Getting Away From An "Either - Or" Mentality About Childbirth

Recently there have been a bunch of good essays (links below) discussing how the birth location, and type of attendant, affect outcomes.  These pieces all take the time for some non-propaganda, nuanced thought and reflection about what would improve things for a diverse American population of mothers.  It’s a welcome change from some of the less rigorous thought we often see on this topic.  Instead of having a pitched battle about whether ALL HOMEBIRTH IS VERY DANGEROUS AND IRRESPONSIBLE AND RISKY!  and whether ALL HOSPITAL BIRTH IS TOTALLY OVERMEDICALIZED AND DANGEROUS AND HATEFUL AND NOT EVIDENCE BASED, these essays look at the improvements we need, overall, to our maternity care system.

Here’s a brief summary (but honestly, these are issues that aren’t well suited to brief summary):

  • we need a standardized care practice for doctors, nurses, and midwives who attend hospital births.  The practice should minimize separation of mother and baby after birth to true medical need, appropriately support normal infant feeding,  prioritize comfort, dignity and infection-avoiding after-care for mother and baby, eliminate practices associated with post-partum depression and PTSD, and train all hospital personnel in all of these areas.  And this should be available to all women in every hospital across the land.  

     Is that really too much to ask for in 2012 in the United States of America?

  • we need a nationally standardized training practice for midwifery that encompasses homebirth and hospital care, so that “midwife” means one thing, everywhere.  Without that, it is impossible to accurately say how “midwifery” care compares to OB care, or how home-birth compares to hospital birth.

These changes would create a more functional system in which each woman could get care appropriate to her particular needs, not the needs of women in general.  This is called reproductive choice, and it should be available to everyone, not just educated, white-glove-insured people in major cities.

A functional system would also get us away from the kind of strident hysteria that too often accompanies discussion about birth, which, when you care about these issues, become truly a pain in the ass to read.  (don’t get me wrong — emotional discussion of one’s birth when you’ve just had a baby is totally appropriate.  Ideally, though, that personal topic is handled separately from a policy discussion of how care can be improved for everyone.)

Here’s what you can do, meanwhile:

  • If you’re pregnant and planning a hospital birth:  take the time to talk to your care provider about her training and experience, including her experience of this hospital’s post-natal care, which she may or may not be familiar with.  If you’re in New York state, you can look up your hospital’s stats including breastfeeding rates.  Take a childbirth class that covers infant care and breastfeeding.  In my childbirth classes, we do role-playing to help students get comfortable with how to talk to personnel in the hospital in a way that gets the information they need and reduce unnecessary stuff happening.
  • During and after your birth, remember that you are the customer.  If you’re not getting good customer service, ask for better.  If that doesn’t happen, write a letter to your care provider’s office and/or the hospital, later, and let them know you weren’t happy.  Policies change when people do this.
  • If you’re pregnant and planning a home birth:  take the time to talk to your care provider about her training and experience in, and out of hospital, and learn about the laws relating to midwifery in your state.
  • Write to your legislators and propose standardized care practices for hospital births and midwifery training.  Send a copy of the letter to all your facebook friends and ask them to do it, too.

Here are the links to the essays:  The original piece in Slate by Emily Willingham, an article about it on Babble by Ceridwen Morris, Emily Willingham’s blog followup, and a Comment by Midwife Amy Romano.

This stuff matters.

How did it go for you?  If you gave birth in the hospital, how did you feel about the post-natal policies and the care you received?  If you gave birth at home, were you in a state where you had access to a CNM?  And what was her home-birth training?  You can email me comments or use the Disqus feature below.

Working And Mothering -- What Would You Tell Your 22 Year Old Self?

Recently, I was talking to a client, lets call her Anne, about the logistics of going back to work now that she’s a mom.  Anne has a tough job that requires a big time commitment, more-than-occasional evening and weekend hours, and intense focus. It’s a job she loves and is great at. 

It’s also a lot like taking care of a baby when you think of it.  

As we talked, we were partly discussing childcare and time management, but, as we chatted, veering more and more into a conversation about what becoming a mother has meant to Anne, how it’s changed her perspective on what she enjoys and how she wants to spend her time.  Anne was pondering how to blend all that with the woman she’d always been, and the career she has really loved.  This kind of conversation involves issues you can only explore, not the kind you can Solve in Three Simple Steps.

