Archive for the 'Leave Moms Alone' Category

Happy Housewife and Burdened Mother — A Battle Without Tact or Mercy

Published on Sunday, February 28, 2010 in Leave Moms Alone and Momma's On a Tear. 41 Comments

I met a friend for coffee on a weekday evening, which I never get to do.  A bona fide chick-date I was getting – uninterrupted conversation with a fellow mother.  She is brilliant, lovely, a professional powerhouse with her own company and a nanny and an expense account. 

We sat down at a crowded counter with our drinks, checked in about the kids and their school and lessons and what it was like to parent at This Stage of the Game.  And then she started asking me questions.

She was divorced, and wanted to know what it was like to be a child of divorce.   What had worked?   What hadn’t? — At one point, she even took out a pen.  I freaking loved that.  Not just because it made me feel very smart and important (although I’m not lying, that rocked) — what I adored was that she was embodying what I think mothers should be doing.

She was leveraging her skills, her expertise, the very best of herself in a campaign to raise her children.  She was doing what she would do in the workplace — asking questions, mining her contacts, outlining the problem and formulating her approach.

Girlfriend was bringing her brains home. 

The media offers us two images of motherhood, and I hate them equally.  First, is the Happy Housewife.  She cleans toilets, is attentive to laundry, and in her spare time she glues crap on egg cartons with her kids.  (It’s always the egg cartoons.  They frighten me.  Am I still a good mother if I never once supervise my children in the gluing of crap on to an egg carton?)  Happy Housewife loves it all, asks for nothing more — and considers herself superior to women who do.

The Happy Housewife has two problems:  first that she’s very limiting to the rest of us.  She’s a threatening image to women who fought to be educated and to find partners as committed to our careers as we are to theirs.   I want to be clear — I am not demeaning housewives.  I am one and I do enjoy this stage of my life.  But I am strongly opposing the idea that the pinnacle of Womanhood is a vapid smile and a feather duster.

I am fiercely — and with great personal experience — decrying the notion of housewifery as every woman’s dream or obligation.

But there’s the second public image of motherhood that’s just as bad — the anti-Happy Housewife who has tossed aside all things domestic precisely because they are threatening.  This is the mother who views kids as both an entitlement and a threat to her identity.   The raising of children, this model says, is menial work of no interest or imagination, and Burdened Mother considers herself superior to anyone who thinks otherwise.

My friend, with her pretty hair and her tea and her questions, was offering the image I’m striving for:  this is Mother.  Consulting a colleague, pen in hand.   She respects her own learning curve, reads the literature,  seeks feedback and incorporates it into her work.  She knows what she’s good at and what she isn’t, she evaluates her mistakes and looks to the next stage on the horizon to figure what skills she’s got — and which ones she needs — to approach it.

This is what I want to sell to the networks and the mommybloggers and the halftime game show:  this woman in the coffee shop, talking about what the wrong turns were, lighting up when I point out what she gets right every day.  She’s not the Happy Housewife who won’t look in the dark corners because there aren’t any, or the Burdened Mother who is too smart to look at all. 

She is a grown-up who made a decision to have children and who views it as her job, her vocation, her moral obligation to give it all she’s got whether she’s enjoying herself or not.  She’s not asking whether her children are holding her back — or whether they’re the perfect reflections of her Womanhood.  She’s asking what the results of her work are — and what does she need to be doing to meet her commitments to the people she made, to get a roof over their heads, meals in their bellies, educations in their brains, and comfort and self-possession in their souls?

Happy Housewife and Burdened Mother are always going to smile nicely for the cameras, and rip each other’s throats out when they stand too close together.   They’re bad for us.  I’d like to leave them there to duke it out while the rest of us in the real world figure out how to get the job done.

As my friend rode off into the sunset with her data to go do battle another day, I felt like there was great hope for the future of Mother, and of Woman.

41 Comments

Why I Breastfeed

Published on Saturday, September 5, 2009 in Leave Moms Alone, Momma's On a Tear, Nursing and Our Eden. 31 Comments

Let me be clear — I don’t believe breast is best. I believe that a happy, satisfied mother and a fed and contented child is best. When breastfeeding interferes with that, it should be abandoned.

However. As much as possible, as much as you can stand it, breastfeeding is quite simply one of the greatest gifts one human being can give another. It’s hard — don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy or enjoyable. In the first weeks, it’s absolutely awful. The sound of a wailing hungry baby has made me curl into a ball and cry more than once. But I’ve never found any challenge with a greater payoff.

I breastfeed because …

… breastfed babies smell divine. Like sweet cream or buttered popcorn. Breastmilk diapers are inoffensive.

