "I'd say about four," he guessed.  (That's exactly what I would have said.)  "Nope," I said.  "I don't think I'm going to need those pants after all."

I climbed on the birth ball (I had been looking forward to the midwife's arrival because rocking on the ball sounded so good) and relaxed through the next couple of contractions.  Of course I'd been uncomfortable -- I was in transition!  No wonder the kids were bugging me!  No wonder I didn't want to be talking about having another baby!  I am having another jaw-dropped moment just remembering.  Lucky for you I can type with my jaw on the floor, or I'd never get this post written.

It wasn't very long at all before I began to have the beginnings of a pushing urge.  I said to the midwife, "I'm worried about pushing this baby out.  But you think I can do it, right?"  She looked into my eyes and said steadily, "Yes.  I think you can."

Schooling: Not Anti-Un-

Jane encouraged me not to be hard on unschoolers, which was not my intent.  I was thinking about two things in that last post and neither was that unschooling is a bad idea in itself.  First: the conference I attended last fall involved a couple of people who struck me as rather extreme, and who occasionally slid into smugness in their extremism.  For instance:  one session I attended was led by a woman whose children never had a bedtime.  She let them listen to their bodies and sleep when they needed to sleep.  Who needs bedtime when you can trust your children?  I do, that's who.  I need bedtime in a big way, and I refuse to see it as a moral failing.  Different people need different levels of structure, and I need that "." at the end of my day with the kids.  I'm not a bedtime tyrant, but I am less effective (and a whole lot less pleasant) as a mother if I don't get a quiet hour with all the kids down for the night. 

Two:  I'm not sure I could be a good unschooling mother.  I think if I didn't have specific goals for the morning, too often 12:30pm would find me slouched guiltily at the computer, with coffee spilled on my pajamas and my children clamoring for lunch and attention.  A crucial part of the "listen to your child and he will tell you what he needs" philosophy is the "listen to your child" bit, as distinct from the "blog until interrupted by bloodshed" approach which I fear would be the dispiriting default around here. What works for us (mostly, although I certainly admit it hasn't worked as well this year as it did the preceding two) is to have focused time after breakfast when we work on school.  I guess it's tied to my first thought:  I need a certain amount of structure in my days. Any unschoolers out there to comment?

My husband picked up a copy of Alfie Kohn's What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? at some point (he doesn't always tell me when he buys books, see, because I have this irksome habit of asking which of the overflowing shelves he's planning to put them on) and I've been reading it today.  It's interesting stuff, all about the state of public schools in this country and the effects of standardized testing. (Alfie Kohn is an interesting guy -- I have mentioned his Punished by Rewards a couple of times here.)  He mentions homeschooling only in passing, but of course I am thinking about what we'll do next year as I'm reading.  Worth picking up if you see it in the library.

Speaking of libraries, my usually non-confrontational 5yo is going through a tough-guy stage.  He launched himself into the storytime room at the library today with a ninja kick combo.  And a loud ninja yell -- it would probably have been better received had we not arrived five minutes late and interrupted "Itsy-Bitsy Spider."  Oops.  Next week on time.

All That Ends Well

My oldest son is crying on his bed right now.  I told him he was welcome to come down as soon as he was prepared to finish an assignment.  "You're never going to see me again then," he announced dramatically, his tear-stained face pink and angry.

When he was five, homeschooling was the clear choice for kindergarten.  He was ahead of the curve academically and a little behind it socially.  I knew that putting him in an environment that left him simultaneously stressed and bored was a recipe for disaster.  Whatever choices we made in the future, I didn't want him to think of school as "that place where I get in trouble every day."

Our family has been through enough transitions recently that homeschooling has continued to be a good choice, albeit a difficult one.  We had a really nice kindergarten year and a rockier first grade year.  Second grade has wrung me out.

