ElementalMom

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-02/compassion-cure

Check it out. Not only can they screw with our births, not only can they damage our kids, but then they can freaking MAKE MONEY OFF IT LATER when they figure out that ARTIFICIALLY DOSING OUR KIDS with a hormone OUR BODIES PRODUCE AT BIRTH FOR OUR BABIES can help fix what should never have been broken in the first place.

I‘m thrilled for those for whom this is a cure, a help, an assistance. And utterly terrified at what this says for the growing number of women and babies whose natural process is being willfully tampered with.

Profit, profit, profit all around. And all the costs to us.

Fuckers.

UPDATE: Angela tells me this wasn’t clear enough, so let me expand on precisely why I’m upset. Oytocin is flooded into a woman’s system with the end of 2nd stage labor. So the mother and the baby are both just swimming in the stuff. That’s why bonding is such a big deal; there’s a chemical peak of oxytocin in both their systems at the moment of vaginal delivery. Dianne Wiessinger speaks and writes extensively about this, from her background as a biologist, if you want to go look it up.

That entire mechanism is nonexistent in a cesarean.

Neither the woman nor the baby get oxytocin in a cesarean. Jostling the mother, having lights on, pretty much EVERYTHING involved in cesarean delivery stops the mammalian brain from producing oxytocin. This is why if you mess with a birthing cat, for example, she will abandon the kittens. If the oxytocin isn’t there, bonding becomes an intellectual rather than emotional/biochemical exercise. It’s also a fact that the rise in autism completely parallels the rise in surgical/medically managed births (as does violence in a culture. Michel Odent is your source for this tidbit.) So the very idea that they can force women into (profitable for them) cesareans, that mess with the oxytocin delivery, and then make those same women pay for artificial oxytocin to help heal the babies they themselves damaged…infuriating.

This hit my feed reader this AM:

http://yellodyno.typepad.com/yello_dyno_blog/2008/02/realistic-fake.html

Realistic fake photos challenge child porn prosecutors.

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity. And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one…

Some of you work in the this arena. Please give us more insight into this issue so we can help to ensure children’s safety.

So please, if you have the talent (and the heart) to help, please contact Jan at YelloDino.

There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.

We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.

But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.

I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)

If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.

After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.

So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).

So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…

In a scant week and a half, I am going to be speaking at the Trust Birth Conference in Redondo Beach, CA.

I‘ve never even been to a birth conference before. I’ve heard a lot about them, heard people talk about what they saw and what impacted them. So I’m kind of flying blind in terms of trying to gauge my audience. I’m having to go on faith that what got me the invite was whipping out my impromptu soapbox about women, especially digital native women, reclaiming their voices through the use of multimedia. Apparently it was a strong enough statement that it got Carla Hartley of the AAMI to go ahead and put me in for the Sunday general session. Woah.

I‘m worried, a little, because I’m talking geek to birthy types, and I’ve had some spectacularly bad luck with that before. You don’t tend to realize how steeped in your paradigm you are, until you try to communicate outside of it, and end up with people looking at you like you’re from Mars. I’m going to be floating the talk around to some folks this week, to get feedback from both the birthy and the geeky sides of the fence.

My talk has been spinning in my head for months, but I’m still only about 3/4 of the way to having it written.
There are many, many presentation styles, and I’m currently quite enamored of the one going around the geekerati circles, that involves pictures at rapid speed, but not a single word or bullet point on any slide. I’m still stressing about whether or not my audience is actually going to engage with that or not. But in the meantime… that’s enough blogging. I have a speech to write…

I blogged a teeny bit about my July 31 miscarriage here. And until I was discussing the due date for the baby I’m carrying now with Mom2, I had forgotten that the baby I miscarried was due right around now.

I miscarried between Rowan and Kestrel too. That one, an eight-weeker and so-called “silent” miscarriage, was horrible, because I still felt broken from the cesarean, and took the miscarriage as a sign that meant I could not do this birth thing that normal women could do. I was an emotional wreck for ages. And that Christmas was kinda sad, because that baby would have been due then. A Christmas baby.

This time, I knew that miscarriages are just a normal part of a breeder’s life, and I wasn’t so freaked out about that; I was just very very sad. This one was not at all “silent”, and therefore I was also physically wrecked for a while. And that baby was due around my birthday. A Birthday baby.

