Month: August 2014 (Page 1 of 3)

The day Jesus walked into the delivery room

For all 4 babies, I had nothing but terrific birth experiences. Please, put that in perspective that I was giving birth, so it wasn’t filled with rainbows and lollipops, but at the end of the day night, I had no regrets about labor or delivery. I had built a strong relationship with my first midwife, Bonnie, who delivered my first 3 kiddos. She knew my wishes, talked me through the hard parts and had nothing but encouragement for my desires for a natural delivery. (She was supremely supportive of my friends who opted for as many painless options as possible, which is what makes her a great practitioner.) Going into that L&D room, I knew that if Bonnie said I needed to take a different course of action, I needed to listen. I had nothing but trust for her.

My relationship with the midwife practice who delivered my 4th was also positive, however there were 4 midwives in the rotation, so I just didn’t have the opportunity to grow the rapport. It was still a positive experience and I had a good understanding of the ethos of the practice so I could trust them.

With this perspective in mind, I’m absolutely appalled this isn’t the case for all women. When I started following ImprovingBirth.org  on Facebook, I was horrified at the stories.

softball water rape exam

 

I respect doctors and midwives and the years they’ve spent practicing and training. They have delivered more babies than I have. The wisdom of the medical and birthing community is needed. Based on my experience alone, it’s clear the above stories aren’t the norm for women.

Friends of mine have experienced emergency c-sections and even post-birth emergencies that could have been quite grave. Praise Jesus for knowledgeable professionals that acted quickly to preserve as much wellness to the situation as possible. Not everyone gets an easy-peasey delivery. Cords are wrapped, heart rates drop, body parts get stuck. Birth is messy and different, every single time for every single woman. So a level of trust must be established for a doctor or midwife to take necessary action in critical situations. We cannot second guess every decision of the health care industry (though I’m the first to question several).

On the other hand, these stories are real for far too many. Women in our developed, first-world country with freedoms guaranteed, did not welcome their babies with such love and joy. It is a sad day, indeed, when fear trumps love on a day so special to families, not because of tragic situations but rather because of tragic carelessness of people’s souls.

Birth, while a joyous and necessary ordeal, can be extremely humiliating. There’s the nakedness. And people’s hands are all over you. I’m not sure it’s protocol for a nurse to shake your hand before she shoves hers in a personal space to “check your progress.” By the time the baby arrives, you have a crowd of people which you never met with access to knowledge about your shaving or waxing preferences. Of course this comes with the territory because it’s the territory of birth, but just because you find yourself in humble situations does not mean you need to be treated with disrespect. In fact, it is precisely because we’re in a humble situation that grace should be most extended, is it not?

Immediately I was taken to a story present in all three synoptic Gospels.

[box] A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” Mark 5:24-34[/box]

Years of bleeding and mistreatment by doctors (the text indicates a majority of male physicians, I believe) who also took her money (can we get political about the cost of birth in this country?!) and she’s out of options. She yearns for wholeness, to be included and treated like a woman again, not just a thing currently enduring a condition.

She’s in the midst of a crowd, a gaggle of onlookers wanting to know who is slowing down the show by requesting something so simple as a touch of the robe, which she fought tooth and nail to the front of the line to steal. Jesus asks the entire crowd who touched him and she meekly steps forward, falling at his feet. I wonder if she fell face down because she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. She trembled with fear at what could happen. Fear. The hands of so many healing men before this one had brought destruction and though she believed this one could be different, her experiences cause a reaction quite the contrary and she trembles.

Ultimately, she gets healed. One of the other gospel writers says, “immediately the flow stopped.” Treating someone as human has immediate effects. Jesus states that her faith healed her. Faith in Jesus? Well, yes. And. Perhaps a faith that it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a better way of life.

There is a Kingdom in which the King believes that all people are… people. Loved. Cherished. Treasured. Made in the image of the one who Created each and every one of them.

The work of this organization brings doctors into the hot seat (and I believe it’s a deserved question, as it seems possible, if not likely, that such treatment of women has existed since, oh, Jesus’ time). Yet let us not all pick up a stone until we ask – how have we been tempted, nay, even acted, in ways that took advantage of those in humiliating places and times because we forgot they were human.

