baby, fellowship, food, & photos

the baby: Is either sick with his first minor cold or teething really early. To wit: he’s stuffy, but no fever. He wants to suck on everything, and even to chew a little. He’s drooling like a mastiff puppy. He can’t get comfortable enough to sleep very long. He only wants to nurse, to be worn, and to listen to Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans. The child will listen to anything (seriously, he was jamming out to some polka on Prairie Home Companion yesterday), but he has his preferences. Lots of strings. Big orchestral numbers delight him. And Sufjan Stevens seems to be his first favorite musician. He also adores a board book we have full of Matisse paintings (which is making me notice Matisse in a new way – how incredible is that? my son is teaching me about art!) and Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Red seems to be a favorite color: when he sees it (especially on book pages) he just kicks and grins, grins and kicks (which is how he responds to almost every book page, but he does so with more vigor if there’s red on it). He lights up around his little baby mirror: he loves that little baby, whether or not he knows it’s him. He’s started to like zerberts, but only very gentle ones, and only if after you’ve given him one, you look up at him and laugh. Then he’ll laugh too. And he started rolling over last week. It is the cute cute cutest thing to watch his face when he realizes he’s suddenly on his back.

the fellowship: I got it (one of the three I applied for)! I got a full year of dissertation funding through my university. This means that as soon as I’m done teaching this class (in five weeks), I can focus exclusively (work-wise) on my dissertation for ONE WHOLE YEAR. No teaching for a full year. I still can’t believe it. The freedom this gives me to spend lots and lots of time with this baby is indescribably great. It’s just a dream. And the time to immerse myself in my project is thrilling. I need to finish by May of next year. The next twelve months will be full of hard work, but it’s work I WANT to do. I can’t tell you what a privilege this is. I really am over the moon with gratitude, relief, and excitement.

the food: So the story here is that J has had to give up dairy, gluten, and soy to get this boy’s rash to go away. This has meant some changes in the way I cook/we eat, but we’ve used the opportunity to make a shift we’ve been heading towards for years. I have been dogmatically vegetarian for a long time. For my first five years, I felt righteous in the knowledge that I ate (lived) ethically because I didn’t eat animals. A few years ago, I started to think about non-food products – soap, shampoo, make-up – and we began to eliminate things that were tested on animals from our household. What good is not eating meat if you buy from a company that, for example, coats a rat’s eyes in mascara? Isn’t that even more cruel? Then I started to avoid factory-farmed dairy. Especially as we neared the TTC period of our lives (and began to think about breastfeeding), I stopped feeling comfortable buying diary that came from animals that were kept for years on end in tiny box stalls being milked by machines all day, This is worse, I would argue, than eating meat because at least beef cattle have a shorter period of suffering. I still believe in all of this. To my knowledge, we buy no (or very few) animal-tested products. But here’s the piece I didn’t get until now. Not eating meat for so long led me to incorporate more and more fake meat products into my diet. Tofu. Tofurkey. Tempeh. Veggie burgers. And when I started thinking about THESE products, I felt troubled. We’d done so much work to eliminate anything but whole, real foods from our diets – to learn how to cook using single ingredients – but fake meat products are full of ingredients I can barely pronounce. And their status as vegan doesn’t tell us anything about the ethicality of manufacturing them. Because they’re mass produced, I can only assume they’re made in assembly line conditions, by factory workers. How well are those factory workers compensated? I don’t know. How far must the products be shipped to reach my supermarket shelf (i.e. what’s their carbon footprint)? No idea. What’s in them, really; I mean, what ARE all those ingredients? I don’t have any idea. This is something J and I have been discussing a lot lately. She’s been eating fewer and fewer of these products and more and more local, ethically-farmed meat for the last year or so. And now I’m finally on board. So here’s what we’re doing. We’ve stopped shopping at the huge regional-chain grocery in town and joined the co-op. If we can’t find it there, it probably isn’t something we need to eat. And for the record: so far it hasn’t cost us any more money to stock up there than it did at the chain. We’ve started to buy local meat that we can trace back to a farm here in town. We could go visit this summer if we wanted to. There’s very little packaging on our groceries now, which means we’re cutting down on the waste products we produce. I still eat a very small hunk of local, ethical (the cows are pasture-raised and hand-milked only twice a day) cheese each week, which feels like such a delicious treat now that it’s rationed. I’ll still eat gluten if we go out, but at home, I’m cooking with lots of brown and wild rice instead. And it’s delicious. I no longer believe that vegetarianism is the feather in the crown of ethical living. I think it’s too tempting to conclude that you’re being conscientious just because you don’t eat meat. I know I felt that way for a long, long time. Now I’m trying to understand the full effects of what I purchase. What I put in my body. Even if animals don’t die to make a particular food, are they mistreated? If so, I shouldn’t eat it. How are the humans who are a part of making a product treated? If I don’t know they’re treated well, I probably shouldn’t eat it. Who’s ultimately profiting off of my food choices? If it’s a farmer, great. If it’s a corporation getting rich off of genetic modifications, I’m not interested. Or at least not regularly so. Because that’s the other piece here: letting go of all-things-dogmatic. Because anytime we think dogmatically, we think un-critically, right? I mean, that’s sort of the point of dogma. This is true of religions, and it’s also true of political stances and movements like vegetarianism. But what I want to teach our son is to make decisions thoughtfully, not based on black and white conclusions he’s drawn up ahead of time. If I’m out celebrating, and I want to eat dessert but it’s been made with conventional butter, I want to do it anyway, and I want to do it guiltlessly. Then I want to come home and eat only local/ethical dairy for awhile. I want to support my community’s farmers most of the time. I want to impact animals and workers alike as positively as I can manage while still staying joyful and unobsessed. So that’s how we’re approaching this new no-soy, no-dairy, and no-gluten diet. And on that note, if anyone has recipes that might work, I’d love them! I’ve almost never cooked meat in my whole life, so this is all new to me. So far, I’m mostly eating chicken and wild caught fish. Tell me what to do!

