ElementalMom

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

Apparently, having a child in this culture means you are disabled. At least, that’s what HR thinks.

I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with the illustrious folks who administer these things last week. This is the third baby I’ve had while working, and thank goodness I kinda know what I’m doing, or it would have been ugly. Last time, I was all fired up about my VBAC, about fighting the birth machine, about making sure everyone and their dog knew that I was having a homebirth, by God.

This time? This time I just want to have my baby in peace. Course, that’s not the way it’s done in these parts…

“Who’s your OB” the chipper operator asks. I simply give her the name of my midwife; it’s easier than arguing.

“What hospital are you delivering at?” I simply give her the name of the only hospital in CA that I would consider setting foot inside. I’ve never actually been there, spoken to anyone there, or interacted with the place in any way, but they’re the only hospital that “allows” VBACs, so that’s my “in case of disaster” backup option. But it allows her to fill the blank in her form without the computer having fits.

“What’s your due date?” This one is a bit trickier. I don’t actually have a due date, for a lot of reasons, that mostly involve my cycle being all messed up from my miscarriage still at the time I conceived this baby. Besides, due dates are pretty bogus (my favorite discussion of this is here). Babies come when they come. If my boss is OK with me working straight up into contractions, if my coworkers are OK with this, then why do I have to… oh never mind. I pull a date out of thin air that’s more or less in the right range, and reaffirm that I can indeed switch the date around “if work requires it.” And that seems to be OK… if the demands of my job require my leave to change, that’s alright. So we’re set.

Because I’ve done this before, I am prepared for the gotchas. I’ve had two other babies in this timeframe, so I know what’s coming. I ask the HR person “so is that goofy rule about not being eligible for Performance Review if you’re on disability still in place?” She mumbles something, and goes to look it up. Sure enough, it is. So by virtue of the period of time for which I’ll be on leave, I will not be eligible for any of the perks that come with a good performance review. Luckily, I figured this out before. So I tell her, “OK, so I’ll contact you, go on vacation for the week of reviews, then back onto disability afterwards.” She gasps. No one has ever handed her this particular workaround before, but of course, other than being a paperwork hassle, it’s utterly valid. I do not make the rules, I just figure out how to work around them.

But I’m lucky; this woman is on the ball. “Oooh!” she says, “it’s the same stupid thing (her words!) for holiday pay too! So go off disability and onto vacation for July 3, so you get paid for July 4, then back on disability again!”. It’s always nice to have a collaborator on the inside.

So my paperwork is all set. I’m good to be considered Disabled by the State after giving birth to my child. But only for six weeks, mind, because I’m not that disabled. And that, my friends, is a whole other tirade.

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.

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.

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

OK, this totally cracked me up:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071212-pregnancy-tips.html

Karen Rosenberg, an anthropologist at the University of Delaware, said that the feature would have been naturally selected in humans at about the same time that bipedalism evolved, nearly five million years ago.

I am just dying, picturing all these cavewomen getting to a certain stage of pregnant, and just falling over and rolling like weebles. And then suddenly, some of them had stretchier spines and were able to get up and run away from the predators, while the others hung out like bait…

I haven’t had a good solid birth rant in a while. Sometimes, the Universe conspires to set me up for one, though.

Night before last, my fabulous pal Jessica invited me to a showing of The Business of Being Born, being hosted by UrbanCrunchyMama. I was really excited to be there, since other ICAN women had been seeing it, hosting screenings, and generally talking it over for a while, and I was looking forward to forming my own opinions.

More on those opinions in a bit.

We got back late, and while I was still reeling, the next day, working on this very blog post, the CDC released the preliminary statistics for cesareans in the US in 2006 (pdf).

Days like this, I wish alcohol was an option. Days like this, I wonder if the stress to the baby I’m gestating is worse than the impact of the glass of chardonnay I could hear calling to me.

31.1%, my friends. I can’t even type that without crying. 31.1% of babies in this country are ripped out of their mothers through an act of major abdominal surgery. More than one woman in three has this damned scar on her belly. And that’s an average. In some states (pdf) , it’s far higher. And you know what really sucks? Those numbers are still, even, low. In some states, cesareans for multiples (twins, triplets, etc.) are not included.

I am not even going to try to be balanced and rational about it at this point. If you want balanced and rational, stop reading.

Nothing has changed suddenly in the last 15 years about American womens’ pelvises. The only thing that has changed is malpractice insurance, and physician arrogance. Oh yeah, and women’s compliance. We just walk right in, when we find out we’re pregnant, we find an OB, and we let that person tell us what to do, because we have this blind, naive, stupid idea that they have our best interest in mind.

