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October and November have tended to be chaotic months for us. Matt and I both tend to make job changes, or move, around this time of year. The cool air gets into our veins, makes us restless.

I have a job, a decent job working for decent people, but not a well-paying job. A job I’m overqualified for, but which is wonderfully close to my apartment. A job where I’m pretty much allowed to set my own agenda, and don’t work all that hard. But also a job where I’m bored.

Today I lied to my decent boss and went to interview for another job. A job that’s a 45 minute commute into Dallas through traffic. A job that’s going to involve overtime, and extra days on occasion. A job I may be a little underqualified for, technically, though I know I can do it.

But a job that pays nearly twice what I make now.

A job that would let Matt work part time and keep Nathan part time. But I wouldn’t see either one of them as much.

But it pays nearly twice as much. And we could use it. We could move to Dallas, cut down my commute, see our family a little less but have a little more freedom. Pay off old debts, get a bigger place.

I’m counting unhatched chickens here, of course. They may never offer it to me. But I think the interview went well. And I like the publishing they do, though I’m going to have to learn very fast to get up to speed. And even if they don’t come through, if I keep looking, it’s likely something else will, eventually.

I haven’t felt fast or even up to speed much since Nathan was born. I feel like I’ve been moving underwater a lot of the time. And there are days when I don’t know if I want to be the super efficient worker I used to be. And other days when I miss that self. Still other days when I want to chuck it all and go grow my own macrobiotic food and never see an office again.

I still want to be a midwife, but without the money to go to school, I can’t get from here to there. So should I turn away from it a while longer to pay us up, put us on better financial footing? It sounds good, and practical. It sounds wonderful to think of buying things when I want them, not when I absolutely can’t go one more day without them. Not that I want a lot of things, really. But little comforts, nicer clothes, good haircuts–stuff like that.

It’s never as easy as “follow your dream” vs. “selling out,” is it? What if your dream takes money? Or you have obligations? Debts and people you owe and things you need, like health insurance? It’s not selling out to not want to be a deadbeat. But not being a deadbeat can be awfully hard, too.

If I knew what the good and right choice was, I’d take it. I still can’t tell.

photo courtesy Dean Hall

In the last few weeks, it seems you’ve grown up, all at once. Maybe it’s the change in the weather, which meant we had to get you some big boy warm clothes (size 2T, and probably bigger by springtime). In your new long sleeve shirts and socks from the boys’ department, wrestling with your sippy cup and holding your graham cracker, laughing a real “huuuh-huh, heh heh heh” laugh, I spy, with my little eye, someone who’s pretty much a toddler.

You’re so close to walking, so very close, and it took you less time to get the hang of standing than it did to learn to get up on all fours. Once you’re walking, running will happen in a flash, then jumping, then being upset when I won’t let you leap off the couch and bust your head open.

We’ve been taking it slow with teaching you to eat solids, not rushing things…but it’s time. You’re going into daycare soon, and they don’t feed you formula and strained sweet potatoes. They want you to use sippy cups and nibble real food. We’re a little conflicted about rushing you, but at the same time, we were probably being lazy. It’s so much easier to make you a bottle, so much nicer to cuddle you while you eat, because it was the only time you were still. But that’s not what you need anymore, so we’ll have to give it up. We’ll have to learn to be satisfied with your regular, hug-and-go style of cuddling, with holding you upside down and playing giddy-up on our knees, with kisses snuck in while you twist away to grab something that’s caught your eye. With rocking you to sleep and rolling you up in a towel after your bath and squeezing you dry while you holler in protest.

So we put tiny bits of cooked pasta and garbanzo beans and peas and whatever else we can think of in front of you at mealtimes. Mostly you don’t eat them, you squeeze them in your huge-for-a-baby hands and frown. Mostly if we put them in your mouth you squeeze up your face in disgust, then make a horrible “ack ACK ack” exactly like a cat with a hairball. Every now and then, you decide something is tolerable, like dried apricots. But it’s slow going.

Despite that, one side effect of teaching you to pick up things off your plate and eat them is that you’ve realized you can also pick up things off the floor and eat them. I don’t know what you were chewing on at your grandma’s this afternoon, but it was already swallowed by the time I got to you. That was six hours ago, so I guess it wasn’t anything toxic.

I’m so excited for you to be going to school, though I try not to think too much about the fact that you’ll only be seeing me and your dad before and after school and on weekends. It feels like a demotion, like we both ended up the non-custodial parents in a divorce and now only get you on weekends.

It’ll be harder on us than on you. You’ll have so much to do and learn and play with that your little brain will hit light speed. In the meantime, we’ll be sitting at work wishing we were playing patty cake with you. It’s the right thing to do, but we’re not having an easy time with it.