Instead, we caught this one, who is due smack in between Kestrel’s birthday and Rowan’s. There will be a nearly perfect three-year spacing between our kids, which is precisely what Jason was hoping for, but too wise to “plan” for, since we all know that biology does what it does when it cares to. My three kids (how weird is that to type! Much less to think!) will be May-June-July. Late spring/early summer birthdays, perfect for parties, far enough apart that they don’t collide unpleasantly with each other, close enough together that they will all always remember each other.

And that, right there? That says “hand of the Divine” all over it.

See, the two miscarriages? Nice due times and all, easy for me to remember. But as my parenting guru pal Valarie told me once (and it rocked my world)… my children will be in each other’s lives far longer than they’ll be in mine. It’s easy, as a parent, to constantly frame your kids in terms of their relationship with you, but that’s not the primary relationship considering the scope of their lives; the primary relationship is with each other. And somehow, this baby picked a time snuggled right in between its brothers. Jason and I are both winter birthdays, but our children are the bright lights of spring and summer, all clustered together.

It’s another reminder that they are each other’s family, long after Jason and I have moved on to whatever adventure comes next. I know that there are some who feel that trying to ascribe meaning to tragedy is simply the coping mechanism of a gullible brain, and that’s fine, they can think that. But for me, for the rest of my life, when “birthday season” rolls around, I’ll be reminded that pretty much even the most awful events can sometimes end up turning out perfectly.

So here I am, over halfway. In our culture, for the first baby, you spend all your time panicking about the unknown of it all. In my case, I spent my second pregnancy wholly focused on the event of the birth, which was a planned HBAC, and came with all the challenges inherent to that. But with this baby, I have achieved an odd sort of calm. People keep shaking their heads at me.

It’s uncool, apparently, to be pregnant and non-dramatic about it. Apparently, despite the fact that I feel great, that I’m gaining normally, that baby is kicking around in there, I’ve got my midwife and my birth plans (including a full emergency backup plan) all dialed in, I am supposed to be freaking out about something.

There’s plenty to freak out about, if I felt like it. Birth isn’t all that safe an event, no matter where it happens. I could worry about shoulder dystocia, I could worry about stillbirth, meconium in the water, aspiration, short cord, breech. Last time labor was 38 hours, this one might be longer. Or, it might be supershort! I could fret about the fact that I’m older, so birth defects of some kind are more likely than they were before (although according to the Powers That Be, I’ve been a geriatric mother for five years already, LOL!). It’s true; this baby could have autism, CP, spina bifida, or a whole host of other things that people are born with. We’ll face that if it becomes necessary.

But you know… there’s nothing wrong with a little hope, is there? Must it always be about impending disaster?

It makes me sad that the American Culture of Fear has so pervaded the American Culture of Birth, that the fact that my simple statements that I feel great, baby’s doing great, and the birth is gonna be great, have people thinking I’m somehow naive or oblivious.

I spent Kestrel’s pregnancy reading everything. I mean everything. I am under absolutely no illusions about what could happen. I know that babies die. I know that mothers die. I’ve faced it, internalized it, accepted it, and… here’s the kicker… I am now moving past it.

In 14 weeks or so, I’m having a baby. And like everything else in this life, there are factors I can control, and factors I cannot, and I am going to meet them with the most joy, and the most faith, and the most love, I possibly can. Everything else is a waste of my energy; energy I could put to use growing this baby. So that’s what I’m doing.

My old pal Mike has decided to go into comedy. This video is from his first or second performance at SFCC. I think he did an awesome job.

…and you’ll always be Bubba to me. =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9wWHvwLokE

This one was really really hard to write. Mostly my essays about unschooling are pretty organic, and roll from whatever we’re experiencing, but lately I’ve been spending some time thinking of the larger cultural implications of the schooling process, and trying to focus on that. And in the interests of full disclosure, I’m also trying to help out some friends who are still arguing with their spouses about whether or not this is an option for them, and trying to encourage a few artist friends of mine who are struggling to continue to create within a culture that so sorely undervalues them. So this one’s for you, guys.