I just recently heard the story of a woman whose doctor told her that her baby was in distress, and not a few minutes later, overheard the nurses talking about how what was really happening was that the doctor had a new wife who demanded that he be home for dinner promptly at 6PM.

31.1 fucking percent. Women cut. Babies cut. Women and babies dying (pdf). Families disrupted. Biology disrupted. And oh, how the money rolls in to the pockets of the hospitals. I hope the shareholders are fucking happy, safely counting their earnings, drowning in blood and pain they never touch. How many Americans are enrolled in a 401(k) that includes shares in Kaiser or any of the other big “health” organizations? Go check your plan. Do it now.

So meanwhile, back to Business of Being Born…

I forget, sometimes, because I am so immersed in the politics of birth, how far I’ve come in the last five years. I was trying hard to keep my cynical mouth shut, with fairly limited success.

I found the portrayals of the births themselves to be fantastic. Women at home, moving, vocalizing, whining, complaining; doing all the things that real women really in labor do. The midwife had filmed her own birth, and she was the biggest whiner of the lot; a fact she admitted with no small degree of humor. I found myself indulging in some equally funny memories of my own homebirth, and chuckling.

It was really really nice to hear other people saying what we say in ICAN all the time, and get branded as being “bitter, hysterical, angry women” over; that American birth is dangerous, pathological, and all about the cash flow. That the lithotomy position is evil. That birth is a natural bodily function. That OBs are surgeons with no training in normal birth. That most medical professionals have never seen a normal birth. That when you start in with interventions, you are playing with mechanisms that are poorly understood, and that nothing good comes of it. A few times, I flat-out applauded.

I have to say though, that while the film is a great start, I am wildly disappointed by the end. And again, maybe that’s just because of where I am, and who I know, and how immersed I am in the whole birth thing. For those of you who haven’t seen the film, basically despite everything she’s seen in making the film, the director (Abby) opts for a classic American McPregnancy, early ultrasounds, OB care, the whole enchilada, and ends up with an emergency cesarean for a breech baby. Oh sure, there are some other complications, and I suspect that we’ll never know the whole story, nor should we necessarily have the right to. But what women are going to take away is that cesarean for breech is acceptable, and it isn’t.

Breech birth is a variation of normal. It has a few special techniques involved, that require some additional training to be able to manage correctly. But instead of simply acquiring that training, midwives who practice more in the medical model, and obstetricians, simply declare breech to be an automatic cesarean, and that’s that. I know a lot of very dedicated women (I’m talking about you, Christie!) who have dedicated themselves to fighting back the tide on this one, and Abby’s inclusion of this debacle in the film sets them all back, and hard.

One step forward, two steps back. Good news, a film about the insanity of American birth culture is getting attention. Bad news, it ends with an unnecessary cesarean. Good news, people are talking. Bad news, they’re talking about how great it is that Abby and her baby were saved. I could beat my head against the wall.

Abby was one of those 31.1 percent of women, cut in 2006. Face to the statistic. Just one out of so very many.

As of today, I’m 11 weeks pregnant.

Same as I was on July 24th. And exactly seven days later, I had a bloody awful seven-hour miscarriage.

So I’m sitting here today, wondering if this is the last week I get to be pregnant again this time.

Should something go wrong again, I do not think I can stand another round of pity. I know that miscarriage is something that happens to childbearing women, it’s a natural thing, but I hate hate hate the implication that I’m broken. I’ve already had to fight off the label of “broken” once before, and I really didn’t like it then either.

Jason has total faith, and no fear. I envy/admire him for that. He has no idea why I’m flipping out.

I have no reason to think I will miscarry again. I’ve got some pretty serious nausea going on this time, which according to most accounts, is a good sign of baby stickiness. So every day I want to puke, I’m reassured. How perverse is that? I’ve also got a noticeable bulge already. Neither of those things happened with the miscarriage. Small comforts, right?

I talked to my mom earlier today. When I told her I was pregnant the last time, she got all giddy excited, started looking at patterns for the next baby afghan, and all that other good grandma stuff. This time, she’s being cautious right along with me. Somehow that makes me sad. I feel like grandparents should get to just rejoice, and not be along for all the crappy parts. Maybe that’s just me taking too much on myself (wouldn’t be the first time).

So I dunno, file this under “overthinking” or “overstressing” or “jeez, don’t you have anything else to worry about???”. I suppose I should. Let go, let God, right? Wish me luck on this one.

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…