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It’s my eleventh Mother’s Day, but I still think of it as my own mom’s holiday. This morning, looking into her fridge, I’m laughing that my mother has purchased seven different kinds of milk for the ten people currently in her house.
There’s something so perfectly, metaphorically, motherly about my mom’s urge to provide milk — even the grocery store kind, even milk from a coconut, it’s still Mom Giving Milk. Even more, she gets us each the kind we like and need, just ‘cause. It’s not how everyone demonstrates what mothering is to them, but it’s beautiful, and beautifully hers.
Happy Mother’s Day to my own mom, and to all of you.
Just so we’re clear — it’s the exploity thing, and the “lets foment anxiety and insecurity and snark among moms so we can make money” mentality that’s wrong with the TIME piece. But if the question is, what do we think of seeing a woman nursing a kid who’s old enough to stand and grab it? Well, some pretty famous mothers have done it.
Sometimes I picture online publishers sitting around a room looking worriedly at a bunch of charts with lines heading down down down — waning readership on their sites! Dismal traffic! Not enough clicks!
Then one of them grins and says, “You know what we need to do.” And they all smirk and don’t even have to talk about what comes next. It’s time for a Mommy-Bomb.
All they have to do is print the word “breastfeeding.”
Or “Formula.”
Or “Stay-at-home mom.” Or “Daycare.”
Or “Epidural.” Or “Natural Childbirth.”
And then a subtitle that includes the words “Good Enough” or “Mommy Wars.”
Done. They all laugh and do five minutes of work looking for someone to be the Sarah Palin (that’s what they call the “feminist” they’ll use to take a nonfeminist position for the article).
They then open some beers and laugh about how they can get women readers to do their work for them. They drive up traffic and ad revenue by fomenting insecurity and divisiveness and discord among the readers who can’t help but get sucked in.
So, it just happened again, with tomorrow’s cover article in Time Magazine (note I am not linking to it), which shows a model-thin woman breastfeeding her preschooler. This one’s got extra cha-ching because it’s not only a Mommy Bomb, it’s also a SexyBoobs Shot. The title is, “Are You Mom Enough?” SexyBoob Lady is giving us a Mona Lisa smile in her tank top and skinny jeans, showing off her gym-toned arms while her three year old suckles. She can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and squirt that shit with home-grown organic breast milk. Can you?
The article is apparently, about parenting styles — whether “regular” moms can measure up to Dr. William Sears’ version of Attachment Parenting; whether Attachment Parenting is keeping women down.
Except it’s not about these things, really.
A group of real women, gathered together with an experienced facilitator can have an amazing discussion about parenting philosophies, nursing, working vs. staying home — the works. But online, these topics don’t lead to discussion, they lead to a shitstorm. They’re not published to inspire discussion and thought. They’re published to create controversy. The hope is that you’ll click and click and click, to be scandalized or outraged, not that you’ll think, contribute, learn.
Here are a few things I think we all know, and one I think we often forget.
1. There’s no one perfect parenting philosophy that suits every baby and family just like not all babies are the same.
2. Babies are really needy and there’s actually no way to raise them without getting pretty mutually attached.
3. New moms, finding their way into their new identity are vulnerable to criticism and guilt, and can become insecure and defensive when they’re lonely with no company but the internet.
And
4. When you click on an ad-based website, you’re making money for that site.
I think it’s shitty that publishers run stories that exploit the normal insecurities new mothers experience. It feels predatory to me. Please don’t add to it by reading the story or participating.
Instead, I suggest you take a look at two really thoughtful pieces *about* the story: Katherine Stone’s piece on Strollerderby collects comments by over a dozen bloggers (including me!) about how to support real life women, not generic philosophies of Motherhood.
Rebecca Odes’ piece, also on Strollerderby, takes a look at the feminist issues in the photography of the cover picture. These pieces are worth your traffic; take a look.
This article from Consumer Reports is a great piece on the ten most “overused” procedures in childbirth:
1. C Section in low risk first birth
2. Automatic repeat C Section
3. Elective early delivery
4. Induction without medical reason
5. Ultrasound after 24 weeks
6. Early epidural
7. Continuous electronic fetal monitoring during labor
8. Routine artificial rupture of membranes (“breaking the bag of waters”)
9. Routine episiotomy
10. Sending baby to the nursery
The article, of course, goes into greater detail about how each of these is overused and what the alternatives are. I like this piece because it’s a great reminder to everyone of a few really crucial points
1. When you’re there, in the hospital in labor? You’re still a consumer, and entitled to excellent customer service.
2. Health care is a product we pay for and it is important to think about whether each thing you do is necessary/worthwhile.
3. You, as an adult, are competent to evaluate whether you need an induction/episiotomy/c-section/ultrasound, just like you evaluate whether you need the other things you pay for. You don’t need to be a medical expert to do this. You do need a medical expert *with you* to talk you through the benefits/risks/alternatives, but after that the decision is yours.
