Light and Momentary

Caution: May Induce Diabetic Coma in Vulnerable Readers

I had the best day.  I had such a good day that I am hesitant to blog about it because misery loves company but who wants to read about happy? 

But here goes anyway.  This was our first day of school.  I was utterly, totally, could-not-be-more-thoroughly burned out on homeschooling last spring, and it was surprising to feel my enthusiasm building again over the summer, like a resilient petunia recovering after an 8yo boy lands squarely on top of it. 

I didn't know what it would be like teaching two, since this is Marty's kindergarten year.  I didn't know how much of our trouble last year was because of me and how much was because of my firstborn and how much was because we are so cut from the same cloth that sometimes sparks fly when we're together.  That is a terrible mixed metaphor but I am leaving it alone in the interest of speed.  If ever sparks flew while I was sewing with two pieces cut from the same cloth, I would speed back to the fabric store, you betcha.  With kids, though, you do the best you can with the fabric you're handed. 

Did I say recently, or was it in a post that I ended up deleting unfinished, that I had decided to be much more structured this year?  Inspired by Mother's Rule of Life, I made up a schedule that has the two older boys working hard for most of the morning.  At the same time, I am giving my older son more independent assignments this year.  Three times today, I said, "You need to have this finished by the end of August.  You set the pace.  I'll check back in with you and see how it's going."

It could be a terrible idea.  He seems to like it, though, here on day 1.

I find a lot to like in The Well-Trained Mind, although it's a little too workbooky for me, and I am using Story of the World as our primary history text this year.  We're starting with Queen Victoria and the British Empire, so I'm augmenting history lessons with stories from that era:  "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" today (a big hit), and A Little Princess is in the library basket as well.

Marty warms up slowly to new things and I was not expecting him to be enthusiastic about school.  I was wrong.  "This is the funnest school I ever went to!" he said.  "This is great!"

We walked to the park in the afternoon, and just as we arrived Joe announced, "I need to use the bathroom."  (New development -- he's out of diapers as of a couple of weeks ago although ARGH I forgot to send him to the bathroom before bed.)  Another mother was walking up with her two kids at just the same time and I said, "There's not a bathroom nearby, is there?"  (I said this knowing there wasn't, and wondering if Joe would be willing to pee in the bushes, and observing to myself that I really shouldn't have drunk a liter bottle of water before going to a park with no bathroom...)

And she said -- I still can't believe this -- "No, but my house is up the alley.  I can't walk with you because I'm short on time but you can go and I'll watch the baby.  It's open."

!!!

I took the two younger ones and she stayed with the two older ones after I told them what was going on.  (And in hindsight I'm surprised I did that -- I guess she and I just felt comfortable with each other off the bat.)  We came back, much relieved, and she and I chatted for a while.  On the walk home two friends, driving by in opposite directions, called out greetings as they passed us.  It made me feel so settled here.

They had requested pizza for dinner, so when we walked in the door I set to work on the dough.  "You can make pizza?" they said. "Could we have this every week?"  It is exceedingly rare for me to get an enthusiastic response at the dinner table, so you can bet I said yes.  I went into the kitchen to serve the older two a third helping and Marty said, "Mom rocks."

After dinner we went out for ice cream; we prayed Evening Prayer when we came home.  During the intercessions we were giving thanks for people in our lives and Marty said, "Thank you, God, for Mom."

And you know, I am hesitating to post those two quotes because TOOT-TA-TOOT behold me blowing my own horn, or at least telling you about someone blowing my horn most euphoniously, but oh well.  Motherhood is not a job in which people pour gratitude on your head.  (Vomit on it, yes.  But "Thank you, Mom, for cleaning my vomit out of your hair without complaining" is not a sentence springing from my children's lips).  On most days the number of body fluids I am wearing by lunchtime is higher than the number of enthusiastic comments I hear in a week about life with me as the mom.  So hey -- I'll blog about it today.

Pete is restless and my husband just came home, so I am going to publish without further editing.  Hope you had a lovely day too.

Doors

This is a post about birth, but it begins with a bit of travelogue.

We went to Rome in 2000.  I had hoped to get to Rome in 2000 from the minute I first heard about the Jubilee, and I was elated when we actually bought the tickets.  It was not an easy trip: the baby was teething and the 3yo did not -- just imagine! -- appreciate the walking tour of Bernini sculpture.  But it was wonderful regardless. 