… no one will ever love you the way your breastfed baby will. Her eyes follow me wherever I go, and I can silence her shrieks just by holding her close and whispering her name. When she’s seven, and she’s sad, and she’s growing up and away, she’ll still find the crook of my arm and I’ll close my eyes and remember when she had a fuzzy head and a tiny pinched face.

… because if you massage breastmilk into a cut, drop it into a conjunctivitis eye, sprinkle it on acne — it clears the problem up. I want as much of that magic stuff into my kid as possible.

… because once you get the hang of it nothing is easier. You can slip a dipe-and-wipe into your purse and be on your way for the entire day without thinking about the next meal.

… because it demands that a couple of times a day I snuggle this young sweet thing, I rub her back, look into her eyes, pay attention to nothing but her.

… because when my baby is elderly, when I am nothing but a scattering of relics in the homes of my grandchildren, when she sits in her chair and looks out the window at a world she is fading from, her body will still remember that it was nurtured by mine. The million blessings I gave her in the quiet dark of the predawn bedroom, the two of us alone, her tiny hand against my skin, lifesmilk flowing between us– they will last her lifetime.

… because when all was said and done, Dr. Button concluded that Eden picked up a beast of an infection somewhere in the third week of life. An infection so severe her liver ached from fighting it, and her body shrank. But she stayed out of the hospital, she stayed out of really serious trouble because of the antibodies I was pumping into her tiny system through my milk. My fierce mother-self protected her with my very body, giving her life twice.

31 Comments

Defying Darwin

Published on Saturday, April 4, 2009 in Leave Moms Alone. 74 Comments

From the International Cesarean Network:

The Cesarean Awareness Ribbon debuted in April of 2004 for Cesarean Awareness Month. The burgundy color of the ribbons represents birth and the wearing of the ribbon upside down symbolizes the state of distress many pregnant women find themselves in when their birthing choices are limited. The loop of the inverted ribbon represents a pregnant belly and the tails are the arms of a woman outstretched in a cry for help.

The Mommy-blogs and the parenting boards are all talking about “Cesarean Awareness Month” and I’ve had a few spammy requests to cover it here. Much of the rhetoric follows these lines — “Stop the horrible butchery of innocent mommies! Are you a victim of Cesarean? Post your story!”

So here’s my story.

When I was preparing for Mary, I was easily sold on the idea that natural was the right way to go, that my body knew what it was doing and should be left to do it without paternalistic, corporate Western medicine to victimize me.

So when Mare was born by emergency Caesarian after an induction at 41 weeks, I felt bad about myself.

“Empowered birth” has become a sort of euphemism for a very specific scenario — no drugs, no interventions, the mother a special kind of hero who gutted it out. According to the rhetoric, I had had an unempowered birth — a victim birth, brought on by my impatience, my lack of faith in my body, and a medical system that dehumanized me.

I researched VBAC when I was pregnant with Ren, looking for a “VBAC-friendly” practitioner who would be willing to let me give it a shot, who would help me redeem myself from my first birth. The response was universal — sure you can go for it if you want to. But it’s going to end the same way the last one did.

“My suggestion,” said the third doctor I consulted, “is that you learn to love Caesarians. Because without them, neither you nor your daughter, nor the baby you’re carrying would be here.”

I finally accepted it: it was nothing I did. It was nothing to be ashamed of or blame anyone for. For me, Caesarian was unavoidable. One step up from that — the Caesarian was something to be grateful for. It gave me Motherhood, and it spared my life.

We scheduled Ren’s delivery for ten days before her due date, to ensure there would be no emergency. It was a lovely delivery. Hard going in the surgery itself, pure joy immediately afterward.

This time out, there has never any question that Caesarian is the only option. I am marshalling my support team with a birth plan that includes dealing with the complications I am almost certain to have — problems with anesthesia, and a spinal headache.

“I want to be supported in my choice to push myself as hard as is safe. Remind me to nurse, wake me up if you have to, or put her on if you can’t wake me. Bring me lattes for the headache, and when those don’t work, hold her while I get the spinal patch and then help me nurse lying down while I wait for it to take. Don’t take the baby so I can ‘rest.’ — This will annoy me.”

I’ll never earn the Earth Mother stripe for natural childbirth, but I am about to have three empowered births under my belt. Each one makes me fiercer and clearer about who’s in charge and what I’m willing to do to get my kids home.

If you believe in a woman’s right to choose, a woman’s inherent capacity to know her own body and its limits, then you must also believe in Cesarean-section. Not for everyone, not every time. But in its time and place, it is a life saving — and life-giving — procedure. When you insist that nearly every woman who gives birth by this method is a victim of her doctor and her own impatience you make me suspect that you are actually the one who thinks I can’t think for myself.

