"Reclaim Your Wife"

Have you seen the recent ad campaign for Bittylab bottles?  Last week they tweeted to new dads:

The idea is that the bottle is so much like a breast that your baby won’t know the difference and you can get your wife “back.”

Um, ew.

As this blog post at Ms. so aptly notes,

When wives aren’t feeding their child, they shouldn’t be expected to be “reclaimed” by their husbands. Women aren’t property waiting around to be used by babies, husbands or anyone else.

Obviously, when you have a baby, your relationship with your partner has to readjust — as you find a new balance, there is less time for everyone.  And it’s totally normal for non-nursing partners to feel, among their feelings, some jealousy of the new baby, even some resentment at the lessened attention from his mate.  There are a lot of ways to cope with the big relationship changes that happen when you add a baby to your life.  

It’s just … ‘reclaim’?  Was she his chattel before the baby annexed her?  

Bittylab touts the bottle as “mom-invented” as though this undoes the annoying misogyny of the “Your Body And Attention Actually Belong To Your Dude And Your Baby Is An Interloper” message.  But the idea of a bottle as “liberating you” from your baby is all wrong — it sets up the mom as a slave to her baby, instead of what she is: an adult caring for him and calling the shots.  

I am not saying it’s wrong to use a bottle.  I’m saying the idea of the bottle as something that “sets you free” implies that breastfeeding is a kind of slavery.  You may indeed, sometimes, feel like a slave.  We all have our hyperbolic moments.  I suggest you keep these thoughts to a minimum and try to reframe it, and think of motherhood as demanding, but not demeaning.

And when we suggest that the bottle sets you free so that you can take care of your man?  

WTF year is it?!  

It reminds me of that essay last year by Erica Jong protesting the way that new moms get involved with their babies (rather than going to parties, as she apparently did after her daughter was born) and saying, reproachfully, that when a woman “breastfeed[s] at all hours” her mate feels that her “breasts don’t belong to him,” and this is bad. 

Your breasts don’t belong to your mate.  Your body is yours.  If you’ve chosen to have a baby, there are difficult moments and wonderful moments.  You’re entitled to find it hard or complicated; you’re entitled to want a break; you’re entitled to think creatively about what might give you a break; you’re entitled to try to design a life where you get what you need in order to meet all your responsibilities.  None of that is wrong or inappropriately selfish.

But don’t support a company that tries to get your money by telling you you’re a slave and that your real job is to service your man.

Smile At Me

Sometimes, those first few weeks of motherhood are a bleary haze of exhaustion.  Especially if the birth was hard and now mom is stuck alone, trying to get the hang of things, with plenty of diapers and burp clothes, but no company.  (No adult company.  Newborns aren’t much company yet).  It can be hard to hang in there and know that things will eventually settle down.  

Many of us have heard “it gets better when the baby smiles” or “by about 3 months there’s a real turn around.”  When you’re in the early wilderness, it can be hard to imagine how that’s even going to make a difference.  But here’s some awesome photo evidence.  This pic I just saw by my friend Marcia Charnizon totally captures what’s so thrilling about it:

marcia bf image

(if my reading of Portuguese is OK, I think this baby is just 3 months old)

And look how the baby’s reaction affects mom:

marcia bf spray

Ain’t love grand?

Sadly for us New Yorkers, Marcia’s located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, but you can enjoy her work on her website and blog.

Working Moms' Group -- Fall Dates

UPDATE:  The November/December group is full to new members.  Please contact me (meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com) for January dates.  

Hi all,

The Working Moms’ Group is continuing this fall, after a fun and productive summer series!

I promise you, we will not solve all the world’s work-life problems in four short sessions.  Ann-Marie Slaughter and Marissa Mayer are not in the group, for better or for worse.  But we will discuss the deep and the trivial issues that come up for real moms who are combining employment and motherhood.  We will do some great problem solving, laugh frequently, cry less frequently, not take ourselves too seriously, eat cookies, and get to know some cool working moms.  Members also join a private listserve where the conversation continues.

As always, we will discuss childcare, feeding and sleep issues, but also work boundaries and negotiation, spousal issues, the way “balance” changes as your baby gets older, career choices, travel, and lots of other issues.

WHERE:  City Treehouse, 129A W 20th Street, between 7th and 6th.

WHEN: 7:30-9:30 pm on four Tuesdays:  10/30/12, 11/13/12, 11/27/12, 12/11/12

REGISTER:  By clicking “Purchase” button at left.

More questions?  Contact me at meredith(at) amotherisborn (dot) com

On Brain Fog, Marissa Mayer and Maternity Leave

Did your brain sort of go offline when you had a baby?  

When I was pregnant with my eldest I was a lawyer.  One of my colleagues informed me that a really bad case of “pregnant woman brain fog,” which she clearly thought I had, meant you were carrying a boy.  In her analysis, having a boy made you stupid: “they steal your brain, since males are dumber than females  generally, so they need to sap the mother.”  

(Meanwhile my secretary was telling me that if “you” — she used a generic “you” but she clearly meant “me” — looked ugly during pregnancy, you were definitely having a girl because, “girls steal your beauty.”  I was obviously having a hermaphrodite!)

My childbirth students and the new moms I work with often complain about “brain fog.”  It doesn’t happen to everyone and it doesn’t happen the same way for everyone, but it’s common enough that I giggled, reading this piece by Elizabeth Beller, about brain fog, which, for her, continues through breastfeeding, so that for months her mind works like this:

Feed Baby!

Blank blank blank blank blank blank.

Blank. Blank.

Baby!

Blank blank blank.

Bottles.

Blank blank blank blank.

Breastpump. Full Boobs.

Blank.

SIDS! SIDS! SIDS! SIDS!

Blank blank blank blank blank blank blank.

Blank. Blank.

Walk. Stroller.

Blank. Blank.

Air. Sleep. Sleep. Please, for the love of GOD, sleep. 

Christ these poor people with small children caught in earthquakes, floods, tornados!! The world is terrifying!!! How can I protect my children?!?

Blank Blank Blank blank blank blank blank blank. Blank blank blank.

Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Blank blank blank blank.

STARVING!! FRENCH FRIES! POUND CAKE! CHEESEBURGER! ANOTHER CHEESEBURGER! Pound cake. A beer.