4. Not all of the things that doctors do routinely are helpful or necessary.
Ask questions. Get to know your caregiver. Be the customer. Get good care.
Another great one from Maurice Sendak. How many of us have felt like this might happen?
Maurice Sendak has died, at age 83. Above* is a clip of my daughter, then age 2, singing Alligators All Around.
He was one of my favorite parenting writers.
Wait, you thought his books were for kids?
Chicken Soup With Rice is a brilliant “Playful Parenting" approach to living with a picky eater.
Pierre is one of the best descriptions I’ve read on how (not) to deal with defiant behavior. (I have read it aloud, front to back, to a roomful of adults taking my parenting workshops).
Where The Wild Things Are shows us how children’s destructive impulses can find a home in fantasy, and lets us see an example of how you can both send your child to bed without supper and also make sure he gets fed.
Bears — oh how many of us have been in that frantic search for the all-important stuffed animal who’s gone missing again! That book is like a tiny treatise on how to play with separation anxiety and loss.
Each book is like a nugget of wisdom, showing us playful ways to cope with all that’s weird and challenging and complex when you live with little ones. You close each one with a new idea of how to proceed. Even poet Rita Dove famously used Sendak as an inspiration in a beautiful poem about mothers and daughters and body talk.
I love when children’s books are also for the parents. Because reading is like nursing: you hold your child close, you use your body and your mind to offer to your child a multi-sensory experience essential to his growth and development. You use intimacy, touch, rhythm and warmth, to expose him of the best that the world has to offer. It is so, so important to your child that you hold him and read to him.
And all too often, just like nursing, we look at reading as though it’s *only* beneficial for your child, as though it’s not equally profound for mom. But that’s wrong. When it works, it’s for both of you — the content of the books, the experience of holding each other and sharing the art of the written word. You’re in the milk and the milk’s in you. He’s in the milk and the milk’s in him. There you are, learning the world together.
Read good books with your child.
I like this blog post. It reminds me of a really wonderful, honest woman I worked with many years ago who sat down with me at our first visit and laid down two books and said, “I like a lot of things in both these books and I want you to help me weave them together to make something that is true to me.”
The two books? Ezzo’s Baby Wise and Sears’ The Baby Book.
I had to stifle a giggle at first, because the two books hold to nearly opposite ideals of parenting. But I deeply respected my client’s desire to combine a natural touch with a modicum of control, and we worked together to find a path that suited her and her family.
Don’t get me wrong, you should absolutely not give your money to that nutbar Ezzo.
But the bigger point is that even those of us who are instinctively high-touch and low-tech, through cluster feedings and colic and night-wakings — even for those moms, an urge to have some control over it all is not at all wrong.
In fact, as long as you don’t imagine you can transform a normal, needy baby/toddler into a pet robot, it’s completely appropriate to look for the things you can control. You must not imagine that a “good” mother is the one who erases herself to her baby’s existence. Babies are needy and your job is to meet those needs. But they are not so fragile that they can’t handle living with real, human mothers, who need a some efficacy over their lives and a sense of self.
It’s the balance that’s hard — figuring out what would help you feel a little control and learning what your baby’s needs are. That’s where help, support, and friendship can be so useful. Help helps.
Collect them all!
The other day, I was finishing a childbirth education series, and one of the students voiced something I think many pregnant folks think about. Now that we’d come to the end of our childbirth class, she said, she was less worried about the birth. But with some of those questions answered, she was beginning to think about what would come after. And when she thought about that, she was more wary:
"It’s really weird, and kind of intimidating, that after I actually have the baby, they’re just going to send me home with him, as though I know what I’m doing!"
When you’re new to parenting, not knowing what you’re doing is pretty par for the course (actually, that lasts — my son is nearly eleven and I still have no idea what I’m doing, but I think you get more and more tolerant of that feeling), but I still thought it was a brave thing for my student to admit. No one likes to feel like they don’t know what they’re doing.
What helps, I think, is to build some community. A supportive community means that you have helpers around after the birth so that you can get some rest and get fed and told you are awesome, which you are.
It also means you have some knowledgeable people around, whose opinion and guidance you trust — those people teach you, and boost your confidence.
And a supportive community also means you have some peers who help you see that what you’re going through is normal, even when it’s really unsettling. You learn from your peers by watching them, with their struggles, and joys, and seeing your own fears and concerns and pride and successes reflected in theirs.
Support is a combination of creature comforts, love, and guidance. Everyone needs it.
But the thing is, for lots of people, the only thing worse than not knowing what to do is the possibility that someone might find out you don’t know what to do. And so lots of people don’t reach out for the kind of community that helps boost confidence. Instead, they buy parenting books.
I’m not opposed to parenting books and I own a ton of them. But they don’t replace the kind of support and guidance you can get from real people in your life. A book might tell you about a generic baby and mother, but the author doesn’t know you.
