You can now visit me at phytophiliac.
Thanks for your support.
17 September 2009
27 August 2009
winding down
Some of you may have noticed that this site has been inaccessible. I took it down because I've decided to stop writing here. I made this choice for a few reasons.
The first is that I'm really unhappy with the direction that my writing has taken. It's all angst and navelgazing and that is not at all what I intended when I started writing. Certainly introspection, but this is too much.
I'm undergoing a sort of metamorphosis, which, according to Jeremy, the resident human development expert, is very normal for my age. But it's been painful. Unfortunately, you've seen the worst of that. I must apologize that my writing has degenerated so severely.
I'm releasing old things but not quite ready to embrace new things, like friends, a profession, a public face. I've been wallowing! And I've been rapidly decompensating in terms of my anxiety. I need to actively address this issue if I want to regain that deliberate, simple, beautiful life.
So I need to let go of this place where I've shared my thoughts for over a year. I need to take some time away from writing. I need to do. I need to act. I need to contact other parts of my self, beyond my intellect, and the dubious ability to string words into a sentence.
There are other issues as well. Though I have not broadly mentioned it here, I have some severely unsettled relationships in my past. Although we might have an unspoken or deliberate agreement that we will not communicate, my requests for privacy have never been met. Sharing myself in such intimate ways through my writing in a public space has placed me in a vulnerable position, considering how deeply unhappy and destructive these relationships have been. Many times I have considered making this site private. But I deliberately write publicly, to connect with others.
When it is time for me to write again, I definitely wish to have a fresh space for that. I also hope to write in a more focused way. I've committed myself to finishing school, and I'd like to have a site that I could connect with my business. That means that I probably won't get as personal as I have here. My writing should be more succinct and pleasant, shorter and easier to read, and considerably more relevant. I hope you will consider visiting. You can leave your email in the comments, or email me, if you'd like to be informed when the site is created.
I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to readers who have traveled with me during the last year, through unemployment, our move out of Utah, my flirtations with Buddhism, our parenting and partnering (mis)adventures, my experience as a working parent, our experiments with sustainability, local food, medicine-making, and all the other questions that bring beauty and confusion to our shared life.
You can continue to find my food here and my photographs here, and I'm hoping to have a new site up very soon. I love correspondence of any sort, so please feel free to write, any time.
And again, thank you. You are the reason I write this way, instead of relegating my turbidity to an OpenOffice document.
I will miss you.
09 August 2009
one of those
I used to be one of those parents. I was one of those parents before I was even a parent. I was one of those parents who looked at other parents and judged them for being less of an awesome parent than I was. I judged parents for crimes such as:
*using disposable diapers
*bottle feeding
*using formula
*going back to work
*having an epidural
*being induced
*giving birth while laying down
*submitting to an "emergency" cesarean
*letting the baby "cry it out"
*buying plastic toys
*putting a newborn in a crib
...especially if the crib was in another room
*vaccinating, especially on schedule, especially with multiple doses at a time
*using an older/used car seat
*giving the baby a pacifier
*persisting in the use of a pacifier after some arbitrary date, like the first birthday
*allowing the baby to watch TV
*circumcising
*applying non-organic, chemical-laden products
*giving the baby a bath every day
*stranding the baby in a car seat or stroller
...instead of using a sling
*not picking up the baby when s/he cried
*starting solids before six months
*using canned baby food
*giving birth in a hospital
*ending breastfeeding before six months...or a year...or two years...or college
This list is not complete.
And then I actually had a baby. And...
I did almost everything I listed above. And more.
Each of these choices has a story. Like that I went to the hospital because I'd been in labor for 60 hours and my uterus was threatening to throw in the towel. A change of venue seemed in order. And the only reason I didn't get that much-desired epidural or cesarean was because I inexplicably gave birth before the anesthesiologist arrived.
As for breastfeeding, I could go into all the details, but why bother? To some people, this will always underline me as a parenting-fail. I certainly felt that way. I made a lot of mistakes. I didn't have the right education or any support. I might have been able to make it work, but I stopped trying. I couldn't do it anymore, my partner couldn't watch me do it anymore, and the kid needed to eat. The end. (Except it wasn't.)