Blank.

Pump.

Blank.

I totally laughed out loud at this description, but it also brings up something serious.

I’m not an expert on the chemical nature of these brain changes during and after pregnancy; obviously progesterone and oxytocin play a role in how we think and feel, and of course the sleep disruption typical of pregnancy and new motherhood plays a role in how clearly we think.  But I am hesitant to just chalk this up to “pregnancy” or “breastfeeding” biochemistry.  And I don’t like looking only at what you’re not able to concentrate on, rather than on what you’re doing instead.

Being pregnant and, later, becoming a mother, is an identity transformation, a creative project.  Creative projects use up a lot of brain power.  Perhaps that sounds mushy and new-agey to you, so I’ll put it this way:

You’ve just added a new citizen to the world and your body is required to grow him, and then to keep him alive.  If you don’t figure out how to get him cared for, he will die. 

Assuming he does grow up, he may become Ghandi, or Hitler, or a random guy selling shaved ice in Tomkins Square Park, or someone with an awesome sense of humor or someone who has really bad taste in shoes, or whatever.

In addition to whatever else you do with your life, your mind, and soul, and decades of your time and patience and attention are now required to help shape that person into Ghandi or Hitler or a random guy selling shaved ice in Tomkins Square Park or whatever; in some ways, how you spend these years will be a major factor in which of these paths he follows. This is true regardless of your parenting style — the fact is, your relationship with him affects his development. 

You created him out of your own cells. 

By fucking!  

And he’s going to turn out to be one of the five most important people you ever know, one of the people who changes you most in all your life.  

But for now he cannot do anything for himself, and cannot survive without you. 

You will be the most influential person in his life, for decades at least.  

You cannot get out of this relationship.  

Ever.  

Oh, also, by the way, you’re flooded with hormones and not sleeping normally and, unless you’re super-rich, you’re probably spending weeks/months/years wiping his butt and cleaning up his vomit and considering emailing photos of both to your pediatrician to check that they’re normal, and also doing work that our entire culture considers menial, and doing it without pay or benefits, and only sometimes finding that unbearable. 

Now, tell us, who are you?

Is it a surprise that, for a while, as you’re getting used to all this, some of your brain power is diverted from your other activities and to your new project?  Really, it’s only if we ignore what it is to become a mother that we could be even slightly surprised by it.

Let’s stop thinking about it as a fog that impairs concentration, and note that what a pregnant woman or new mother is doing involves a huge amount of concentration and brain activity 24/7  — some of it conscious and the rest of it simmering back there, the creative project of learning to be a mother.  Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s nothing.

I’m thinking about this today because I just read that Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, has announced that she’s pregnant with her first child and plans, this fall, to take “a few weeks of maternity leave” and she’ll continue to “work throughout it” (obviously she means “work for Yahoo”).  I don’t know her.  Most likely she is in that tiny fraction of a percent of American women who can afford to not wipe butts if she doesn’t want to.  

Many women who are great, wonderful, earnest and devoted mothers find it reassuring and calming to reincorporate their work-life as soon as possible after their children are born.  There is nothing wrong with that — it can be done with patience and support and appropriate balance.  But, as the world dissects Marissa Mayer and her maternity leave plans, it’s important to remember what maternity leave is — beyond the physical recovery from childbirth, there’s the creative transition to parenthood, which is not something that can be farmed out to nannies and nurses. 

I’m not saying that’s simple or easy to navigate — certainly if you’re a CEO or owner, you can’t fully “leave,” just like a mother of a second or third child can’t simply stop paying attention to her firstborn.  But I wish we’d stop thinking of maternity leave as a vacation — which you might choose not to take, just as lots of Americans choose not to take vacations (or weekends!).  And instead, that we think of the first word in that phrase — “maternity” — and focus what the mother is doing, for itself, and not *only* inasmuch as it takes away from her other things.  

My kids aren’t babies anymore.  Looking back, I remember having an awfully hard time concentrating on some non-child issues I had to deal with when I was pregnant.  That “fuzzy” feeling extended into the new-parent period. It was most intense while I wasn’t sleeping and was breastfeeding round-the-clock, but in truth, it has lasted years. 

Years!  During which my ability to attend to the non-motherhood details of life was reduced, somewhat, compared to what I was like before I became a mother.

Finally, I asked myself, why I was comparing myself to what I was like before I became a mother?  Meanwhile, now I was a mother — I would be, forever. 

And it was time to stop acting like that was a freaking impairment.

Today, my eldest is home sick.  Just having him in the house means my attention is a little diverted from writing this post.  Not just because he is complaining every five minutes, but because I am thinking about him, and not just this.  

Is that “mom brain”?  I am, after all, charged with his care.  Wouldn’t anyone — mom or otherwise — find that attending to something new takes away some of the resources you have for your other things?  

Lets stop thinking mothers ought to be just like childless women. 

Happiness in 6 words or less

I’m enjoying this exercise (discussed here at mom101) where folks boil down something strange that makes them happy into six words or less.  

I’m a pretty wordy gal, but after thinking it over, my answer is “deviled eggs.”  I could give you about six thousand words on why, but, briefly, I have memories of several vastly different times in my life — in 1990, in 2003, and in 2008 — in several different relationships, where funny, loving, intimate moments coincided with the presence of deviled eggs.  I also kind of like the taste of deviled eggs, but that’s pretty secondary.

What does it for you?

Are You A Mom or a Philosopher?

There’s been much hype lately about “hyper” parenting styles — from the Time Magazine brouhaha, to that book claiming that French-style mothers do everything better, and Erica Jong’s rant that overly “attached” moms don’t party enough — parenting styles are getting a lot of scrutiny, especially parenting styles that emphasize attentive devotion to an infant’s needs.

I’m always dubious about criticisms of parenting “philosophies” — there’s good and bad in any philosophy, but it doesn’t tell you much about what goes on for real people.  I’ve worked with over a thousand mothers; none of them lives a Philosophy.  

Here’s the thing — human young are extremely needy — they can’t eat regular food, or walk, or talk, or even hold up their heads, and they take years to mature — any philosophy that ignores that is at best delusional and at worst abusive.  On the other hand, real life parents cannot, as a practical matter, terminate every other aspect of life for the care and cultivation of perfect offspring for years and years on end.  They need a life, too.   Real people make nuanced choices through the day. So big arguments about whether This Style Of Parenting is the be all end all are arguments about nonsense, not practical discussions about what actually works for real moms.  I kind of feel like, let’s just throw philosophy in the toilet and talk about real life instead.