Somehow we got onto a tangent about Anne’s infant daughter.   “My husband said, ‘Maybe when she’s growing up, we’ll encourage her to pick a career that blends better with motherhood,’” Anne told me, and went on, “I was so annoyed!  If someone had said to me when I was in college that I should pick a career that blended well with motherhood I would have been totally disgusted by that.”

"And what about now?" I asked.

"Well … "

There aren’t simple answers to this, are there?  The fact is, it’s very tricky to weave together a pre-baby life and a post-baby life.  What do you think?  Email me your stories about going back to work, what’s worked well and what’s been complicated, and what advice, if any, you’d give your 22 year old self, now that you’re on the other side of this.  I’ll feature the stories here.

meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com

Mom Upside Down

I did a handstand today in my yoga class!

Which is pretty ironic because only Friday, I mentioned in a blog post that after more than a dozen years, I’d never managed to succeed at an inversion.  So, first of all, wow, how cool!  There I was, upside down!  

Second of all, do you know what else is cool, in life?  That you can learn to do new things even when you’re old.

I used to do a lot of yoga, and then basically stopped for many years because kidsworklifeblahblahblah.  Having a kid turns your life upside down and I think it’s a multi-year process for the dust to really settle.  Add a second kid, a career, a marriage, a family … adulthood can start to feel like you’re constantly cutting things out to get the emergencies settled — it can feel constraining even though each of the things in your life is something you love.  Sure, I had a list of my favorite “me-time” activities, but though pedicures are lovely, a decade of using them as my “go-to” thing had me sort of bored.  

So, inspired by a friend’s “Now That I’m Turning 40” to-do list, I decided to get back into yoga.  I was lousy at it at first.  I got better really slowly.  The first time my teacher said, “You’re looking good!” I assumed she meant “for a middle aged mom” and not just “good.”  

It’s not always easy to get to class.  I have to use time I should be working, or could be writing, or might be attending to my family.  It’s expensive.  It’s inconvenient to get to.  I could burn twice the calories at the gym.

I kept at it anyway.

And then today I pushed my feet off the wall and stood upside down.  And I felt really good.  Not just good for a middle aged mom; good.

Can You Breastfeed On The Moon?

I’m surfing the net while my daughter plays with stickers, and she sees an article I’m looking at about a woman breastfeeding in this month’s Italian ELLE.  Here’s the pic, courtesy of Babble:

italian elle on babble

My daughter’s four, and, at the moment, very interested in female beauty and fashion, so she comes right over to comment on the model’s hair and shirt and lipstick.  Then she says,

"What is she doing?"  

I say, “She’s nursing her baby.”  

Nina says, “Standing up??”  

I love that the question isn’t “Can a nursing mother look like a model?” or “Can you be in a magazine while nursing” but just the physical logistics — can you do it standing up?  I tell her that, yeah, you can basically do it in any position once you get the hang of it and the baby’s not a newborn. 

"Can you do it in a headstand??"

I laugh.  Because I’ve spent the better part of the past dozen years trying to get both legs all the way up in a headstand, without success.  (Additionally, during that time, I breastfed, and weaned, two children.)  

So, the answer is “no” — I personally could not.  But, as it happens, I know of  a perfect example of this very thing, so I can show her a role model even if I couldn’t be one:

http://youtu.be/WqZCYCUcfGs

We watch, and she’s barely impressed with the mom’s yoga moves.  Apparently it’s a given that moms can maintain an inversion.  We are on to the next:

"Can you breastfeed on the moon?"

Nina assumes that if men have been on the moon, women have, too.  

That if women have been there, nursing mothers have been there.

Kids today.  They think mothers can do anything.

Guess How Many Times A Day Someone Barges Into A Hospital Room On A New Mom?

Here’s one for the “I Can’t Believe We Needed A Study To Tell Us This” file: an article I read this morning from lactationmatters.org, entitled “Do Interruptions Interfere with Early Breastfeeding?”

I don’t mean that the article was stupid (at all!), and in fact, there’s something validating that someone actually recorded how frikkin’ often new moms and their babies are interrupted while they’re still in the hospital.  Want to know how many times? 

53.  Fifty Three interruptions in a twelve hour period.

This topic came up last week at the new MOMs group — I’d asked a group of new moms who’d just met to talk about what was most surprising since their babies’ births, and although that conversation can go lots of different ways, this group mostly talked about how the births had gone, and the first couple days in the hospital.  Several moms talked with annoyance about how frequently people barged into the hospital room, (“it felt like someone was constantly coming in to do something”) and how difficult it was to get any peace, privacy, or even just a little time to think straight.  

