ElementalMom

Yesterday was my eighth wedding anniversary.

This is not the man I thought I was marrying. The guy I thought I was marrying was a rough, tough, hammer-swinging, tattooed-and-earringed bad boy. I thought the sun rose in his eyes, and wasn’t terribly concerned about the rest.

Things change, with time. If you’re lucky and you’ve chosen really, really well, you change for the better, together. Goodness knows I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last eight years. I’m certainly not the person he married either; that girl was not a mother, not a wife, not a lot of other things I consider myself to be, now.

It seems like no time has passed. It seems like it’s been far more than a scant 8 years. It’s had high highs and low lows and the only thing I can say with absolute, utter certainty, is that I am more madly in love with him than I was back then, and that’s saying a whole lot, since the smitten level was pretty high at the beginning.

So here’s to eight years, m’love, and another eight, and another, and another. Let’s see what happens next…

Tags: Anniversary, Family, Jason, Love, Marriage, Musings

Art by Holly Defount

It’s been 10 years since the Renaissance Faire at Black Point ended.

Every year about this time I get the jones. It is pretty subtle some years, and some years hits me like a brick. This was a brick year. And it’s one of those things that if you say to another Faire veteran, “Isn’t it that time…?” they know exactly what you mean, and when you try to explain it to someone who wasn’t there, you cannot make it make sense. Folks who are veterans of the Southern Faire get the jones in springtime, and us Northerners get it in late summer.

So here I am… missing Faire. Faire gave me so much. Which sounds weird, but, for example, I cannot be startled by strangers. Pretty much anyone can throw improv at my head, and I’m ready to catch. Public speaking holds zero fear for me, and in fact I’ve been told again and again in corporate and advocacy settings that my presentation skills are excellent. Good thing none of those folks know that those skills were honed not at Toastmasters, but on the dusty streets of Black Point Faire, rolling in the dirt, spitting water, and hollering over the crowd in a bad Elizabethan accent while pretending to be falling-down drunk as soon as the opening parade went by at 10 AM. What do you do with a drunken sailor, anyway?

I miss the people. Faire was home to more creative, colorful, wacky, fascinating personalities than anyplace I’ve ever been. From the profound to the pathological, Faire was home for all of us, and that provided the starting ground for understanding. I may not have agreed with or even liked the choices that some of my fellow actors made, but I learned to roll with it. Faire was a great place for learning to leave your judgment at the door.

I miss sitting on the deck of the hootch long into the night, singing non-Faire songs and discussing philosophy, storytelling, and the finer points of various beverages. I learned more about tea and whisky on that deck… I miss being my unexpurgated self. I miss being able to say what I think when I think how I think, and not worry about consequences or political correctness. Cutting loose at Faire for 12 weekends every year was critical to my sanity, critical to retaining a sense of myself in the onslaught of everyday society. The outside world is all about compliance; Faire was all about creativity and personality, improvisation and showmanship.

I miss the place. It sounds goofy, but Black Point was magical. I can’t describe it. I won’t even try. But it was more magical than anyplace I’ve ever been. Maybe it was all those people who believe in fairies in one small place being so intense for so long that the energy seeped into the trees and rocks. Maybe not. But not being there actually hurts sometimes.

I can’t believe it’s been ten years since that chapter of my life passed me by. I still remember the final ringout parade. I remember sobbing the entire length of the thing. I remember thinking that something so fabulous could not really end. I remember being stunned by how not-Black Point the following year’s Faire at Nut Tree was. I didn’t have the heart to carry on after that. I and my life have moved on to other things.

But some years, when the jones hits, I sit outside on the deck at night, and try to catch a hint on the wind of oak and bay trees, of the heat given off by the road after the sun set, of the chai at Mullah’s. I can hear the singing in the radio of my mind, sometimes, and I’m unutterably sad for what was lost.

So once again, farewell to Black Point. Being there was a turning point in making me who I am and I’m grateful forever. But I so miss you.

Tags: Black Point, Renaissance Faire, Sea Dogs

Over the last extremely stressful year, I’ve been exploring my personal spirituality a lot. There are no atheists in foxholes, the saying goes, and I kinda roll with that. Frankly, I almost have to believe that, because of some of the things that I’ve seen happen to other moms, and that have happened to me.

Almost a year ago, the marvelous Dana gave me a mala bracelet made of bodhi seeds. It’s fabulous and I love how it feels in my hands, but it’s too big to wear and the elastic gave up pretty rapidly. So Dana bought me another bracelet, and brought it to me right before Aurora’s birth. At first I thought it was just a nice pattern on the beads, but on closer reflection, discovered that the carvings are tiny Madonnas.