We hold just as much guilt for hurrying past a situation demanding mercy because we have an appointment with the cable guy. 

I’m thankful when I found myself in humble situations, it became the opportunity for pain to bear joy, not heartache. Thoughtful and loving hands handled me and my little ones with care. It’s time we begin to demand this for all women. (And men and children, too, of course. Especially if any of them give birth.) And as we demand this in the delivery room, let us demand it of ourselves on the streets, in the stores and in the classrooms.

 

Focal points: Cucumbers and Vrksasana

Our garden consists of 82 tomato plants, 6 green pepper plants, a few hot peppers and just a couple vines of cucumbes. However, those cukes are hearty. My most recent plucking yielded 15 new ones, and I had just checked about 2 days ago.

Picking cucumbers is tricky business. First, the dang things are prickly. DO NOT RUB YOUR HANDS TOGETHER. Ouch. Also, the part that connects them to the vine: strong stuff. (I’m contemplating how to use cucumber stem as sticky tack so that Miss M’s foam letter O will stay on her wall, because the 3m squares clearly are not working.)

(If there is a secret to cucumber harvesting I’m clearly not aware of, I beg of you to share your secrets. I will pay you One Million Dollars Pickles.)

Not only do cucumbers have the evolutionary survival tactic of remaining green while ripe and thus blending in with surroundings, but their choice of placement is spot on. I have discovered it’s nearly impossible to see a cucumber by looking at the plant head-on. Instead, you have to rummage around, pretending to look for tomatoes and steal a glance over and notice that a nearby vine has 14 green prolate spheroids dangling alongside you. You have to get on the ground and look up. I suppose one could even begin digging up the garlic heads and see a cucumber sprouting out easier than if you went up to the vine and looked straight at it.

Just when you think you’re done – the heavy bucket protruding and you’re wondering if the neighbors locked their car doors, because if not, you’re dropping in a minimum of 5 cucumbers and a quart of tomatoes –  you see 4 more. Just hanging out, in what would appear to be clear view. Except, it’s not, if you’re looking directly at the plant.


Not long ago I took a yoga class with a special guest teacher who had us trying a variety of standing balance poses. Note: balance poses are Yoga’s gift to us so we can practice not being competitive. If you think you’re a bad ass yogi, start standing on one leg and swinging the other one around.

As an exercise, she had us in Tree pose and asked us to set our gaze across the room on a specific focal point. By narrowing our eyes, it becomes easier to root into the ground and maintain balance. Then she asked us to look at a spot on the floor right in front of us. I was not the only one to topple over.

It turns out we tend to loose our sense of balance when we keep a shortsighted focus.


The rhythms of summer have nearly evaporated. JJ returned to setting an alarm and prepping the coffee the night before, as if the coffeepot would ever wake up before me. Though my own 2 school kids have another week at home, we’ve thrust ourselves into school-year pace. And I’m exhausted.

Historically, I’ve kept a sacred 1.5-2 hour afternoon window of stillness, that precious time in which work is produced and sanity recovers itself. However, this autumn I have 2 older children who outgrew naps. They still head upstairs to “rest” but at most I can get an hour of tranquility before they just start finding new ways to annoy from across the house.

It is so easy to look at life right now and wonder how in the world it’s all going to happen this year. The school stuff. The church stuff. The work stuff. The spending quality time and soaking in precious young days with my children stuff. Trips to the museum, trips to the zoo, trips to friends houses and trips to grandparents’ homes. And then there’s the eating. All of the food that I seem to be cooking all of the time. This morning I made pot full of oatmeal, a dozen muffins and one kid drank half my smoothie while another also devoured the last bowl of Rice Krispies. By the time we finally finished breakfast, someone asked if it was time for lunch.

If I zoom in and only look at life right in front of me, chances are, I will fall over. Balance is laughable. Looking at our state of life right now, head-on, I will see no fruit – only a mess of vines and leaves growing in 15 directions, threatening to suffocate my tomatoes.