I couldn’t imagine putting you in daycare three months ago. You were still so little, such a clingy needy baby thing, happy in your two naps routine, a bath the biggest excitement you could imagine.

But now it’s just one long nap a day, and you get bored in the bath after a while and want to start messing with the faucets. You can get from one end of the apartment to the other in about 1 minute flat, and I can tell that you’re looking for new things to do. When we took you to visit the preschool, you watched the other kids with fascination, yearned towards the unfamiliar toys and play mats, flirted with the teachers, and got peeved when we didn’t let you play but took you home instead.

So, it’s time. I hope your old mama can learn to adjust, because it’s only the beginning.

I’ve run across this from a few women around my age, otherwise fairly self-confident people who don’t take guff from others or kowtow to men. And yet, somehow, they can’t deal with the idea of their husbands being with them when/if they give birth.

And OK…I can’t speak for the men here. Maybe some of them have fragile illusions about their womenfolk’s bodies that will be shattered by seeing it perform a natural and yes, messy function. So their women apparently never have gas, use the bathroom where the guy can “hear” them, or scratch themselves in the man’s presence. Hell, Tammy Faye Bakker never took off her makeup when her husband could see her…she made up her hair and face to go to bed.

But I think that’s selling guys short. If you live with a person for any length of time, you know that they are not super-clean and fresh and pretty at all moments of the day. If you already hated them, then those moments of ugliness and smelliness would make things worse. But there is something about actually liking and loving the person you live with that allows that to be–not important. It is simply irrelevant, much the same as your own bodily processes don’t make you hate yourself. They are just facts of life, like the weather.

Before I got pregnant, Matt and I had both gone through some serious illnesses of the stomach flu and food poisoning kind. We had quite literally seen each other at our least appealing…and survived. We didn’t stop finding each other attractive. I mean, we still attempt to look nice for each other, and to not be horrible disgusting slobs, but not because there’s any real fear that there is some circumstance in which one of us would look so bad that the other one would never be able to find them desirable again.

And I would hazard that as messy and maybe icky as childbirth is in principle, it’s different when it’s your kid and your wife—just as seeing your spouse ill and vomiting is different than seeing some random person yarfing on the street. And I would go so far as to say that birth is mostly much more positive to witness than stomach flu–after all, you get a baby at the end.

I would say to women who have this fear that not only are you selling the men short, you’re depriving them of a singular experience, being present at the birth of their child. Ultimately, it is your choice and should be, but if your relationship is healthy, witnessing birth won’t damage it and will probably deepen it. If your relationship isn’t healthy, keeping him away from you while you birth isn’t going to save it.

And I have it on good authority that if he loves you, waiting in a room while you go through who-knows-what without him, feeling helpless and worried, is rough on him too. If it were reversed, if he were going to be in pain for 20 hours at a stretch, wouldn’t you want to be there, getting him ice water and wiping his face and holding his hand if it could help?

We still have this hangup about “mystery” in romantic relationships, and then wonder why so many men and women feel alienated from each other. If you are truly going to share the rest of your life with this person, why keep your real self hidden the whole time? How can you be a soulmate to someone with whom you are afraid to share one of the most important and difficult events in your life?

And you know, birth is an amazing event…I have heard many men speak in awe of their wives’ strength and endurance. They were not disgusted. They were amazed at seeing a deep, powerful part of the person they loved that they had never known existed.

It’s a gift, letting someone be near you at birth, not one to be taken lightly. A laboring mother needs to be surrounded by love and respect and honor–just the kind of thing a loving partner can provide. Of course my feelings are partly due to the fact that I think birth should not be an ordeal endured alone under bright lights and a stranger’s hands.

All our husbands can give us when we birth is their love and strength. It seems foolish to deprive ourselves of those things because of some weird misplaced shame about letting our husbands see us push out a baby. We are honoring them, not imposing on them, and the good ones know that. We should let ourselves believe it when they tell us so.

I love a good birth story.

I can’t think of a better example than the birth this morning of laborpayne’s baby boy. She’s a career woman, mother of several (I can’t keep track, possibly six now!) kids, and a doula and homebirth advocate.

Her beautiful pictures of herself in labor and her amazingly coherent blogging DURING labor (jeez!) are just awe-inspiring. I just want to quote the bit that stuck out to me:

I have to stand upright for each contraction- the pain is worse if I sit or god forbid, lay down. My body wants to be upright. Everyone I’ve shown my birth space to, keeps saying, where’s the bed? I won’t birth in a bed, perhaps a squat or on all fours if I don’t feel like standing. I’ll do what my body tells me when the time comes. Now my job is to get through each contraction that comes faithfully every 10 minutes- the downward pressure is all encompassing- like diving into the deep end of a pool.

