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!)

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.

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:

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

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

“What is she doing?”  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last month I blogged about how many hospitals undermine breastfeeding while paying lip service to the “Breast Is Best” slogan.  Recently I had an example of how this happens.

I was at Weill Cornell visiting a former student.  Her 2 day old baby had been born slightly premature and was still hospitalized, though mom had been discharged.  We sat together in the Waiting Area as she began to get the hang of nursing.  

Do you remember getting the hang of nursing?  It doesn’t happen immediately for everyone, even with help.  The door to the waiting area opened and closed a dozen times as people came and went, and each time, I saw her eyebrows knit together and her shoulders squeeze up and forward as if to provide a modesty shield.  Most of the moms I meet work up gradually to the idea of nursing in public; this new mom had to do it on Day Two because there was no private place for her.  She was hyper-aware of every random person who sauntered into the waiting area, including the coughing toddler who turned up the volume on the giant television screen. Scooby Doo was blaring.  The chairs were narrow and hard.  There was no stool to rest her feet on.    

I went to the nurse’s station to ask for a pillow to help position the baby.  When a baby is positioned correctly, he gets plenty of milk and the mom will not be in pain.  That is called:  breastfeeding working.  Squeezing the mom into a lousy office chair where she can’t get comfortable or latch the baby may as well be called:  why not give up now?

When I asked for the pillow, the nurse looked at me with an expression that said, “Honey, this is not a hotel.”  She let a long pause go by, a long, very awkward pause, as though to shame me for asking her to do an errand.  Finally she said, “I’ll look.”  After a long while, during which my client tried her best, contorted on the lousy chair, the nurse returned saying, “We don’t have any.”  

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