Well, they’re right:  The study found that over the course of a twelve hour period, mothers in the hospital were interrupted an average of 53 times.  There were more than twice as many interruptions as periods of alone time.  That means that a new mom had to deal with someone coming in to do something to her pretty constantly; and the study also found that the interruptions themselves lasted longer than the stretches of alone time.  In fact, half of the “uninterrupted” stretches were less than ten minutes long.

Guess what?  Moms didn’t love that.  

In my New MOMs group, many of the same moms were also complaining that they didn’t have enough help with getting the hang of nursing, or that they were “left alone” to figure it out by themselves.

These things aren’t at odds, at all:  New mothers are not supposed to be left all alone, isolated, without help or company or support.  They are supposed to have easy access to supportive, knowledgeable people who can help them, and who can attend to their needs as they learn to get the hang of dealing with the baby.  They are not supposed to be isolated and when they are, they languish.  And all too often, they not only don’t complain, they feel guilty and weak for not being able to figure everything out themselves.

Isolation is bad for mothers.

But isolation is not the same thing as privacy, and all interruptions are not equal.  One mom I spoke to described how frequently people came in to take her blood pressure and temperature, or to check on the baby, or to have her fill out forms.  Did anyone come in to just sit with her and keep her company?  No.  No one in the hospital is paid to provide company. Did anyone come in saying, “Good morning, what can I do for you that might help you feel more comfortable today?”  Of course not.  The hospital does not provide a concierge.  Did anyone give her a list of resources that might help or educate her if she wanted that?  No, the hospital is not a school that provides education for its customers.

Did anyone assess her breastfeeding before the baby was discharged and provide her with detailed, evidence-based guidelines about how to proceed?  No.  Apparently the hospital is also not concerned with infant growth and nutrition.  You and your boobs are expected to figure it out for themselves.

What did they do?

Well, lots of people commented that she should be breastfeeding.  People talk and talk and talk about how “best” breastfeeding is.  People gave varied opinions about how frequently she ought to nurse and how long the baby ought to stay on the breast.  Most of them disagreed with each other.  

And they got all the data they wanted, about her temperature and blood pressure and wound-healing, and her paperwork was all complete.  They did that on their own schedule, in the way that was most streamlined for the hospital, not for the woman who’d just done a day of labor followed by major abdominal surgery and whose nipples were cracked and bleeding and whose baby had lost a lot of weight.

This. Is. Not. Good. Customer. Service. 

Newborn babies need lots of skin to skin time with their mothers, but new mothers (understandably) often feel modest about showing skin to strangers.  Having the door of your room burst open while your shirt is off can throw even the most unflappable new mom, especially when it happens multiple times per hour.

New babies also need frequent feedings, but new moms getting the hang of nursing often don’t appreciate someone barging into the room just when they’re squeezing the breast and looking at the color of their colostrum.  New moms are human beings; they need privacy.  When they don’t get it, they cover up.

The study found that moms perceived that interruptions interfered with breastfeeding.  This does not mean that doctors and nurses came in and literally said “You need to stop feeding now” or that the moms were told to ignore their babies’ cues to feed if someone else was in the room.  What it does mean is that as a practical matter, the moms felt that being on the other side of a revolving door was getting in the way of learning to nurse.

Why aren’t we making it easier on new moms?  How about some hospital protocols that group necessary clinical interruptions together in a way that makes it a priority to get new moms longer stretches of privacy?  

And how about making sure that, if someone’s going to enter a new mom’s room, that person:

(a) ask the mom “were you about to feed the baby?” and offer to come back later if it’s easier for the mom, so that no mom leaves the hospital feeling like someone was barging in on her every five minutes, and

(b) be prepared, qualified, trained and equipped to ask about nursing, assess the breastfeeding dyad, and provide appropriate, supportive help OR ELSE SUMMON SOMEONE WHO IS, so that no mom is discharged from the hospital without a breastfeeding assessment by an IBCLC.

People like to feel like they know what they’re doing — that’s because we’re human.  And when you’ve just had a baby, you often feel the opposite.  No one wants strangers barging in on them constantly when they’re feeling like a big messy work in progress — that can make you feel like giving up on whatever you were working on.  Instead, what new moms need is enough privacy to get the hang of things, and enough help to be guided in the right direction.  