Still, people buy the books, looking for guidance and handholding, and expertise. But too often, the books make the parents feel worse, not better. A recent English study looked at parents’ reactions to a variety of books by parenting “experts” over the past half century, and found that
although the advice from these experts changed over the decades, the one thing that didn’t change was the way it was delivered. Whatever the message for mothers, it was given as an order with a threat of dire consequences if mother or child failed to behave as expected.
I see this way too often. It’s so disheartening when a mom comes to the MOMs’ group worried that she’s ruined her baby because she can’t meet the standards set forth in the parenting books she’s been reading. So, just to get this out of the way — if you are following your gut, and trying to respond to your baby (your baby, not a generic baby in some book) and your baby doesn’t behave the way the book says she will,
Or if you’re using a combination of common sense and heart, and trying to get to know your baby, but it turns out you don’t feel the way a book says you ought to feel,
Or, if you’re reading a “trusted” guide about parenting, but the philosophy it describes sounds horrible to you, or just illogical or untrue, or you can’t imagine how you’ll ever do the things the book describes,
That’s all totally normal and not a sign that there is something wrong with you.
And when you give up on following that book, it is not baby-ruinous.
Babies aren’t generic. Their fates are not sealed in whether you did what was written on page 302 of that book on your nighttable. Parents aren’t generic. They have legitimately different ideals and values and feelings about how to go about their lives.
Raising children does not require parenting “experts.” It requires patience, attention, a lot of creativity, willingness to play a little, to experiment … lots of things.
It helps to have a decent knowledge of infant development, and you may need someone to teach you that, so you’re not exhausting yourself trying to get your 2 week old baby to walk. And if you have a clinical question about your child’s medical care, yes, you need a doctor. And clinical breastfeeding questions should be answered by an Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC). And many many people find it helpful to read or learn about a variety of different parenting styles and philosophies in general.
But for day-to-day parenting decisions? You don’t need an expert. You need real people who really know the real you and your real baby, and can help you find your way until you’re confident that you’re the expert.
So buy the books, if you like, but try not to take them as mandates. And when you’re reading something that makes you feel lousy, you need to stop and ask yourself why you put yourself through that. Isn’t your life hard enough now, without some obnoxious author’s voice in your head undermining your confidence when he doesn’t even know you and your baby?
Or skip the books entirely. One of the moms in my MOMs group this week told us she doesn’t read the parenting books at all; she found them too stressful. ”So what are you reading?” I asked.
“Fifty Shades of Grey" came the reply. Giggles all around.
That’s a much more entertaining way to spend your time!
Having kids gets a little crazy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be happy, productive, and sane. It is your life going by, after all.
I think everyone kind of knows that, but it can be pretty hard to find a good balance between the rigid, unfeeling antipathy of Tiger Moms/French Mamans and the Loosey Goosey of Too Much Indulgent Chaos Bordering On Helicoptery Martyrdom.
Especially when your baby is now a toddler, walking, beginning to talk … apparently ready to take over the world.
It helps to have some guidance. Next week, I’ll host a TODDLER PARENTING WORKSHOP where we’ll:
The class is open to parents of toddlers 11-30 months old. Although you can bring your little one, you may find it easier to pay attention if you leave her at home.
DETAILS:
TODDLER WORKSHOP II: Hands-On Problem Solving for Real Parents
Saturday, March 31, 2012, 10-noon, Kinected, 151 W. 19th Street, 2nd Fl.
$50 per person or $60 per couple (use paypal button at left). If you are a former student of mine, you can come for half price if you bring a full-paying new student or couple. Contact me to arrange this at meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com.
Last night I went to a great event hosted by CEA/MNY — a discussion of modern maternity care between the awesome Jennifer Block and Ina May Gaskin.
I can’t do justice to the whole event, which was so interesting, but I was particularly struck by the way Ina May described getting interested in birth in the first place. She reported that when she was pregnant with her first child in the mid-1960s, she went to a doctor and was told she would have medication to knock her out, and a “forceps birth.” When she asked why it was then-standard practice to extract all babies by forceps, the doctor told her that it was because “all” first-time moms had an “iron-hard” pelvic floor, which the baby would destroy like a “battering ram” unless a doctor cut her perineum and pulled the baby out.
A doctor who talks that way, whether it’s 1966 or 2012 is clearly trying to scare his patient out of further discussion, not provide guidance and counseling and safe, compassionate health care.
Here was Ina May’s reaction at the time:
"I didn’t know about that. But I did know I didn’t have any parts that were iron hard. But I didn’t know that you could fire — should fire — a doctor who says something crazy."
Ina May was inspired by her own common sense — not at first (she did, apparently have the knocked-out-forceps birth that time), but later, after she became a mother, she became inspired to reevaluate the care she and others were receiving, and make dramatic changes.
