February 26th, 2010

The trajectory of a downward spiral

So please, may I draw you the trajectory of a downward spiral? It’s when you get The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems out of the library in October, The No-Cry Sleep Solution out of the library in December, and you pick up a used copy of Nighttime Parenting by Doctor Sears come February. This last one signals complete surrender, along with the fact that I bought a bed rail last week.

It’s funny how unwilling I am to give up on my insistence that some book somewhere will contain the answers to our sleep issues. I think this is where desperation can take you. And it’s even funnier, because in no other area of my life would I even consider self-help books, except this one. I scoff at self-help under most circumstances, thoroughly convinced that the truest wisdoms are to be found in fiction. (But aren’t there a dearth of babies in fiction? Real babies, I mean. Literature is rife with narratives about pregnancy, but who would want to read a book about life with an infant? [Though some people have, of course: check out Stephany Aulenback's Babies in Literature Series at Crooked House]).

The Sears book might be the one that actually works though, because it seems to take most things that we’re doing, things that I worry we’re doing wrong, and then tells me my child will grow up to be maladjusted unless we keep on doing them. And seeing as I am the laziest nighttime parent the world has ever known, we really might be on to something.

(Though Harriet is still moving into her own room this weekend. She does manage to spend about half her night asleep in her crib, and the very best part of her move is that we’ll be able to read in bed again. I can’t wait.)

January 6th, 2010

On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering

Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I’d have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, “Get thee to a lactation consultant” a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.

I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn’t in the first place– I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I’ve learned that you get your money’s worth, and that Bjorn’s not where it’s at anyway. We’ve had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I’ve used it every day (it’s snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).

If I could go back about six months, I’d tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn’t have “a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime”, but that she’s screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn’t have believed myself then, and even once we’d figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I’ve found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.

Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I’ve acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen’s book, but she was right about this: “If [the new mother] feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her.” Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by “authorities” in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)

Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they’re all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we’ve no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We’ve fed her whatever we’ve taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury’s chocolate, and she’s devoured it all.

Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we’re all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied– I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn’t. And we can go onward from there.

What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn’t done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I’m not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.

It’s not just working vs. not working, of course. It’s everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I’ve received lately is, “Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are.” And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.

Anyway, it’s not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I’m unsure of myself, but because I’m so damn sure of myself that I’m baffled when you don’t see it the way I do. And there’s this line we’re meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We’re meant to say, about our choices: “It’s what’s best for our family”, but that’s the most sanctimonious load of crap I’ve ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other “choices” we’ve made: I’d prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.

Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don’t think I’m the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.

December 31st, 2009

The very best decision

The very best decision I made all year was to choose Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over as the first book to read after Harriet was born. Harriet herself and her birth having been that big storm that knocked it (me) over, and did it ever. Like everybody else, I had no clue how hard those days (and endless nights) would be, but somehow I knew that Colwin’s lightness and humour would be a kind of balm. That this would be the kind of novel I’d actually get through at a time like that. And what a comfort it would be to read what Colwin wrote about motherhood, and its early days, attesting to the awfulness of it, validating my experience, but with a touch that assured me that things would get better. Underlining the joy that was there, and please, may I quote the passage again that said it all?

“Motherhood is a storm, a seizure: It is like weather. Nights of high wind followed by calm mornings of dense fog or brilliant sunshine that gives way to tropical rain, or blinding snow. Jane Louise and Edie found themselves swept away, cast ashore, washed overboard. It was hard to keep anything straight. The days seemed to congeal like rubber cement, although moments stood out in clearest, starkest brilliance. You might string those together on the charm bracelet of your memory if you could keep your eyes open long enough to remember anything.”

Truly, truly, books can save our lives, and make our lives. All the very best for a joyous 2010.

December 7th, 2009

Then the worm turned

“The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I’ve ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn’t. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and for Germany.”– Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

November 19th, 2009

Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts

I suppose it’s not so different to those mothers that wish to see themselves in their children’s books, that I’ve been looking for me in my own reading. Or rather seeking representations of my experience since becoming a mother, not because I’m so entirely self-interested, but because the politics of motherhood are hard to understand. And motherhood is politicized, the whole of it, which is natural in the case of any group of people lacking power enough to properly go around.