Here’s what you can do:  

If you’re pregnant and planning a hospital birth:  Make a sign for your door that says, “Please, Only Urgent Interruptions; I Am Feeding The Baby.” Hang it at will.  Feel free to ask anyone who comes in whether they can come back in half an hour.  Have contact information for an IBCLC who can help you out as you begin breastfeeding.

If you’ve just had a baby:  The hospital will contact you with a generic call or letter to ask how your experience was.  I know you have a baby and you’re tired.  But take the time to answer their questionnaire and answer honestly.  If you got lousy customer service and know what would have helped, tell them.  You don’t have to figure out how they should conduct all their business, let them sort out the logistics.  But you ought to let them know you have a complaint with the way they do it now.

If you are a friend of a new mom, and can see that she had a lousy hospital experience because of this: write to the hospital and complain.  

Things don’t change when no one complains.

New TSA Rules for Air Travel With Breast Milk

New moms in the MOMs group often ask about airline travel with their babies.  It’s challenging to deal with the packing, and the logistics, and figuring out what to do with the car seat, and pouring your mouthwash and shampoo into those ridiculous little 3 ounce bottles.  But for nursing moms, TSA anti-terrorism rules have sometimes made it even more confusing and complicated.  I think we’ve all heard of moms who were told to pour out the expressed breast milk they’d worked so hard to pump, or moms who had to “prove” that their breast milk was real (and not a bomb?  WTF?) by drinking it in front of the TSA Official.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently nasty or wrong with tasting your own breastmilk, but somehow being forced to do it while a snickering Security Dude watched always seemed totally humiliating and just weird and wrong.

But! here are new rules from TSA which seem to clear things up, and which specifically say you don’t have to drink your own breastmilk to get on board.  The new rules say that moms can bring breastmilk on the flight, even if the bottle has more than 3 ounces, as long as she follows a few procedures:

  • Separate these items from the liquids, gels, and aerosols in your quart-size and zip-top bag.
  • Declare you have the items to one of our Security Officers at the security checkpoint.
  • Present these items for additional inspection once reaching the X-ray. These items are subject to additional screening and Officers may ask you to open a container.

So that’s good.  Breastmilk is still “da bomb,” though. :-)

(Thank you, Ruth Callahan, for directing me to the new TSA guidelines)

"Porn for Pregnant Ladies" aka Tell Us What We Want To Hear

pregnant chicken -- jon hamm pregnancy

Here’s a funny post about what we yearn for during pregnancy — she calls it “Porn for Pregnant Ladies” but it’s totally safe for work and it’s a little hilarious — images of famously hot actors saying just what you want to hear when you’re great with child.  I think my fave is Jon Hamm:  

but this one is a close second:

pregnant chicken 2

Space Available in Upcoming New Moms' Groups!

Hi folks!

There’s space available in both my Chelsea new moms’ group (which starts today!) and the Tribeca new moms’ group, which starts next Tuesday.  

New moms’ groups are a great place to meet likeminded people, relax a little with your baby, and learn a few things.  Here’s an email I got from one of the moms just last night!

Thank you for a great class. I thoroughly enjoyed the camaraderie, as well your insight, knowledge, humor and overall delivery (you are so articulate!) And, I am now a regular reader of your blog, which I really enjoy.

Aww shucks :-)

We have fun at the Moms’ Groups, yk, it’s some laughing, some crying and some poop explosions, and many members go on to become long-term friends.  Come join us.  You can find out more and register here.

Get Your Chick On: How Sex Is Like Chicken And How Talking Helps

 So, recently I wrote an essay about a time I was given a sex toy, instead of cash, in exchange for teaching a class.  (Funnily enough, just around the same time, there was an article on TDB about sex toys not only going mainstream but even being marketed for Extremely Religious People.  Isn’t it weird how a topic gets into the ether?

 Now, my essay wasn’t an x-rated review of sex toys, nor was it in any way explicit about my own sex life.  Really, it was about navigating the way one’s identity changes over the course of a long relationship and after parenthood.  Nevertheless, the Surprise Guest Star of the essay was a vibrating cock ring, and in response to publishing it, I got a lot of reactions that basically boiled down to:

“!!!”

One of the reactions was from a friend who expressed concern that using sex toys would “desensitize” a person to “regular” sex, become addictive, and, generally, transform something that should be wonderful and natural into something artificial and bad. 

I found I had an immediate, visceral reaction to this, which was, just, NO. There are lots of things can be used in a harmful way, but that doesn’t make the thing itself bad or dangerous. 