She began to think about medical advice and “what people said” about birth not only at face value, but in terms of whether it made sense to her. She knew that “iron hard” does not sound like a description of any part of a woman’s body, and instead of concluding “I must be wrong about my body!” she began to explore the other possibility — maybe the person saying this is wrong, even though he is a doctor.
And if so, then what?
The answer is, then I owe it to myself to to find (and ultimately, for Ina May, to provide) care that does make sense.
It’s inspiring. At one point, Ina May added that another point of inspiration for her was that she had been “an English Major in college.” Everyone laughed.
She described how reading Tristram Shandy got her thinking about midwifery care. Her point was not that reading 18th century literature is all you need to be a caregiver. Her point was that you don’t have to be a doctor to have a thinking cap. Ina May felt confident that the intellectual gifts that served her in the rest of her life would help her understand enough about maternity care to make competent decisions for her own body’s care.
You don’t have to become Ina May and start a Farm and catch 3000 babies in 40 years and become a birth guru. But we can all take action in our own lives by insisting, with ourselves, that when it comes to the care of our bodies, that we use the common sense and intelligence we bring to everything else. Birth (and breastfeeding, and motherhood) is not so haunted and mystical and weird and shameful that common sense and intelligence don’t apply.
And when it feels too daunting to do that yourself, let that be a sign to you that you’re not supposed to figure all this out alone. Childbirth classes, mother’s groups, breastfeeding support — all of these things exist to help you find the kind of care that will help you feel cared for while you do the transformative hard work of becoming a parent (or becoming a parent again!)
I used to love Atlantic Monthly, but in the past several years I noticed that their articles about motherhood issues can be super douchebaggy.
I remember a crappy piece many years ago by the often great Sandra Tsing-Loh, basically arguing that the ruin of society was caused by parents who try to understand their kids, an article that conflated basic empathy with “zero parental boundaries.” It had all the nuance of a cow bell.
Later, Hannah Rosin’s "Case Against Breastfeeding" (April, 2009) was similarly monolithic, transforming the author’s personal ambivalence about the act of breastfeeding into a million-watt advertisement for the formula industry and a defense of Neanderthal husbands. (My response to this piece was published as a guest blog on California NOW's website, and the full text can be found, now, here).
And now it’s a piece about home birth, in their current issue, by a dude OB, who has never, obviously, had to make a decision about where to give birth. Nor has he ever been to a home birth. His assessment is based on a time that he accepted a mid-labor transfer from a homebirth midwife.
I had been planning to ignore the article, since I’ve already cancelled my subscription and told them what I think of their “Cases,” and the way it seems they publish flame-war-generating pieces whenever a dull moment threatens readership. And I had been planning to ignore it, also, because, as I’ve blogged about before, I’m sick to death of discussions of birth politics that lack nuance and sound like propaganda.
But when I read it, I found it was less of a diatribe and mostly a stupid whinge. Here’s the gist:
OK, there was this OB, and once he was in the hospital and a woman came in in the middle of her labor, with her midwife. She had planned a home birth, but after many hours of pushing, the baby hadn’t arrived. Her midwife had advised her to transfer to the hospital because the birth was now outside the range of normal for homebirth, which is just what home birth midwives ought to do in such a case, just as any kind of care provider ought to refer out when something is beyond their scope.
So, mom-to-be goes to the hospital and encounters Doctor. Doctor scowls at her (this is his description, not hers!).
He tells us that he would have recommended a c-section hours earlier. Not because the baby was in danger — there is no suggestion that the baby was in danger when they got to the hospital — but just because he would have “worried” (his word, again).
Mom wants to hear whether there are other options. Doc tells us that there was no medical reason to do a c-section then, but:
It would have been easy to tell Laura that a cesarean was recommended given how long she had pushed, but I knew it was the last thing she wanted, so I explained that we could try some other interventions …
She agrees to try his suggestion of augmenting the labor with Pitocin to strengthen the contractions.
After they start the Pitocin, though, the baby’s heart rate decelerates. Doctor again informs mom of her options. They can do a c-section. Or they can use some tools that we’ve developed for this situation, which give us a closer look at the baby and the labor. They are: the internal fetal monitor and the intrauterine pressure catheter, and they exist, ideally, to give us a closer look and, hopefully, avoid doing a c-section if there’s no medical need.
She proceeds with them and, a few steps later, again with his counsel, decides to use the vacuum extractor to assist a vaginal delivery.
The baby is born safely.
At no time does the doctor say that he thought that the choices that he gave and that she chose were unsafe or inappropriately risky.
Afterwards, the mom conveys that she is happy the baby is born, but unhappy that she had to make the transfer, and unhappy with this doctor’s temperament. To his great surprise, she hopes to try for another home birth next time.
Why is this so astonishing to the doctor, and why does that prove, to him, the “Case” against homebirth? To me, this story is actually a great example of
In fact, it seems that the biggest drawback in this case was that the doctor was scowling and the midwife — who actually knew this patient — had no privileges at the hospital and so she couldn’t provide the kind of assistance that helps give better care than you can get from a stranger.