I have posted very little about homeschooling, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe because it is a minefield for a perfectionist like me, and I dread the thought of criticism.  Maybe because it's been so rough this year.  We've had some good days, but we've had too many conflicts like this one.

Right before Christmas, the NY Times published an essay in response to those studies about how bad American kids are at math.  The writer said, "Who needs math when those nice Asians will do it for us?  I can't help my high school kid with her math homework and I don't care."  I put down the paper and said to my husband, "If you couldn't solve two equations in two variables, would you admit it in the New York Times?  I could teach Alex how to do that in a week." 

The next morning, I said, "Hey, let's pretend we're planning your birthday party.  If you get six trays of sushi and four cartons of ice cream, it costs $44.  If you get five trays of sushi and eight cartons of ice cream, it costs $60.  How much does each one cost?"  That was Monday.  By Thursday, he could write down the equations when I gave him a problem.  He needed a little guidance to isolate one of the variables, but then it was easy for him to find x, plug it in, and figure out y.  He thought it was fun.  I did too.

(This is another reason I have seldom posted about homeschooling:  my oldest son is a sharp cookie and I don't want to sound boastful.)

But too often it goes sour unexpectedly.  This morning we were reading Story of the World on the porch swing, surrounded by daffodils and birdsong.  I was thinking we should have a little Paul Revere party on April 18.  It was all very pleasant.  But when I said, "Okay, time to write down some of the things you want to remember from this chapter" -- kablooey.

I am tired of kablooeys.

Last fall I went to an unschooling workshop.  It was thought-provoking and enjoyable but it confirmed my feeling that unschooling is not for me.  The featured speaker talked about her son learning to use commas at age 18 -- an anecdote which she told with satisfaction but which horrified me.  In my view, if my son cannot use commas at age 18 I will have let him down badly.

But I am also not a workbook-y kind of homeschooler.  We don't do spelling drills, or Latin vocabulary drills, and our three years of math lessons have all been "let's sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and see where it takes us this week" kinds of things.  (If there are any other laid-back math types out there, my husband bought a book called The Number Devil which Alex has read over and over again -- he loves it.)

In between paragraphs I went upstairs to confirm that yes, I am really an evil ogre who eats small children with horseradish and apricot jam I was serious about writing down some things to remember.  I fixed a quick lunch for the boy who said earnestly, "Part of the problem is that I'm hungry."  I stayed beside him while he wrote down six things that caught his fancy in the chapter we read.  Now he is happily writing the story of an alien civilization in side-by-side English and alien pictographs.  All's well that ends well for him.  For me -- I'm not so sure.

The Boob Nazis

It was the angry comments following a Chez Miscarriage post that inspired my first post about breastfeeding, and the angry comments following a more recent entry are the impetus for this one.  Specifically, it's the nazi epithet that gets me going. 

It seems like any mention of breastfeeding in non-crunchy quarters evokes cries of "Nazis!" within about 20 seconds.  And the part of me with an interest in semantics can appreciate that the word has more than one definition these days, that it has come to mean "person who is irritatingly overbearing" rather than "overseer of genocide."  But most of me, having poured heart and soul (not to mention time and energy and money and creativity) into helping mothers breastfeed, flinches every time.  Which means a lot of flinching.

There were some really good comments in response to the Chez Miscarriage post, but it bothers me to think of people reading misinformation in the first 65 comments and not wading through the remaining hundred to find out more.  So I'm posting here instead on how much I hate to read about boob nazis. Or nipple nazis. Or La Leche nazis.

La Leche League takes a lot of heat for being radical and militant.  You'd think there were billboards around the Schaumburg office trumpeting, Never give your baby a bottle!  Nurse until age 6!  But LLL is not radical on breastfeeding.  It was radical in the 1950s, when exclusive breastfeeding for six months was widely thought to be as unworkable an idea as desegregated schools.  That was fifty years ago.  Times have changed.