The Natural Products of Our Training

Previously, I’ve posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can.

It did not occur to me, until I was sitting in a room with about 40 other corporate web content delivery professionals (a set of Kiss-of-Death adjectives if ever there were), at a recent gathering for sharing of information about using multimedia on websites, how thoroughly our assumptions are informed by the schooling we got. The point was to familiarize people with the technologies available, and give them some ideas for how to use them.

So how come, I’m sitting there wondering, less than 1/4 of the presentations actually used multimedia? See, corporate folks? Their attention is on keeping their jobs, and looking good for their management. Sort of like how kids in school want to impress the teacher. More and more, I’m convinced that they don’t actually participate in the web beyond what’s required in their daily work, the same way that schooled kids tend to do what’s required for the grade, and not much more, and certainly not much different.

For example, one presentation stressed strongly how important it is to have good solid metadata in things like videos, because there’s no text for a search engine to provide more context and/or relevancy through, so the tagging you give is pretty much all you get. People all over the room are nodding and smiling, like this is news.

Um, hello? Old news, folks. My son Rowan, who is five, understands metatagging. He knows how to start the laptop, launch a browser window, get to YouTube, and search for Tom & Jerry cartoons… in English. He also gets really upset when his searches return videos in other languages (although sometimes he thinks the Japanese ones are pretty funny…). He gets that lack of appropriate tagging is a usability problem, because that’s what it is for him. Of course, he doesn’t have the language to fully express all that the same way we do. But the fact is that as a consumer of multimedia content, his behavior and his reactions are utterly predictable, and at age five, he is already forming opinions about the technological acuity of the people who post such content.

You can remind people to tag their content, but if they are not consumers of such content, they won’t really understand, as Rowan does, how insanely frustrating it is when it all goes pearshaped.

So then, later in the day, people are talking about using new media (whatever that is) to attract “the new developer”… you know, the youth who are driving things now. And I’m nodding, cause I totally agree. And then they start talking, heaven help me, about the Universities and speaking to college students! And in my head, I can see Rowan, already cruising the web, already conversant with how to click past annoying Flash intro pages, already becoming a savvy consumer of online technology. Considering the ugly brushes we’ve already had with minor forms of academia, (here and here), the very idea of my child going to college is ridiculous, and waiting to graduate from the Ivory Towers Of Ossified Thinking to become successful is laughable in the economy of today.

Rowan knows who Duke is, he knows what Flash animation is, and he knows to look for the blessed “skip this intro” buttons. He knows what HTML is, and I’m teaching him coding, a little bit at a time. I think about him encountering his first “Hello, World” and I cringe just a little bit. Just like it’s absurd for a roomful of adults who don’t even use multimedia to stand around talking about presenting it to people who are native users of it, it’s absurd to think that someday some professor will be more competent to teach my child about the Cloud than he, who’s been breathing it for years, is.

I‘d like to really recommend that my colleagues and compatriots leave work early, go home… and watch their kids interact with the digital environment. They will learn far more from that exercise about the context of the Digital Native, and about the reality of content propagation for that audience, than they will by listening to a roomful of Digital Immigrants blather on about a sky they’ve never even really seen.

A mom on a local unschooling group I’m part of recommended a singing program, boy’s choir, that was gearing up to do auditions. She has two sons, one not much older than mine,  one 14, in the program, and they were both loving it. Sure, some schoolish aspects, but both the boys were learning tons about music in a way that really inspired them, and left them talking after class for hours about what they’d learned. So, since Rowan has expressed strong interest in singing, we decided to check it out.

After the first session, I ended  up with flashbacks. Hideous school flashbacks. Ugh ugh ugh. But that’s not the point. I was sitting next to this other mom, and she was every bit as horrified as I was. It was like in the last two sessions, it had gone from a freeform, kids-on-the-floor doing breath work and learning music, to being this weird, sit-in-your-desk, let’s give out tickets for the most obedient and compliant groups, kind of nightmare. Rowan’s not even enrolled (I made it clear that he was going to take a few sessions to warm up to deciding if he was even interested), but the teacher was already correcting Rowan. And that’s the part I need help/reassurance with.