Mothers are also a group of people desperately trying to tame chaos, which makes them perfect targets for authority of all kinds. And these authorities, I’ve noticed, do tend to be men and childless women, which is probably because these are the only people unlearned enough to think that babies could be a science. In Mother Knows Best: Talking Back To The “Experts” (published by York University’s Demeter Press, which also published Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Art of the Mommy Blog), writers address this notion of “expertness”, and discuss the impact of these authorities on modern mothering.

And it is “mothering”, which the carefully benign “parenting” is usually an euphemism for anyway. Mothering a baby is scientific like the tide is, natural as anything, tied to the moon, but much more difficult to time by a clock. So that an expert will tell you that your breastfeeding pain is impossible, because Baby’s latch is fine, but feeding makes you want to die. Another will tell you that babies don’t get fevers whilst teething, even though you’ve had three children and it was the case for all of them. I read a book by a breastfeeding champion who said that babies do not require burping, that gulping does not cause gas, but he’s obviously never met my daughter. A baby’s poo (oh, of course I was going to talk about poo! Can you believe I waited until the third paragraph!), says the baby books, will always be yellow, but I’ve met mothers of the healthiest of babes with veritable rainbows. (And even worse, even the “experts” don’t agree with one another. This is very confusing. In making any major decisions about my child’s wellbeing, I’ve found the best solution so far is to throw the baby books out the window. They make a mighty thunk. What fun!)

All of this expertism serves to undermine a mother’s instinct and confidence, and the idea that there is just one way to be a baby or a mom is what pits women against one another so mercilessly. The conflict is apparent even in the anthology– in “Deconstructing Discourse: Breastfeeding, Intensive Mothering and the Moral Construction of Choice”, Stephanie Knaak questions studies that find any difference between breastfed and formula-fed babies. In the next article, Catherine Ma begins “If the Breast is Best, Why Are Breastfeeding Rates So Low?” with “The consensus on the benefits of breast milk is undisputed on both institutional and individual levels.”

So which is it? But in this anthology, that is not the point, which is instead to examine the politics of these ideas, which it does so effectively. And novelly as well, which is novel itself with arguments that have been rehashed over and over again. In “Making Decisions About Vaccines”, Rachel Casiday writes about those parents who “know” that the MMR vaccine was behind their child’s autism, just as that mother I mentioned before “knew” that fevers came with teething. Whether or not these parents are right is not the point either, and Casiday’s thesis is that this kind of parental “knowledge” has to be taken into account by authorities regardless. These parents have their own particular brand of expert knowledge, and the dismissal of their concerns by authorities is what leaves other parents torn between experts (for it was a scientific study, however now debunked, that made the autism/MMR link) and wary of having their own children vaccinated.

Mother Knows Best also examines breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and how these inform ideas of “the good mother”. How many feminists have embraced these practices, though they run so contrary to feminist politics. The fetisization of “the natural”, to justify breastfeeding and attachment parenting, though these ideas are out of place in the society in which we live (and in America, in particular, where maternity leave is pitiful). I have become quite accustomed, in the liberal circles in which I run, to turning my nose up at sleep training and Nestle, but it was interesting to interrogate these ideas, and question where they come from. To consider whether it might be egocentric to forego a career to be there for your child, and assume your presence will make up for whatever material goods the child will lack. How ultrasound imagery renders the fetus subject rather than object. How pregnancy guide advice compares to actual women’s experiences.

Though academic theorizing is odd to those of us outside the academy, I’ve found it quite useful to examine the politics of motherhood within this construct. Because discussions of motherhood get so personal, otherwise, and then defensive, mean and ridiculous. And all the experts who claim to come without agenda, but nobody is, so to take a step back is really worthwhile. An anthology like this is the closest thing to “the big picture” that I’ve been able to grasp yet of the big, big picture that motherhood is, and for that reason among many, I’m glad I read it.