LLL gets occasional criticism from some breastfeeding activists because its positions are fairly moderate.  LLL says, "Breast milk is the superior infant food" -- not, as many lactivists prefer, "human milk is the norm for human babies and formula is inferior."  On weaning, LLL says, "Ideally, the breastfeeding relationship will continue until the baby outgrows the need."  Not the want, but the need; not the child, but the baby.  There's no mention of age, and right off the bat they acknowledge that it's an ideal.  That's a pretty sharp contrast to the popular stereotype of "do it for five years and we'll give you a gold watch."  (LLL's views on a baby's need for the mother's presence may seem radical today; ironically, that was probably pretty mainstream in the 1950s.)

One Chez Miscarriage commenter was particularly angry about "those commercials LLL made with pregnant women riding mechanical bulls," the ones, supposedly, that the AAP wouldn't endorse because they were too far out there.  Three things in response to that:  first, even if LLL had the budget to make slick commercials for national broadcast, they wouldn't use risk-oriented language; that's just not their angle.  Those commercials were made by the Ad Council in consultation with the US Department of Health and Human Services, based on research into approaches that would motivate people to see breastfeeding as important and not just as a nice perk to squeeze in between Kindermusik and baby massage classes.  Second, the AAP's president raised questions about the ad campaign after formula company lobbying, over the protests of the AAP's breastfeeding division.  You can get the scoop here, but the nutshell version is that it had more to do with formula company execs saying to the AAP, "Hey, remember that chunk of cash we gave you last year?" than with AAP higher-ups realizing, "Oh, yeah, the confidence level in this study was only p=.005, not p=.001."

And third:  why is there so little discussion about the message of the commercials and so much focus on the evils of stating that babies should breastfeed?  A whole lot of American women are obsessing about their pregnancies, feeling guilty about tiny risks.  Folic acid supplementation affects less than one baby in a thousand, and yet how many women freak out about getting pregnant when they're not taking it?  There was a discussion at Leery Polyp about risk-taking in pregnancy in which soft cheese came up repeatedly.  But pasteurized cheese, soft or not, is simply not a vector for listeria.  Sane women in this country are religiously avoiding a substance that poses no risk to their unborn babies, and getting angry about hearing that formula does present quantifiable risks to children after they're born.

Raising children involves risk, make no mistake.  It was risky for me to let my 5yo climb trees on Tuesday, risky for me not to insist that he get out his helmet today to ride his bike.  It's risky to put him in the bathtub, for Pete's sake.  One of the painful bits of motherhood is weighing the risks.  Not everyone is going to be able to breastfeed; some mothers who are able to do so will decide it's not for them.  But can't we have an honest conversation about what's at stake without calling anybody a nazi?

When I am not busy flinching, I am always curious about what has happened when women feel slammed about feeding choices.  I have met a couple of alarming LLL Leaders, and I'm sure they do some damage.  But by and large the LLL Leaders I know are compassionate women working hard to support mothers.  They are volunteers with families, and if you call them when a toddler has just emptied the mustard jar all over the dog you may get a garbled answer to your question.  Probably, though, you will get reasonably current information presented with best wishes for you and your baby.  For free.  How many women can say that after they contact their doctors' offices with breastfeeding questions?

Sometimes I wonder if LLL and its Leaders are catching the flak for statements made by mothers who come to meetings and say outrageous things.  If you go to a meeting for the first time and the Leader says calm, temperate things while a visiting mom complains that her in-laws wouldn't eat placenta stew or breastmilk yogurt, what story are you going to tell about the day you checked out LLL?  And yet it is virtually certain that the Leader, LLL's actual representative at the meeting, is as startled as anyone, and is scrambling to find a good response that gets the meeting back on course without leaving the mother feeling more frustrated.  (Perhaps, "My! That menu gives new meaning to 'made by mom'!")