And why was this doctor scowling at the mom the entire time?
To me it seems that the mom was pretty much the ideal consumer. Not because she wanted a homebirth, but because she sought explanations and information, and made good, competent, adult decisions about the care of her own body, with the counsel and guidance of the expert she was paying to help her.
**
At one point in the essay, the doctor complains that
Short of a cesarean, she had experienced about as invasive a delivery as modern obstetrics has to offer.
I don’t get this complaint. The mom might feel disappointed, afterwards, that fate handed her this particularly difficult birth, which required medical intervention. But even really Birthy people, if they are sane and reasonable, don’t reject the idea of medical intervention per se — they reject the idea of using it when it’s not necessary. In this case, everyone seems to agree that it *was* necessary.
And if this mom preferred Pit and IFM and the vacuum to a c-section, who is this doctor to say that she ought to have preferred the c-section and spared him the extra hours by her side? She is the customer. She is the owner of her body. She is the decider. He is the servant.
Women seem to like to make decisions about the care of their bodies. It is not “crunchy” to say that a competent adult woman can be trusted to choose, among safe options that have been explained to her, the course that will be best for her.
**
Finally, the doctor whines that he hated this birth because he was forced to clean up “the midwife’s mess.”
What mess?
What if the patient had been his hospital birth patient from the start, and had had this exact same labor? After a couple hours of pushing, he’d have suggested a c-section; she’d still have asked what the other safe options were.
Would he have forced a c-section on her? That’s not allowed — as long as we continue to say that laboring women are competent adults, you can’t actually force one to do a c-section, especially when you admit that there’s another safe option.
They’d have landed in the same exact place.
There they’d have been — with her preferring to continue to push and use a little Pit and ultimately IFM and the vacuum, and him wishing she’d just do a c-section and get it over with. It’s clear he doesn’t get why the one is preferable to the other to her, but really? Who cares why she sees it one way. She’s the customer.
If she’d been his patient from the outset and had asked for more options instead of doing a medically unnecessary c-section, and they’d proceeded exactly the same, with the Pit and the IFM and the vacuum — would he have then said that he hated that birth because he’d have had to clean up his own mess?
Or would he have said, perhaps quietly, to a colleague, that he hated the patient because she asked questions, knew her options, and used her doctor as a guide, not a god. Would he confess that he longed for the days where women were conditioned to behave like docile little lambs, and not ask questions or realize they were competent to make decisions for themselves?
Or lets say that he wore her down, because she was tired and suggestible. Let’s say she caved to his pressure and said yes to him. Let’s say he got to do his c-section and go home.
And then she developed MRSA and was rehospitalized for days and days after her child’s birth?
Or had trouble breastfeeding?
Or was, “just”, deeply unhappy, felt that her integrity was bruised, or that she’d been bullied into beginning her course of motherhood with an unnecessary major abdominal surgery?
Who would be cleaning up his mess, then?
In the New MOMs group, we often spend a session talking about mothers-in-law. It’s a famous thing to joke about the woman who raised your child’s other parent, right? She’s unappreciative? Clueless? Finds you inadequate? Brags about all the things she did that made your partner turn out so awesome? Expects you to cater to her? Doesn’t really like you? Thinks you’re not quite good enough for her precious child? Wants to see the baby too much, or not enough? Doesn’t see how weird and idiosyncratic and demanding she is? Doesn’t do things the way *your* family does?
OK, friends, check it out: One day you may well be someone’s mother in law.
Put that thought into your waffle iron and toast it while you make your next set of plans to see your partner’s mom. What kind of mother in law would you be?
Today I was reading a humor piece on Huffington Post by a woman with a five year old son, looking ahead to a time when she’s the mother in law, full of demands and expectations of her son’s future wife.
I don’t think I’ve ever known a mother to obsess over her infant daughter's future spouse, but it's a thing I've seen often among mothers of sons. Just the other day, I was talking to a group of new moms about their feelings about their babies' gender. Of course everyone starts out saying, “I'm just happy to have a healthy baby,” but beyond that, many of us also do have some feelings about raising a boy or raising a girl. And sure enough, one point that is often raised by mothers of sons is: ”One day he'll marry someone and his wife won't like me and she'll want him to do all the holidays with her family and they'll move away and I'll be left all alone! Whereas if I had a girl, she'd stay with me forever.”
There are many assumptions here that make me really uncomfortable — hetero-normative, sexist and marriage-normative. (Maybe your son will be with a guy! Maybe your son will marry someone who has two dads and you’ll be the only grandma! Maybe your son won’t get married! and so on). But let’s get away from all that stuff and talk about what else is going on here?
Because assumptions aside, it sure is common for women married to men to incorporate their own family traditions, not in a 50-50 balance with their husband’s family’s traditions, but in a way that prioritizes her family’s access. In many hetero marriages, the bride’s mother “gets” family holidays and access to grandbabies in a way that the groom’s mother doesn’t.