When I am an old woman I will remember our day at St. Peter's.  Of course I will remember the Pietà and the great baldacchino.  I will also always remember walking through the holy door, flung wide in celebration.

A door is only a door:  its purpose is merely to get you from one place to another.  And a birth is just a birth; it gets you from pregnancy to motherhood.  But we seem to think, at this time and in this country, that births are meant to be more like the gates to the Emerald City than like Consorti's stunning door to St. Peter's. Absolutely, safety comes first.  If the lintel crashes on your head when you open a door, it doesn't matter that it was a work of art.  But I am saddened by the idea that beauty and welcome and celebration are just frills.  I am saddened that so many women in this country are seeing these doors, and thinking they have no other options.

This post has been brewing in my head since Pete's birth in April. I wanted to write it when I saw the NYT article on midwifery (the one that featured Moxie's midwife). Hospitals are cutting midwifery services, it reported.  They get reimbursed at higher rates when OBs attend births, so they want OBs attending births.  The question of what's best for most women -- a birth attendant whose training emphasizes finding and treating pathology, or a birth attendant who believes that childbirth is a robust process -- is taking a back seat to the question of what's most profitable. 

I wanted to write this post when Katie Allison Granju blogged about the recent study on home birth safety that found, just like every other good study on home birth safety, that planned, attended home birth is no less safe than hospital birth for low-risk women.  I got into an argument in her comments section (and now I can't find that post in her archives) with a woman who told me I should climb a mountain and say "om" if I wanted a sacred and empowering experience.  Her common sense, she said, told her that hospitals had to be safer than homes, the data notwithstanding.  (I didn't tell her that she should sell her car and take the bus if she was that worried about safety, since in the big picture attended childbirth, regardless of location, is safer for both parties than car travel.)

I wanted to write this post when BrooklynGirl posted about policies at the hospital where she will deliver:  no food or drink for laboring women, for instance.  She said, "Going to a high-intervention hospital and expecting low-intervention treatment seems a little like going to a French restaurant and ordering Eggplant Parmigiana."

But there's more at stake when we talk about birth choices than there is when we talk about ratatouille vs. caponata.  I remember hearing Ina May Gaskin and Naomi Wolf discuss their books on WFUV a couple of years ago.  Naomi Wolf was busy haranguing the medical establishment; Ina May Gaskin said, in her calm and matter-of-fact way, "In my community, women believe that their bodies are capable of bearing children.  And mostly, they are right." I do not mean for this post to sound like Naomi Wolf, berating the hospital staff who want birth to be safe.  I am only wishing that more American women could have the confidence that Ina May's neighbors do.  I am wishing for widespread recognition that safety in childbirth need not exclude beauty and tranquility.

This is supposed to be the era of evidence-based medicine, and yet circular thinking abounds.  We don't let women eat during labor because they might need emergency C-sections.  When they need emergency C-sections, we say, "Oh, good thing she was fasting."  It is not rocket science to see that fasting is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Why isn't there more outrage in the face of a 27% C-section rate?  What if 27% of American women were told they needed surgical assistance to walk, or swallow, or breathe?  Childbirth is different in important ways, of course, and it certainly does have its dangers.  But it is a well-designed process essential to the survival of the species.  It is normal.  A 27% C-section rate simply doesn't make sense.

My frustration with irrational thinking is only one part of why I wanted to finish this post, though.  My home births verged on sacramental -- they were put-out-your-hand-and-touch-the-face-of-God experiences.  I wrote after Pete's birth about being fully engaged -- mind, body, and soul -- in cooperating with a miracle.  It is a fine thing to be alive, I wanted to say after my two home births, a fine thing to have a woman's body.  I wish there were less fear about birth in this country.

Home birth is not for everybody; unmedicated birth is not for everybody (though I want to say loud and clear, in case anyone reading this has suffered through a miserable hospital birth, or has pleaded for an epidural at 4cm after planning to go natural, that my two home births were far, far less painful than my two hospital births). High-tech obstetric care saves lives, and of course I'm grateful that it's there.  What's missing is the recognition that low-tech care for low-risk women, particularly home birth, need not be a choice made on the fringes.  Birth can be both safe and sacred. 

My posts about Pete's birth are absurdly long, but that's because I wanted to hold fast to the details.  It was such a happy day that I didn't want the memories to slip away from me.  Why is it commonplace for women to say, "I couldn't get pregnant again until I had forgotten just how horrific the birth was"?  To my ear that says something telling about mainstream birth practices.

