Emotion Web
My husband has a saying that he represents visually.
| Belief. |
Now think outside the box.
The most recent escalation of net-drama to cross my radar involves two bloggers I deeply admire and generally respect. It seems that one blogger believed something about another that apparently isn’t true. I’m not privy to what happened next, but the second blogger is now being harassed for what the first blogger believes. And now a third has been dragged into it.
And because of that, the second blogger now believes that the first blogger is spreading lies and hate about her.
And I don’t know what to believe, but I’m inclined to think there must be some misunderstanding.
Today, I’m disappointed in people. Including–perhaps especially–myself.
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. – Mother Teresa
Speaking of books…
Because I was speaking of books earlier, to wit, “Baby Led Weaning,” a resource I’d like to refer to a skeptical friend to so that she can understand it a little bit better. But it’s not stocked by any of the local libraries, including Super Big County (Fairfax, VA) library system, where I have a card because I work in this county.
It made me realize that I would happily buy this book for all the local libraries if I knew for certain they would add it to their collection as opposed to shifting it over to the book sale pile.
Most libraries, however, do accept requests for books, and it occurs to me that we crunchy-inclined mamas could do ourselves a great favor by making sure our favorite books on pregnancy, birthing, and parenting are stocked by the local library. Fairfax has the books by Ina Mae Gaskin, but not the one by Henci Goer, for instance.
(Although I just found The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth on Google Books, available as a limited preview. Tell your friends!)
So my question for you, dear readers, is…
What books would you recommend for your dream library collection? What books should every library have on hand and feature more prominently than, say, What to Expect on the pregnancy/birth/parenthood display rack?
Protected: BB-led Whining
Sigh.
I thought I would do much better at babyblogging. Or Mamablogging. After all, that’s part of the reason I was inspired to migrate from my main blog, that and to do so a little more anonymously, especially when I found out I was pregnant and didn’t want a boatload of congratulations I wasn’t ready for.
But now… now…
I feel so BLESSED to have this baby–a baby who was conceived a year ago tomorrow. He was three months old on Thursday, already! I can’t believe it!
He’s holding his head up now, and not quite able to steady it enough to sit in the bumbo. But he certainly has quite the charming smile.
And it’s the kind of smile that seems to get around. Here he is with his dad and with one of the nerdlings, as my sitter and her husband calls their kids. Those kids absolutely dote on him.
So what can I do to be a better mamablogger? Should I just go ahead and migrate over to the main blog again, to really, truly BE a mamablogger?
And note: I am not a MOMMYBLOGGER. Adorable infant notwithstanding, I have a teenager too!
So anyway, I wrote extensively about how bad the weekend last weekend was, just not here. So without further ado, let me point you to that blog–which is even more neglected than this one, I assure you….
And if I could only figure out why it’s saying I’m posting as “Google.”
Fighting Intervention Harassment
Desirre Andrews made a fascinating post over at PrepForBirth that itemizes interventions that often aren’t necessary but are often pushed, subtly or not so much. Because I’ve now dubbed what I went through during my second labor “intervention harassment,” I’m going to encourage you to read her post and then come back here to see how many of these things I either endured (in bold) or refused (in italics).
* The uniform
* Who’s on first?
* On a short leash. (I was on a medium one, actually, only confined to bed 20 minutes out of every 2 hours.)
* The big drag around – I was browbeaten for refusing the IV and finally consented to a heplock just to shut the frackin’ nurse up.
* Staying put
* Ice chips and Jello I didn’t even get jello.
* The marketing tool – Nah, I didn’t feel like getting into the shower, honestly.
* One is enough They would have let me have a second person, but what they had in place was frustrating. Absolutely no one but those two people, and no one under 18 for our entire stay, which put the kaibosh on the kids meeting their baby brother.
* I know more than you– I got this, but in a defensive way, not an offensive way. I had come up swinging as soon as she ordered pit the first time, and she felt like she had to remind me that she had gone to school for this.
* If you don’t… – I can’t count the number of times she came up with excuses to intervene. The most absurd was her combing through the monitor print-out, and pointing to an instance where the baby had moved away from the transducer as evidence that the baby was in distress. I actually laughed at her. “If it happens again,” she said, “you’re getting the pit.” I spent the next two sessions on the monitor panicking over what she might do every time his heart beat slowed down even a little.
* Attitude and atmosphere – My day nurse seemed almost terrified of me, and because I was getting a rap as an uncooperative patient, I spent most of the day miserable–and progressing slowly. When the natural-birth-fluent night nurse came on, the energy changed, and I opened right up.
* Only if you ask – Kind of. There were things I should have asked for, but it wasn’t until the night nurse came on that I realized what I should have asked for.
* Bait and switch – Thank goodness, not for me. But I did notice something about the childbirth ed class: they talk about all this walking around you can do, and gloss over the fact that once you have an epidural, you’re not leaving the bed. Considering that everyone in the class but me was planning an epidural, I felt it was irresponsible of the educator to be singing the praises of walking during labor–so I pointed out the incongruity for the benefit of my classmates.