the photos:

B visits mommy at work (and is smitten):

Bram and mama greet spring:

See those active arms? That’s our boy. His legs usually move that fast too! Gods help us when he’s a toddler:

This face:

 

at 39 weeks

• I don’t go to bed without finishing every last dish in the sink. “If this is it, I’ll want to shower,” I think. “Shower, and add things to the bag, and be with J. I won’t want to do dishes.”

• I watch J’s face a lot. When her body tenses up with the frequency of Braxton Hicks. With the new intensity of pressure. With a baby who’s fully engaged and ready. I watch her breathing.

• I spend hours with our cats, wanting them to know how loved they are. Setting the intention to include them. These beings who got me through the whole of my 20s and into my 30s. These soul animals who I love, I suspect, more than I’ll ever love an animal again.

• I am careful with friend time, not knowing how this time will change. Not knowing when I might be undistractedly attentive again.

• I worry. That he won’t come for weeks. That he’ll come today. That seeing J in pain will break my heart. That the same people who have excluded me during this pregnancy will exclude me once he’s here. Talk through me. Ignore my new mamahood.

• I take lots of photos of J’s belly. I realize how deeply I’ve come to love this atypical roundness in my wife’s body. That I’ll miss it.

• I feel sad that I can’t breastfeed. I mourn that.

• I let myself attach to this new class of students, which I didn’t think I would. I feel vulnerable with them. I feel that we’re sharing something indescribably sweet.

•  I drink even more water and take lots of Vitamin C. I want to be strong.

• I try to picture his face. His eyes. His mouth. I love him fiercely. I sing to him nightly.

• I pace in and out of his nursery, resisting the urge to wash his things again. His linens. Resisting the urge to keep up the frantic pace of nesting that dominated the past month.

• I watch as the world interacts with J, congratulating her when they see the belly. I think, “how presumptuous.” I think, “Oh, God, women who are placing their babies in other families must face this.” I think, “Why don’t you see me? I’m full term too.”

• I cook. I bake. I crave heartiness: kale pesto and squash pudding and sweet potato hash. Foods of the season, his season, E’s season.

• I think about the day of her arrival (January 19th). I wonder if he’ll come on her day, something shared between siblings who will never share anything.

• I feel gratitude for our midwife. Our midwife who has been like a gift; I can’t even tell you. We showed up in her exam room all those months back, bundles of fear and anxiety. A thousand questions a visit. Vibrating with longing and fear of longing. She met every question. Just, met them. Honestly. Patiently. As if there were nothing wrong with us. As if we made sense. She made us feel safe, almost unbroken, strong enough to do this.