I said to her, “I think it doesn’t have to be that way.  Like, usually, I make roast chicken plain, but sometimes I change it up and use lemon and oregano.  The fact that sometimes I use oregano doesn’t make me not like having it plain anymore.”

My friend looked at me like I’d just thrown the easiest out-of-the-ballpark homerun pitch ever and said, “Mer.  Sex is not like chicken.”

I thought about that for a long time.

I concluded that in fact sex is quite like chicken:

  • It can be really flavorful and almost embarassingly juicy, or it can be dry and tasteless.
  • Even though it really tastes good and almost everyone likes it, it can totally turn into the boring, expected default “we’re having chicken again,” as a substitute for something more inventive.  
  • It can be prepared endless ways.  There are whole books describing hundreds of ways to make chicken.  But I think most people spend their entire lives doing it the same two or three ways and only try it, say, Polynesian Style, on their honeymoon when they’re travelling, or when they go out for their anniversary.
  • The kind you get on your wedding night is generally not the best kind you ever had.
  • Some people like it bone-in; others prefer it boneless.
  • Some people like it when it’s free-range and organic and has a really sharp, distinctive, meaty taste.  Other people want it to be as bland as possible and not really have to think about the fact that it’s flesh.  Chicken is so diverse that all of these people can be made happy.
  • You can identify the kosher version because a tip of it is cut off.
  • When you buy it on the cheap, it is full of chemicals.
  • AND, when you ask a real cooking maven how to tell if someone is a good cook, they will say that the best cook in the world makes a simple, plain roasted chicken that is transcendant.

On the other hand, chicken is unlike sex in that you don’t have to do the whole eww-y salmonella-preventing handwashing thing after touching it raw.

 By the time the final version of my essay was written, I’d written the words “vibrating cock ring” so many times that they ceased to be shocking.  I had told versions of the cock ring story to many of my friends and a group of us started jokingly referring to it as a “VCR.” In fact, by the end of the revision, it was hard to remember what had been outre about it to begin with.

At one point, I confessed to my editor that I was worried that I sounded like a big rube, and that no one would get what had shocked me about the cock ring anyway (she laughed and said she didn’t think so, and she was right). 

Here is what I conclude from this:

1.  You can get desensitized to a word by using it.  That word could be “cock ring” or it could be something pertaining more directly to motherhood like, “breast-milk” or “breast” or “nipple” or “poop” or even “Mom” – all of which are words I’ve seen people flinch at in the early days. 

2.  You get desensitized to the idea that something is outrageous when you get familiar with it.  This could be a change in your sex life.  Or it could be the very idea that your sex life changes over time.  Or it could be something much more mundane, like the initially outrageous idea of a baby sleeping in your room, or milk in your breasts, or a pump that removes the milk, or that you’ll cope patiently with colic, diapers, tantrums, or the notion that you’ll survive not having time to blow your hair dry or get to the gym every day.  Familiarity makes things seem not strange anymore.

3.  Talking to other people makes even weird, crazy things seem a lot less weird and crazy. This is also a kind of desensitization.  I think it’s desensitization to your own ego, and its so important.

But no, I don’t think that a sex toy is going to desensitize you to sex if you liked sex in the first place.

Now, go subscribe to Brain, Child:  The Magazine for Thinking Mothers.  And register for a new moms’ group, where you can come talk about this kind of thing. 

 

What Kind Of Help Would Help?

My friend Jessica Lang Kosa, PhD, IBCLC, a lactation consultant in the Boston area, and general new-mom-bad-ass, recently linked to this great post from Bay Area Breastfeeding, LLC, which tells new moms when to seek help for a breastfeeding problem.  It’s a good check list, and reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about how new moms sometimes need help sorting out what kind of help would help.

I find that new parents’ needs tend to fall into three categories, in ascending order of prevalence:  clinical help, information, and general support.  Let’s talk about how you can get all those needs met.

1. CLINICAL HELP:  This is the thing you’ll need least frequently, but requires the most expertise.  Clinical problems are problems that require an expert and need to be solved or else something bad will happen.

If you have a concern about the baby’s health, the person to go to is his physician.  If you have a concern about your own physical health after the birth, you should consult with your own health care provider.  If you have a toothache, you see a dentist.  If you are clinically depressed, counseling and/or medication is what will help.  Etc.  This much is obvious, I think.  

If you have a clinical concern about breastfeeding, you should consult with an Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC).