But before we do, there are two ways that I see “philosophy” really do some harm, so let’s just get them out of the way, OK?

1.  Seeds of Doubt:  

If I told you that my eleven year old came up to me asking for a drink of water on a hot day, was panting and red-faced from being outside in the heat and said he was thirsty, and I told him, “It’s not time for your water,” and made him wait 45 minutes, you’d think I was insane for withholding it.  Would it matter to you that I’d just read a book telling me to space my child’s drinks evenly through the day and not be tricked by manipulative nagging?  What if I told you that my five year old daughter was awake at 5 am crying that she had a bad dream, but I didn’t go in and tickle her back because she hadn’t been in her room twelve hours yet and my book told me that I should be consistent about boundaries and leave her till seven a.m.?  

I really hope it would sound like nonsense to you to follow a book at those moments instead of attending to my actual children.

On the other hand, I’m sure we can all imagine other types of situations where I’d be right to say no to both kids — over a lot of protest — where it was clear that they were pushing a boundary and needed some limit setting.  

In both cases, I’d be meeting my kids’ needs — the need for unexpected water or back tickling on the one hand, or the need for a boundary on the other.

What’s hard about having a baby, especially your first, is that it’s not always easy to be confident that you can tell what your kid really needs.  Here’s where the bevy of books and experts enter, designed to tell you.  But the thing is, none of the books live with your kid, and while some of them can be helpful in general about what you may be observing, ultimately the best judge of what your kids are doing and why, is you.  But  there’s a difference between giving you a general sense of what you may be observing, vs. scaring you out of your own judgment or telling you what to do regardless of the specifics.  

What’s really hard in the hour-by-hour of parenting is that no mother always knows the right thing to do.  Parenting requires living with some anxiety about how to proceed.  The wisest support people you encounter will give you some information about infant development but also help you learn to cope with that anxious feeling of uncertainty.  When you have some tools to cope with uncertainty, you can tune in to your best instincts and come up with a good plan for your family.  It won’t be perfect every time, but nothing is; it will be good enough.

The dogmatic books and experts, on the other hand, tell you it’s all very simple — three steps or five minutes or twelve nights, but if your life doesn’t happen to fit perfectly with their regimen, that lack of nuance sadly works to increase your self-doubt the way that airbrushed and photoshopped images of women plant seeds of self-doubt even in the most body-confident woman.  

With the photo-shopped images, the best course is to minimize your exposure so they can’t infect your brain.  Increasingly, I’m thinking, lets do the same with experts and books that leave no room for the real, weird, nuanced complexity of you and your baby.  Find the people who help you learn to cope with uncertainty.  Real moms, in real life, are the best place to start.

2.  Some Philosophies Are Just Wrong. 

OK some basics:  Human infants need to be held.  They need to be fed very frequently.  They need an adult around who can make eye contact, and engage.  There is simply no way around these facts.  Any book that is essentially telling you that you can turn your human infant into a tadpole who does not need parenting, is wrong.  Any book that says that you can harm your children by loving them or by attending to their needs, is wrong.  Any book that says that you should not ever trust your instincts about what your child needs, is wrong.  

Having said all that, we’d be missing half the problem if I ended it there.  Because the flip side is:  Human mothers have feelings about meeting the needs of their infants — good feelings and bad feelings.  It is not always easy, it is not always fun, it is not always lovable to be appropriately available to the needs of a growing child.  It can be frustrating and annoying and very lonely.  And any book that says that your own feelings and needs are irrelevant, that you shouldn’t have them or that you should ignore them, or that good mothers never feel these things — is equally wrong.  And any book that tells you that you should not want anything beyond meeting the immediate needs of your infant, is wrong and misogynist.  What you feel, and what you want are not always aligned with what you are prepared to do.

So — on the one hand, infants are genuinely needy and it is appropriate to meet their needs.  On the other hand, as a mother you may not always love that.  How do we reconcile these things?  

I think the way to answer that is to look at what not to do.  It’s a mistake and so unfair to reconcile these by not meeting your baby’s needs or by deluding yourself that your baby doesn’t have them.  Your baby is just a baby; she needs parenting.  

On the other hand, you don’t want to go to the other extreme either.  I like this piece by Katherine Stone which reviews a study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies which found that an “Intense” parenting style made parents unhappy and even clinically depressed.  “Intense” parenting style puts the needs of the infant at such a premium that the parents become irrelevant, and it’s no better than the other extreme.  Katherine discusses how this is different from developmentally appropriate parenting, where parents attend to the children without ignoring themselves. 

I have to tell you, I read the list of “Intense Parenting Tenets” and felt like clawing my eyes out — yeah, you’d become depressed if you believed these things.  Below are the “Tenets” and, following, my revision, for you to modify to your own life and your own needs, day by day:

INTENSE PARENTING:  • mothers, not fathers, are the most necessary and capable parent

REVISION:

1.  Mothers are really important to their babies, and women who’ve just become mothers sometimes underestimate how much they’re capable of and how necessary they are in their babies’ lives.  That doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can or should attend to your baby’s needs.  It also doesn’t mean that you are going to love every second of it.  

(also, p.s., how heteronormative?!)

INTENSE PARENTING: • parents’ happiness is derived primarily from their children

REVISION:

2.  Parents of older children often describe their children as a source of happiness and enrichment — this is something new parents can look forward to.  Parents of newborns are often surprised that they don’t feel a deep relationship yet.  Many of them take great pleasure and satisfaction in many aspects of being with their babies, but many of them also feel a sense of mourning for the kind of freedom and happiness that went with being childless.  It is an adjustment.  As an ongoing matter, adults need adults in their lives for happiness and stimulation, not just children and babies.  However, the bond you share with your children can be extremely rewarding, especially as it deepens over time.

INTENSE PARENTING: • parents should always provide their children with stimulating activities that aid in their development

REVISION: 

3.  Living with an attentive adult who makes eye contact, holds the baby and talks, and reads to her, is phenomenally stimulating for an infant.  Think of your job as a parent as to introduce your child to the world, not to create a second-by-second bonanza of stimulation.  Hanging out is often the perfect activity.  When you’re about to do something, you can start by thinking, “does this seem like it would be fun?”  Yes, for you, not just for your baby.