And I couldn’t help thinking…yes, why do we have beds in our birth spaces at all? Why not some sort of comfy couch with bars for pulling on and squatting, and a well-cushioned floor for all-fours and kneeling? Why not a rope with handles (this was something I saw in Spiritual Midwifery that I dearly wanted at my birth but couldn’t figure out how to do) hanging from the ceiling, so I woman could pull down on it?

I wish I could commission a study of birthing furniture that would actually help women rather than hinder them. What would the optimum birth space look like? I think laborpayne has the right idea.

What’s funny is thinking about that, the optimum space would look more like a gym than a bedroom. But then, since labor is labor, is work, that makes perfect sense.

Congratulations to laborpayne and her new son, little Josiah.

***

Update: did a little googling. Here’s a description of a “woman-led” birth center design, with pictures, but honestly, I think it’s basically a fancy hotel room…the center is still the bed. Though the birth tub room is pretty bitchin.’

Here’s an interesting midwife study in process that looks at the concept of “Birth Territory” and its affect on laboring women.

Ooh, and here’s a similar study out of New Zealand and Australia (NZ has some kickass midwifery practices, I’ve heard).

But I never heard about his mad slapshot till now.

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I think playing in that robe would be pretty tough..

Courtesy of Jesus of the Week, also home of Baseball Jesus.

…is a post I’ve tried to write a dozen times. Abortion and reproductive rights in general are issues that are so complex, so tangled up with religion and our feelings about women, children, babies, and what life means, that it would probably take a book to explain it all. So tangled that I once considered myself part of the pro-life movement. Which is why going into all my thoughts on the matter involves telling a big chunk of my life story, and that’ s more than a blog can do.

This post at Feministe says a lot of what I think more succinctly than I ever could.

There is no excuse…no excuse….for forbidding abortion while also making survival more difficult for mothers and children, while also making contraception more difficult to get, while also cutting back on services for women and children’s health. No excuse at all. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot reduce abortion while increasing the reasons a woman would feel desperate to seek one. But the anti-abortion Republicans have done exactly that. Making it crystal clear that it is not the little babies they are concerned with–not once they are born, anyway.

What they are doing instead is revealing the truth underneath their mask of compassion for the unborn; the truth that they hate and fear the poor, and blame the poor for their misfortunes. Denying poor women a way to stop having more children than they can afford to raise is a way of keeping them poor. Rich women have always gotten abortions, and they always will, and that includes a lot of churchgoing pious Republicans. But poor women are the ones who put bleach into themselves, or used knitting needles and crochet hooks, or went to underground doctors who butchered them, and often died.

When I was on the other side of the issue, I would disbelieve such stories. I could not imagine a sane woman doing that to herself! Surely it was exaggerated.

But now I can see it. I can see having three kids already, and a husband who’s gone or abusive, and not enough money to feed and clothe the little ones you already have. The condom broke or your husband wouldn’t use it or you used birth control and it failed, as it sometimes does. And you’re pregnant, and if you take time off to have the baby and give it up for adoption, you’ll lose your job, and you don’t have health insurance anyway. And your choices are stark; try to get an abortion, or lose your home and go onto the streets with your kids.

I don’t like abortion…and here’s a news flash…no woman does. It is by all accounts a difficult and uncomfortable experience. But then so is frostbite and starvation on the streets. The only proven method of reducing abortions is not to make them illegal, but to make them unnecessary by increasing access to education, contraception, and other resources that help women get themselves out of desperate poverty.

So here’s the analogy I use now. Let’s say you sell cruise ships, which come with lifeboats. About 10% of the time, your cruise ships go off course, hit rocks, and start to sink, and everyone has to use the lifeboats to survive. The way to fix this situation is not to get rid of all your lifeboats. It is, obviously, to fix the faulty navigation system. And maybe train the crew better. And maybe get a better construction company to build your boats. And maybe find a less rock-filled course for your ships to travel. Etc.

But if you follow the current logic of the antiabortion Republicans, you decide that all these sensible measures are just coddling. Instead you get rid of the lifeboats and blame the drowning passengers and crew for failing to stay out of trouble, or for not being good enough swimmers to stay afloat for days while fending off sharks.