A step back and slightly to the side and I see the bigger picture. I see children enjoying days together. I see play. I see a family enjoying healthy dinners, sitting around the table together and talking about the day. When you turn off the zoom, you don’t see splashes of pizza sauce on the counter top or the toy dishes spilled out of the basket for the 19th time.

The Motherhood Balancing Act requires us to firmly plant one foot, strengthening muscles you didn’t know existed (which will be sore after the first few uses) while you stretch and move the other leg. It’s a tug and pull while remaining rooted. We’re forced to be in the moment, dealing with each day as it comes but we often forget another gift: the view from the big picture.

From time to time, pulling back and remembering how we’re not just filling days but building a life, gives us the strength we need to stay firm. We take a deep breath, we look at another spot across the room and enjoy the surprise of finding yet another treat ripening right in front of us.

The Play Behind Closed Doors

A frustrating morning this week rendered my children to a “different room, anywhere other than right beside Mr. M,” who was being suffocated by sibling presence. Soon I heard them skitter upstairs. Then silence. A worrisome silence.

I finished my task and opted to sort laundry on my bed so I could spy prevent disaster. What I found changed the pace of the morning from monstrous to magical. They had shut the bedroom door. They shut me out. closed door

When they came out, unknowing of my presence, they donned bath towels as raincoats, pushing a stroller to take Lady C “to a friend’s house.” Then they dropped Miss M off at “school.” When I peeked into H Boy’s room, they had made a bed on the floor with the girls’ blankets and he had been “reading” to them before bed.

Soon they returned “home.” The next time they emerged, Miss M had a baby stuffed under her dress. “Bye grandma and papa, we’re going to the hospital!” I hear them say. Apparently Lady C was stuck at home with the grandparents because I heard H & M go into another room and then an uproar of laughter: “I pooped it out!” I hear. And then there was a baby. (So. That’s how it happens.)

I kept folding, trying to remain invisible because the truth of the situation rose to the top: while I should be intentional about playing and interacting with my kids at home (and I’m trying to do a better job of this), in their time without me my kids become more imaginative and cooperative. They stick with their play for much longer spans of time when I’m not involved. They try new things, find creative props and tell their stories of life using lenses I simply don’t know how to operate.

PlaytimePlaying House

This is such a good thing.

I half-jokingly say that the best thing I could offer my kids in life is siblings. On this morning, it was simply a true statement.  At one point I told myself, “this is the childhood I dreamed for my children. Right here.” Because it is. When I look back at my early years, I see my sister and I lining the staircase with stuffed animals to play school and getting out our Barbies to live in their piano home with my dad’s basketball trophies serving as doors, beds and furniture. We ventured outside on rusty grain augers and “shredded” snow in the winter. We climbed a dirt hill where one of our cats hid her kittens and affectionately and appropriately called it Kitty Peak. Our industrial-sized gas tanks became horses named Silver and Goldie (which, ironically, were both silver).

Play, play, play, my children. Go. Create. Do. Find the ordinary and discover it with new ideas, see it with imagination goggles.

They rarely do this in my presence, just as my parents were mostly absent from my own adventurous memories (though I can look back to plenty of examples of quality time filled with love and play). I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the responsibilities we carry as adults and our inability to set that down at the door. We’re always thinking of the pick up involved after or the unlikelihood that this could actually work. We feel the need to correct and make everything into a teachable moment. I wonder if sometimes our teaching results in less learning than these episodes of creativity the kids embark upon by themselves.

I just read a fascinating article on children’s learning styles around the world and literacy, but what jumped out at me was the author mentioning how often kids want to learn in private: “When I entered the room they looked up like kids who were caught doing something illicit. This is another thing you learn about kids when they don’t go to school. They don’t want to be watched all the time. They don’t want to be scrutinized and measured. They often don’t even want to be praised or encouraged. They have a remarkable sense of dignity and autonomy, and they defend it fiercely. They want their learning to be their own.” 

So while JJ and I converse about my participation and engagement with our kids (as opposed to work, which I am prone), I agree. Treasure these days with them, sit at the table and make a mess.

And yet.

Send them to the basement. Direct them upstairs. Shut the door. See what magic they come up with on their own.

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