doulicia

Decommissioning My Doula Bag

2010-06-16T11:15:00.002-05:00

I have been dancing with leaving the doula profession for a while now. There was a period of nearly a year when I didn't take clients, then I was back in for several. Then off again for six months, then pulled back in. Looking at this blog, I see that pattern repeated. Like with a cat at the door, all this coming and going becomes frustrating and confusing.

The reasons I keep coming back are the same ones that led me to this work in the first place. Birthing women are amazing. In a world where so many things are disappointing, overwhelming, discouraging, it renews the spirit to work with pregnant and laboring women. Every one of my clients has been smart, strong, inspirational. Even when the circumstances of the birth were not what they had hoped for, these women shone. They triumphed. Who can resist being around that?

In the past few years many of my clients were women and families whom I'd served before. That, too, was a pull. It is such a to have witnessed a woman's prior labor(s) when heading into a new one. It is a blessing to already have a bond with the family. I have yet to say "no" to a repeat client.

And yet. Life has become more complicated. I don't know how. My children are older and more independent. But I find myself busier with them after school than I used to be. In part there is more shuttling -- to piano lessons, soccer practices, friends' houses, etc. There is also more emotional need. I am more exhausted helping my adolescent navigate friendships and self-discovery than I was helping him learn to read or ride his bike.

More and more there are no "good" nights to be called away to a birth, no weekends I can afford to miss in my family's growth.

Dabbling in doula work doesn't work either. This spring I had two clients, my first in more than 6 months. With each of them there were things I forgot (e.g. offering to drop off postpartum herbal bath mixes) that used to be reflexive. Hospital policies had changed and I didn't know. I felt out of shape.

Hard though it is, I need to embrace these many signs that it is time. I am not saying I'll never return to being a doula. But for now I need to stop.

I am so grateful to each woman who shared her birth with me, and to each birth for what it taught me about life, mystery, knowledge and faith.

She's back!

2010-01-07T14:36:00.002-05:00

I've lost my voice -- my blogging voice -- I've been away so long. Zoinks.

As I work to find it, let me offer a little explanation for where I've been (and where I may well run off to again). It's several places, really:

1. Facebook. Nuff said.
2. New job
3. Family life
4. More Facebook (Scramble will be the death of me)
5. Lack of inspiration

If I can reconstruct the past year or so correctly, the end of my blogging was brought about by wanting to keep the focus of this blog on birth, but not having much to say about birth.

Nothing bad has happened, I wasn't distracted by, say, a personal health crisis, or marital troubles. Thankfully.

But I took a new job in October, 2008 and did not take on any doula clients for the first year I was there. It's a good job, for me and my family. I did not want to jeopardize it by running off to the hospital with little or no notice. "You were where? With whom? Why?" It can be hard to explain a doula's life to people.

At the same time, I became, inexplicably, less interested in birth topics. The fodder of this blog has been as much my reflections on our birth culture as actual births I attended. In theory I could keep thinking and writing about birth even if I wasn't observing it.

But my physical leave from birth coincided with (or caused, or perhaps was caused by) a general apathy toward the whole topic. I took "The Farmer and the Obstetrician" off my To Read list. I recycled my DONA magazines the day they arrived.

I can't say why I replied to an inquiry last July from a pregnant woman due in October. Before I knew it, I had a client. Then another -- expecting twins in December. Then a friend asked me to be her doula for her November birth. I had 3 clients and still wasn't sure how I felt about my relationship to birth work.

I plan to write about these births. They each, as always, taught me something. They each have larger take-away lessons. I am planning to be the doula for two women due this spring. Both are repeat clients.

At the same time, I have let my DONA membership and certification lapse. I haven't written here -- about birth at least -- in over a year.

Could it be that I'm moving into a different life phase, one that is enough removed from my own pregnancies and births that I no longer have the same emotional response to reproduction? Is birth "just" an interest -- like knitting, Wilco or professional hockey -- that captured me completely for a period of time and left me burned out? Maybe I'm just flaky.

Time will tell.

I wrote today. I have several things I hope to post about soon.