It’s time we all became grownups on this issue, and stop talking about the way we wish the world was, and start looking clearly at the way it is. Poor women face enormous obstacles, and every child they have increases those obstacles. That’s the hard truth. And all women, at some point in their lives, may come to a similar place of desperation, and seek to save themselves by ending a pregnancy. We cannot change that fact; we have to work with reality instead of against it. If we do that, we might actually accomplish the original goal of reducing abortions, instead of just ensuring another generation is forced to live in poverty.

First the blessings. I just wanted to pause here long enough to acknowledge all that we have been given by our friends and family over the last long year or so. Probably this isn’t a complete list, but if I remember anything else, I’ll post again.

1. The computer I’m typing this on and the monitor, keyboard, and mouse…thanks deanpence!
2. Our kitchen table and chairs, baby clothes and toys, sheets for our bed, a new food processor, room and board for several months, babysitting, general emotional support, Nathan’s car seat, our TV, and probably a whole lot more–Mom and Glenn.
3. Storage for my dresser and various other things for four years until we needed it, our TV table, equal amounts of clothes, toys, dinners, and babysitting, a really nice if underutilized breast pump, a baby rocker, a high chair, and occasional cash, and probably lots more also–my inlaws.
4. Much of what I registered for, and much that I didn’t in the way of baby clothes, toys and equipment, nearly all of which got used to pieces–my coworkers, Matt’s coworkers who hadn’t even met me, old friends I haven’t seen in 100 years who didn’t have any money either but dug into their bank accounts for a little something for the baby.
5. Help with cross-country moving (twice!) and disposing of all our abandoned New York furniture…Matt’s buddies who have become mine, namely deanpence, Smokey, Little Jack, and others.
6. Help for me, therapy-wise, after Nathan came; my friend Chris, the wonderful ladies at the ICAN mailing list (really, if you are ever pregnant, sign up there; you will learn more about real birth than you ever thought possible), my friends at MATH+1, some midwives and doctors I’ve met online, and occasional random commenters at this very blog who stopped by to let me know I was not, in fact, crazy.

I sent out my thank you cards after all the formal gift giving, and I’m pretty sure I got everyone, but it still staggers me to have received so much when we were so much in need. We’ve been poor, to put it bluntly, for awhile, and there were lots of ways we’ve wanted to help and not been able to for the last several years. I just hope we can give back as much as we’ve gotten, that we’ll have the resources to do so someday.

I guess I felt the need to post this because a) it was just right to do it, and b) it’s not been so great a week. Not money wise, this time, but I can feel the anniversary of my c/section creeping up on me. Logically, it shouldn’t matter that I am X number of days from the anniversary of a given event, but we human beings seem hung up on things like that. So it’s a struggle to think of ways to remember good things about this time last year, and not see everything that was happening in the light of bad things that came later.

I can do it, some days, but it takes a lot of strength.

Because although I was as gripey as any pregnant woman, I was happy, too. And I’m still happy, actually, that I had that pregnancy and had Nathan, regardless of how his birth went. I’m at an odd place where I can feel grief and happiness that are entirely separate, like oil and water–I’m either in one or in the other.

I am trying to find ways to associate his birthday with that happiness of the pregnancy, the excitement I felt when my water broke (and it was VERY dramatic, just like in the movies, ha), and then just….fast forward to oh, about 2-3 months in, when I was finally starting to recover physically and he was learning to smile. My water breaking was my last good memory of being pregnant (well that and sneaking food during my labor, though if I had to do it again I’d dare the midwives to stop me). The rest is a separate time that I have to deal with in a separate way…moments of goodness (seeing Nathan, the kindness of one particular intern) and many more of darkness, that didn’t lift for a long time.

I have two bad knees that crackle when I climb stairs. When a storm is coming, one of them gets sore and hurts more than usual. Old wounds do that..they ache when the weather changes, or when memories crowd in, when a certain date cycles past.

But the operative word here is “old”. I am past the point where I felt like a part of myself had been erased or cut out permanently. I’m knitted back together, however clumsily, and I function, and most of the time, I’m not grieving anymore.

I can’t say I’ll ever see Nathan’s birthday the way he will, as a lighthearted excuse to eat cake and get presents. I think I’ll always be conscious of setting aside some of my memories so that the day can be about him. And someday he’ll hear the whole story, because I believe that’s the right thing to do, but when he’s old enough, when it won’t spoil the day for him.

I don’t know about this year…we’ll probably do a little cake for him to smash, take some pictures, scare him with the singing, find out what he thinks about his first taste of chocolate. Nothing big. And in the years after, he’ll be telling us how he wants it to go, what he wants it to be like, and what things were like the actual day he was born won’t matter as much as whether he gets the particular toy he’s been craving, or whether he’s old enough to drive or vote or buy a beer.

Which, for him, is the way it should be.