INTENSE PARENTING: • parenting is more difficult than working

REVISION: 

4.  Parenting is surprisingly difficult if you imagined it was going to be easy.  It is harder than some jobs and easier than others.  The pay is awful but there is a casual dress code.

INTENSE PARENTING: • a parent should always sacrifice their needs for the needs of the child

REVISION:

5.  A parent should sometimes sacrifice her needs for the needs of the child, and sometimes the child is going to have to sacrifice or wait on the needs of the parent.  This is true in any relationship and also true in parenting.  The difference is that in other relationships, both parties decide together about give and take.  With your child, you are responsible for figuring out what fair sacrifices on both sides are, because you are the adult.  If you have loving friends in your life and you aren’t depressed, you will learn to have confidence that you can make good judgments about how to balance that, but you will not always be certain that you’ve done it right.  That is okay, and enough.

This is a saner version of parenting, but it needs some honing to your particular situation, and that takes time. I hope you contact me so we can talk about it further.  

Keep that baby shaded!

It’s really hot out, and I’m often asked about sunscreen safety for little ones, so here’s a nice infographic from the FDA, showing us, basically, that the best bet is to keep your baby in the shade; one caveat below the image, for breastfeeding moms.

sun safety

The article goes on:  

Should you put sunscreen on infants? Not usually. The best approach is to keep infants under 6 months out of the sun, especially between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM.

But when you are outside together, here are some of the most important ways to protect your infant from the harmful rays of the sun: an umbrella and brimmed hat for shade, a cooler for liquids, a bottle for hydration, and clothing for covering the skin.

Learn more about keeping babies safe in the sun. 

Graphic by Michael J. Ermarth, Food and Drug Administration

One thing, though — I’m noting the bottle in the picture, so I’ll add:  if your baby is breastfed, she is really unlikely to need supplemental water.  Breastmilk is 87.5% water, and allowing your baby to nurse when she seems to want to should provide all her hydration needs, even on hot days.  There is a nice summary of guidelines for water use on hot days here, basically saying it’s not necessary, and citing numerous studies to conclude that even at temperatures up to 105, breastfed babies do not need supplemental water as long as they are allowed to nurse (citing multiple studies).  Furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said 

During the first 6 months of age, even in hot climates, water and juice are unnecessary for breastfed infants and may introduce contaminants or allergens.

On the other hand, the baby pictured here is already sitting up and may be more than six months old.  Small amounts of water, recreationally, or with meals, are fine in older babies, though even an older baby who is still nursing will get plenty of water from breastmilk.

Moms do need water, though!  I am hoping that cooler is totally filled with beverages for that mom and the friends she’s meeting for her picnic!

Bringing Sexy Back -- Study Looks At Sex And New Motherhood

One of the things you hear about sex after baby is that “you have to wait six weeks.”  A new study published online this month in the Journal Of Sexual Medicine, looked at when women resumed sex, what kind of sex they had and what motivated their timing.  It goes beyond the generic idea, and explores  why, when and how real new mothers have sex.  It found, (to no one’s surprise, I hope), that there are a lot of factors at play, and that it varies.

Before we get into it, though, can we just pause on the “Six Week Rule”?  Usually it’s expressed as something like:

You have to wait six weeks after having a baby before you resume normal relations.

Now, I ask you, what does any of that even mean?   Although we’ve all heard this “rule,” this is not some sort of medical canon.  In fact, as I understand it, there is no medical basis at all for a generic 6 week (or any!) proscription on sex.  Instead, this recommendation started with doctors giving their patients “permission” not to do it for a while out of some concern that the poor women otherwise couldn’t keep their husbands at bay.  

Can we look at all the assumptions there?  a. She has a husband.  b. He wants to have intercourse, obviously.  c. She doesn’t, obviously.  d. She can’t say no to him without a doctor’s note. e. The only kind of sex is intercourse.  f.  By six weeks she either should want to, or she should do it anyway, because for god’s sake we just gave her six weeks off, sheesh.

Doctors should not pretend there are medical reasons for things that have no medical reason.  

Also, what reason could there be?  No one ever spells it out.  There’s a kind of image that childbirth always causes a disfiguring gaping-wound trauma to your ladybits.  It is a Disaster Area that mysteriously requires no ongoing clinical care or medical attention, yet is so horrible that we cannot touch it, play with it, think of it or go there.  Vagina Zahadoom.

A normal spontaneous vaginal birth might leave you feeling sore and tender for a few days, but it’s not physical trauma that restricts your body’s normal functioning any more than some other kind of big workout.  Even for women who had stitches, the generic idea of avoiding all contact in the zone for six weeks is arbitrary (and tell me, how is an orgasm without penetration going to get anywhere near that scar?).  And what about the 33% of American moms who have a c-section?  What vaginal trauma do we think they suffered?  

I just hate the idea that we’re all carrying around this idea that birth is a vaginal explosion that turns your nether regions into Beirut.

So — if you want to have sex before you’re six weeks out, it is beyond unfortunate to be told a bullshit reason not to.  You’re a grown freaking woman; you’re allowed to have sex if you feel like it, it’s your body. Talk to your doctor and ask if there’s any reason *not* to.

And by the same token, if you don’t want to have sex, whether it’s been 3 weeks or 3 months or freaking five years, you don’t need a Fakey Mc-Fake medical excuse.  “I don’t feel like it now” is enough.  That’s the other thing about the Six Week Rule.  Do you know how many women I meet who feel unready for sexytimes after 5 weeks and six days?  Many.  Too often, I find, those moms  have interpreted the six-week thing as an affirmative injunction, like it’s mandatory to do it at six weeks, like by then they “ought to” want to “by now” because they had “six weeks off.”  Because their doctor said so.

No.  Your doctor has no idea what you like in bed, or when you like it, or how or where or why.  

(btw, I have never, in ten years of working with new moms, heard of a doctor who spontaneously had an actual conversation with a pregnant patient about this, asking what the couple’s sex life was like, and tailoring any future recommendation to their specific habits, desires and physical limitations, if any.)  