The Gynecological Exam: Physician versus Midwife

2009-03-02T21:14:00.002-05:00

I had my annual gynecological exam today. For the first time in a dozen years, I saw a physician instead of a nurse-midwife. My reason was convenience. Our family practice doctor's office is about 2 miles from our house. The CNMs are more like 13. And they're usually running way behind.

Since finding them for my obstetrical care, I have stuck with the nurse-midwives for my gynecological needs for three reasons. First, being a believer in the midwifery model of care, I wanted to support CNMs with my business and my insurance dollars. Second, it was a way to stay connected with practitioners that I would encounter at births (the only births for which I've been a doula at the smaller-volume hospital in town have been with this nurse-midwife team). Third, I liked them. At least one I consider a friend.

But in this busy year (hence the pathetic blogging record of late), I am trimming time where I can. Cutting an hour and a half experience in half won out. I will write an apology note to the midwives soon.

Long back story. What I wanted to write here were my observations about what was different with my physician exam compared to the midwives. By and large previous exams and this one were very similar. I felt comfortable (physically and emotionally) at all of them; I had my breasts palpated, my cervix scraped, my uterus and ovaries squeezed between a finger in the vagina and one on my abdomen.

But there were a few things I noticed that were different about this exam.

My doctor did not ask about my calcium intake. The midwives always ask about my diet generally and calcium in particular. Each year I leave their office with a photocopied list of foods high in calcium.
My doctor did not examine my labia before putting in the speculum. Typically my midwives look at the exterior before diving in for the pap.
My doctor did not ask me to do a Kegel. The test I fear at every exam is the midwife's request that I do a Kegel squeeze on her finger. Let's just say it is always clear I do not regularly squeeze and release. Every year I vow to practice nightly -- at least weekly -- and forget as soon as my pap cramping goes away.
A nurse was present. I might attribute this to the fact that my doctor is a man. But my previous OB/GYN was a female and she always had a nurse assist, too. Midwives do it all for themselves.
I was not asked for updates on my family. Usually I spent at least 5 minutes telling the midwives about what my boys -- the ones they caught -- are up to.

Is there anything to extrapolate from this? I doubt it. I still felt like I had a thorough exam, that my whole health was considered. But maybe these differences are telling. I can't think of anything my doctor did that the midwives do not. It was all loss going from them to him, not a trade-off of some questions or procedures for others.

The differences were small. Small enough that I suspect I'll return to my doctor next year. But that is not to say that other things being equal -- namely the distance from me to health care -- I wouldn't choose a midwife over a doctor.

Cervix Photos

2008-12-09T10:30:00.003-05:00

I'm guessing anyone who visits hear is already more in the loop than I and has already heard of My Beautiful Cervix. A student midwife and doula took (actually had her partner take) daily photos of her cervix. THEY ARE AMAZING!

I have seen cervices, including my own. But I never saw or imagined the variety of fluids that are continually exiting the uterus. My image was of an organ that bled a few days a month and was otherwise quiet. I mean, yes, I knew about vaginal discharge and have observed its changing textures. But LOOK AT THESE PHOTOS. There's creamy, there's milky, there's bloody. Every day a different combination.

Women, we are marvels. Truly.

Assisted Reproduction

2008-12-01T11:57:00.002-05:00

I read an account, in yesterday's Times magazine, of the author's decision to hire a gestational surrogate. It nicely illustrated the kind of circumstances that can lead to surrogacy: protracted infertility on one side; financial and altruistic benefits on the other.

Coincidentally, a solicitation for the Smile Train ran alongside part of the article. It reminded me of a news item I saw last week linking assisted reproduction (ART) -- particularly in vitro fertilization (IVF) -- with increased incidence of certain birth defects. Among these was a more than doubling of the risk for cleft lip with or without associated cleft palate.

The magazine showed photos of the author's healthy baby. My friends who have used IVF share similarly joyful results. It seems like it would make the decision to pursue IVF much more difficult if you suspected something in the process itself made your baby more at risk for certain defects. On the other hand, any choice to conceive, let alone raise, a child is fraught with risk to that child's health and well being.