I didn't have a job when I gave birth, so I just stayed home. Kind of by default, not because I intended to be a stay-at-home parent. I hated being the at-home parent. Even though I liked the kid and all. Which leads into the issue of "crying it out." What this means is that sometimes, I left him on the bed, left the room, shut the door behind me, and collapsed against it. Because I was horribly depressed. And I was afraid I'd hurt him. It was a wise decision to leave him alone. Somehow, we both survived.
Our kids used pacifiers because I couldn't nurse them. Blueberry gave it up willingly around seven months, but Bean continued to use it for one simple reason. We just couldn't take it away. Because she would cry, and cry, and cry. And refuse to sleep. She would cry so hard it was like her entire family had been burned at the stake before her bloodshot eyes. So we'd give her the pacifier. And she'd do that adorable nomnomnom thing wherein her eyes would roll back in her head with pleasure and then immediately, magically, she would fall into a blissful sleep. We weren't willing to make the sacrifice. In the end, we forced our way through it because we knew it was damaging her teeth. And it was getting kind of embarrassing, trying to explain why our going-on-three-year-old was still using a pacifier at night. Even more embarrassing was that, after we made the commitment, she only cried about it for one night. ONE NIGHT.
Parents have stories. We have our reasons, why some things, MAKE THAT ALL THINGS, just don't work out as we'd hope.
I still have strong feelings about a lot of these choices. I had a homebirth with Bean. I chose it because I believed it to be the safest choice for my baby, but I admit the second reason was for myself. I desperately needed to feel autonomous. I didn't need to feel powerful, but I did need to feel capable. Much of my depression after giving birth to Blueberry was because I'd had so much of my personal choice stripped from me. My body had been broken and abused by others' carelessness and resentment. I gave birth at home because I wanted the experience to belong to me and my family. I didn't want to be managed, pushed around, forced to submit, assumed incompetent, and invaded - all of which outlined my experience at the notorious birth factory of Provo, Utah.
For a period of my life, I thought about breastfeeding more than almost anything. More than food. More than love. More than sex. More than God. (Yes, I did think about that back then.) I thought breastfeeding could save the world. My heart was broken by statistics of breastfeeding. And when I couldn't breastfeed . . . my god. I can't express how that made me feel. Another vast chunk of postpartum depression was consumed with the theology of breastfeeding-as-religion, and what an apostate I had become, that I gave up when there was still some flesh attached to my chest, when the pump hadn't yet chewed through all of it.
Circumcision is one issue that I try not to broach with other parents. I still believe it to be a violation of human rights. We didn't circumcise Blueberry and I would never choose to circumcise a child without a valid medical diagnosis. But I no longer proselytize about this issue. So many of my choices have turned out to be the wrong ones. This tiny thing we chose not to do? Doesn't amount to a hill o' beans, really. It doesn't make us good parents.
That's a truth that underscores much of my relaxed attitude about parenthood. I wanted to have a homebirth, and breastfeed, and delay solids, and co-sleep, and wear my children against my chest, and discipline positively, and avoid disposable diapers and plastics and canned food and animal products and conventional produce and television and yelling and toy guns and chemicals and vaccines and public school because I thought it would make me a good parent. We all want to be good parents! We all want our children to be aware of the sacrifices we made on their behalf. We want them to go into their own parenting experience thinking about everything we did right. We don't want them to require years of therapy because we spanked them and fed them bad food and used the television as a babysitter.
It's natural to want the best for our children. They seem so delicate when they're first-born, when they have no motor control, or bowel control, or drool control, and no shut-off button for either the crying or the cuteness. But in a short time most parents learn that they are amazingly resilient little creatures. In his first year, Blueberry electrocuted himself and fell down the stairs. He was spotted running with a knife and waving a blow-dryer near a bathtub. There were moments when I thought I was going to kill him, myself, or whomever happened to walk in on the madness. I wondered, more than once, why I had done this - to myself, to him, to my partner, to the world. I desperately need to do right by that boy.