I read a snarky piece on Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions -- a book that does invite some snarking -- in which the reviewer complained that Wolf talked about her births and not her children's births.  I think that complaint speaks volumes about the American view of birth:  we forget, too often, that parturition brings forth a mother as well as a baby.  I will call them my births without apology.  My children will never remember them; I will never forget.

Of course birth isn't just about me:  it is more than anything a call to selflessness.  And yet at the same time it is about me.  One of the hardest things about pregnancy and motherhood is the loss of control, the moments in which you realize you are not in charge.  (I posted about this very thing, hugely pregnant and sobbing, in April.)  In their efforts to improve outcomes, to give better answers to the scary "what if?" questions all pregnant women ask, many hospitals wrest away more of their autonomy [edited to acknowledge that many women willingly cede it].  The irony, the crashing, underappreciated irony, is that for the average low-risk woman such care offers no improvement in safety over lower-tech alternatives.

I believe that for many women home birth can restore a welcome, appropriate feeling of autonomy.  I believe, too, that a joyous birth experience lays an important foundation for new mothers.  With home birth it's your living room, your fridge, your applesauce and your choice to eat it.  It's your labor and you can climb in your own tub when it feels right to you.  It's your pain:  you own it, you ride it. It's your body, doing something astounding; it's your baby, whom you have yearned to meet.  It's your birth -- your very own everyday miracle.

Chamber

Joe has learned a Bad Word.  He flings it at a sibling who won't share; he spits it out with the utmost scorn when I tell him to do something he's not up for.

The word?  Chamber.  I don't know where he got the idea that chamber is an obscenity, but he is using it as such with glee.  It's catching on with his brothers, too.

I was going to write this as a funny post, about how hard it was to keep a straight face when he hurled it at me.  "You need to speak more respectfully than that, Joe," I would say, but it was hard to take him too seriously.  C'mon, chamber?

But I'm not laughing at the moment.  I've had a few rough mothering days in a row, and I'm feeling discouraged.  I'm asking myself again: how strict do I need to be? how much do I let slide?

It was a blessing, although I didn't see it that way at the time, that my first son's big behavior issue was aggression.  If it had been mouthiness, or defiance, or any number of other things, it would have been harder to tune out my mother when she said, "That boy needs a smack on his behind."  Since the issue was aggression, though, it was easy.  I wasn't going to hit a kid who needed to learn not to hit.  I wasn't going to teach him that the way to deal with hitting was to hit back harder.  And I hoped, absurdly idealistic as it seemed then, that he would learn not to hit because hitting is wrong -- not because other people hurt you if you hit them.

[brief interruption -- summoned upstairs to deal with a teary Marty.  "Mom, he's calling me a chamber!"]

Anyway:  I wanted my son to be governed by love of what is right more than by fear of what is wrong.

Rudeness is another instance where the best thing to do is obvious. "I'M YELLING AT YOU FOR SPEAKING SO DISRESPECTFULLY TO ME" just doesn't make sense. 

On a good day, I offer a civil reminder about my expectations.  A child who doesn't change his tune can wait in his room until he's ready to speak kindly.  For particularly egregious offenses, he'll need to show his willingness to contribute to a peaceful, smoothly operating household by taking care of a chore that's not his responsibility. (Usually it's something a little tricky or a little icky.  It needs to be done cheerfully or we start over.)

I'm having a string of bad days, though.

Yesterday I was sitting at the pool with a friend in a similar spot.  "Maybe we should have been reading the Pearls all along," I said glumly.  (Can't find an easy link and am short on minutes -- the Pearls (whom I haven't read, so feel free to let me know if I'm misstating their position) advocate using corporal punishment early and often.)

It's so uncertain, this business of raising children.  I've never wanted so badly to do something right, and I simply can't know how it's going to turn out.  Keep plugging, keep praying, I guess.  But boy, I am wishing for a magic wand today.

Yesterday my oldest said, "I've set myself a goal to read 900 pages in two days and I'm almost there!"  This morning my second son said, "Hey, Joe, we jumped off the diving board! Give me a high five!"  I see little glimpses of self-discipline, of cooperativeness and fraternal love.

I'm still feeling frustrated, though -- so much so that it almost makes me want to say chamber.