Perhaps it is the case that parents going the ART route have considered scenarios and answered hypothetical questions before meeting with a doctor or employing the proverbial turkey baster that the rest of us avoid altogether simply because we can. That does not mean the "unassisted reproducers" don't face risk of loss and complications. Rather, because our initial investment is so low (semen is free), we have the luxury of hoping for the best.

Individuals can make a difference after all

2008-11-20T21:24:00.003-05:00

I was pleased when Ricki Lake released "The Business of Being Born." But I had more reservations than many of my birth colleagues, who seemed to think the movie would spark a renaissance in attitudes toward labor and delivery in the U.S. Surely the movie would draw a crowd of converts like myself instead of women unsure about or wholly skeptical of non-medicalized birth paradigms. Surely an Obama rally would draw only the Democratic faithful.

Or would it? We have a liberal president for the first time in 8 years. And apparently home birth rates are up in New York. Not only that, they're appealing to new classes and cultures of women. Says the article, "Home birth professionals in New York City have been struck...by the fact that the increase is coming not so much from the dyed-in-the-wool back-to-nature types as from professionals like lawyers and bankers."

Moreover, "One reason for the change, it seems, is “The Business of Being Born,” a documentary produced by the actress and former talk show host Ricki Lake, which ran in only a few theaters during its theatrical release in January but has become an underground hit among expectant parents since coming out on DVD. "

I stand corrected. Ms. Lake, I apologize for my cynicism. You made a movie to "educate[ ] people and empower[ ] them to really know their choices in childbirth." Darned if it doesn't appear you did just that.

More personal recriminations

2008-11-11T12:52:00.004-05:00

Last Friday I went to a fundraiser for our local volunteer doula program, Doulas Care. It was very nicely done. I am hugely impressed by the amount of work that went into it. I know most of the employees and volunteers, so my gratitude is quite specific.

The evening was a delightful mix of socializing with birth colleagues , browsing silent auction items, and tasting wine. They had live music and a caterer. There were twinkle lights everywhere in the renovated barn where the fundraiser was held. It was quite enchanting.

I left with a high, great feelings for the increased awareness I've seen about doulas and birth in the last 5-6 years. I felt a sense of unity with these women and men who are committed to the same cause. I was affirmed by shared stories of births gone well, and women empowered.

By the next day, I was thinking again of this article a friend posted on his Facebook site. It's about maternal mortality and the persistence of high death rates among women in poor countries. The article has an accompanying slide show.

Between the images of spartan delivery rooms and descriptions of deaths that would be so easily prevented in developed countries, I realized how different the global issue of birth is from what I confront here in this little corner of Michigan. Yes, we have poor women here. Yes, women start labor without a minute of prenatal care. But there are places where they can be brought for safe delivery and recovery.

Insurance is, of course, its own issue. But if someone is hemorrhaging in this community, she will be given a transfusion at a hospital.

I was reminded again of a midwife friend who left the area saying she was "tired of these Ann Arbor women and their fancy birth plans." It sounded so cynical at the time. These were the women who were seeking her out for the amazing birth experiences of which she was so often a part. We needed desperately needed her and her birth philosophy here. How dare she leave.

She went on to work in rural Latin American countries and on American Indian reservations. Her patients were not concerned with whether or not they could birth in the squatting position. They were hoping, especially in Central America, simply to survive the experience and return home with their child.

I've thought about this before and come down hard on myself. On doulas generally. Aren't we all just birth junkies fortunate enough to have found this mechanism for getting to be present at birth?

Hopefully the answer is no. I think it is no. I think we want women to have a positive birth experience. Thankfully, in much of the developed world, fundamental questions of survival are largely taken for granted. We doulas arrive on a scene that has the luxury to focus on the smaller details: informed choice, minimal psychological trauma, enhanced bonding. But I suspect that if we were in a culture where birth was a dicier proposition, we would do what we could to assist on that level: lining up blood donors for each woman in advance of birth, helping women get to care, providing care to families in the event of loss.

It is a spectrum. We are fortunate to be on the more luxurious end of it. But we would serve even if we were not. Wouldn't we?

Paying a Premium to be Female

2008-11-03T20:51:00.002-05:00

An editorial in today's NY Times called attention to the fact that women often pay more than men for the same health care insurance coverage. They are also excluded from eligibility by conditions that are uniquely female: having had a c-section for example.