• I fret about silly things. Will the clothes we want to take be clean (I do laundry daily). Will I have time to wash my hair. Have I put the sweater-cover-thing on the carseat correctly (it’s cold out there).

• I wait. Like every parent before me, I wait.

 

contact

Last night was the second meeting of our natural child birth class (which will meet eight times). So far, I think we’re both learning a great deal. The facilitator is deeply knowledgeable, sweet, and compassionate. Though she doesn’t always use inclusive language, I usually feel included. The other couples are all heterosexual, but they’re also all interesting and open. It’s sometimes painful (as discussing the details of childbirth sometimes triggers flashbacks to the trauma of birthing Emmett), but overall I’ve enjoyed it tremendously, and I’m glad we signed up. I think it will help prepare us for Rabbit’s entrance into the world (whether or not that birth looks the way we’d like it to).

But last night’s material included a long discussion about the importance of skin-to-skin contact, and it solidified some concerns I’ve been having about this culture’s treatment of non-gestational parents. I’ve said here before that J being pregnant has made me feel newly sympathetic to dads. Newly offended on their behalf. Newly connected to them. This is a concrete example of what I mean.

I should say first of all that I LOVE the attention skin-to-skin contact (or Kangaroo Care) has gotten of late. Birth has been far too (forcibly) medicalized for far too long in this country, and it’s thrilling to see us return to (and lend credence to through research) some common sense notions, such as the idea that babies are advantaged by proximity to their parents right after birth. This is a lovely thing if parents are able to do it.* We know now that skin-to-skin contact helps babies regulate heart rates and breathing. We know that it reduces respiratory distress. We know that it helps to facilitate both breastfeeding and bonding. This is all good stuff. I can’t remember my own experience of being born (as I was, you know, just born), but I can imagine that entering the world is some tough, scary business. How lovely to think about dimming the lights. About slowing down the frenetic pace of post-birth processes (like the vitamin K shot, and weighing in, and cleaning up). And I cannot imagine a more joyful sight in all of the world than this little boy in J’s arms. The two of them touching. Her holding to her chest what for months she will have held within her body. I get emotional every time I imagine that moment, and I’m so grateful to be surrounded by medical professionals who advocate for and support it.

The problem is that (so far anyway) I’ve never heard anyone talk about the importance of skin-to-skin contact with non-gestational parents (not of their own will, anyway; only when I’ve advocated for it). Indeed (and I hope that all of you have evidence that I’m wrong on this), I fear that very few people in the childbirth community are advocating for non-gestational parents (most of whom, of course, are dads) at all. And because the.birthing.of.babies is treated with a mysterious sort of reverence (a fierce insider/outsider dichotomy wherein if you haven’t done it, you’re always already less than someone who has), dads seem to feel silenced. If they have an opinion about how they’d like to experience meeting their children, they don’t say so. They don’t seem to think it’s their right.

Even in this open, loving, progressive birth class, the handout we were given about this moment says that moms should focus exclusively on bonding with their babies – that no one should “disturb” them during this critical time (even their partners or co-parents) – but that dads should spend these early moments advocating for moms. Making sure the cord pulses for long enough. Making sure the birth plan is followed. Not bonding, but doing the WORK that the moment requires. Staying busy. Providing for their family as (of course) dads have been expected to do for…well…always (at least in the U.S.)? Nowhere on this otherwise extremely helpful handout does it even mention that, perhaps, non-gestation parents might also want to take a moment to gaze at their new baby. To touch him or her. To kiss him. To connect as a new family. A whole family. The message here is clear: dads are extraneous, or, if they are useful, it is only for their ability to make sure that mom and baby are well.

And what’s worse: NGPs are told that they’re at risk of being an impediment to this intimate moment. When I asked our facilitator about non-gestational skin-to-skin contact, she said that that’s fine, but not until baby and mom get a good latch, and that can take hours. And she warned me not to break a latch just to get to hold our son. This was a hurtful moment. I would NEVER break my son’s first latch with his mom’s breast. Nor, I suspect, would any of the dads in this class. Our presence in that room makes apparent our deep desire to help, in any way we can, as our partners labor to bring our children into the world. We feel helpless. We feel left out, but we’re mostly okay with that. But warning me that it would hurt my child if I separated him from his mom (who he needs, this warning makes clear, much more than he needs me) is a way of letting me know my place as an outsider.