Somehow that one is less obvious to people.  So let’s explore it a little.  If you had strep throat, you wouldn’t rely on your mother, or your co-worker, or your neighbor, to deal with it, right?  Because it’s a clinical problem.  Your mother (or co-worker/neighbor) has no training in dealing with your medical problems!  She is not qualified.  She might provide you with comfort by giving you tea with honey, and she might be very compassionate and do a load of laundry for you because you’re sick and can’t deal.  She might help you not feel so down in the dumps about it.  And all these things are super-helpful.  But if you have strep throat, you also need clinical help for your throat, and your mom can’t fix that.  So you go to the relevant expert — your doctor.  

Likewise, if you have a clinical concern about breastfeeding, the person to go to is an IBCLC.  Because your mother (or co-worker, or friend) has no training in assessing and addressing a clinical breastfeeding concern, and is not qualified to help.  

If you had just given birth and you had strep throat, would you look to your Labor Nurse for a solution?  No.  The nurse is trained as a labor nurse.  She does not have the training and qualifications to deal with strep throat.  You’d see a doctor.

That labor nurse also doesn’t have training dealing with clinical breastfeeding issues, unless she is also an IBCLC.  

(Why do so many of us assume that just because she was looking at your vagina for ten hours, the labor nurse knows about human lactation??  Yet many people mistakenly look to their labor nurse for clinical guidance about breastfeeding, and, unfortunately, many non-IBCLCs spontaneously offer clinical advice about breastfeeding, instead of saying, “let me send an IBCLC to see you right away since you have a question about breastfeeding.” It’s up to you to remember to ask whether the person advising you is an IBCLC.)

By the way, speaking of who is and isn’t qualified to provide clinical breastfeeding assistance:  Let’s say your husband had a toothache and you happened to be at your kid’s pediatrician for a well-visit, would you ask the pediatrician what to do about his tooth? No.  The pediatrician is not the expert you go to for that.  

Guess what, your kid’s pediatrician also doesn’t have the training to deal with clinical breastfeeding problems.  

Can you imagine if you sat at your pediatrician’s office and described what was going on with your husband’s tooth and she said, “it sounds fine to me” without even seeing him?  

She might be right about his tooth.  But it would not be right to take that as appropriate guidance.  Your dude needs a dentist. 

Even weirder, can you imagine if the pediatrician said to you “it sounds like his tooth is a problem” and then she told you what to do about it, without seeing him?  

No! 

And what if she told you your husband should only be brushing his teeth once every three days and never flossing, because his teeth might not learn how to fight the germs off themselves if you let them rely on dental floss.  Wouldn’t you be like, “Wait — aren’t you a pediatrician?  With all due respect, have you ever had any training about dental health?” 

Right?

Your kid’s pediatrician isn’t an IBCLC, either, and hasn’t had training in human lactation.

The person to see for clinical breastfeeding problems is an IBCLC.  

Hopefully you’ll encounter many people who are gifted and knowledgeable about breastfeeding in general.  A postpartum doula or a childbirth educator or an experienced nursing mother — or even your kid’s pediatrician — might turn out to be a great, helpful resource for general breastfeeding support.  That is all that most people ever need.  Just like most of the questions you have about your baby (how do I give a bath?) don’t require an expert fix by your pediatrician.  But if there’s a clinical problem, you go to the expert.  And if you’re not sure whether there’s a clinical problem, ask an IBCLC.

(I should mention here:  I am an IBCLC.  But most of what I do isn’t clinical practice, but, rather, the guidance and education and counsel that are more commonly sought by new moms.  I got the IBCLC so that if I’ve developed a relationship with a client around our work on the logistics of going back to work, the challenges of sleep deprivation, the weirdness of developing a parenting style, or the marital strain that becoming a mother has entailed, I don’t have to refer her out just because she also has a bleb.)  

2. New parents also sometimes need INFORMATION.  (How much weight gain can I expect of my baby in the first three months?  How do I give a newborn a bath?  Why is my hair falling out?  Where can I find a great new-mom’s group in my area?) Some of this kind of information can be answered online (you can find growth curves here) and sometimes you’ll consult a book, or your childbirth educator, or doula, and sometimes your friends and family will have answers. Try to distinguish questions that have One Correct Answer from questions that come down to personal style.  If it’s a question that has a Correct Answer, you want to make sure you’re asking someone qualified to answer correctly — a lactation consultant, or a childbirth educator or a parenting educator, or a physician or midwife, or a tax attorney, depending on the question.  