(btw2, What are “normal relations” anyway?  The Six Week Rule makes it seem like sex is just one thing — that everyone does it at the same time, the same way (and that “everybody” is a guy with a penis and a woman with a vagina and it’s all “insert tab a into slot b”).  Lots of folks dig intercourse, obvs, but it’s not the only way to get off.  Sex is supposed to be something that feels good, right?  And, as we grow, isn’t it normal that what feels good might also develop and change?)

** 

Soooo, this study looked at what actually happens with sex after a baby.  And one of the first things they found debunks the idea that no woman wants sex initially: 40% of women were masturbating in the first few weeks.  

Hm.

So, despite the “6 Week Rule” assumption that of course she doesn’t want it, apparently many women are at least into sex with themselves at first.

(you know what’s hard about blogging?  Everything I write I imagine how it could make someone feel bad.  So, I wrote that and now worry that someone reads it and feels guilty that she wasn’t getting herself off when her kid was 3 weeks old, like it’s one more thing on the endless perfectionist to-do list: have a perfect vag birth, breastfeed flawlessly, donate extra pumped milk to tsunami victims, lose all weight instantly, teach your child Mandarin and harp lessons while they are nursing, bake your own gluten free bread and do it all while masturbating!  So — NOT LIKE THAT.  Every one of us has to take some time to blend the newness of Being A Mother with the rest of who we were beforehand.  For many women, that means that the sexy stuff takes, temporarily, a back seat to the other projects.  For other women, though, being sexual never goes away, and that’s where that 40% figure becomes interesting.  My guess is that it has more to do with how she learns than with anything else — some women table everything else to immerse themselves in learning something new, others proceed more evenly.)

The study looked at what activities moms did and when they did it.  They also looked at the mom’s desire level. (I love that the study also separated out desire from what the ladies were doing and when they were doing it.  Because, as anyone who’s seen Girls, (or When Harry Met Sally) knows, it’s possible to engage in sexual activity without desire.  

They found that … it varies.  As to timing, “significant differences in time to resumption were found.”  They also found that not everyone was doing the same thing, duh!  Although a majority waited a couple months before intercourse, only 60% were having intercourse *at all* at 7 weeks.  Many women started with oral sex (giving) and masturbation before intercourse.

When identifying the factors at play in what activity women chose, and when, the study found the following factors were significant:

* good birth experience

* adequate social support

* mom felt the partner’s sexual fulfillment was important

* mom perceived partner had a lot of desire.  

* mom’s fatigue level

Results also suggested that postpartum desire was not  significantly influenced by breastfeeding status, vaginal issues, or psychosocial variables.  Desire was increased most when women had feelings of intimacy and closeness to their partners (shocker!).  Desire was lowered by fatigue, sleep issues and time constraints. 

One thing this study did not examine:  Was the sex any good?  Because isn’t that actually kind of the point?  I have a lot of clients and students whose main complaint about sex isn’t about what, when or how much, but that it’s lousy, dull, “different,” weird or even painful at first.  I’d love to see a study that examined sexual pleasure in new parents.  For now, if your baby is really young and you have resumed sex, it’s also not mandatory to do it a lot if it’s lousy.  For some folks, sex is not awesome the first few many times, for lots of reasons.  There are things that help.

So what does that add up to?   Women aren’t generic.  Some will feel more muted desire and need a sexual hiatus as they transition to motherhood, others are ready to go right away, but what “ready to go” means varies from mom to mom.  Some stuff is clear, though:  when we foster appropriate education and support (great childbirth class, labor support and appropriate clinical care to improve birth experience, postnatal support and a mom’s group to provide social support, cultural and societal supports that foster the bonding and intimacy between partners and help new parents get rest), we are investing in new parents’ partnerships, and in everyone’s well being.

Taking Care Of You

I can’t count the number of times I’ve told clients and students “be gentle with yourself.” 

"Take care of your own needs."

"Put your own oxygen mask on first so that you can take care of everyone else."

"Fill up your cup."

"Make time for friends and cups of tea, chocolate, sex, fresh air, pedicures.  You deserve it."

"You deserve to be happy."

So easy to say, all of these things.  

Not always so easy to do.

Not even easy when your career involves talking about this stuff.  Which is why I love this recent piece called "Self Care Means Taking Care of You!" by my friend Caitlin Fitzgordon, a postpartum doula and childbirth educator in Brooklyn.   Caitlin writes beautifully about her own struggles to balance the normal sacrifices of devoted mothering with a genuine need to prioritize herself.  She says: 

Losing yourself might be considered a normal part of motherhood. Your old self is gone and a new self develops—one hard-wired to take care of a new, delightful, confusing, needy person. Sometimes, though, it goes too far.

It’s true.  In the early weeks/months/years it’s appropriate — and can feel awesome — to totally throw yourself into motherhood, even if that means you look, from the outside, like you’ve lost yourself.  But at some point, you’re not just Becoming A New Mother anymore, you are one, and your normal, human, adult needs come rearing up and need to be fit back in.  Not in place of caring for your child, but alongside.  Finding a place for yourself can be oddly difficult — not just because it’s logistically hard, but because it can feel weird and wrong to even have needs.  Caitlin reflects honestly and candidly about her own excesses, and I admire her courage in saying, essentially, “yeah, no matter how much of this I might tell my own clients, this stuff is hard for me, too.”

Boy do I see my clients struggle with this stuff, and boy do I struggle with this stuff myself, sometimes, too.  It can take different forms — for some moms it’s literally that they don’t make time for themselves, to go out with friends, to get to the gym, to sometimes take naps.  My own kids aren’t babies anymore, so I get a lot more time than new mothers do, but no matter how many times I re-learn this, I still have phases where the balance is really hard.  For me it’s less about what my free time looks like and more about my mindset — I sometimes forget that my own happiness is not only a priority but a necessity. 

A necessity.  Like, how feeding my children is a necessity.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of considering a mother’s happiness only a luxury, something you hope “someday” to make time for, or something kid-dependent (“I should be happy as long as my kids are thriving and my work is getting done”).  Well, I think that a lot of the things we took for granted when we were childless are now luxuries (time, certain kinds of privacy, flexibility, comforts).  But not happiness.  The idea that you’re supposed to “do without” happiness as long as your kids and work are getting handled; the idea that you should be stoic enough enough to handle everything and never need much for yourself is, um, totally freaking misogynist, puritanical and basically effed up.  