I dissuade pregnant women from the idea that Cesareans are “the easy way.” In my experience they are painful, scary, and impersonal. They carry long term health effects. I support every effort to keep women from having them if they don’t absolutely have to.

But I will never support a movement that puts my birth method in the same catagory as terminal illness and domestic violence. I am no victim. And I certainly won’t support rhetoric that paints obstetrics professionals as butchers.

This year I am celebrating Cesarean Awareness Month with the birth of my third child by Cesarean. It is a tribute to the profession and practitioners that granted me what evolution sought to deny: life past the age of 27, and a shot at motherhood. Multiple times.

I have learned to love Cesareans, to accept them as a part of my choice to have a family. I am very proud to be a woman who takes her Cesareans like a champ, who does what she has to do to get the kid home.

Because that’s actually the important part.

74 Comments

Breast is best, and other total lies

Published on Saturday, January 24, 2009 in Leave Moms Alone. 98 Comments

I want to preface this post by saying I exclusively breastfed both of my daughters for 18 months. When Ren was five months old I had to have an MRI which meant I couldn’t nurse for a week. I spent the next month pumping, nursing, eating godawful stuff (barley … blech) to get my milk back.

So know that I say this with love:

Breast is not best. That is a total lie and I wish they would stop feeding it to all the exhausted, exhilarated, beat-up new mothers of the world. I’ve watched it reduce so many great moms to tears of self-recrimination and doubt. I’ve talked to friends whose first days, weeks, months of motherhood were ruined by the hours they spent torturing themselves with pumps, pills, meetings, gadgets, gizmos and endless tears.

I know women whose worst doubts about themselves were realized at the hands of callous lactation consultants so single-minded in their mission to promote breastfeeding that they totally abandoned the greater cause of nurturing babies by nurturing new mothers.

Yes, the science is irrefutable: breastfed babies have stronger immune systems, slightly higher IQ’s*, and are less prone to obesity. Even the most modern, well-developed of infant formulas can’t do what this magic stuff can do. Breastmilk evolves over the course of baby’s infancy to provide the right balance of fat, sugar, water and protein at each stage. A nursing baby doesn’t get dehydrated or constipated and is protected from a myriad of infections. All but the sickest babies will nurse through fever and stomach bugs, making Mama more powerful than Motrin and Pedialyte combined.

Breastfeeding can be a beautiful experience, continuing the bond of the womb, a special closeness between mother and child. There is nothing more tender than a pair of wide trusting eyes peering up, a hand resting on Mama’s skin, baby totally in love and totally secure.

There is no doubt breastfeeding is one of the greatest gifts that a mother can give her child.

But it isn’t the greatest. It isn’t best.

The best thing a baby can have is happy, satisfied, secure parents. A mother who feels inadequate in the face of her child starts to resent her child. A mother who feels forced, every two hours, to engage in an act she finds excruciating, or degrading or just plain distasteful is going to associate those feelings with her baby. For those women and their babies, breastfeeding is bad.

Far better a mother who has surrendered — to her own humanity, to the love of her child, to the realities of her own life. Far better the mother who prepares a bottle and feels good about it than the mother who struggles for weeks or months to do something that brings her misery.

It’s not that I don’t think mothers should try. I think every mother should be told how good it can be and encouraged to give it her best shot — for just one day, one week, one month, whatever she can stand to do.

And then she should be left the hell alone to sort out how best to nurture herself and her child, as will be her job for the next 18 years.

I am grateful to have had the happy luck of being a mother for whom breastfeeding was successful. I worked hard at it, it’s true, but I also happened to draw the cards that made it work. (For the record, the blissful Natural Birth cards did not make their way anywhere near my hand.) I am convinced that some women don’t make enough milk no matter what they do. Even if that’s not true, it’s not the point. There is a limit to what any new mother should be expected to stand. When it’s too much, it’s too much, and only the new mother can know when that is.

The bottom line is that millions of formula-fed babies go on to be perfectly lovely Americans who can’t be distinguished from their breastfed counterparts in any significant way. Certainly, no way significant enough to justify giving over those precious first weeks and months to misery.

So if you are considering breastfeeding and have stumbled across this page in search of perspectives, here’s mine: the best thing you can do for your baby is provide a loving, nurturing home. Please give breastfeeding your best shot, because it has great benefits if you can make it work. But don’t let it get in the way of your top priority, which is a happy mom and baby.

Breast is good, but it’s not best.

*Seriously, honestly … do you think anyone actually misses a point or two of IQ?

98 Comments