November 13th, 2009

Horizontal Parenting

I am very excited about the Parenting Method I have devised, and subsequent book I am going to self-publish about my Parenting Method (via lulu.com). My method is called Horizontal Parenting, and I’ve been practicing it for about six months now. Its core tenets are the five Ls– 1) Lie down to breastfeed, 2) Lie down to soothe your crying babe by gently rocking your hips, 3) Lie down to have your baby sleep on your chest (contrary to everything the Back to Sleep people will tell you), 4) Lie down to play with your baby– a popular game is lying on one’s back and throwing a soft ball up to the ceiling again and again. The fun never stops. 5) Take time every day for yoga practice– but only the savasana pose. (This last tenet doesn’t start with L, but that’s because it’s the exception that proves the rule.)

The jury’s still out on the advantages of horizontal parenting on child development, but my child seems to be developing fairly normally (save for her new, disturbing penchant for pinching the fat on my upper arms). For me, however, the advantages are multifold– I never have a sore back, I get to sleep at night (albeit sometimes uncomfortably on my side), I get to lie on the couch and read or nap frequently throughout the day, and I get many opportunities to breathe in the sweet smell of my baby daughter’s head.

As soon as I figure out how to cook dinner from a hammock, then I will really claim to have it all figured out.

November 10th, 2009

All the processes of change

“All the processes of change, imagination, and learning ultimately depend on love. Human caregivers love their babies in a particularly intense and significant way. That love is one of the engines of human change. Parental love isn’t just a primitive and primordial instinct, continuous with the nurturing behaviour of other animals (though certainly there are such continuities). Instead, our extended life as parents also plays a deep role in the emergence of the most sophisticated and characteristically human capacities. Our protracted immaturity is possible only because we can rely on the love of the people who take care of us. We can learn from the discoveries of earlier generations because those same loving caregivers invest in teaching us. It isn’t just that without mothering humans would lack nurturance, warmth, and emotional security, They would also lack culture, history, morality, science and literature”. –from The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik

October 29th, 2009

What Mothers Do

What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen is a very weird book. In one sense, it’s actually the most informative book on motherhood I’ve read yet. It’s almost a Scientist in the Crib for moms, decoding their behaviour to show that what goes on all day long is more profound than you’d ever suppose. That all of what a mother might spend her time doing during a day in which she “got nothing done” is full of significance, essential to her child’s development and therefore society at large via that next generation.

Stadlen posits that we lack the language to articulate what it is that mothers do. What mothers do badly, of course, we have all kinds of words for (overbearing, possessive, over-involved, negligent, narcissistic, heartless, cold, etc.), but no way to express anything between these two extremes. And it is this lack of vocabulary that undervalues a mother’s work, that she has no way to express what she has accomplished at the end of every day.

“People ask mothers: ‘Is he sleeping through the night yet?’ ‘Have you started him on solids yet?’ ‘Has he got any teeth?’ No one seems to ask: ‘Have you discovered what comforts him?’ Yet the ability to sleep through the night, or to digest solid food or to grow teeth, has little to do with mothering. Babies reach those milestones when they are mature enough, whereas being able to comfort depends on a mother’s ability.”

In her book, Stadlen points out what mothers’ do do. How their worlds are so completely shaken by the birth of their babies, cut off from matrilineal traditions that might have prepared girls for eventual motherhood. But how this “shaking up” opens up the mother to all the knowledge she will have to come by in order to get to know how to take care of her own specific baby. She expresses that to be a mother is to be “constantly interruptible”, which mothers begin to take for granted, which outsiders might find obnoxious or unhealthy, which is hard for a while not to resent. What mothers do as “comforters”, learning to soothe their babies through trial and error and after a while are able to do it without thinking. Tiredness that is absolutely uncurable. That it’s hard, terrible, and wonderful, and changes the way you relate to the world– to your partners, to your own mothers. Also to one another– Stadlen does a stunning job at pointing out the competitive and defensive dynamic in mothers’ conversations, the cycle of desperate talk which leads to a word of advice, and then mother recounts the reasons that advice won’t work which makes her sound more desperate and receive more advice and so it goes…

Stadlen claims to write without agenda, and I could read her book without throwing it out the window because her lack of agenda agreed with mine, but come on: “The literature on crying babies tends to focus on technique. However, responding to a crying baby involves more than technique. Underlying what a mother does is her philosophy of human nature… Her basic choice is either to see her baby as good, in which case she trusts him, or alternatively to see him as the product of evil human nature, or of original sin, which requires her to train him.” Parents who insist their children must sleep through the night, suggests Stadlen, are the product of a generation who were sleep-trained themselves so to be inflexible and now are unable to accommodate the basic needs of their young.

