Baby Apollo & Family

Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

As you may know, I first came to consider home birth when I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth a few years before becoming pregnant.  Carrie’s girlfriend Clark birthed her babies at home, and I think she shared Ina May’s books with Carrie.  Carrie told me that she thought I’d appreciate them, and asked if I would read Ina May’s Guide so that we could discuss some of the issues it raised.  I got the book and gobbled it up.  I read its first-person birth stories with the same riveted curiosity that I brought to the sex-books aisle at the library in my adolescence.  I hadn’t even realized before that I had never really heard any birth stories.  Birth wears the same sort of strange taboo against honest discussion as sex and death do, in our culture.  The birth stories and Ina May’s facts and statistics made clear that normal labor runs into dangerous complication when a laboring woman is in an environment where she feels anxious, embarrassed, or disempowered, and where she feels alienated from her body and nature.  I knew from even casual doctor’s appointments that hospitals and the medical establishment make me more likely to feel disempowered and alienated.  (I love Paul Simon’s line, that they “talk to you like you’re some kind of clinical fool.”)  Ina May’s report that birth can and should be sacred and empowering resonated with me, as did the idea that the proper role of medicine in birth is to provide emergency backup, not to dominate or dictate otherwise healthy labors. 

But the implications of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth went further for me than the vista of my own “birth plan.”  Ina May’s illumination of the centrality of the mind-body connection for laboring women forces a reconsideration of birth throughout history, and casts new light on the framework within which so many women and babies were dying before Medicine came forward to rescue mothers and babies from each other.   Ina May demonstrated that fear, lack of support, past sexual abuse, and “modesty” all inhibit the natural process by which a woman’s body opens up and births her baby.  I considered this in light of the place of the female body and female sexuality in the religious culture of the Abrahamic religions and other patriarchies.   I considered it in light of the fact that it is so hard, even now, to find a woman with a completely positive relationship to her body and her sexuality.  Given that women have been taught for countless generations that the Word of God is that their bodies are shameful, wicked, and dangerous to themselves and others, and that childbirth is God’s punishment for Eve’s attempt to access knowledge (see Genesis), and given the needs of the female mind-body for a smooth delivery: What is remarkable is not how many women have died in childbirth over the centuries, but how many women HAVEN’T died. 

I followed Ina May’s advice for myself and did everything I could to plan my birth in the most supportive and comfortable environment possible, with midwives I trusted deeply and backup medical care if need be.  As a result, Apollo’s birth was the happiest day of my life, and not just because of the end product.  After his birth, I came to realize how rare this kind of birth is—birth in an environment that explicitly acknowledges its sacred nature and aims to support and empower the laboring woman— and I started trying to understand why.  My search has become my passion.  I want to do whatever I can to ensure that all women have the information and support that they need to choose empowering births if they want them, and to give birth in environments that acknowledge their experience as important and their baby’s welcome as sacred. 

The more I learn, the more I am amazed.  One new thing I learned is how radical was Ina May’s publication of her two books.  I had not realized that, when she started her work at The Farm, there were almost zero midwives in the United States.   The medical industry had eradicated the profession in the first half of the century.  I've come across many people's assertions that Ina May "single-handedly" brought midwifery back to America.  She happened to live in a community of hippies that treated her husband, Stephen Gaskin, as its spiritual guru.  One of this community’s central tenets was that birth is a sacred event in life, and should be supported as that.  So she had an environment that supported her efforts to create comfortable non-medical environments for women to birth in.  After doing this for several years, she collected birth stories and published Spiritual Midwifery, which is both a collection of first-person birth stories and a kind of manual for midwifery.  First of all, to even have a collection of birth stories was radical, given how women in our culture tend not to share these stories with each other.  SM carried story after story reporting that birth can be an ecstatic, gorgeous experience.  Only now do I understand how utterly radical it was to report to America that birth can be beautiful.  Generations of American women had given birth literally knocked out cold, or held down to their hospital beds with nets-- literally!  The fact that natural birth can be the ultimate empowering experience was completely lost.  So Ina May introduced this radical fact.  Show me where else in written history the beautiful experience of birth has been discussed?  Also radical was this idea of seizing back from Medical Science the practical knowledge of childbirth, in her midwifery manual, and putting it in women’s hands as a physiological process that they can usually manage themselves.  Then in 2000, 25 years later, she published her second book, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.  Like Spiritual Midwifery, its first half was first-person birth stories.  The second half was, this time, not a technical guide, but an analytical report of what she had learned about birth over decades of serving as a midwife.  She reported that a woman who feels anxious or embarrassed runs into dangerous childbirth complications.  And she reported how supportive prenatal care and loving and encouraging environments for birth enabled the great majority of women to shed the fears that threatened their lives and to birth their babies safely and happily.  These facts were hitherto unanalyzed and unreported in medicine or in popular culture-- and they are absolutely critical to understanding how to make birth safe for mothers and babies.  And yet, these truths about the nature childbirth had never been widely distributed before.   