The editorial mentioned that women fortunate enough to obtain coverage may find that maternity care isn't covered. I would add that even those policies that cover maternity care do so only when it's provided in a hospital. Ixnay on the omebirthhay.

This type of information is rarely surprising. Last week our office was buzzing about a study that said heterosexual marriage added seven hours a week of work to the woman's load and decreased the man's by two hours. My colleagues appreciated confirmation of what they felt to be true, but no one found the study enlightening.

Similarly, are we surprised health care is a little harder to get or pay for by the women in our society? Sadly, no.

More grounded, no less busy

2008-11-02T20:56:00.002-05:00

Time flew. My self-imposed hiatus is over. I found four items to flag for my "doulicia fodder" favorites folder. I got my legs under me at the new job (and what a pleasant new place it is!). I saw a doctor about my sore Achilles tendon and received a diagnosis of tendonitis, for which I begin physical therapy this week. I spent a gorgeous evening passing out Halloween candy from our front step and watching bats swoop over our house.

Now, November. A work colleagued had a baby, her first, last week. She called to say everything went "really, really well." I haven't heard the details of what that meant to her, but I am glad for her happiness.

Another colleague told me she was pregnant last week. We have in common a friend, who is also a former client. Small world.

This Friday I'll be going to a fundraiser for the Doulas Care program, our local volunteer doula service for low income women. I'd like to say I'm generous enough to be one of the volunteer doulas. I'm not. At least not for now. But I have served on the board of Doulas Care's precursor organization, and provide what financial support I can.

I'm eager to post and reflect on the issues I flagged. For now, I'm just getting back in the groove. Hi.

Where I've Been and Where I'll Be

2008-10-08T21:05:00.002-05:00

I've changed jobs since I last wrote. By which I mean my regular, non-doula employment at the U. It's a great change, but time consuming.

This move, coincides with a planned break in my doula work. I am not taking on any new clients until 2009.

I have not spent a lot of time lately thinking about birth. Which is not to say I haven't been thinking about it at all. I have.

But the other things pushing in right now make me think I'll extend what is already a 3-week break from blogging a little longer. Assuming things settle back into a routine around the house, I look forward to resuming in another month or so. And whether or not things settle, a new batch of clients will no doubt bring new fodder for posts.

So the few of you who check in from time to time might want to just make a note to wait until November.

Enjoy your October.

Is Breast Really Best?

2008-09-17T09:43:00.003-05:00

Let's take a stick to the hornet's nest, shall we? Let's call into question the tenet, the slogan, the moral high ground. Could formula be okay? Might it not really matter to babies if they are breast fed or not?

One academic thinks so. Joan Wolf is going head to head with La Leche League on the website Opposing Views (a neat concept in itself).

Before villifying Wolf, read what she has to say. She raises excellent questions about biases and omissions in the studies that have been used to label breastmilk the preferred baby food.

Better yet, read her complete article, "Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign." It will likely make you uncomfortable. It will challenge your fundamental assumptions about breastmilk, mothers, and public health campaigns.

The author and I were randomly assigned college roommates. She was a feminist, an honors student, a spitfire. I was not at all surprised she became an academic.

I read and commented to her on an early draft of the breastfeeding article. It shook me. I was surprised to learn how little is really known about the benefits of breastmilk over formula. So many of the studies that compare groups of babies who are breast or formula fed cannot control for other confounding factors.

I do not think Wolf is trying to undermine breastfeeding. Rather, she is saying that before we launch a national health campaign, we should make sure there is sound science to support it.

Obviously, I am a breastfeeding supporter. In part this is because of the very research Wolf questions. But it is also because I have a fundamental faith in the superiority of evolution over chemical engineering. I do not believe a feeding system that has sustained mammals for hundreds of thousands of years could be improved upon or even equalled by a few decades of tinkering in the lab.

I also find it more cosmically "right" to have mothers feeding babies from their bodies than from bottles.

But these things are arguments of faith, not reason.

Read for yourselves. Keep an open mind. Whether you end up persuaded or not, it is good to know the rational and scientific arguments for and against.

