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http://consciouswoman.org/2008/08/04/conscious-woman-of-the-month-august-2008/
Want to have your blood pressure raised? Want to realize yet again how incredibly lucky you are to have been born as you were? Read this month’s Conscious Woman article, about Dalit activist Manjula Pradeep.
Laureen is a writer, a professional editor (here and here), a scuba instructor, a beginning sailor, a traveler, a birth advocate, a blogger, a podcaster, a website manager, an enthusiastic geek enabler, and an obsessive researcher who's chiefly focused on, and delighted with, her husband Jason and her sons Rowan and Kestrel. She's a lifelong Californian, which lends a distinctive spin to both her ideas and her politics, and she's discovered, in her peregrinations, that the world is far smaller yet far more fascinating than anyone gives it credit for being.
It’s clear I haven’t been blogging much by how my LWOS announcements stack up. And lest anyone harangue me for working on those posts instead of Aurora’s birthstory, I wrote the LWOS posts up while I was still pregnant. So there. Anyway, this post is a fun one, about something astonishingly cool that Rowan did.
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2008/07/upside-down-and.html
Meet Halima. Gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s Aurora’s milk sister.
So what’s a milk sister? That’s a baby who has shared milk from the same mama. Because Halima’s mother had a rare and really unpleasant birth complication, she is unable to nurse this time (Halima has an older brother). And because her parents are completely clear on the fact that breastmilk is hands-down the best thing to feed a baby, they called for help. I’m on one of the email lists they asked for assistance on, and so here I am, pumping milk.
Technically, that means I’m nursing three kids right now. I am the dairy queen!
Joking aside, it’s astonishing how much distaste people have for this practice. The squidge factor is superhigh. And yet 100% of the people who flip out when they find out you’re feeding a stranger’s child, even indirectly, drink the milk of other species. But sharing human milk? That’s just yucky.
Grow up.
The research has proven, time and time and time again, that human milk is the best food for human babies. So why do people flip out when you feed human milk to a human baby? Clearly they can’t have thought it through.
It’s ridiculously hard to find information on this practice of milk sharing. I know that in the Muslim faith, milk siblings are considered so close they may not marry. I know that in Romanian culture milk siblings are considered as closely related as blood siblings. I know that before some 19th century man decided that corn syrup solids were better than wet nurses, this kind of thing just happened without comment, because women looked out for each other and for each other’s babies. If something happened to make it difficult to feed a baby, other women just stepped in and helped. And like so many other aspects of what’s now referred to as “attachment parenting”, it was such a common event it was pretty much entirely undocumented. Which makes it tough on those of us trying to access the accumulated wisdom of generations.
I have huge admiration for Halima’s parents. The lengths they’re going to to ensure milk for their girl are just herculean. I think of all the women who could breastfeed and don’t because of some misguided ideas about vanity and propriety, and I want to cry. But I also think that great challenge often gives great blessings both to those who endure and those who are called to assist. I feel honored to be able to give this connection to my children, this new milk sister of theirs. Even Kestrel gets that this is an important thing; he’s voluntarily cut back on his nursing times, in favor of “just cuddling” so there’s more milk for Halima.
So if anyone reading this knows more than me (which wouldn’t be hard) about milk sharing, especially in other cultures, let me know in the comments. And if anyone reading this is in the SF Bay Area, more donations are appreciated.
I‘m working on the birthstory, the announcement, and all that good stuff. But for right this instant… I had to post this photo.
I love the “getting to know you” phase. It’s everything babymooning is about.
More later, I promise!
Because it really does work this way. An unschooling post not about the boys, but about Jason and Marc.
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2008/06/history-sucks.html
http://midwiferyworld.com/?p=232
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 16, 2008)—Just in time for Father’s Day, at its annual meeting last weekend, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution to introduce legislation outlawing home birth, and potentially making criminals of the mothers who choose home birth with the help of Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) for their families.
I think what kills me about this is that if home birth is outlawed… what are they planning to do with the babies of the women who do it?
More news as it appears, and as soon as I have some concrete action to take, I’ll let y’all know.
La Leche League founder Edwina Froehlich died last Sunday. She was 93.
I am completely devastated. Edwina pretty much embodied everything I admire in an activist. And also proved that even if you come late to your passion, you can change the world.
My favorite article about her, so far, is the Chicago Tribune piece. Some tidbits:
In the 1940s, Mrs. Froehlich witnessed her older sister Pauline go through what were then standard hospital childbirth procedures: plenty of drugs, the use of forceps and no fathers allowed, said another son, state Rep. Paul Froehlich (D-Schaumburg). Her sister also was discouraged from breast-feeding.
“That experience led mom to seek a better way,” Paul Froehlich said.
Newspapers would not run stories or meeting notices that included the word “breast,” so the group used the Spanish word for milk, “leche,” for its name.
How fabulous is that? Smack into some stupid arbitrary rule, and work around it creatively. See what’s wrong with the world, and change it. Some other fun bits from the New York Times piece:
Edwina Froehlich,… was inspired to help found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby…
A pioneer on several fronts of motherhood, she worked for Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic lay organization, before marrying John Froehlich when she was in her early 30s. She had her first child a couple of years later, making her comparatively old to have a first child at the time, and she made the controversial decision to forgo giving birth in a hospital in favor of a more natural delivery in her Franklin Park, Ill., home, with an obstetrician attending.
“We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals and social pressure,” Mrs. White said.