Sometimes the new moms I work with who have sons, are already anticipating this imbalance and worrying about being the excluded Mother-In-Law, even when their babies are still in diapers. This feeling is summed up in the HuffPost piece, which parodies a “prenup” the author wants her five year old son’s future wife to sign — a contract which puts mom at the center of her son’s life forever.
It’s meant to be a joke of course, but it’s not exactly a joke — it’s also an expression of this anxious feeling that one day your son will leave you after all the earnest love you’ve poured into him for these long months and years. Those feelings, and the anticipation, are normal, and worth exploring. Who doesn’t feel the bittersweet of a child’s eventual independence?
But you can do more than fret about this. There’s actually something you can do: be nice to your own mother in law. And encourage your baby’s dad to be loving and expressive about how much he digs her, too. Because your baby learns, more than anything, by watching what you do. You want him to be good to you when you’re the mother in law? Give him an example.
I wondered, reading the HuffPost piece, how the writer treats her precious son’s grandma on dad’s side. Does she follow the rules she hopes a future daughter in law would? Does she include her and love her and consider her an equal grandma to her own mother? Does she encourage her husband to be generous and loving and expressive about how much he loves his mama? When you do these things — and holyOMFG they sometimes require a LOT of character on your part! — but when you do them, the message your son gets is: grown-ups are good to their mothers; it has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl.
Being good to your mother in law doesn’t mean taking away from your own mother. Likewise, when your husband is good to, and loyal to, and enthusiastic about his mom, it doesn’t mean he is picking her over you. There’s enough love to go around. That’s what family is about.
But maybe your MIL is whack! Recently a student of mine confided that her mother in law had just said something like, “Well, you’re better at being a mother than I would have guessed! Even though you can’t cook.”
Sometimes your partner’s mother is so freaking difficult that you absolutely marvel that she created him. But honestly, your future child-in-law may think just the same about you, right? So — don’t you think you ought to teach your kid how to behave in case you turn out whack yourself?
It is hard to turn the other cheek. And I am absolutely NOT saying you should lie down and passively accept anything abusive from any family member! It is vital to set good boundaries with parents and in-laws who can’t play nicely.
But I think only good can come of a lifetime of showing your child that when it’s family, you try to look for the best in someone, try to focus on what might make a positive relationship, and try to find ways to lovingly connect — because that’s how we take care of our family.
Here’s a conversation I have not infrequently with former clients who contact me when their child is a bit older:
Me: Wow, so nice to hear from you! Your baby must be <several months or more older> now — how is everything going?
Her: “I was doing fine, really, everything was settling down … but suddenly I’m just feeling … <sniff> … really … down <sniff, sniff>. I don’t know what it is; things are totally OK with the baby, it should be good … but I’m just feeling, now … <sniff, sounds of tears> … . “
Now, look. Parenting is never a cakewalk, and sometimes what’s happening in a call like this is that the mom is just having a hard week — that happens to all of us. And talking about it really helps.
But more often, when I get this phone call, I have two followup questions for that mom — (1) did the baby just start sleeping through the night and/or (2) have you just weaned. And more often than not, the answer to one or both of them is “yes.”
Usually it’s:
"Yes! And I thought I’d feel so much better, but here I am feeling even worse … "
I’ve thought about writing about this for a long time, but I’ve resisted because I haven’t been able to find good research backing up my speculations about why this happens. But last week an article on Huffington Post talked about the very thing I’ve observed for years. In “Weaning and Depression Linked In Many Women”, Catherine Pearson bemoans the lack of empirical data on this, and calls for more research on the issue.
Here’s the gist of the situation: When a woman is nursing, her brain almost constantly is secreting a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin does a number of interesting things in addition to letting the milk down. It acts almost like a drug that makes you feel good. It takes the edge off pain; it makes you a little high, a little trusting, a little floaty feeling. During lactation, a mom’s body is flooded with oxytocin and another hormone called prolactin, and together, they activate the same receptors as the drug Ecstasy; actually, a better way to describe that might be to say that Ecstasy is popular because it makes people feel like they’re having an oxytocin high.
Even before you give birth, you’re familiar with oxytocin from other life moments it’s helped you — oxytocin floods the body when you’re falling in love and that’s what makes you feel that sparkly feeling that all is right in the world. And it floods the body when you have an orgasm, which is what makes *that* sparkly feeling. You get a hit of oxytocin from massage, and from hugs, and from situations where you feel safe, loved, loving, intimate. It’s the hormone we’re all, basically, addicted to; it makes us like being with people who take care of us and keeps us coming back for more.
We all have our usual dose. And that dose goes way up while you’re nursing and then back down when you wean, and that transition back down seems to be particularly hard on some women.
(Wait a sec, maybe you’re nursing a baby but you’re not finding nursing and new motherhood to be like taking E? I think most people don’t. But underneath all the chaos of your day, there’s that baseline of oxytocin, helping you to get through it, while it’s hard, tiring and confusing. Oxytocin takes the edge off.)