As I’ve posted before, I’m not a Catholic. Not even close. I resent the idea that an institution thinks they can come between me and my personal relationship with the Divine. So la.

My aunt Marla, before she died, surrounded herself with latin images of the Madonna. I miss Marla hugely; I think we might have had a lot to talk about once we were both mothers. Sadly, she did not live to see my children. But I think of her all the time; when I see the film Dune, when I hear David Bowie, when I see Madonnas.

I refer to Mary a lot in my birth advocacy work. If you point out that Christ was born unassisted in a horse barn, suddenly modern home birthing looks pretty slick. And also classical. I’ve seen a lot of devout Christians do a 180 on their ideas about homebirth once this fact is mentioned. Mary is therefore my own personal patron of why homebirth works. When I see her, I think of women’s power in birthing.

To some degree, all mothers touch the Divine. You can’t be this much a part of the dance of birth, death, and everything in between and not be in touch with something bigger than yourself. Sometimes, it’s just because it’s all so overwhelming you have to have someone to hand it over to; the responsibility for it all is just too crushing otherwise. In that way, all mothers are to some degree the Madonna. I do recognize that some women reject that role entirely. But I also see women all around me who step up to the plate and embrace the sort of growth that motherhood can bestow upon you if you let it.

So on days where it’s too big, it’s too crazy, it’s too amazing, it’s too humbling, I wear my Mama Mala, I thumb through the beads, and I think of all the Madonnas I know.

Yesterday, I received an email forward simultaneously from both of my favorite Jessicas in the world. They were pointing me towards a woman who had a bunch of frozen milk to donate to some worthy baby, and they both thought of Halima.

I pounced, and immediately sent the woman, Gal, an email asking for the milk on Halima’s behalf. And then went and read her blog, Growing Inside. For a while. And then I sat and held Aurora and cried (I’m actually crying again just typing this out now).

Gal’s baby girl, Tikva, passed away at 8 weeks old. That’s how old Aurora will be on Friday. And Gal has been pumping all 8 weeks, not knowing if she was going to be able to feed Tikva or not, and wanting to keep her supply going. So there are now three huge ice chests of milk for Halima, and Willa, another baby whose mother cannot nurse her for medical reasons. They are Tikva’s milk sisters, as Aurora is Halima’s.

Women are so strong, so tough. They go through so much just to keep the species going. I am struck by the fact that these little girls are all of different ethnicities and religions. At some place in the world, the men of each of their heritages are trying to kill each other. And here in the Bay Area, women, mothers are coming together in a heartbeat to nurture our young in the best way we possibly can, and take joy in the connections we can make.

Hope, apparently, and love, come through breastmilk.

Tags: milk siblings

Aurora's Dolphin Dreaming

Miss Aurora down for the afternoon nap. Who knows what babies dream of? We can only guess.

Tags: Aurora, babymoon, naptime

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.

Tags: Birth, Musings, Pregnancy

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90272530

Jonathan just sent me this link, to a segment on Fresh Aire with Jonathan Paskowitz, and his documentary Surfwise. This film both encourages and terrifies me, frankly.

When you’re steeped in a fear-based society, sometimes it feels safer to stay under the radar as far as possible, and a lot of that is letting people assume what makes them comfortable, and not making too much noise about the choices your family makes, because that way, you aren’t dealing with possible State interference. You can talk to people about homebirth, homeschool, blah blah blah, but not all at once, because they shut down and assume you’re completely insane and/or incompetent.

Then along comes a film like this.

Compared to what the Paskowitzes did, what we’re planning is tame. Nine kids in a 24-foot trailer makes three kids in a 47-foot boat sound pretty palatial and spacious. So that’s cool. And while we do enjoy the raw food thing, my kids know what fat and sugar are, and are allowed to indulge. I’m thinking I might keep this film up my sleeve, to show folks that we’re not nearly as extreme as we sound.

But once I’m done with self-protection mode, I start really thinking about what those folks did, and wishing someone had covered the stuff I really want to know. Like… do all nine kids still like each other? What kinds of encouragement in learning were they able to do? How did they manage things like laundry? You know, the real details of making a family like that really work… in a 24 foot trailer, nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve gotten to see it. Stay tuned.