And my identity became trapped in it. If he consumed a scrap of food with pesticide on it, I was a bad parent. I had failed already by giving birth to him under bright lights with mean people around. I hadn't nursed him or slept with him; I'd given him a pacifier instead of a nipple, and I carried him around in a stroller instead of a sling. I'd been bullied into one round of vaccinations and something horrible had happened to his umbilical cord - probably because I hadn't taken care of it properly. My identity was inextricably tied to his unfolding. My sense of self was buried in a pile of cloth diapers, organic baby clothes, and issues of Mothering magazine. I was riding right up on that high horse, terrified to fail, sad to see others succeed, and desperately wishing to save other parents from making my mistakes.
I can't accurately describe the process of extricating my identity from my parenting. I've only become aware of the consequences recently, as I observe conversations from afar. Once upon a time, I couldn't stop myself from becoming enmeshed in conversations about homebirth, vaccinations, organic food, breastfeeding, disposable diapers, circumcision, media influence or education. Now, it takes a lot to convince me to discuss it. And I guess it's because I realize that the best I can offer is my own experience. I'm not an expert. I don't know everything. Quite frankly, I don't know anything. About you. About your family. About your child.
When I left my religion, I had to learn to live with uncertainty. And I found that I love uncertainty. Certainty is fucking boring. I'm not sure it was the right thing to give birth at home. I worry that I should have vaccinated my kids. I wonder if they're massively deficient because they only eat plants. I understand why some women choose not to breastfeed. Using cloth diapers might not have been the greenest choice. A movie is unlikely to corrupt my children's brain cells, and it wouldn't kill them to attend public school.
Many of the choices I make for my children appear radical, regressive, questionable, even dangerous. Consider the red-hot issue of vaccinations. I don't often discuss this issue because, perhaps surprisingly, I don't have strong feelings about it. I have no defense against the supposition that we've made the wrong choice. I have no offense against parents who choose differently. It was an entirely irrational choice so I can't really explain it. I can say this, however. Choosing not to vaccinate is a deeply personal decision that requires us to take a strong role in preventing disease. It means that if there is a breakout, our kids may need to be quarantined. It means that we have to be hypervigilant about illness. It means that millions of parents in this country think we're abusing and neglecting our kids, that our kids should be forcibly vaccinated, that we're putting everyone else at risk for the sake of some cultist conspiracy theory. But we didn't choose not to vaccinate for any particular version of the truth. And in the end, this is true about all things. For everyone.
I think, as parents, we all have our own version of reality. Our reality is however we choose to see it, whatever reinforces our existing conceptions and experiences, and it's easy to forget that other realities are just as valid as our own. So everyone else seems crazy, that they choose to give birth at home, or to skip breastfeeding, or to use cloth diapers in this day 'n' age, or to push their babies around in a stroller. It just doesn't make sense. Why would you do that to yourself/your partner/your family/your workplace/your baby/your heritage/the world?
I'm not sure why our culture is so wrapped up in the development of little children. I assume that we used to parent by instinct. I guess that before the advent of experts, we just looked to our parents and grandparents and tried to do whatever seemed to work for them. Now we look at our parents and grandparents and hope like hell that we don't fuck up that badly. And we look at our friends and wonder how or why they do this or that and what can we do to make it better. And we depend on self-education and hope that we're getting the right kind. And we experiment.
But children don't come in one-size-fits-all models. So it might be appropriate for one child to be rocked to sleep while another needs to be put in a bed, in a room, one room away from the parents. And as a result, the one parent will feel superior in her commitment to mothering while the other will wonder why the former wants to torture herself that way. In the end, both children are sleeping. It's only the parents who are awake, thinking about what everyone else is doing.
I needed the humbling experience of failing at each and every one of my parenting endeavors. I needed the perspective of a fuck-up, I really did. I needed it to realize that it's right to be a good parent in spite of, not because of, all of my careful, "conscious" choices.