* New with bells and whistles – I don’t think they were pushing interventions for a better bottom line.
* Routine vaginal exams – I refused all vaginal exams after I got to 5 cm until I felt the urge to push, but getting to 5 was a battle because of the environment.
* Pushing the epidural – Didn’t apply to me since I had refused the basics that were needed for an epidural. but omg, the pit-pushing! That I refused it four times still blows my mind, and I’m starting to feel like the pressure to accede to these procedures constitutes intervention harassment. And while I’m sure there are folks that say, hey, at least you fought it and won.. there was this horrible hour between 6 and 7 when I began to doubt myself.
In other words, that harassment almost worked, and if it hadn’t been for the night nurse, it might have.
Two months and counting
I went back to work this week. In some ways, it went fantastic: I wasn’t late to work any day, pumping went great, I’m really happy with the day care arrangement we all worked out. In other ways, it didn’t: It looks like I may have to use bottles even on days I telework because Jesse still likes cluster feeding at the breast, and that just doesn’t work when I’m working; I found myself distracted by habits I’d gotten into while on leave that can’t continue while I’m working (oh hai @moshermama twitter stream); and getting back into the groove of a job I used to do seamlessly is proving to be paved with all manner of speed bumps that didn’t used to apply to me.
Jesse shocked me by sleeping through the night for the first time Sunday night, going down about 10:30 and waking up about 5:30. I was so expecting the 2-3 feeding that I was shocked when I found that I had slept nearly til the alarm, which was going off at 6. He’s doing this regularly, too, although Thursday and Friday he enacted some weird timeshift and woke us up at 4:30 both mornings. Ugh.
He doesn’t have his checkup until next week, but I think he weighs about 13 pounds already. Size 3 months is a wash; I’m glad they lasted 2, honestly.
Ok, that’s the Jesse update. Next up is another of my birth rant posts!
My first Wordless Wednesday, webcam edition
The doctor isn’t always right
Not long ago, I wrote my birth story up, and I got a lot of web traffic from it because I turned down pitocin four times, believing it to be an intervention that wasn’t indicated for my labor and that having my labor medically managed would increase the bottom line cost of my birth and increase the chances that I would have a cesarean section.
A couple of weeks ago, I had my 6-week followup with the woman who _should_ have delivered my baby. She often shares anonymized birth stories with me, almost like case studies that help me better understand what is rapidly becoming my vocation. She told me about a recent night on call, when she had a woman with a scheduled cesarean successfully VBAC because she arrived at the hospital fully dilated and ready to push, and a woman having her fourth vaginal delivery go wrong because she had insisted on getting the epidural at two centimeters, well before the baby was engaged; when the baby finally did descend, it did so in a brow presentation, and got hung up, and she wound up having a c-section.
In other words, it’s not as important to have a birth plan as it is to be fully prepared. A birth _plan_, especially if you’ve never given birth before, quickly goes out the window when things don’t go to plan–and they usually don’t.
But by being prepared, you can spare yourself a lot of agony. One tip I don’t hear mentioned much, but one that helped me when I was fighting the OB for a natural birth, is to talk to other women in your family, if possible, about their birth experiences. One of the objections my OB had to allowing me to progress naturally was that I was clearly carrying a big baby. My retort was to list off the birth weights of my aunts and uncles, my own and my brother’s and several of my cousins. It hadn’t helped that K had showed up at a funny angle and gotten his shoulder hung up on my pelvis back in 1992–but not seriously so. Another objection she had was that if something *did* go wrong, she wanted it to happen during daytime hours when there were “a lot more people here.” Staffing issues on the late shift?
But as I continued to talk to my midwife at my 6-week checkup, she explained to me that the doctor–new to the practice–had never had a patient question her judgment. Remember her comment during my birth story, that she was accustomed to a certain process? During her medical school and internships in India, and her residency in an inner-city hospital, she had never faced a strong-willed, well-informed patient who was prepared to advocate on her own behalf.
So here’s where my birth “plan” went wrong. Not only did I get a stranger delivering my baby–I got a stranger who had never encountered a birth she hadn’t medically managed. Had I put blind trust in this woman, it was possible I’d have wound up with a c-section.
Now, for the post-script. It turned out that the OB called the senior doctor in the practice, the one that I thought would deliver me if my midwife wasn’t available, and asked her what to do with this stubborn patient who kept refusing treatment. The senior doctor responded, “Get used to it.” As my midwife explained, our community has a lot of intelligent, strong women who don’t want to be treated under an assembly-line process. By fighting the new doctor, I taught her something new about the kind of doctor she could be–one that listens to her patients, one that resists a rote process, one that doesn’t hunt down a pathology or use fear tactics to bully her patients into interventions they don’t need.
What of all the doctors who never get this lesson?
Wordless Whenever
Generation Angst 