Some folks think that oxytocin is what makes you “bond” with the baby; I find it a little silly to reduce something complex like love to a simple chemical reaction, but perhaps the oxytocin helps us get started, so that we manage to find the baby compelling and cute even though she screams and shits all the time and won’t let you sleep. In fact, when you think about it? The fact that we manage to love our kids is a little irrational. You’d have to be a little high to keep coming back for more. High on oxytocin. I think it’s supposed to be that when the baby is first born, it’s all chaotic and hard, but you have this hormone that makes you feel OK enough to get through it. And then gradually your life calms down and is easier and then you’re ready to cope with it without a mega-dose of a feel-good hormone.
Oxytocin doesn’t leave you forever when you’ve weaned, of course, you still get it from touch and security and trust and love. But that regular hit of it, many times a day, at regular intervals, triggered by breastfeeding, the baseline — that’s gone once the nursing is over. And while lots of moms don’t love breastfeeding, and many are happy for the freedom of having an older child who doesn’t need the breast, there are some women who seem to go into a kind of withdrawal after the oxytocin isn’t there. I’ve seen it happen at weaning, and I’ve seen it happen when the baby sleeps a long stretch at night, or during a nursing strike. In these cases, the mom herself is weaning off the oxytocin she’s used to getting all day long.
I don’t mean to suggest that every mom who feels sad or wistful after weaning is experiencing only a chemical withdrawal. There are also cognitive reasons a mom might be sad or down, or just feel the poignancy of life, around any major milestone. And many moms find that weaning is a non-event for their mood. But it seems to me that some women are particularly sensitive to this hormonal change.
And yet it’s totally under-discussed.
In my observation, women who feel a real dip in mood around weaning often find that they “even out” after a few days or weeks, as their hormones rebalance. There’s a great description in Joanna Goddard’s blog post about her post-weaning depression at Cup of Jo — her depression starts when she abruptly weans, and ends, spontaneously, six weeks later, when her period resumed.
Still, it can be a shock, and a serious downer, and for some moms, it’s the beginning of a slide into clinical depression that they won’t spontaneously snap out of in a few weeks. Yet I never hear of OBs or midwives mentioning any mood changes around weaning. Even for moms who see counsellors or therapists, these transitional hormonal changes are often unexplored. Most moms are utterly surprised by it, and that surprise can delay getting help.
Here’s what does help, though.
(Keep an eye on this, though. You probably don’t want a decades-long cycle of pregnancy and nursing! At some point you have to ramp down off the Fertile Goddess Dose of Oxytocin. And I’ve seen some pretty irrational behavior by more than a few moms at the end of their reproductive cycle who seemed desperate and a little manic to replace the new-mom feeling of “abundantly needed and physically in-demand but rewarded by the powerful feel-good hit of oxytocin” — including everything from adopting half a dozen new pets to having an affair to using some pretty serious recreational drugs. The problem is, obviously, you just create a bigger mess for yourself to clean up that way. How about one cat and a massage. And some chocolate. And a bunch of date nights :-) Keep an eye on yourself.)
"I never sought out professional help … I never felt like I was a danger to myself or children. The extent of my mood swings were sadness and irritation, and they seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared."
and another who says:
"I wish I had committed to seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist, since that might have helped me feel more supported and comforted … But during my depression, I didn’t feel confident that they would be able to help — I didn’t think anything would help."
It makes me so sad. Because I think we all know that the major symptom of depression is “hopelessness,” but when you’re saying: ”I didn’t think anything would help” — darlings, THAT IS WHAT HOPELESSNESS MEANS. All too often folks think that if they’re not “a danger to themselves or their kids” it’s not bad enough to get help.
No! It’s bad enough if you’re feeling like crap.
It’s bad enough if you’re sad and confused and irritable with mood swings that are currently f*cking up your life.
As someone wise once said to me (because I’m certainly no stranger to depression myself), “You don’t have to be lying on a stretcher in order to get help.” It’s hard to do, but you really gotta do it, because as hard as it is to believe, when you feel better, you will actually feel better. :-)
Company helps. And honesty. And treating yourself right. And patience and time and breathing and sunshine and chocolate. But when you need more, you need to reach out and get clinical help in the form of talk therapy or medication or both. If you’re finding that impossible to do, ask your partner to help you take the first step. Or please contact me and I’ll see whether I can help you find the help you need.
What about you? Did you have a bumpy ride with weaning?
Perhaps you’ve heard, lately, that French children behave better than Americans, because their folks use superior parenting techniques?
