The Hardest Choice

The article below is a beautiful and heart-breaking piece about abortion past the first trimester. It is so difficult for me to understand how people cannot hear stories like this.

The Hardest Hardest Choice: Why I Had a Second-Term Abortion.

Life With Baby

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard

I am trying not to be worried that my house will never be as clean as I want it. Crumbs are not poisonous. They are not specks of doubt flung around announcing my inability to manage my life.

I was telling my partner – I need to think in terms of sanitation..the house must not pose a health hazard – rather than trying to actually keep it clean. I can understand a bit more now where good old Betty Friedan was coming from.

My sweet angel wants to be held. Always. I am not of the cry it out school of parenting. Or the school that thinks you can spoil your baby. He needs what he needs. He need reassurance. He needs my arms and my breast and my heartbeat. Still adjusting to his life that is his own and not 100% woven together with mine. As I said in an earlier post: It is flattering, but exhausting.

Yet. I want to life a life that is about love and peace and gentleness and kindness. Maybe I am some sort of cliche, but these things actually have meaning for me – they are not words – but a life that I long for and believe in. And it cannot be lived if I am running around like a mad woman muttering about papers that are not written or sleep that is not had or crumbs that have not been dust-busted.

So, I try to lose myself in my mesmerization. Let myself feel it. The soft skin. The wonder of our boy. The way his eyebrows are just little fuzzes that I can rub against my cheek while he is sleeping on my shoulder. Just let him sleep on my shoulder rather than try to put him down in order to do something else.

The way his breath smells sweet. The magic of watching him learn how to giggle.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

So I will do what I need to do – the work, the school, the cleaning, the errands – as I can. But when I cannot, I will smell his sweet baby breath. Sit and wait for the wild turkeys to come and get the corn we have put out for them.

Pray.

Breathe.

Cuddle.

And try to let go.

New Year New Year: a bit of rambling/visioning/thinking and an annoucement of sorts

Hello 2009. We are 9 days into you. I wonder how this will go?

I tend not to be a big new year resolution person because I am not really good at keeping big promises and because I am always trying to improve things (um, maybe too much) and I guess adding to that isn’t really so helpful. Really, I don’t know. I just don’t do them much. (As I write this, I realize I did it two years ago right here on this blog where I vowed not to buy new clothes for a year and I stuck with it very well for five months. But usually I don’t do resolutions, and maybe my failure five months into my 2007 resolution helped to solidify this.)

Anyway, so I guess I want to reflect a bit on the upcoming year and how I would hope that it might go for me and my family.

Um, so I guess I am sort of private and this blog isn’t really a personal journal, but it I suppose I will want to write about this more at some point so:

drum roll

is about a month and a half until we welcome a little baby into our family. So that makes for a very different year. I have been reading about pregnancy since I was 15, and excited about having a baby since I was old enough to hold my baby cousins. I’ve always wanted a family and it has always been a big part of how I envision my life.

I would read about or talk to women who would say that they didn’t like being pregnant, and I would think, “They must not love it enough. They must not have read enough about all the natural remedies that can make it better. They must not have a midwife and a doula and a support system.”

Until I got pregnant and have been very very very sick ever since. I do not believe in a God that teaches us lessons, but if I did, I am sure this would be one of God’s humbling lessons to Elizabeth about how you can’t control everything in your life and you shouldn’t judge other people so harshly, especially until you have walked a mile or seven and half months in their shoes.

I should probably clarify that there are women who have been more miserable than me in pregnancy and, as far as we know, nothing is really really wrong. I have not been hospitalized. Baby seems healthy. I seem healthy (enough). But every day is a day to get through. Which does not facilitate the pregnancy pre-baby, round belly, pregnancy joy that I had been envisioning.

Soooo, my point here is that in the New Year, I am going to try to let go a bit more and realize that I cannot read and plan my way out of the struggles and road bumps in life, and that sitting counting the hours and the days until something is over or better does not make for mindful, joyful living. In high school, it was “Oh, how I can’t wait until college.” In college, “Oh how I can’t wait to settle down with a partner and be done with college.” In my Masters studies, “Oh, how lovely that will be if I can get into a Ph.D. program.” Each semester: “Oh, how nice it will be to be done with papers.” And, as much as I have tried to not think it, it has often been, “Oh, how wonderful it will be for the baby to be born and not be pregnant anymore.”

And so goes our life.

My life has, far too often, been about achievement. I wanted to be the line leader in Kindergarten. The best reader. The best community service do-er. Get more scholarships. Seem more special. Write better papers. Be the best future minister.

In one way, of course, this is good. It is good to work hard, right? To do good. But, of course, we can do it too much.

And, at the end of the day month year, our wall is covered with diplomas and our drawers are stuffed with A+ papers and the congregation loves the sermon and we have missed What We Are Here For. Which, for me, is to love others. To be loved. To drink hot chocolate and hear others’ stories and be present to people and be present to myself. To cuddle the cats. To love the colors of the trees. To ease the suffering of others.

I have seen this so much in the last months as I tried to not collapse finishing my classes, waddling around like a sick hippopotamus on speed trying to read enough, write enough, do enough, and watch myself be perky and cheerful to others, as if I was watching some other person who could not turn off her fake cheer and show how tired she was.