They were going over material. And over it. And over it. Rowan was clearly bored senseless, and so decided to improve on the drawings in the notes they’d been given. So he was corrected for drawing, not singing. Then they started singing, and again, the teacher wanted to know why he was writing. Turns out he was keeping track of all the items in the fill-in-the-blank song they were singing. Finally, she called his team up to sing the piece, and he had it cold. And I could
see from his look that he was just unimpressed.

So here are my questions…

1. The voices in my head are telling me that it’s somehow wrong to be absolutely delighted in how your kid chooses to entertain himself, and that’s it’s not OK to be so pleased at his ability to maintain autonomy in the face of authority. Tell me there’s a way to shut that voice up? How long until I can strangle my Inner Compliant Student?
2. The other mom, and some of the significantly older boys I talked with, say that the experience we’ve had the last two sessions is aberrant, and we should stick it out, because everything will change, and once it does, it’ll be awesome for him. Rowan’s unimpressed, and talking about moving on to other things, but he’s clearly disappointed, because what he wants to do is become a better, stronger, “more musical” (his words) singer. Having had a great-grandfather in opera, and a grandfather in rock n’ roll, he’s got pro singing in his blood, and he’s very interested in that. He was
   asking for training when we found this, and it seemed like a great opportunity. Am I damaging him by encouraging him to stick it out based on the recommendations of folks who know what I’m upset about and looking for? Or do we just walk away? Rowan’s not sure, neither am I.

Thoughts? Comment below…

Because my dental insurance finally agreed to pay up, I had the money, in hand, finally, to pay off one of my seriously delinquent bills. We’re talking, haven’t paid in three months. OK, fine, I’m a bad dog, but if the money isn’t there, it isn’t there, nothing I can do about that. But yesterday, the checks arrived, so today, I decided to give the fine folks at CitiBank a call, and clear up my account problems. There are several messages on my answering machine (sigh. I am a bad dog) from a woman with Collections, listing her number and direct extension. So logically, I’d start there, yeah?

So I call. There is no way to request a direct extension from that 800 number. I get the operator. I give her my social, my account number, mother’s maiden name, address, and phone. She tells me that the extension I’ve given her is for the St. Louis office, and cannot be directly accessed from her switchboard, but she’ll send the woman an email letting her know I am trying to reach her, and in the meantime, transfer me to another department.

I‘m on hold for 9 minutes, when Katrice picks up. I give her my social, my account number, mother’s maiden name, address, and phone. She is satisfied it’s me. Unfortunately, my account is more than 29 days past due, and she can only do those, so she has to transfer me.

I‘m on hold for 8 minutes when Jorge picks up. He’s very perky. I give him my social, my account number, mother’s maiden name, address, and phone. He is satisfied it’s me. I say, immediately “look, I’ve been on hold and bounced around and I just really want to give you guys my money, please!” He laughs. And then cannot get his computer to bring me up. Apparently, his section of the Bad Dog Hasn’t Paid Bills pie doesn’t include me either. I listen to him pound on his keyboard a bit. I offer some suggestions. In complete defeat, he says he has to transfer me. At this point, I’m not terribly surprised. I wish him well, and hear him cussing, in Spanish, at his machine as he transfers me.

Have I mentioned that CitiBank has dreadful hold music? Have I mentioned that at this point, roughly 20 minutes into my adventure, I’ve heard the music track loop twice? Have I mentioned that I’ve heard every ad they have for every financial product, and the irony of advertising investment products when you’re on hold for Collections is just overwhelming?

So I’m taken off hold by Menashi. She’s Indian. I give her my account number, my social, mother’s maiden name, phone number, and address. Just to, you know, change it up a bit. Menashi is far more formal about obtaining my information and hearing my story. But apparently, once I’ve spent two minutes on that, she regrets to inform me (I adore formal Indian phone manners) that she can only deal with people whose accounts are more than 30 but less than 60 days overdue. And that’s not me. So she’s transferring me to Collections (which is where, if you’ll recall, I called in the first place). And sure enough, it’s the same 800 number and extension I tried while making my first call. A total of 27 minutes ago. Menashi is pretty sure she can directly transfer me to the right place, despite my borderline panic at being sent back to where I started. She’s sweetly reassuring, but hits the hold button before I can finish babbling.

