ElementalMom

Wheeeeeee! You’ll find it here.

The clever amongst you will note that the post references a four year old, and Rowan is now five, so clearly that post has been sitting in the queue for a while. ::shrug:: It happens like that sometimes.

This is the best bowl of mashed potatoes I’ve ever had in my life. Smashed with a fork because I don’t own a masher any more, with coconut oil because I try hard not to do dairy any more, it’s nonetheless a bowl of steamy starchy ambrosia goodness. You’d think a raw food advocate would cringe to sing the praises of the lowly boiled and smashed potato, but speaking as someone who, in matters of comfort food, is wholly controlled by her Irish ancestry (I know 101 ways to make a potato sing… no, not like that… sigh…), I can definitively say, this is a damn good bowl of potatoes.

“Why are you getting all emotional and ethnic about a bowlful of starch?” you ask… I’ll tell you. Turns out that NVP, or “morning sickness”, is far more complex than I thought. Check these out:

• http://tinyurl.com/2fj4ohMorning sickness: a mechanism for protecting mother and embryo.
• http://tinyurl.com/yqjb3lReproductive immunosupression and diet. An evolutionary perspective on pregnancy sickness and meat consumption.
• http://tinyurl.com/2adku6Vomiting and nausea in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. (This one’s a hoot; says it’s basically a result of your environment, if you’re getting along with your husband, or if you’re stressed with your children.)
• http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant570/Papers/Edwards.htmAn Adaptationist Approach to Pregnancy Sickness

  Pretty much more than you ever wanted to know about cross cultural and adaptational root causes for pregnancy sickness.

• http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v44n5/035602/035602.htmlOn Morning Sickness and the Neolithic Revolution

  Why NVP is at least as much cultural as it is physiological. I’d never thought of it like this.

One article states,

There is a great deal of variation among women with respect to the severity and duration of NVP symptoms. For the majority of pregnant women, nausea is transient in nature and has few long-term consequences for their pregnancy or their life, although it is undoubtedly unpleasant in the short term. For as many as 35% of pregnant women, the NVP symptoms are severe enough to seriously disrupt their lives, causing them to change their usual activities. An average of 2.5% of pregnant women require hospitalization because of hyperemesis gravidarum. Predicting which patients are likely to suffer from NVP is difficult. There are no reliable indicators. Fatigue appears to be associated with nausea during pregnancy. Women who have a history of severe nausea during pregnancy or whose mothers suffered from severe nausea during pregnancy are at greater risk. Multiple gestation and molar pregnancies are also associated with increased nausea. Despite the unpleasant and disruptive nature of NVP symptoms, nausea during pregnancy is considered a normal part of pregnancy. Nausea and vomiting in the first trimester of pregnancy are associated with a decreased risk of miscarriage, preterm delivery, low birth weight, stillbirth, and fetal and perinatal mortality. Women suffering from severe NVP do not appear to have different birth outcomes from those of women who experience mild nausea.

So speaking as a girl who had a pretty devastating miscarriage not that long ago, the fact that I’m sitting here, queasy as all hell, nibbling on this bowl of mashed potatoes and utterly unable to drink my customary morning tea, is A Good Thing.

And yes. I’ll keep y’all posted. In the meantime, send potatoes…

Friends, as part of blog action day, I’m blogging about the environment.

This is, if you know me, laughable. I have a graduate degree in treehugger. I’m totally evergreeen, yeah?

I had no freaking idea what awareness of my footprint truly was until I moved onboard a boat. Here are a few highlights:

• Water consumption. Here, have two tanks. Use only the water that’s in them, and figure out how long it takes for you to go through that amount. Get progressively more creative about trying to fill the tanks less often.
• Sewage. When you have to drive the boat over to the pumping station to deal with your output, and 100% of the family’s waste is in a nice tank under someone’s bed, suddenly, you become aware of exactly how much waste human beings make, and how much work is involved in processing it. I am utterly nauseated by the amount of water wasted by “normal” flush toilets, now that we have a simple pump toilet, and every cup of water in is a cup of water we’ll have to pump later.
• Food. You have a tiny bit of storage space, and every inch matters, so you go for more food and less packaging. And you start to realize that every package takes up an insane amount of space. And besides that…
• Garbage. Oh my god. In our marina, the garbage dumpster is pretty close, but the recycle bin is a really long haul. So “take out the trash” involves walking 400 yards or so up to the gate, getting a cart, bringing it back, putting in the garbage and recycle bags, walking (uphill) back up to the gate, out to the bin, down to the other bin (probably another 500 yards or so), and coming back. Lovely exercise, yes, but not while slogging around bags of yuck. So you start working out brilliant schemes to minimize trips, and therefore, garbage. I am reminded of a college professor I had, whose family generated one lunchbag’s worth of garbage a week. We are working to emulate him.
• Sustainability. Recently, we had to replace the battery bank. That’s four 150-pound batteries. That’s a ton of expense and a ton of waste, and a giant PITA to get out of the boat, down to the battery place, yada yada yada. I expect the new batteries to last six years, minimum. Someone asked me why I hadn’t just gotten auto batteries, which are cheaper but less durable, and all I could think was “yeah, let’s see you schlep those babies…”. Things in boats are always priced in multiples of $1000 (the term is “boat bucks”), and when you’re looking at massive outlay, you’ll do almost anything to repair, reuse, or otherwise extend a thing’s life. We thought we were in for replacing the water heaters, and when my friend Jon managed to rewire the old one, I almost cried with relief and gratitude.
• Recycling. Not just paper, glass, etc, but other stuff as well. There’s very little free space on a boat, so things like freecycle and paperbackswap just rock. Get a thing, enjoy a thing, give it back to someone else, get a different thing… less attachment, more joy, less clutter, more entertainment.
• DIY. This is *huge* in the liveaboard community. People here know tools, use tools, and it’s expected that if you’re going to call in a pro, it’s because you tried everything and then some before you did. It’s a spirit of self-sufficiency that’s going to be required, if we all don’t quit screwing up the environment we have.

So those are the big things I can think of at the moment. Who knew my footprint could get smaller? I wonder how small it will get before we’re done?

Through a strange set of circumstances, I find myself today thinking a lot about Christy Brown’s mother.

The tenth of her 22 births, Christy was born with cerebral palsy, in the crushingly poor Dublin of 1932. Despite being told he was a vegetable, he was not human, Mrs. Brown persisted.
“It is his body that is shattered and not his mind, I’m sure of it”.

Famously, at the age of five, Christy snatched a piece of chalk from his sister’s hand with his left foot, the only piece of his body under his control, and wrote on the floor. The first word he wrote, two years later, after dilligent coaching? M-O-T-H-E-R.

In my younger years, as a passionate reader of Irish literature, I was enthralled by Christy’s writings. Like a younger, harder, more bitter James Joyce, he illustrated for me the land of my ancestry. Listening to the Pogues, reading Christy’ intensely descriptive words, I could simultaneously feel like I’d found home, and also the complete understanding for why my ancestors left there to come here.

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
And we dance”

Obviously, I’m a very different girl now than I was back then. Still in love with James and Christy; I’ve made room aboard the boat for my copies of their works. I find odd comfort there sometimes. I reread “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man” when I was pregnant with Rowan and couldn’t do anything but read, and it was a completely different book from what it was in high school.

So again, I find myself back with Christy. (And Shane McGowan, naturally. Somehow they go together, for me.)

Christy Brown, a clown around town
Now a man of renown from Dingle to Down
I type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose
And where it’s gonna end
God only knows

Down all the days
The tap-tap-tapping
Of the typewriter keys
The gentle rattling of the drays
Down all the days

I have often had to depend upon
The kindliness of strangers
But I’ve never been asked
And I never replied
If I supported Glasgow Rangers

What would Christy have become, without his mother? I think about the odds she was overcoming, and I am absolutely stopped in my tracks. Twenty two births? Thirteen children, one profoundly handicapped? How incredibly easy would it have been for her to throw up her hands, declare she couldn’t cope, and leave Christy to rot in a corner? She didn’t have laundromats, she didn’t have take-out dinners; she had grinding, grinding work.

And her love, mother’s love, was so big, it got straight past those who marginalized her 10th child, past the work and the poverty and I cannot even begin to imagine the physical exhaustion, to hold him up as someone worthy. Worth existing.

So here’s to you, Mrs. Brown. I do not even know what your name was. Christy refers to you as mother, everyone else calls you Mrs. Brown, or Christy’s Mum. I only hope to God I can be half the mother you were.