Unbelievable! As someone who is just too tired at 3:00 am to do anything but feed the baby whilst sleeping, I eat this stuff up with a spoon, but it’s terrible! And perhaps what I get for reading a book by a psychotherapist.

Her chapter on maternal love is also problematic. She cites recent literature challenging notions of maternal love, and new ideas of “maternal ambivalence”. Stadlen is troubled by assertions that all women actually experience these feelings, because she hasn’t found this in her years of working with new moms. She is troubled further by the idea of “maternal ambivalence” itself, but this (I believe) is because she understands it as women feeling hatred towards their babies. From what I’ve read on the subject (which is everything I can get my hands on), it’s far more complex than that– rather that whilst loving their babies, women can be amazingly unfulfilled as mothers, or rather not completely fulfilled, and yet the all-consuming nature of motherhood makes other ventures difficult. Also, that spending a day alone and exhausted, hormonally jacked up, being puked on and cried at, is utterly horrible, full stop.

Stadlen seems to think there is no end to what a mother’s comfort can provide. She also thinks that babies always cry for a reason, and that these maternally ambivalent women just couldn’t get past their own selves to figure out what that reason was and tend to it– I’m not convinced. Stadlen is right to counter the “bad mother” trend that is too ubiquitous in current writing about motherhood, but I don’t think all women are naturals when it comes to mothering. Part of this is because mothering is not valued in our society, as Stadlen sets out in her book and as she seeks to rectify with her explanation of mothers’ doings, reclaiming the art of it all.

So it’s a shame, because the women who’d probably most benefit from the fascinating and wonderful things she has to say about motherhood will find themselves attacked here.

October 27th, 2009

Not a problem requiring bookshelves

“If she feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her. Every time a woman has a baby she has something to learn, partly from her culture but also from her baby. If she really considered herself an expert, or if her ideas were set, she would find it very hard to adapt to her individual baby. Even after her first baby, she cannot sit back as an expert on all babies. Each child will be a little different and teach her something new. She needs to feel uncertain in order to be flexible. So, although it can feel so alarming, the ‘all-at-sea’ feeling is appropriate. Uncertainty is a good starting point for a mother. Through uncertainty, she can begin to learn.” –from What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen

October 14th, 2009

She loves the library

No one takes things personally like a new mom, I’ve found. Any advice I’m given, I take as a slight: “Oh, she sounds hungry!” I translate as, “You don’t have a clue what your baby needs.” “Perhaps you’d sleep better if she was out of your room” means, “You suck and you’re depriving your baby of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits.” It never ends. Everybody thinks they have the solutions, and I know I have no solutions, so I’m sensitive, you know?

Yesterday, however, my reaction was a bit over the top. I was at the library (picking up my reserved copy of The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Which is a titular lie– apparently I still have to solve them, and she just tells me how to via methods I am far too lazy to implement. My husband says we have no problems anyway and we’re doing just fine. [We do practice the EASY method already, by mistake, and it's excellent]. Anyway, today I believe him and I’m returning the book to the library because it’s making me crazy) and the baby was squawking in her stroller.

“Oh,” said a fellow patron, not supposing who she was speaking to (naturally, as I am no one), “I guess she doesn’t like the library.”

And I flared up like a rash. “Of course, she likes the library. She loves the library. It’s her favourite place to come. We come all the time. She loves books, and text, and print media of all kinds.” Poor fellow patron looked frightened. I continued, “She’s just sick, bit of a cold. And she’s tired. And the sun’s been shining in her eyes. It’s close to her nap. We’ve been running errands and she’s sick of her stroller, plus, I’ve been depriving her of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits. But she loves the library. Loves it, she does.”

Patron had disappeared by the time I was finished this tirade. Perhaps she’d slipped out the door while I was in the midst of my passion, and had sought hiding in a locked bathroom cubicle, I don’t know. But I am pretty sure she was a candidate for kind stranger most sorry she’d come across me yesterday.

And maybe Harriet just hates Tracy Hogg.