No conclusory paragraph at this time—Apollo will wake soon and I write on the run.  

Toddlin' Along

Well, you might wonder what Apollo is up to these days.  His development has been incredible.  Every day brings new abilities, new reach, new sounds, new expressions.  He can’t quite run, but he can shuffle quickly and with great determination.  He growls, he cooes, he squeals, he screams, he inquires, he requests, he commands, and opines, all without making a single intelligible word.  He does say “mama,” “papa,” and “dada” a lot, but we can’t yet be certain if he means those words to refer to us.  Still, his communication advances daily, and he seems increasingly to understand many of the things I say to him.  At the playground he now knows that, if he wants to pick some shiny object up, he should carry it over to the trash can and deposit it there.  What a good little citizen!  He is still very much a fat and adorable baby.  He has a big cushy booty, fat legs, fat feet, round soft cheeks, and has a sturdy little body and strong arms.  His reflexes are quick: his hands spring forward like a cat to protect him from falling on his face many times a day.  He plays with all of his toys every day.  He reads all of his books and browses the book shelves for new ones.  He picks up the books one by one and will carry them over, plunk down in your lap, and want to sit there and turn the pages and hear the words and point at the pages.  If nobody is available to read to him, he looks at the books by himself and murmurs to himself.  One of his favorite books is a cardboard book I got in Alaska called Polar Babies, which is photos of baby polar animals with big words like, “Wooly lamb wants to play!” and “Little musk ox sleeps in the snow.”  He always spends time on the picture of the emperor penguin family; two elegant parents curving gracefully over two adorable baby penguins.

He can stack rings on a pole now and can open boxes.  He can climb up on furniture by himself but hasn’t quite figured out that he can use that to access forbidden objects at heights.  Though we anticipate that development any moment, which may create big baby-proofing challenges.  Like all children, and especially toddlers, Apollo needs at least some attention all of the time.  Though we’ve done our best to make the house safe, I still basically need to keep an eye on him constantly. 

And he’s down to only one nap a day.  We have segued into a new routine, which goes something like this: he wakes up at 7:30 or 8am.  He bobs along in Jonah’s wake as he gets ready for work, and they have breakfast together.  After Jonah leaves, we spread the cloth across the living room rug that turns it into his play area, and take each of his favorite toys out of his toy chest, saying good morning to each one, as in “Good morning, Clacky Crocodile!”  We play on the rug for a while and do some housework.  Then we go out to play: on Tuesdays we go to an English-speaking moms ‘n’ tots playgroup, and on Thursdays we go swimming.  On other mornings, we go to the playground.  We return from playing around 11:45, and Apollo goes down for his nap pretty easily.  He sleeps for an hour or two.  This is my only time to do anything that I can’t do when he’s awake.  Yesterday, he napped just long enough for me to eat, read email, and skim two newspaper articles.  When he wakes up, we play some more and do some more housework.  After he’s been awake for about an hour, we eat lunch.  Mid-afternoon, we make our way out the door for any marketing I have to do, and for a trip to another park or playground.  We come back home around 5.  I prepare dinner in the 10-minute increments that he can tolerate in the kitchen; otherwise we play and do housework.  Perhaps this seems like a lot of housework.  Within an hour of vacuuming, somehow the floor is sprinkled with bits and crumbs; God knows how they get there.  So I’m vacuuming twice a day.  Apollo loves to play with the vacuum now and it can actually buy me a little time here or there.  Not to get on the computer; god no; anytime I sit at my desk before the computer he automatically starts crying.  But the vacuum can buy me time to do a few dishes or take the laundry out of the machine.  Apollo eats dinner around 7pm.  Then he takes a bath and receives a massage.  Then we go back to the toy rug and put each toy back in the toy chest, and say good night to each one.  “Good night, Box of Blocks!”  Then we get into bed and he goes to sleep, usually in 15-25 minutes.  So he’s down for the night at 8 or 8:30.  Jonah comes home around 9 or 9:30.  We go to bed around 11:30.

That’s pretty much the routine.  On Monday afternoons, Apollo and I take a class with Sabina in Amsterdam.  He’s generally content in the car; he looks quietly out the window, or munches on these nice seaweed chips he loves, or takes a nap.  And he’s happy to toddle about in new spaces and look at everybody and everything.  On weekends, Jonah is obviously involved in Apollo’s waking activities, and on weekend afternoons the three of us usually go for a walk in the lake park or on an outing.  Apollo’s eating his meals regularly and can tell me pretty well when he is hungry or thirsty.  (He stands by the sink and looks at it intently and squeals when he’s thirsty, and he moans and stands by his high chair when he’s hungry.)  He still nurses plenty, probably a dozen times during the day (if only a quick nibble) and two or three times at night.   He’s very cute and loveable.  He makes up funny games every day, like sticking out our tongues and touching our foreheads together, that make him laugh uproariously.  Jonah thinks he may be slimming down, but he’s still a chunky monkey.  This continues to be the sweetest and the most demanding work I’ve ever done.