Since it’s the French, the new book about this comes to us as “wisdom” and not a “battle hymn” (Chinese parenting styles are so last year). And since folks are apparently more comfortable making fun of the French than the Chinese, the response to this has been more humor and less angst than responses when the Tiger Mom book came out, as in this Guardian review which totally made me giggle:
American mothers are taught to respond immediately to their child’s demands. ‘Why would you vouloir to faire that?’ said Agathe. ‘It is obvious que all bébés are un morceau d’un fuckwit and haven’t un clue what they wanter. That is why all enfants are made to stander for une heure chaque jour with an ashtray strapped to their têtes.’ … .a French maman will dire, ‘Vie est un bitch, et puis you die’ and as a result French children are extremely well-adjusted to existential ennui.
Funny reviews aside, though, Americans love to read parenting books that tell them everything they do is stupid, and that other people in other parts of the world are superior (why is that?). But here are a few truths you should know:
1. French toddlers throw food. Toddlers are toddlers; they aren’t developmentally different from American toddlers.
2. Their parents may react differently when it happens. That is about the parents, not the toddlers. There is no parenting style that can make an 18 month old act like an 8 year old.
3. You can’t really ever divorce yourself entirely from your culture, so there’s a limit to how much of a non-native approach you can suddenly morph into.
4. On the other hand, it’s almost always a good idea to observe what others do and see whether you can learn from them.
Instead of bemoaning our culture and trying to become French, Chinese or whatever it is this year, there are plenty of things you can do and still be you, to guide how you react to normal toddler behavior, and cultivate a decent, enjoyable, appropriate, non-frantic life, yes, even with young children.
Earlier this month I held a Toddler Parenting Workshop where we covered the Four Basic Principles of living with a toddler. The ideas are not French, or Chinese. If we have to name it, I’d say it’s Pragmatic Parenting, but we can also call it American if you’d like, because I do very much believe that parents don’t need to suspend the Pursuit of Happiness just because they’ve had kids. They do, however, need to make adjustments, because Happiness with small children isn’t exactly like Happiness when you’re childless.
Next month there will be another workshop focussed on hand-on practice.
We will apply the four principles and role-play specific parenting scenarios (like: how to respond when your kid throws food. Which they do. World-wide.).
If you missed the first Workshop, don’t worry — we’ll have a review of the basics at the beginning. <But I’m not going to read Frog & Toad again, you’ll have to ask the other students to give you a summary :-)>
Details:
TODDLER WORKSHOP II: Hands-On Problem-Solving for Real Parents
Saturday, March 31, 2012, 10-noon, Kinected, 151 W. 19th Street 2nd Fl.
$50 per person or $60 per couple (use paypal button at left). If you are a former student of mine, you can come for half-price if you bring a full-paying new student or couple — contact me to arrange this, at meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com.
Dear Pregnant folks and People With Babies,
One day your child will begin to talk. And it will seem like, Hallelujah, now things are going to settle down. And they will settle down, in many ways.
But you will still have a child. And you will have literally each of these conversations below, beginning at age 2 (when it is still age-appropriate) and continuing, each of these conversations, every single day, through age 8. Multiply by a couple kids, add in the fact that your employer also does sh&t like this and sometimes your spouse, too, right … this can devolve into insanity!
Unless you know how to find it amusing.
Last weekend I taught a fun Toddler Workshop where we outlined the Four Basic Principles of living with/communicating with little ones. Next month we’ll have a followup workshop where we practice how to use those principles, role-playing some of these fun scenarios and others. We’ll play out how to get through them without a throw-down, and with your sanity relatively whole. Check back here for date and time details!
The illustration is from http://www.nickmom.com/blog/nickmom-originals/seriously-asking-me-that/
Courtesy of my ten year old son, from a book called Children at Play, a Cul de Sac Collection, Richard Thompson, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2009.
P.S. Is this my son’s way of making fun of my career?
It’s so important to read to your kids. Start with these:
I don’t know the original source, but I saw it posted on facebook by someone named Ashley Nichole Crelin
Hey folks — there is still some space in this weekends Toddler Parenting Workshop at Kinected! Details follow:
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I mean this in the most loving way, but: Toddlers are crazy.
Like babies, they are inconsistent, irrational, and loud, and they can’t really do anything for themselves. Unlike babies, they can move around, talk (back) to you and leave a path of destruction through your home.
Once you know how to deal with them, though? They’re actually a lot of fun.
SO: Come to this Toddler Parenting Workshop and we will discuss:
Fun stuff, right? But I tell you — when you can understand what’s going on inside the Toddler Mind, you can make sense of it and have a little of your sanity back, without worrying that you’re creating a future monster. It can even be really delightful.
Here are the details: Toddler Workshop: Saturday, Feb 11, 2012, 10-12noon, Kinected Center, 151 W 19th Street, 2nd Floor. $50 or $60/couple. To register, click the paypal link to the left that says “Parenting Your Toddler.”
Discount for former students who bring a full-paying friend! Email me for more info at meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com.
Kinected is a wonderful resource for pregnant women and new moms: find out more here.
You may bring your child, but most parents find it easier to concentrate if their little one isn’t along.