It is so hard to be an “older” mother. It’s so hard to stand up when the world wants to shame you for doing what’s biologically appropriate in birthing and feeding your offspring. Having had a cesarean with my first baby, and feeling that breastfeeding was at least something I could do right, it’s because of Edwina’s work that I was able, 2.5 weeks out from that cesarean, to participate in the Berkeley, CA Guinness World Record Breastfeeding event. It healed a lot of the “broken” feelings I was working through. Breastfeeding has also been a really good arena for me to use in my birth activism work, to show mothers how very wrong doctors can be about very basic things.
But at the time Edwina and her six cohorts (Marian Tompson, Mary White, Mary Ann Cahill, Mary Ann Kerwin, Viola Lennon, and Betty Wagner) got started with LLLI, breastfeeding in America was down to 20% of women. It’s not a whole lot better now, but without them to hold back the tide, who knows how much harder it might have been for me to get the support and encouragement I needed for this critical aspect of mothering?
So thank you, Edwina, for standing up for what you believed in, and making it that much easier for me to do so as well. You’ll be missed.
I‘m due to have this baby any time now.
It’s obvious if you know me and know my dates. I’ve been telling people “I’m having a Gemini”, so that’s a clear clue. And of course, I’m huge, so that’s a dead giveaway.
If even one more person asks me “haven’t you had that baby yet?” I’m gonna stick ‘em in the eye with a fork. Cause clearly, they aren’t actually using their eyes for, y’know, observation or anything. And that’s just the people I see in person. The oh-so-subtle “oh, I was just thinking of you and thought I’d call…” phone calls aren’t much better. I’ve put myself on self-imposed phone rest (like bed rest, but better), and made Jason answer the dratted thing.
I was pondering, this morning, as I awoke having yet again not gone into labor in the night, what it is that makes people get in such a hurry at the end of a pregnancy. It’s like at 36-37 weeks, the baby has to stay in, then at 38-39, everyone starts freaking out and being impatient. “Is it there yet? Is it there yet? Have you had it yet?” It sounds like little kids at Christmas. Or at the end of a road trip. Or… and it struck me… like people who are excited about an event, but have no actual work to perform to ensure said event comes off.
Think about it. Adults who are responsible for filling the gas tank, doing the auto maintenance, doing the trip planning, doing the driving, parceling out the snacks… they never ask “are we there yet?”… they just stare out the windows. Adults who are fully engaged with the holiday madness of shopping, party-having, cooking, planning, etc, always are startled by how fast the calendar moves, and wish for an additional week or two.
So here’s my solution. People who ask me if I’ve had that baby yet? Clearly, they haven’t enough to do. The next person who asks me that question gets invited to bring a casserole, do a load of dishes or laundry, handle the grocery shopping, or rub my feet (since helping actually gestate this little punkin is physiologically impossible). I figure if I start involving the rushers in the process, they’ll realize there’s so much going on, that clearly, they need to either pitch in fully, or maybe plan themselves a road trip.
I spent another half an hour on the phone with HR. They’ve upped they ante.
The rules, if you’ll recall from part I of this rant, are that if you’re disabled during the focal review period, you are ineligible for raises, etc, until you come back, at manager’s discretion. I happen to think this is ridiculous, since the timing of my pregnancy is random (basically), and it’s discriminatory to hold a penalty over my head because I happen to have gotten pregnant when I did. People who take vacation time are not penalized, and it’s a similar situation. But because the state feels that pregnancy equals disability, and since disability is seldom of finite duration (unlike maternity, sigh), they feel the need to protect themselves. I understand it within the disability context, but I find it to be highly irritating in this circumstance.
So… I figured out during my last two pregnancies that if I were to go on disability (maternity), then go off and go onto vacation for the focal review period, then to go back on maternity (disability), it’d preserve my general sense of fairness, dot all the correct “i’s”, and be done with the charade.
However, the charade has escalated. No one can tell me when, precisely, the “focal review period” is. No one has dates. Nowhere on the HR website, nowhere in the manual they have for the phone center folks, nowhere, are there actual dates that define the “focal review period”. Everyone’s sure it’s in June or July. No one can say precisely when. But everyone can see clearly that if I’m on disability (maternity), I miss out, and it creates more paperwork and hassle for my manager, and some financial loss for me, potentially.
Seriously uncool.
The gentleman I just got off the phone with took 20 minutes trying to find the information. Finally, he asked me why I cared. So I explained. He could tell me that if I was out on leave for more than 1/4 of the total focal review period, I was ineligible, but he was, again, completely unable to define “focal review period” as a set of calendar dates.
So everyone’s clear that there are penalties and I will suffer them, but absolutely no one can tell me what the rules we’re playing by are. Frankly, I’m beginning to feel ever-so-slightly oppressed.
The gentleman, whose curiosity is piqued, promises to call me back tomorrow, “after he’s jumped on the focal guys”. I’m looking forward to finding a nice, simple answer. Normally, this kind of sparring intrigues me, but at this point, I’m baffled at the inconsistency. I am very lucky, in that my manager rocks, and I’m not actually worried about the penalties of the situation. It’s more a “fighting the principle of the thing” than an actual fight for my check, but frankly, it’s unfair to put myself and my manager in that position. I’m dependent on the kindliness, reasonability, and sense of fair play that my manager has, which is not a luxury everyone has. What about women who get pregnant and work for rules-based creatures? How do they fare? And again, I’d have known none of this, but for my prior two pregnancies. The information is not at all forthcoming.
So stay tuned, mommies and iconoclasts. This could get entertaining.
I‘ve been posting some pretty heavy stuff, so for a gorgeous Saturday morning, I’d like to share this…
Harry Belafonte and the Muppets, Turn the world around
So is life…