Other topics, such as how often to bathe your baby and how to do it, come down to personal style and don’t have one “right” answer.  For that stuff, your mom or friends or even an email from your co-worker’s wife’s friend’s babysitter’s mother might be the best help.  

But if you don’t like their “advice,” do it your own way!  That’s the difference between “right answer” information and “personal style” information.

3.  SUPPORT.  More than any of the other issues, new parents need support and companionship.  Most moms I work with never need clinical help.  Their pediatric visits are well-visits, and their six-week followup with their own OB or midwife is a routine checkup.  They mostly never need the clinical services of an IBCLC either.  But they still need support, counseling and gentle guidance. 

Good support is a blend of guidance and friendship.  A great support person listens to you, helps you get the little stuff off your hands so that you don’t have to waste your energy on it, and gives you enough guidance that you have the tools to do the big stuff for yourself.  She helps you sort out the advice you’ve gotten into “right answers” vs. “personal style.”  She helps you figure out whether you’ve got a clinical problem, and if you do, she helps you get clinical help.  

Mostly, she lets you talk about what’s bothering you and sort it out.  You trust her judgment so it’s reassuring when she tells you you’re doing well, and if she tells you she’s concerned about you, it inspires you to make changes.  She is looking out for you.  

Every single new mother needs multiple support people, and they’re mostly going to be people you already know. Some of your support people will play a mentor or coaching or counselling role, and some will be more like helpers, and some will just be friends who make you laugh or make a good cup of tea.  You should have lots of people in your life — this is what it means to have a village!

It’s right to need support, and it’s right to look for it.   Too often the new moms I meet are embarrassed to admit how much help and guidance they need.  But that’s kind of backwards.  I think if we can remember that it’s so human to look to other people for support and guidance and companionship, and stop pretending that Good Mothers Have Everything Under Control All The Time, the whole world will be a happier and more gentle place.   

So open up to the people in your life and ask them to come hang out with you.  You’re not asking them to be experts and you’re not required to follow all their advice.  You’re looking for a human touch. That’s not being weak or dependent, it’s being a human being — we humans take comfort from friendship.  And when your need for support and information is more than your own family and friends is ready to provide, look beyond the nest — try going to new moms’ groups or working one on one to get the help you need so that you can find your way. 

The Best Time I Ever Got A Sex Toy In Lieu Of Payment

So yeah, once I was teaching a class about what happens with sex when you become a mother, and they gave me a cock ring — instead of money — for payment.  And then I wrote about it for Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers,* and now you can read about it on Huffington Post — here.

*Do you know about Brain, Child?  It is the only literary magazine out there that publishes thoughtful, smart essays and features about motherhood, and it is so good, and also funny.  You should subscribe immediately.

Plan B and the Choice To Become A Mother

Here’s a good post from The Feminist Breeder about the Plan B pill.  The short story is that the FDA was set to approve OTC sales of Plan B, but at the last moment the Secretary of Health and Human Services intervened, making it impossible for young women under age 17 to get Plan B without a prescription.  The issue is now before a federal judge.

Becoming a mother I think creates more nuance in one’s feelings about reproductive decisions, and this is an issue people have strong feelings about.  The topic might not seem immediately relevant to a blog about motherhood.  But it is.  I think we’re all getting this stuff wrong when we frame discussions about reproductive liberty in terms of “choice” to have an abortion or not.  In fact, I think the word “abortion” distracts us from the alternative.

I think the discussion should be from a different angle. These are the real choices:  

Are you prepared to saddle yourself with the profound physical changes and logistics of managing a healthy pregnancy?  Yes or no?  

Are you ready to be responsible for the care of your body during a pregnancy?  Yes or no?  

Do you have access to health care and a place where you can get good, caring, evidence-based prenatal, puerperal and postpartum healthcare and education about childbirth?  

Are you prepared to turn yourself inside out to meet the physical and emotional challenges of labor and childbirth?

Are you prepared to use your body and time and sanity for the care of a creature who can’t talk, can’t walk, can’t even move, and relies on your bodily fluids for her very survival twenty-four hours a day, and are you prepared to undertake this in a culture where your school or job aren’t required to even give you some time off to begin to deal with it?  

Are you prepared to reinvent yourself in the role of caretaker, guide, mentor, educator, and shepherd a new human being from tiny baby into adulthood, and are you prepared to educate yourself about how to do this in a way that she turns out happy, well-adjusted and a contributing citizen?  