I'm not a good parent because I gave birth at home, or because I slept with Bean, or because I hauled ass all over Utah picking up donor breastmilk lest a drop of formula pass her sweet little rosebud lips. I'm not a good mother because I try not to hit my children, because they'll be Waldorf-educated, or because they play with wooden toys and eat their greens. These are just trappings.
I hope that I'm a good parent because I support my children in their unfolding, and because I largely stay out of the way. Because I don't try to put them in boxes, and I don't hover over them and pick at their inadequacies. Because I hug them and read to them and give them clear boundaries. Because I take responsibility for my choices, but I won't overstate my influence. Because I don't let their goodness speak for my goodness. Because they don't define me. Because I'm uncertain.
And so, after several years of being the harshest critic on the block, I'm now largely neutral to the choices of others. I can only do what feels right for my family, and I might be wrong. Whatever seems weird or radical or non-conforming about our family is really quite mundane when you're living in the middle of it. And I won't allow it to define me anymore - being the sort of parent who makes very deliberate, sometimes strange choices for the supposed sake of my children. I will always encourage parents to educate themselves, but I have no illusions about the truthfulness of the things we learn. Everything is filtered, and we do some of it ourselves. If we could filter judgment out of our relationships with other parents, we might find the peace and support we really need.
*using disposable diapers
*bottle feeding
*using formula
*going back to work
*having an epidural
*being induced
*giving birth while laying down
*submitting to an "emergency" cesarean
*letting the baby "cry it out"
*buying plastic toys
*putting a newborn in a crib
...especially if the crib was in another room
*vaccinating, especially on schedule, especially with multiple doses at a time
*using an older/used car seat
*giving the baby a pacifier
*persisting in the use of a pacifier after some arbitrary date, like the first birthday
*allowing the baby to watch TV
*circumcising
*applying non-organic, chemical-laden products
*giving the baby a bath every day
*stranding the baby in a car seat or stroller
...instead of using a sling
*not picking up the baby when s/he cried
*starting solids before six months
*using canned baby food
*giving birth in a hospital
*ending breastfeeding before six months...or a year...or two years...or college
This list is not complete.
And then I actually had a baby. And...
I did almost everything I listed above. And more.
Each of these choices has a story. Like that I went to the hospital because I'd been in labor for 60 hours and my uterus was threatening to throw in the towel. A change of venue seemed in order. And the only reason I didn't get that much-desired epidural or cesarean was because I inexplicably gave birth before the anesthesiologist arrived.
As for breastfeeding, I could go into all the details, but why bother? To some people, this will always underline me as a parenting-fail. I certainly felt that way. I made a lot of mistakes. I didn't have the right education or any support. I might have been able to make it work, but I stopped trying. I couldn't do it anymore, my partner couldn't watch me do it anymore, and the kid needed to eat. The end. (Except it wasn't.)
I didn't have a job when I gave birth, so I just stayed home. Kind of by default, not because I intended to be a stay-at-home parent. I hated being the at-home parent. Even though I liked the kid and all. Which leads into the issue of "crying it out." What this means is that sometimes, I left him on the bed, left the room, shut the door behind me, and collapsed against it. Because I was horribly depressed. And I was afraid I'd hurt him. It was a wise decision to leave him alone. Somehow, we both survived.
Our kids used pacifiers because I couldn't nurse them. Blueberry gave it up willingly around seven months, but Bean continued to use it for one simple reason. We just couldn't take it away. Because she would cry, and cry, and cry. And refuse to sleep. She would cry so hard it was like her entire family had been burned at the stake before her bloodshot eyes. So we'd give her the pacifier. And she'd do that adorable nomnomnom thing wherein her eyes would roll back in her head with pleasure and then immediately, magically, she would fall into a blissful sleep. We weren't willing to make the sacrifice. In the end, we forced our way through it because we knew it was damaging her teeth. And it was getting kind of embarrassing, trying to explain why our going-on-three-year-old was still using a pacifier at night. Even more embarrassing was that, after we made the commitment, she only cried about it for one night. ONE NIGHT.