And yet, weirdly easy to buy into!

And, once you’ve gotten a little mired in it, and you’ve either started yelling at everyone a lot (Caitlin) or become depressed and withdrawn (me), it’s a total pain in the butt to get out of because of Guilt (“I should be more stoic and need less and do more!”) and Hopelessness (“It’s pointless to take a fifteen minute nap when I’m this tired/ I’ll never have time to get to yoga anyway”).  

It’s so ugly.  

And what’s really tricky is that a lot of the time, the very obligations that leave us feeling trapped are things we also love: Taking care of our kids.  Nurturing our careers.  Connected time with our partners.  Tending to our home.  It’s not that we shouldn’t take these commitments seriously, it’s that we need to keep an eye on whether they’re in a balance that still makes us happy.  And if the answer is no, we need to take that seriously.

There’s not a quick cure or a permanent fix.  But I think sometimes it helps to just insist you go to that spinning class at the gym even though you feel sad and lumpy and you don’t have time.  You go anyway, and you sweat and feel better.  

Or push your sorry ass out the door and have a drink with friends even though you feel it’s all so exhausting and you are also now stinging-with-guilt-because-you-were-kind-of-a-total-martyry-beeyotch-to-your-partner-about-the-fact-that-he-was-going-to-do-what-we-don’t-call-babysitting-but-which-he-was-totally-thinking-of-as-babysitting.  You go anyway, and you get there and laugh and laugh and laugh and feel light, because friendship sloughs the stress off you.  

Or you send your husband out to dinner with your kids when you’re exhausted, even though you work full time and feel guilty that you “should” want to be with them every waking minute.  You do it anyway.  And then your apartment is quiet and you lie in bed and meditate or masturbate or read a book or browse Facebook, or I don’t know, whatever you like to do, and find that you are starting to feel a little better.  

And a little better with the next thing, and better still with the next and then suddenly you find yourself saying, “I’m starting to feel human again,” not because you’ve stopped being serious about your work or about your kids or about your other obligations, but because you’ve started being serious about taking care of yourself.  Too.  Being an adult, being a mother, being a wife, being someone with a career and a life — these things shouldn’t mean you don’t also get to feel human.  

It doesn’t get all solved with one pedicure.   Taking care of yourself is like taking care of your kids!  You do it in tiny bits, little by little, making small incremental progress, reassessing all the time to see whether what felt good last month is still good now.  It may start, though, by insisting: I will not succumb to guilt for needing some human comforts!  And it helps to remember, as Caitlin wisely notes, it’s not something you do once, not something you master and are then done.  It’s something you practice forever. 

What helps you take care of yourself?

"Vagina"

I hope that when I’m an octogenarian, I am as funny and clever as these two bloggers who posted this truly awesome piece about  the ridiculousness of the recent Michigan Vagina Fiasco.  I may have to start referring to the female genitalia as a “front butt” now.

I’m linking to this, here, because all mothers have vaginas, obviously, so a nationwide meltdown about one congresswoman’s use of the word “vagina,” is relevant to us all.  

(The short version of the story, if you haven’t followed it, is that Rep. Lisa Brown, a state congresswoman in Michigan, used the word “vagina” in a debate over that state’s bill governing abortion.  After using the word, she was banned from speaking in the State House, which, since her job is to be a legislator, means that she is no longer capable of representing the voters who elected her.)

The world contains lots of different people with lots of different views and perspectives, but one thing is clear:  women possess vaginas.  There is nothing disgusting about that, or about the word itself.  After the V-Bomb was dropped, another congressman told the press that the word Rep. Brown had used was:  

vile, so disgusting, that he could never bear to mention it in front of women or “mixed company.”

WTF?

We are adults.  We can name our body parts, even the amazingly multi-tasking body part involved in birth and sex.  It is offensive to all mothers — every mother, no matter her politics — when someone is punished because she mentioned the body part that makes her female. 

I do have to chuckle, though, imagining what would have happened if she’d said “vulva”.  Of course half her audience would probably have thought she was talking about a kind of car.

Tom Tomorrow cartoon about Lisa Brown

Edit, 6/26/12:  Just found this excellent cartoon from Tom Tomorrow, a propos:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/25/1102290/-Unspeakable

Where Are The Professionals?!

It is 3 am and you are changing your newborn’s diaper and looking at the glob of scab that will ultimately become her belly-button and suddenly, you are possessed of a certainty that you are supposed to *do* something to it, but you can’t remember what.  Wash it?  Swab with a q-tip?  Ointment?  Rubbing alcohol?

Depending on how tired you are, this resolves one of two ways:

1.  Say to self, “well, I’ll look it up in the morning, but whatever the right thing is, there is no way this baby is dying even if I get it wrong in the middle of the night.”  

or

2.  New-mom-meltdown where you become more and more anxious, not just about what the right answer is, but about the fact that you don’t know it, and whether this is a sign that you are basically a shitty mother.  I so hope this isn’t where it goes, but I know that for all of us, sometimes this is exactly where it goes.

Also, if you took a good prenatal class, this thought process is generally also accompanied by:

"Crap, we talked about it in that newborn care class, but I can’t remember what she said to do???"

Look, most of these late-night (and mid-day, and morning, and afternoon) freakouts are just the ordinary course of new parent development, and if you’ve got lots of loving people around you who take good care of you, they’ll help you figure out what to do.  Even more important, they’ll help you remember that freakouts are almost always over things that are low stakes and the “answer” doesn’t matter that much.  (And if those people don’t do that stuff, you need some other people in your life to help you get that!)

Still, in a pinch, it’s so helpful to have someone who can tell you the detailed answer, right? 

You can email me, of course, but I am generally asleep at 3 am (and one day you will be, too, I promise), so you won’t get a response till morning.  

So, at those moments, your best bet is an awesome resource called www.birth360.com  The website is a series of great, short videos by renowned educator and author Erica Lyon (author of The Big Book of Birth).  You click on a topic (like, umbilical cord care! ) and there she is, reminding you exactly what you learned in your newborn care class.