Are you prepared to handle the hassles and the disappointments and the frustrations and the time-suck and the logistical nightmares that go on for years and years, and the way that society denigrates you and stops taking you seriously when you’re a mother, and the hurdles you will face in your career because you’ve got a kid?  

**

What kind of world is it when we say to someone:  even if the answer to all of these is NO, you have to do it.  Choice is the only civilized option.

People Are Still Having Sex; they always will.  It is what adults do, for pleasure, for self-expression, for love; not just for reproduction.  It is delusional to imagine that there could ever be a world in which adults don’t have sex for pleasure.  

But sex can lead to pregnancy.  And becoming a mother is an enormous, serious undertaking.  Whether the person confronting these questions is still a child herself, or is over 17, it is wrong to force her to do it when she knows the answer is “no.” How can we say she is too young to make this decision but also say she is old enough to become a mother, the biggest responsibility of all?

If Plan B is safe enough to be available over the counter, it should be available over the counter for anyone who needs to purchase it.

Space Available in Upcoming New Moms' Groups!

Hi folks!  I love working with new moms, but I hate dealing with calendars and scheduling.  I mean, really hate and dread, like, I feel like I can’t face figuring out the calendar without some special decadent treat like: eating chocolate while having a massage, or: not sweeping up under my kids’ chairs for a week.  

Weirdly, no one offers me those treats just for dealing with my own schedule.  

Sigh.  Anyway, after much delay, here is my schedule of upcoming NEW MOMS’ GROUPS.  If you’re local to NY, you can come to the Chelsea group or the Tribeca group, talk about real stuff, and generally have a good time.  You’ll meet some cool women and they may become friends for life — one of my best friends is someone I met at a new mom’s group a decade ago when we were both unshowered, leaking milk on ourselves, sleep deprived and hoping there were other women who’d had a babies but retained their sense of humor.

Here’s one mom’s feedback on my New MOMs’ Group:

I could barely get myself and my baby out the door in those early months, but my sessions [at the New Mothers’ Group] were something I’d never miss. Meredith’s classes eased my mind, taught me everything a pediatrician doesn’t, helped introduce me to a great network of Moms and gave me a public haven to get my confidence up as a new Mom. 
  -Odette

If you want to talk about real mom stuff and can’t make it to a group or aren’t local, contact me and we’ll do some private consults. That’s easy to schedule!

New Childbirth Education Classes UP

Hi, People:  My 2012 schedule of Childbirth Education group classes is now, finally, up, through summertime — here.  So, register, and tell all your preggo friends.

Classes are fun, funny, and informative, and you’ll meet some cool other expectant parents.  Here’s a quote I just got yesterday from a student who took my October class and just had her daughter:

I think the biggest takeaway from the [childbirth] class for me was a great base of knowledge about labor + delivery, and the confidence to make the decisions that are necessary during the process.  I went into my labor with a very open mind & made decisions as they came about…. This was the most amazing experience of our lives to date.  Meredith - thank you for giving us the tools we needed for a successful birth!!!

Private classes are always available by contacting me directly at meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com.

Goodnight Light and the Red Balloon

If you’ve taken my Sleep Clinic, you’ve heard me talk about _Goodnight Moon_ — Margaret Wise Brown’s classic bedtime story, which acts like part prayer, part lullaby and is an iconic part of so many folks’ bedtime routines.  

The book’s been parodied lots of times, but this hilarious piece at McSweeneys is a new take on it — it’s an analysis of GNM written in the style of a scholarly essay, complete with an assessment of symbols of postwar materialism (bunny lists all his belongings), and thematic content (red balloon =  cold-war-era Communist threat), and an exploration of Bunny’s Search For Masculine Self:  

[T]he bunny’s final “goodnight moon” demonstrates his completion of his rite of passage and his development into a full man bunny. The moon, which visually appears on every page, grows larger and more pronounced—it is a chanting feminine voice, haunting and disturbing his world. Just as he must overcome his sexual desire for the woman who says “hush,” the bunny must resist the impending femininity outside of his safe confines. In Queer Theory, the bunny’s final admonishment—”goodnight noises everywhere”—represents his full on embrace of a heteronormative lifestyle and a rejection of his “deviant” thoughts, probably about the kittens with the mittens.

If you’re reading GNM to your little one night after freaking night, perhaps this will add a bit of chuckle-value for you.