Parents have stories. We have our reasons, why some things, MAKE THAT ALL THINGS, just don't work out as we'd hope.
I still have strong feelings about a lot of these choices. I had a homebirth with Bean. I chose it because I believed it to be the safest choice for my baby, but I admit the second reason was for myself. I desperately needed to feel autonomous. I didn't need to feel powerful, but I did need to feel capable. Much of my depression after giving birth to Blueberry was because I'd had so much of my personal choice stripped from me. My body had been broken and abused by others' carelessness and resentment. I gave birth at home because I wanted the experience to belong to me and my family. I didn't want to be managed, pushed around, forced to submit, assumed incompetent, and invaded - all of which outlined my experience at the notorious birth factory of Provo, Utah.
For a period of my life, I thought about breastfeeding more than almost anything. More than food. More than love. More than sex. More than God. (Yes, I did think about that back then.) I thought breastfeeding could save the world. My heart was broken by statistics of breastfeeding. And when I couldn't breastfeed . . . my god. I can't express how that made me feel. Another vast chunk of postpartum depression was consumed with the theology of breastfeeding-as-religion, and what an apostate I had become, that I gave up when there was still some flesh attached to my chest, when the pump hadn't yet chewed through all of it.
Circumcision is one issue that I try not to broach with other parents. I still believe it to be a violation of human rights. We didn't circumcise Blueberry and I would never choose to circumcise a child without a valid medical diagnosis. But I no longer proselytize about this issue. So many of my choices have turned out to be the wrong ones. This tiny thing we chose not to do? Doesn't amount to a hill o' beans, really. It doesn't make us good parents.
That's a truth that underscores much of my relaxed attitude about parenthood. I wanted to have a homebirth, and breastfeed, and delay solids, and co-sleep, and wear my children against my chest, and discipline positively, and avoid disposable diapers and plastics and canned food and animal products and conventional produce and television and yelling and toy guns and chemicals and vaccines and public school because I thought it would make me a good parent. We all want to be good parents! We all want our children to be aware of the sacrifices we made on their behalf. We want them to go into their own parenting experience thinking about everything we did right. We don't want them to require years of therapy because we spanked them and fed them bad food and used the television as a babysitter.
It's natural to want the best for our children. They seem so delicate when they're first-born, when they have no motor control, or bowel control, or drool control, and no shut-off button for either the crying or the cuteness. But in a short time most parents learn that they are amazingly resilient little creatures. In his first year, Blueberry electrocuted himself and fell down the stairs. He was spotted running with a knife and waving a blow-dryer near a bathtub. There were moments when I thought I was going to kill him, myself, or whomever happened to walk in on the madness. I wondered, more than once, why I had done this - to myself, to him, to my partner, to the world. I desperately need to do right by that boy.
And my identity became trapped in it. If he consumed a scrap of food with pesticide on it, I was a bad parent. I had failed already by giving birth to him under bright lights with mean people around. I hadn't nursed him or slept with him; I'd given him a pacifier instead of a nipple, and I carried him around in a stroller instead of a sling. I'd been bullied into one round of vaccinations and something horrible had happened to his umbilical cord - probably because I hadn't taken care of it properly. My identity was inextricably tied to his unfolding. My sense of self was buried in a pile of cloth diapers, organic baby clothes, and issues of Mothering magazine. I was riding right up on that high horse, terrified to fail, sad to see others succeed, and desperately wishing to save other parents from making my mistakes.
I can't accurately describe the process of extricating my identity from my parenting. I've only become aware of the consequences recently, as I observe conversations from afar. Once upon a time, I couldn't stop myself from becoming enmeshed in conversations about homebirth, vaccinations, organic food, breastfeeding, disposable diapers, circumcision, media influence or education. Now, it takes a lot to convince me to discuss it. And I guess it's because I realize that the best I can offer is my own experience. I'm not an expert. I don't know everything. Quite frankly, I don't know anything. About you. About your family. About your child.