It’s more than that, though.  Great prenatal classes don’t just teach you “how”; they address the way that having a baby is a life experience that involves your body, your mind, your identity.  Having a baby isn’t just learning to change diapers and give a bath, it’s adjusting to the way that living with a newborn is weird and new.  It’s coping with uncertainty and doubt as you grow into the role.  It’s learning how to communicate with someone who can’t talk, and learning who you turn out to be now that you’re a mother.  

What helps you grow into all this is community and support, so that you are free to voice your fears and ideas and explorations in a safe environment, as you get the hang of it.  But when it’s 3 am and your Moms’ Group isn’t till tomorrow afternoon, you may also find yourself hanging on Erica’s words in some of the other birth360 videos, where she talks about maternal sanity, or doing “just one thing per day.”  

One of my favorites is this clip, called "Where are the Professionals?!"  about how many new parents feel, initially, when they’re booted from the hospital, baby in tow, feeling like imposters.  She injects a much-needed bit of humor into all this stuff, which dispels some of the horrible solemnity we can all slide into when we do something new.  

I have known Erica for many years, and her classes are some of the best out there.  She’s an awesome resource and the site is a great help for many new parents; check it out.

So, OK, but one more thing.  Erica says, at the end of that last clip, “it takes a little while for the part of you who is a mom to feel like a mom.”  I can’t overstate how true this is.  And so, when you’re freaking out in the middle of the night, as you’re clicking over to birth360, try to remember that one sentence, OK?  Because a lot of the anxiety and self doubt comes from just not being used to the role yet.  It will come, it just doesn’t come, for everyone, right away.  It comes in spurts, I think, and some people “feel the part” within the first few weeks, and others not for many months to come, or even over a year.  

It’s a big transition.  Be gentle with yourself.  

Working Moms' Group is Back!

I’ve had a bunch of requests to re-start the working moms’ workshop and listserve. 

The irony is, often new moms who are back at work don’t sign up for this kind of thing because they have no time.  But here’s the deal, folks:  you need this even though you don’t have time.  

Why?

1.  Because it builds knowledge:  we cover the logistical nitty gritty stuff (how and when to pump), and also the big emo concerns (“will my baby love the nanny more than she loves me??!”)*.

2.  Because it builds confidence:  you deserve to get to know a group of awesome other women in the same situation and see your experience reflected in theirs and let it all hang out just like Stay-At-Home moms get to do at the MOMs’ group.

3.  Because it’s a good networking opportunity.

4.  Because it’s only twice a month and you can totally make it to this, I promise.

5.  Because it will be fun.  Maybe you’ll all even go out for a drink afterwards!

Each week we’ll discuss a new topic pertaining to the balance of work and motherhood —For instance: 

  • Childcare — finding it, and then, when you do, having a great relationship with your caregiver, learning to tolerate the normal doubts and ambivalence, and how to assess whether this set-up is right for your child.
  • Food Stuff:  breastfeeding, pumping, weaning, nighttime issues, and, for those with older babies, solid foods.
  • The Re-Balance of Power: co-parenting with your partner when both of you are employed
  • Basics of Self-Care:  sleep, exercise, and basically how to get a life.
  • Work Issues — negotiating liveable work arrangements, dealing with co-workers

WHERE:  City Treehouse, 129A W 20th Street, between 7th and 6th.

WHEN: 7:30-9:30 pm on four Tuesdays:  6/12/12, 6/26/12, 7/10/12, 7/24/12

REGISTER:  By clicking “Purchase” button at left.

Members will be invited to join a private listserve to continue the discussion.

More questions?  Contact me at meredith(at) amotherisborn (dot) com

*Of course your child will love you more than she loves the nanny! She will also especially love that you are providing her with a wonderful loving nanny.  :-)

 

Apparently John Cleese Knows Everything About Parenting, Birth, Work, Marriage And Life!

Someone sent me this link to a talk by John Cleese about creativity, which I watched, at first, because I figured there’d be a few good jokes.  But I realized, watching, that although he’s supposedly talking about creativity in general, the whole piece is a fabulous essay, indirectly, about the importance of creativity in parenting and birth.  And your career.  And your marriage.  And life.  Creativity is they key to happiness in all of these things, and it isn’t a talent but a mode of operating.  Anyone can get at it.

I couldn’t agree more.

Many of you who have taken my classes/workshops/groups have heard me talk about how important it is for mothers to maintain a playful sense of curiosity, humor, and faith that although pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood are very serious, they are not meant to be solemn. Curiosity, a willingness to experiment and be silly and get stuff wrong (because a wrong choice might be a stepping stone to something brilliant), a sense of humor … these are some of the ingredients of the creative mode, and Cleese’s speech is all about how to get at that mode more easily.

Scary things happen when you embark on parenthood.  The stakes can feel really high.  Scary things make us anxious, and anxiety can squash out the open, fun, confident feeling that lets us be our most creative selves.  John Cleese says that the “closed mode” (where we’re not able to be creative), is characterized by anxious feelings, impatience, attempts to be organized, focus on small trivial tasks, and, sometimes, manic pursuit of a goal.  In short, it’s where new moms spend a lot of their time. 

One of the problems is that anxiety makes us worry that we don’t know enough.  So we consult experts — too often we don’t consult the kind of experts who guide and support us in being authors of our own lives, but, instead, the kind who confirm our fears that we don’t know anything and solemnly tell us How To Do Everything Their Way.  But if you are a non-generic person with a non-generic child, generic advice — even from famous experts — will not work.  

What will work is a customized, creative, individualized approach.

To do that, you need to get into the creative mode, which he describes as expansive, less purposeful, more inclined to humor, and filled with curiosity for its own sake.  (Doesn’t that sound more fun?) 

Being there will help you figure out how best for you to handle: the challenges of labor, parenting a baby, the transition back to work. Tricky infant feeding and sleep questions.  Tantrums.  Choosing a new midwife or OB or pediatrician.  Unloading the dishwasher and other shared domestic chores.  Finding time to get to the gym and have your nails painted and groove on your partner and sometimes do decadent things. In short, you’ll need to get creative to handle being an adult with a real, complicated life, and kids.  

(Well, actually, you can get by without being creative, but you deserve a life where you’re not just getting by.)  