What worries me is that I’m the only one in the class so far who has mentioned that there is (for all two-parent families) a third person in the situation. That it’s actually GOOD for NGPs to think about bonding. That we, too, have waited and waited to meet our little one. That our lives have utterly changed in that moment. That, lacking the benefit of carrying, the benefit of breastfeeding, we might need advocacy in those critical first moments too. That those moments of bonding between NGP and child might be important to consider alongside such physiological concerns as heart rate and temperature.

That the relationship between NGP and child is actually as important as that between GP and child; thus the benefit of bonding should be shared.

This exclusionary tendency makes me intensely sad. Lots and lots of children have absent fathers (dads who leave, dads who stay but don’t participate actively in child-rearing). We fault them (hello: the phrase “deadbeat dad”), but we forcibly create distance that must be (for some fathers, at least) incredibly difficult to overcome. We act as if mothers are naturally closer to their children than fathers, but, even in our most thoughtful spaces, we cultivate that as a reality. We make it so, and then we criticize it.

And it doesn’t need to be that way. When I asked about this at our first Meet the Midwives meeting, most of the midwives at our clinic (ours wasn’t there) said skin-to-skin contact needed to be with the bio-mom, that all of those regulatory benefits work much much better with her. That I shouldn’t even think of holding our son until an hour after he’s born. “Okay, an hour,” I thought. I cried. I adjusted. I can do an hour. Our facilitator last night said the same thing – J’s body will be much better for Rabbit than mine – only she said I shouldn’t even think about it until two hours, and then only if he’s already nursed. But here’s the thing: the research I’ve done indicates that dads (there’s no research on non-bio mamas) can give their babies almost as much benefit. Really: as much benefit in almost every way. That NGPs can facilitate temperature and heart beat regulation. That NGPs can even facilitate breastfeeding.**

Yet our plan to do an hour of skin-to-skin contact with J (longer, obviously, if at the hour point Rabbit is nursing), followed by an hour of skin-to-skin contact with me, has most often been met with warnings and hesitation.*** “Sure,” most professionals seem to say. “You can do that. But later. But don’t be selfish. Don’t put your needs out there too much. This isn’t about you.”

But isn’t it? Rabbit has two parents. Isn’t it in his lifelong best interest to have connected with both of us in these early hours? I think that – in our well-needed realization that babies don’t benefit from being whisked away and cleaned up immediately – we’ve gotten a bit of tunnel vision. We see birth moms now, and we see babies, but we’re blind to NGPs. And I resent that, not just for me, but for dads. None of the fathers-to-be said anything during the class (or when I asked about this issue and mentioned my concerns). But after class, one of the dads came up to me and said that he’d never thought of any of this before. When the facilitator said that two+ hours of skin-to-skin (exclusively with birth moms) was best for our babies, he was upset. He’d been assuming he’d hold their baby right away, and having this dismissed as unhealthy for his baby (with no acknowledgment that he might want to share in the experience, that his baby might benefit from his presence) was jarring. I’m sure he wasn’t alone. But neither he nor the other dads stopped and asked the question. I think this is because they’re told they are outsiders to this experience. That their job is to support, not just during labor (when supporting is obviously all they can do), but after, as well.

It doesn’t need to be this way. It’s great that we’re beginning to understand the importance of so many of the systems we disrupted when we started over-medicalizing birth. But there must be ways of doing that without telling NGPs that their role at birth is akin to that of any other birth partner: someone who’s there to support a mom through labor, but whose child isn’t being born. Because if we have studies suggesting that skin-to-skin contact is a powerful tool for one parent, shouldn’t we talk about using it for two?

* Of course, these early moments are a luxury altogether. If we’re blessed with adopted children, we won’t have them at all, and we’ll have to mourn that (for ourselves and for our children, who would no doubt have benefited from this early intimacy). Just as I’m already planning for ways to bond in lieu of breastfeeding, we’ll have to be creative to overcome the loss of this time. And we’ll do that with gratitude and joy. So though I know this post is shortsightedly birth-centric, it’s where we are now. And it’s how lots and lots of parents become parents, so it feels important to talk about.