When I left my religion, I had to learn to live with uncertainty. And I found that I love uncertainty. Certainty is fucking boring. I'm not sure it was the right thing to give birth at home. I worry that I should have vaccinated my kids. I wonder if they're massively deficient because they only eat plants. I understand why some women choose not to breastfeed. Using cloth diapers might not have been the greenest choice. A movie is unlikely to corrupt my children's brain cells, and it wouldn't kill them to attend public school.
Many of the choices I make for my children appear radical, regressive, questionable, even dangerous. Consider the red-hot issue of vaccinations. I don't often discuss this issue because, perhaps surprisingly, I don't have strong feelings about it. I have no defense against the supposition that we've made the wrong choice. I have no offense against parents who choose differently. It was an entirely irrational choice so I can't really explain it. I can say this, however. Choosing not to vaccinate is a deeply personal decision that requires us to take a strong role in preventing disease. It means that if there is a breakout, our kids may need to be quarantined. It means that we have to be hypervigilant about illness. It means that millions of parents in this country think we're abusing and neglecting our kids, that our kids should be forcibly vaccinated, that we're putting everyone else at risk for the sake of some cultist conspiracy theory. But we didn't choose not to vaccinate for any particular version of the truth. And in the end, this is true about all things. For everyone.
I think, as parents, we all have our own version of reality. Our reality is however we choose to see it, whatever reinforces our existing conceptions and experiences, and it's easy to forget that other realities are just as valid as our own. So everyone else seems crazy, that they choose to give birth at home, or to skip breastfeeding, or to use cloth diapers in this day 'n' age, or to push their babies around in a stroller. It just doesn't make sense. Why would you do that to yourself/your partner/your family/your workplace/your baby/your heritage/the world?
I'm not sure why our culture is so wrapped up in the development of little children. I assume that we used to parent by instinct. I guess that before the advent of experts, we just looked to our parents and grandparents and tried to do whatever seemed to work for them. Now we look at our parents and grandparents and hope like hell that we don't fuck up that badly. And we look at our friends and wonder how or why they do this or that and what can we do to make it better. And we depend on self-education and hope that we're getting the right kind. And we experiment.
But children don't come in one-size-fits-all models. So it might be appropriate for one child to be rocked to sleep while another needs to be put in a bed, in a room, one room away from the parents. And as a result, the one parent will feel superior in her commitment to mothering while the other will wonder why the former wants to torture herself that way. In the end, both children are sleeping. It's only the parents who are awake, thinking about what everyone else is doing.
I needed the humbling experience of failing at each and every one of my parenting endeavors. I needed the perspective of a fuck-up, I really did. I needed it to realize that it's right to be a good parent in spite of, not because of, all of my careful, "conscious" choices.
I'm not a good parent because I gave birth at home, or because I slept with Bean, or because I hauled ass all over Utah picking up donor breastmilk lest a drop of formula pass her sweet little rosebud lips. I'm not a good mother because I try not to hit my children, because they'll be Waldorf-educated, or because they play with wooden toys and eat their greens. These are just trappings.
I hope that I'm a good parent because I support my children in their unfolding, and because I largely stay out of the way. Because I don't try to put them in boxes, and I don't hover over them and pick at their inadequacies. Because I hug them and read to them and give them clear boundaries. Because I take responsibility for my choices, but I won't overstate my influence. Because I don't let their goodness speak for my goodness. Because they don't define me. Because I'm uncertain.
And so, after several years of being the harshest critic on the block, I'm now largely neutral to the choices of others. I can only do what feels right for my family, and I might be wrong. Whatever seems weird or radical or non-conforming about our family is really quite mundane when you're living in the middle of it. And I won't allow it to define me anymore - being the sort of parent who makes very deliberate, sometimes strange choices for the supposed sake of my children. I will always encourage parents to educate themselves, but I have no illusions about the truthfulness of the things we learn. Everything is filtered, and we do some of it ourselves. If we could filter judgment out of our relationships with other parents, we might find the peace and support we really need.
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