There are a bunch of key points in the speech, concrete ideas about how to get into the creative mode.  (hint:  you need time, and space, and some people you can talk to, and a sense of lightness — sounds like a new moms’ group to me!).  But you should watch him explain the whole thing, so you can look at him and think of laughing your head off at that Fawlty Towers episode with the rat.

Perhaps my favorite part is towards the end when he says that being creative requires being prepared to tolerate the anxiety of sitting with something we haven’t solved yet.  

How many of us has been there, with an annoying or worrisome problem with our babies/toddlers/work/spouse, insecure because we don’t know how to deal with it, and totally irritable that the problem is Not Fixed And What If It Never Gets Fixed And Just Gets Worse And Worse!!??!  

Being creative, and successful, and happy doesn’t mean never feeling that way.  But Cleese’s ideas about how to cope with that moment, and what comes before and after that are, I think, really inspiring.  I hope you contact me to talk more about how to apply these ideas to childbirth and parenting, one-on-one or in a group.  meredith (at) amotherisborn (dot) com (or click the “Ask” button at left and leave your contact info!)

Why The C-Section/Obesity Study Makes Me Feel Reverence for Bodies and Bacteria and Even, Kind of, Poop

In the past few years, I’ve become fascinated with “good guy” bacteria — the bugs that live on and inside us, and keep us safe from disease and infection.  It’s kind of awesome that we’re home to zillions of microbes.  You’re a walking Starship Enterprise and the crew is doing maintenance and defense work on you even as we speak!

(Let me pause and say that if that concept make you a little squeamish, you may find the rest of this blog post grody).

Along these lines, I was fascinated to read of a recent study which concluded that gut bacteria may be the reason that babies born by c-section are twice as likely to be overweight later in childhood, compared with babies born vaginally.  The study, in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, found a large disparity in childhood obesity rates between kids born by c-sec and those born vaginally, even after considering other factors such as mother’s weight, baby’s size and the length of time they were breastfed.  

We already knew that babies born by c-section have an increased risk of post-birth infection vs. babies born vaginally, in part because of good-guy bacteria:  as babies travel through the birth canal, and all the good bacteria that live there (yes, your vagina is filled with bacteria! It protects you from illness) coat the baby’s skin, providing your baby with an initial coating of anti-germ protection even as he’s being born.  (A baby born by c-section on the other hand, comes out of the sterile amniotic sac, directly into a germ-filled operating room.  Germs that cause illness have the opportunity to colonize his skin before mom’s good anti-sick bacteria can colonize and protect him.  This is why skin-to-skin contact is especially important for babies born surgically — frequent contact helps the baby get a nice coating of protective bacteria from the “Mother Ship.”)

So, but here’s how this plays out with the obesity thing.  Apparently the presence or absence of different gut bacteria play a role in how we use energy, respond to insulin and lay down fat.  And babies born by c-section have different gut bacteria than those born vaginally, even years later.  Why? 

Take a step back.  There’s bacteria in your gut, right?  What happens to it?  Mostly it lives inside you.  Also, some of it comes out when you poop.  So, you can find traces of it around your bottom.  Pan the camera back and let’s think for a minute about how babies born vaginally could come into contact with their mom’s gut bacteria?  As a another childbirth educator once quipped, “it’s not by accident that babies are born with their face an inch from your asshole.”  They’re designed, apparently, to meet that part of you first so they can get exposed to your gut bacteria and, yes, ingest some (microscopic) amount, so it can colonize their gut.  And that is apparently going to help them for the rest of their lives.  Next step for the newborn is to be placed on mom’s belly, where he can get colonized with her external, protective skin bacteria, and after that onto mom’s breast where the colostrum in her breasts is filled with immune factors so that with the first swallow her body tells him:  “all the stuff you were just exposed to is harmless for you, so don’t use your energy mount an immune response to any of it; you can use your energy to grow, stabilize temperature and sugar, and get acclimated, not for defense.”  Her breastmilk also contains pro- and pre-biotics to further colonize his gut and protect him from the inside.

I think this is kind of awesome.  Not the image of a baby with her nose in your rear end — sure, that’s kind of eww-y when you stop and think.  But what’s totally magnificent to me is the way our bodies are designed to do this right.  There are so many small things, invisible until we study them, which turn out to have tremendous lasting significance.  

What can you do?

Don’t feel bad if you had a c-section, that kind of backward-focus doesn’t help.  If you had a c-section, focus on behaviors that lean against any increased potential for obesity; we should all do that anyway.   C-section can be a very, very important surgery, and when it’s medically necessary, it is a tool we are very lucky to be able to use, and to have such phenomenally good results from most of the time.

But what we all can do, I think, is maintain a kind of reverence for the body, and remember that no matter how sophistocated we are, and how good our technology, how advanced our medications, and how grateful we are for the way they save lives, nothing we can invent compares to the complicated beauty and grace of a functioning human body. 

There is much we do not understand.  When it comes to a body that is healthy, we should be very reserved about elective surgeries.  And we ought to manage labors to minimize the likelihood of c-section, not just for all the reasons we know, but, even more, for the reasons we don’t know yet.  

UPDATE, 7/13/12:  Here’s a great article exploring the science of this issue, from Science and Sensibility.  

"Best Childbirth Classes in NY"

Hey folks.  Of course I’m biased, but I totally agree with this article titled Best Childbirth Classes in NY, which names Tribeca Parenting, where I currently teach group childbirth classes.  

There are lots of ways to teach a childbirth class; anyone can hang out a shingle and do it.  But TP hires only teachers who have completed the rigorous 2-3 year certification program through CEA/MNY.  Then, all the TP teachers also participate in regular continuing education, to ensure that we are up to date not just on timeless things (like basic physiology and anatomy) but on things that do change, like local hospital practices and current research about medications, interventions and technology, and perinatal care.  (Plus, sometimes we get to have really fun continuing ed to learn things like how to teach reflexology; which of course requires that we all get foot rubs! :-))  

The TP childbirth series is designed not only to instill knowledge, but to allay anxiety, build confidence, and foster a feeling of community among a bunch of total strangers who are all embarking on a great adventure.  The teachers are smart and funny and real, and we want our students not just to learn, but to appreciate that you can be your regular self throughout the birth process. 

If you’re pregnant and lucky enough to be in NY, I hope you’ll come!  I’m teaching on Wednesday evenings at the 62 St location.  More info on my series here.