Seven minutes after that, Mitch in Collections picks up the phone. Desperate, I blurt out “I really, really, just want to give someone my money. That’s all I want to do. I have been on and off of hold four times, I’ve been transferred around, I’ve been on the phone over 35 minutes, no one can work with me, PLEASE before I rattle off all my numbers, will you PLEASE tell me you’ll take my money?” Mitch is laughing so hard by the time I finish, he can barely choke out a request for my information. I give him my accountnumbersocialsecurityphoneaddressmother’smaiden all in one breath at this stage. I’ve had practice, and it shows. Mitch dissolves into laughter again, and says “yes ma’am, we at CitiBank would be happy to take your money.”

And what followed from there was one of the more pleasant conversations I’ve had in a while. He was funny, he was human, he was understanding. We chatted about why my payment was late, and when I explained the whole thing about having two mortgages and supporting five people on one paycheck, but we had this dream and this boat and blah blah blah, he gave me a really great speech about not letting bills interfere with dreams, and started coming up with ideas to help me out. When I commented on his rare but delightful humanity, he replied “well you know… we’re all just people, and anyone could have a problem at any time, and it’s not that you’re bad, it’s that you’re in a situation. I’d be an ass not to recognize that and work with it.” He also waived my fees, in exchange for my “unusual determination” wading through the phone tree to get my bill paid.

So the lesson here? Even in banking, sometimes you can find a real live thinking human being. And they are blessed amongst bankers, for they still have a soul. And you can bet…they’ll get prioritized in the bill rotation.

Whoot! I am so excited!

My first ever podcast interview is live on Carla’s Miss Adventuring show. You can also access it directly from iTunes, if you’re so inclined.

Carla is going to be turning her guests’s “Tips for Misadventurous Living” into a book somewhere along the line, and you can see my (and the other guests’s) contributions to that list here.

I had a lovely time chatting with Carla, telling stories, and figuring out why it is we do the things we do. Enjoy, and please come on back here and let me know what you thought! I’m really curious to hear your feedback on this one, since I’ve never done anything like this before.

Thanks!

My pal Angela sent me a copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, with the note “You’ll want to shake her occasionally, but a good read.”

With a recommendation like that, what else could I do? I sat down to see what the deal was. And ended up taking quite the unintended ride.

EPL is the story of a woman who hits thirty (naturally), freaks out over pressures in her unhappy marriage (naturally), goes through an unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), and then goes on a pretty self-indulgent and thoroughly control-freaky pilgrimage to try to get her act back together. And in doing so, she meets characters (naturally), has revelations, has several serial breakdowns, and eventually (at the convenient end of her trip and her book) meets the man she’s going to marry.

In the process, she has internal battles with her Wellbutrin prescription, eats incredible-sounding food that would probably kill me, makes all kinds of decisions about how to handle things that help you understand where the chaos in her former life probably came from, and ends up halfway around the world trying to recreate the world she left behind.

I know, I sound pretty hostile. That’s largely because I get all pissy like that every time I read a book that I could have written, better. I think my personal journey, through hitting 29 (overachiever!), freaking out over my unhappy marriage (naturally), going through my unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), going on a pilgrimage to get my act back together, meeting characters (as you do when you’re paying more attention to the people around you than you are to the noise inside your head), and meeting the man I married, in my not so humble opinion, is a far more entertaining journey than the one in EPL. In any case, mine had diving with sharks, a government coup at gunpoint, and several fistfights in it. At least when they made a movie, they’d need a special effects budget (the mark of any really good story is the number of explosions in it, IMO. Which probably explains the chaos in my former life, too.)

Those of you who lived through those years with me are probably chuckling at this point (I can hear you from here, Bubba). And wondering how I’d manage to disguise their identities in the final draft.

The fact is, everyone thinks their story, their journey, is interesting stuff. And the fact also is that people who should be writing but aren’t writing enough get pissy all out of proportion with the people who actually have nailed book contracts to write about what they do.

I‘ll take it as a sign. A sign that I need to get busy, writing.

I‘m a titch late on this, but a new post went up on LWOS a little while back, part 2 of my Digital Natives discussion.

http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2008/01/digital-natives.html

Go read! Leave comments! Increase my clickrate! LOL!