** If you’re interested in the research I found on this, please let me know!

*** Our midwife has never offered these warnings. In fact, she brought this up a few appointments back, saying basically: “You two do whatever you want. He’s your child. You’ll make the right choices for him.” We super love her.

 

bodily

Things are going well here in our fourteenth (almost fifteenth!) week with Rabbit River. We’re happily settling into the reality of being here (this house. this town. this version of our lives.) for two more years. J is getting over a lousy summer cold, and though the coughing has brought back her nausea, we’re hoping it’ll abate again soon. I finished an eighty-one page dissertation chapter draft yesterday, and am moving on to the next today. (I’m trying to get as much written as possible before this baby comes, so I can spend most of my time loving on him or her!). J is a finalist for the job she most wants, though this isn’t as exciting as it sounds: it means they’ve offered the two positions to two other people, but if either of them turns the offer down, or fails the background check, that line will be offered to her. She’s super disappointed (and doubtful that in this economy anyone would turn down an offer), but we haven’t given up hope. She has another interview on Monday. Other than the difficult work of hiding her belly for interviews, things are pretty peaceful.

But I’ve been dealing, in the aftermath of January, with two bodily problems, and now that things have settled down, I’m finally addressing them.

The first is a fear that – because so many things happened to my body at once, because things went so wrong and we still don’t know quite why – maybe there’s more wrong with me that we don’t know about. I get swelling above my ankle now, and feel sure it’s a blood clot. I worry that my heart murmur might be a problem. I get scared a lot. That I’m going to die before I get to raise a family, or grow old with my wife. I learned (the night we lost E) just how out.of.control a body can feel, and now I can’t seem to get back my trust.

The second is a resurgence – since deciding that it isn’t safe for me to try to get pregnant again in the future – in the old, old ghost of anorexia. I haven’t acted on it, but not doing so has been a struggle. Like many women, my late teens and early twenties were a battle for self-esteem, and I fought that battle with (among other things) food denial and exercise. It was difficult for me to recover from because, personality wise, I get a lot of pleasure from self-denial. There are pictures where I’m too thin. J hates to look at them, but try as I might, I still can’t believe that I’m not prettier in them. To this day.

I won this battle a long time ago, and it hasn’t come up for me since coming out eight years ago. And it helps that J and I became cooks together because now I love food too much to be as good at denial as I used to be. :) But I hear this in my head all the time now: if you can’t be pregnant again, you can at least be thin and beautiful. I hate this voice. I feel a responsibility as a teacher, as a parent, and as an educated woman to FIGHT against the dangerous beauty standards to which we subject ourselves and one another. I know how influenced I am by the women I look up to – teachers, colleagues, friends – and I take any influence I might have over female students or other women seriously. I am devoted to never passing this on to my daughters. I want to be an influence of health and moderation: I’ve exercised consistently since I was nineteen, and that’s important to me. Strength is important to me. Healthy living is important to me. Food ethics are important to me. But there’s a line, and it would be so easy to cross it, so easy to feel in control that way.

Because that’s what it is, right? I’ve felt out of control, and I know I could get the sense of control back by over-exercising, by obsessing over everything I put in my mouth. I’ve found control that way before, found value in my body that way before. Once you know you can get it so easily, so cheaply, you never forget. I can’t control what happened to my body in January – nor the knowledge of its weaknesses that I’ve learned about since – and it’s hard to just face that. Retaliation and resistance are easy; vulnerability is the tricky part, the part that requires real guts. But I want to learn how to accept vulnerability. Refusing it is an illusion anyway, and I’m not interested in that. So this week, I went to my school’s clinic (the only place my insurance covers me without a referral), and I set up an appointment to help me let go of these false measures of control. Living in fear is not living in the moment. These are (God willing) the last six months that J and I will be a couple without people to parent, that we’ll live alone together. I want to enjoy that. I want to enjoy this Rabbit’s arrival, to enjoy his or her presence, without wasting so much energy on fear. I want to love my body not because it can make healthy babies, nor because it is thin, but because it’s mine, and it’s healthy (enough), and it carries me through this life. And I want to be present for the people I love, not self-obsessed. I think these issues make sense given everything I’ve been through. I think they emerged as coping devices, and maybe I needed them at first. But my goal now is to begin to put them down.