The thing about running open support groups is that you attract people who need support -- sometimes more support than you can give them.  I've been leading groups of various kinds since college, and it's often a struggle to juggle everybody's needs.  I used to lead a Bible study attended by a high-functioning autistic man.  Of course I wanted him to feel safe and welcome, but some nights I wanted to pick up my Bible and whack him on the head with it when he went off on yet another weird tangent.  (The sword of the Spirit becomes a blunt instrument.  Charity, thy name is not Jamie.)  Recently I was talking with a friend who is an LLL Leader about a frustrating situation she is dealing with in the group she leads, a mom who means well but who can be terribly tactless.  How many mothers have left meetings feeling affronted by this woman's comments?  At what point does the Leader say, "Stay home, please," to the problem mom who has not responded to requests that she tone it down?  It's awfully hard to gauge.

LLL's focus is mother-to-mother support.  Sometimes that's a magical thing -- I've seen meetings where a teary-eyed mother comes in saying, "I just can't do this for one more day," and the woman next to her says, "Oh, I felt that way in January -- what's going on?"  Another woman says, "Have you tried...?" and a fourth says, "Hey, this is what worked for us."  As the meeting is ending a fifth woman says, "Want to come over for coffee?" and a year later the formerly teary-eyed mother is there with her nursing toddler, saying, "You know, the first weeks were miserable for us too but it got so much better."  And that's how it's meant to be, I think, with more experienced mothers saying to newer mothers, "Yes, it can be awful, so let us help you through the rough spots."  But much of mother-to-mother support depends on the mix of mothers doing the supporting.  It's not always magical.  Or maybe it's magical in a Wicked-Witch-of-the-Breast-complete-with-evil-flying-monkeys kind of way and not in a Glinda-the-Good-you-know-the-way-home-Dorothy kind of way.

I have some sympathy for the absolutists because there is a comforting (if misguided) certainty in absolutism and motherhood is the most terrifyingly uncertain thing I have ever done.  I would love to find a secret formula (no pun intended) to ensure (ha!) that my kids will grow up to be holy, happy, healthy men who send flowers to their mother on her birthday.  (Ivory roses, please.  And on my gravestone, boys, how about "The Most Extraordinary Mother Anyone Could Hope To Have"?)  But even now, with my 8yo, sometimes I want to say, "You know, I cleaned your butt without complaining for four long years, pal, so can you cut me some slack already?"  When he was a baby, I wanted to be the über-Sears mom because I wanted him to feel loved and secure.  What a rude shock it was to see that I could carry him in the sling until my pectoral girdle had permanent slingprints, only to watch him knock over smaller children with glee as soon as I set him down.  (At a La Leche League meeting, no less.)  How sharper than a serpent's tooth indeed.  Hadn't he read the part about how he was supposed to be loving and gentle because of my loving gentle mothering?

And I know this is the easy part.  The stakes get higher.  A woman I know is struggling to deal with a drug-addicted daughter and it is wrenching just watching from the sidelines.  I can't even let myself think about all the things that might go wrong in my children's lives or I would just have to flop forlornly on the floor, felled by those fearsome feelings of futility.  My firstborn mostly beat the absolutism out of me with his will of iron and his struggles with aggression, but I can easily imagine that if I had had a docile, compliant child instead I would have given the credit to the Sears plan.  Or the Weissbluth plan or the Ezzo plan, if I had stumbled across them first.  It would be nice to have a Plan to take the edge off the biting uncertainty that is raising children.

I'm tempted to wonder why it's rare to read complaints about "sleep nazis" or "schedule nazis," given that there are a whole lot more "thou shalt nots" coming from Gary Ezzo or Tracy Hogg than there are to be found in most of the books I own on breastfeeding.  But it would be a counterproductive wondering (more namecalling is not the desired outcome), so I won't even start.  My point here is simple, really:  motherhood is a tough gig.  No matter what choices you make in your fervent hope to do the right thing by your kids, you leave some people scratching their heads and others pointing their fingers.  It isn't easy for any of us.  Can't we be kind to each other?