Palin's Pumps

The Republican presentation of Sarah Palin as its Vice-Presidential candidate reminds me of G.W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court three years ago.  The Republicans nominated a woman for an important job usually filled by men.   The woman they proposed was profoundly under-qualified for the job.  When she was laughed off the stage, the Republicans were like, “Well, we offered you a woman, and you didn’t want her.  So we give you… Samuel Alito!”

Of course, nobody’s laughing Sarah Palin off the stage.  Unlike Harriet Miers, Palin knows how to own the limelight.  But Sarah Palin is more alarmingly unqualified for the role of Vice President of the United States, let alone the presidency, than Miers was for the Supreme Court.  You don’t have to look past her professional (and educational) credentials or her frightening provincial policies to see that.  And yet, who can resist looking beyond them to the reality show of her family drama?  Perhaps this is what the Republicans are counting on—that America will lose sight of her relevant credentials as it gets caught up with their emotional response to her feisty charisma, or in personal questions of whether they blame her or identify with her for going back to work three days after her baby was born, or for possibly sacrificing her pregnant teenage daughter and her army-bound son to her political principles.  There is too much that we don’t know about those situations to judge Palin’s judgment.  Like, does she have baby-care for little Trig other than Bristol, and if so, what is it?  But perhaps the most revealing thing about this Palin drama is how the national dialogue about it reflects America. 

I mean, you know America has changed when Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist crusader who almost single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, gives this quote in support of Palin: “’People who don’t have children or who have only one or two are kind of overwhelmed at the notion of five children,’ Ms. Schlafly continued, mentioning that she had raised six children and run for Congress as well. ‘I think a hard-working, well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well.’”  Phyllis Schlafly supports working mothers and believes that women can be C.E.O.s?  You’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s hard to find quotes in the press that are critical of any of Sarah Palin’s mothering choices, making me wonder what America is really saying off-record.  I have found it striking that the few critical quotes that I’ve read have tied their condemnation in to breast-feeding.  Maureen Dowd, the Phyllis Schlafly of the Times editorial page, wrote an editorial imagining a Palin presidency as absurdist “chick-flick”:

“The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it’s close to Alaska. ‘Back off, Commie dude,’ she says. ‘I’m a much better shot than Cheney.’"

Oh, har har Maureen, you are so witty…….not (as Borat would say)!  What is the significance of satirizing a female president in light of the fact that she may still be breast-feeding?  What do quotes like this tell us about the perception of breast-pumping women in the work place?  I think the suggestion is that the breast pump is a signifier of inappropriateness, if not under-qualification.  I certainly see an implication that, the more "important" the job, the less appropriate the breast pump.  Another Times article, “A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers,” reported:  “In interviews, many women, citing their own difficulties with less demanding jobs, said it would be impossible for Ms. Palin to succeed both at motherhood and in the nation’s second-highest elected position at once.  ‘You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency,’ said Christina Henry de Tessan, a mother of two in Portland, Ore., who supports Mr. Obama.”

I can’t help but notice that nobody even mentions juggling a baby and a blackberry—it is assumed that the baby will not be brought into the work place, even for a quick nurse and cuddle.  What ever reasons people have for separating mothers and babies for 8-hour work days, their reasons do not include the best interests of the mother and baby.  Did you know that the consistency and elements of breast milk change from day to day, and from hour to hour?  It becomes more watery when baby needs refreshing, more dense and nutritious when baby needs that; it even produces the medicine that the baby needs if its immune system is challenged.  A mother produces the milk that her baby needs at the time she produces it—not what it will need next week, or later tonight, or when it is defrosted in a few weeks.  Of course, breast-pumping technology helps a lot of women to give their milk to their babies under circumstances that would otherwise make it impossible.   And breast milk beats formula any day.  But it would be better if women could make choices about whether to pump their milk in a context that also enabled them to nurse their baby directly in a comfortable, respectful environment.

The current reality is that if a woman wants or needs to return to a job that doesn’t welcome her baby, and she wants to continue breast-feeding, she needs to pump her milk.  What are the chances that Sarah Palin is still breast-feeding Trig?  If she’s like most American women, she is probably not.  Even women with the desire to continue breast-feeding after their return to work usually give up quickly thereafter.  The quotes about Palin’s pump can offer a little insight into the disrespect and negative pressure that a woman faces when she tries to present herself as a competent professional who is also a breast-feeding mother.  Some jurisdictions, like New York, California, Oregon, and the Navajo Nation, have attempted to remedy this by passing legislation protecting a working woman’s right to pump her milk in her work place.  (Phyllis Schlafly must be in retirement.)  Those laws are a step in the right direction, but if the New York Times is any indicator, baby, we still have a long way to go.