I do not want to show this sort of life to our baby. I do not want to miss first coos, and the magic of a baby growing up while I scramble to Do It All. And I do not want him or her to learn that to live is to Do Good and Do Right and Achieve. I have not spent enough time playing. Or laughing. Or drinking hot chocolate. And I want my little one to do this more.

I know this is cliched and I almost don’t want to post it because it seems to me like it could be some sort of email spam story about treasuring our friends and our life and our children. All that is missing is a note at the end that if you don’t pass this on to 10 people you will be cursed.

It reminds me of a thousand sermons about being in the moment. A thousand books about Women Who Do Too Much and our rushed 21st Century World and how we need to Slow Down.

Perhaps there is a reason that there are so many damn books and sermons on this – because it is hard.

So, as we prepare to welcome a new little person into our lives, I have given myself a little new year nudge, realizing that it will never be a goal I will Achieve, but that it is an important path to be on and remind myself of.

Be present. Be gentle. Love. Let myself be loved. Slow down. Remember what will be important as I look back on my life.

Mess up.

Try again.

Be thankful.

Amen.

New York Times Watch: Exclusive breastfeeding may not be best for your baby. Ugg.

I am so appalled by this New York Times article. There is an absolute public health consensus that exclusive breastfeeding through six months is best and highly beneficial (see WHO guidelines, AAP guidelines) and breastfeeding (with introduction of some solid foods) through one year (AAP guidelines) or two years (WHO guidelines) is ideal.  The Times article raises questions about vitamin D deficiency in exclusively breastfed babies.  The author writes:

Physicians have known for more than a century that exclusive breast-feeding may be associated with vitamin D deficiency and rickets, and that the condition is easily prevented and treated with inexpensive vitamin drops or cod liver oil. But doctors are reluctant to say anything that might discourage breast-feeding.

Now some researchers are also linking vitamin D deficiency with other chronic diseases like diabetes, autoimmune disorders and even cancer, and there have been calls to include blood tests of vitamin D levels in routine checkups.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with pointing out that there are low levels of vitamin D in some mothers and breastfed babies and that this should be attended to. But I just kept waiting for the punch line when the author of the article points out that, “Although there is a risk of vitamin D deficiency, it is always far better to exclusively breastfeed babies through six months, and partial breastfeed through at least a year, and deal potential vitamin D deficiency through regular exposure to the sun, a balanced diet on the part of the mother, and supplementation (either of mother or infant, depending on situation), than to not breastfeed due to potential vitamin D deficiency.”

But the author never says anything like this.

She does quote a mom who says, “I thought I was doing the best thing for her,” after blood tests showed her daughter had no detectable vitamin D. Implying, of course, that she was not doing the best thing for her by breastfeeding.

And the author quotes a doctor who says, “I completely support breast-feeding, and I think breast milk is the perfect food, and the healthiest way to nourish an infant. However, we’re finding so many mothers are vitamin D deficient themselves that the milk is therefore deficient, so many babies can’t keep their levels up. They may start their lives vitamin D deficient, and then all they’re getting is vitamin D deficient breast milk,” which, if you read the first part, is sort of an endorsement of breastfeeding although it is quickly followed up by its “dangers.”

It isn’t as if anything said in the article is wrong. And if you already know how important it is to breastfeed (when possible, of course – some moms do not have the ability or luxury of breastfeeding, and this is in no way a critique of them) then this article isn’t going to discourage you. However, if you aren’t sure this article could be read as, “Better be safe than sorry and just do formula.” Which is not good for so many reasons (Mothering Magazine covers this well – see, for instance here, here or here.)

It reminds me of this new style (or maybe it is old, but I notice it more these days) of writers trying to be somehow “neutral” by saying, “Well, so and so says this,” and “another so and so says this” and leaving it at that like, “Well, we’ll just let the reader decide,” even when it comes to things where there is a clear consensus.

I just feel like the slight gains in making mamas and families feel like breastfeeding is a good, viable option for feeding their babies are fragile and I wish the Times would be a little bit more careful in their approach to such important topics. And, although I don’t like the Times article, it is mostly upsetting in the wider context that there is a lack of awareness of the importance of breastfeeding and climate of non-support of breastfeeding mothers. And this just doesn’t help things much.

And when they scrape their knee, you can also hire someone to comfort them.

The NYTimes is running an article about people who hire a nanny to comfort their baby at night. One woman says

“[The nanny] swaddles the baby and sings to him and that’s the whole point for us — she has a lot more energy and patience at that point in the day than my husband or I do. We are wiped out.”

And, hey, I understand being wiped out and having a high pressure job and all but, um, why did you have kids? It isn’t like it is going to get easier. Are you going to hire someone to potty train them? Learn to ride a bike? Go to parent teacher conferences? To me, comforting your baby and attending to his or her needs is an essential part of being a parent. I am not against having a nanny or help for some tasks. I am not for this parents-have-to-be-heroes and be perfect and all-attentive. But it seems like six nights a week of someone caring for your baby is sort of like having a baby and then hiring someone to parent him or her, especially if you work during the day so you aren’t home with the baby then either. You can’t parent only on Sundays.

I just think it is part of this on-going thing where people think they can still be good parents without making any changes to their lives. (See article that Ms. T pointed out a few months ago about how children are not decor (shock!), including this weirdo family that refused to put up stair railings because it just looked so bad. Do seat belts also wrinkle their clothes, too?)