Tags: Paskowitz, Surfwise

I was extremely honored to be asked to provide a guest post on Rixa’s wonderful “True Face of Birth” blog recently. The post was a response to a comment-storm, generated by some people who were not prepared to see some pretty typical homebirther stuff online (although what they thought they’d see on a blog subtitled “Raw, Powerful, Ecstatic” is beyond me…)

Anyway, here’s my contribution to the fray, “Judgment, Fear, and Focus“.

My friend S gave birth today. Her little boy came into this world surrounded by family, touched first by people who love him, quietly, smoothly, beautifully. The details of the story are hers to tell, and hopefully I’ll be honored enough to link to them sometime soon.

Four months ago, S believed she could not have this kind of birth. She’d had two cesareans. She lived in a state where midwifery is illegal. Her best option was to resign herself to planning the best cesarean possible.

But S is strong. And she asked questions. A lot of questions. And in three short months, pulled together a birth plan that involved things like respect, and privacy, and having her two other children present. It also involved driving across entire states, and finding midwives who viewed two prior cesareans as a failure of the system, not a failure of S’s body. And it involved S and her husband having the faith, and the strength, and the endurance, and the foresight, to question an entire paradigm that was pushing on them harder than it pushes on most people, throwing up barriers that stop most people from getting the birth they want.

So when I tell you that her birth was completely without incident, that it all went off without a hitch, and that today, S is not a recovering surgical patient, she’s a woman who claimed her power and changed everything by sheer determination, those of you who daily see what the birth machine does to women in this country will understand why I got off the phone with her, and cheered and danced around and cried a little and did it all again some more. Such a small thing, such a simple birth, such a miracle that it ever got the chance to happen like it did.

So here’s to S, her husband, and their family. Yours is the story that tells me there’s hope of being able to topple the birth machine. You had your normal, quiet birth against insane odds, despite stupid laws, around ridiculous constraints. But you did it. And nothing will ever stop you ever again.

UPDATE: Shaye’s birth story is now live, here.

I was chatting with my incredibly wise pal V last night, and we were talking, as we do, about birth and babies and whatnot. The topic of pain-free birth came up.

I‘ve thought about this a lot. I completely bought in to the idea that if you didn’t have fear, you wouldn’t have pain, as espoused by Grantly Dick-Read in "Childbirth Without Fear". And then in the middle of my 30+ insane labor with Kestrel, decided that I was never going to trust the word of someone who’d never birthed for anything ever again.

Steeped as I am in birth circles, I have read a lot of birth stories. There are some that are ecstatic, euphoric, orgasmic… but they’re outnumbered hugely by those that are painful, uncomfortable, awkward, and agonizing. And so there’s a little bit of backlash thinking here, that the ecstatic crowd, those that feel OK with the Gaskin term "sensations" are either crazy, or they’re trying to create a thing into being that currently really doesn’t exist.

Once again, I’m pulled into using sports metaphor for birth. Marathons hurt. Triathlons hurt. All kinds of athletic endeavor hurt. I was telling V about a certain world-class freediver who acknowledges that not breathing hurts, and requires himself to resist 14 urges to breathe before he allows himself up. And how, I ask, is that any different from a birthing woman telling herself that she’ll just get through this contraction… and then just through the next one… and then just through the next one? The freediver is lauded for his athletic accomplishment in not breathing for six or seven minutes by virtue of his amazing ability to control a bodily instinct through willpower. But a woman, taking it one contraction at a time, is somehow lesser, pitiable, a figure to be saved from all that by intervention.

It occurs to me that in the english language, we only have one word for "pain". This is supposed to cover everything from cancer to broken bones to childbirth to heartbreak to headache. Apparently when we were pulling together this polyglot language, we decided to minimize our description of this state, so that you’re either in pain, or you’re not, but perhaps it’s gauche to really get too into the details of "in pain". So someone on chemo and someone in labor are both "in pain". If they’re both in a hospital, they both are trying to use the same dumb "scale of 1 to 10" descriptor to communicate what they’re feeling to an outside person.

No wonder so many mechanisms, processes, theories, and drugs exist to try to save women from labor. I know that were my bones broken, were I enduring dialysis or some other process, I would absolutely want those at my disposal. But what we’re lacking is the linguistic differentiation, in two syllables or less, to say "pain that is the sign of pathology and illness and needs to be obliterated by any means possible" and "pain that is your body’s way of kicking in an endorphin payoff down the road".

Got that? I’m not enduring labor pain. I’m purchasing my endorphin rush, one sensation at a time.

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…

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.

Tags: Birth, Family, Musings, Pregnancy

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.

Tags: Family, homebirth, Musings, Pregnancy

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

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!

Tags: Carla King, living aboard, Miss Adventuring, podcast