Even if in the end you return to faith.

Does Vaginal Birth Help Hardwire the Maternal Brain?

2008-09-10T19:30:00.004-05:00

According to this article, the brains of women who birth vaginally show more activity in response to their baby's cries than those of women whose babies were born surgically. Says one of the investigators,

Our results support the theory that variations in delivery conditions such as with caesarean section, which alters the neurohormonal experiences of childbirth, might decrease the responsiveness.

Yes, perhaps. But empirically, do we really see this? I would be curious what demonstrated behaviors, if any, correlate to the increased or decreased brain activity?

Obviously, I like any research that supports caution in using Cesarean sections. But this one seems especially primed to make women who have a C-section, including those true emergency C-sections, feel guilty. And that is the last thing any new mother needs.

update: Interestingly, a list of headlines related to this research, all cast it in negative terms (e.g. "C-Section Poses Risk to Bonding"), except one: "Natural Childbirth Makes Mothers More Reponsive to Own Baby Cry." This is my concern. The latter headline affirms vaginal* birth, while the others criticize surgical birth -- and, indirectly, the women who experience it.

*note: I, too, share the pet peeve of labeling all vaginal birth, "natural!"

Further Clarification on the Role of the Doula

2008-09-02T09:38:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted a link to an article about a local couple whose baby was born in their front yard. It was a great birth story, but worried me because the couple's doula reverted to her midwife training when the baby came early. What if the article made people think all doulas check for dilation?

Apparently I wasn't the only person who heard alarm bells. Local midwife and doula trainer extrordinaire Patty Brennan wrote a to-the-point editorial in the same paper last Friday. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Damn Creepy Guys

2008-09-02T08:40:00.004-05:00

I was greeted by this in my e-mail this morning:

SECURITY BULLETIN from
Department of Public Safety

BULLETIN DATE: Sept. 1, 2008

OFFENSE: Attempted abduction

LOCATION: South of campus near Packard Road and Independence Street (near Fraser’s Pub)

An unknown man reportedly approached two young women in separate incidents after dark Aug. 31 and attempted to push each one into a nearby minivan, the women told the Police Dept. One woman reported she was jogging in the area about 9:40 pm when she was approached and the second female reported an incident one hour later. In each case, the woman fought off the man and succeeded in escaping without injuries.

Just last night I was complaining how I hate it that I can't run where and when I want without fear. As any road runner (or cyclist) knows, traffic lights are a pain in the rear. Your rhythm is thrown off, not to mention any consistent measure of your time. And every intersection bears the risk of a collision, flesh with metal.

But traffic lights are at intersections of major roads. This runner keeps to major roads because of visibility. It's going to be harder to pull me into a van if you have to put on your hazards to pull over, and cars are regularly passing in both directions.

I run on major roads.

Now I see that a major road, in a "good" part of town, was the site of two attempted abductions last night, an hour after I was out running. And these were bold attempts. Dragging a woman off the street into a van!

I already avoid the public bus in the afternoon, to no small personal inconvenience, because of one particular creepy guy. I'm starting to think I may need to become a gym rat for the same reason.

It really is enough to make one want to carry a concealed weapon. This from Ms. Peace and Love.

Random Birth Thoughts

2008-08-26T11:13:00.002-05:00

I spent last night perusing my birth blog links (midwives, doulas, etc.). There's so much inspirational stuff out there. It reminds me I should spend more time reading when I'm on-line and less time playing WordTwist in Facebook.

And I should spend more time writing when I'm on-line than browsing groups on Ravelry.

But then hasn't many a therapist said we fill our lives with too many "shoulds?" The kinder approach to oneself is to be forgiving, especially of small vices and transgressions (Mountain Dew, buying more yarn than one could possibly use, Scramble...).

Anyway, I wonder how many of you have heard about this reported link between surgical birth and the risk of Type I diabetes for the baby? They don't seem to understand the mechanism yet. Still, another reason to birth vaginally if you can.

I do not have any clients for the fall. At the moment I'm appreciating the break from call and visits. My guess is that will fade by October and I'll add someone before the end of the year. I am still in touch with my most recent two clients, one of whom just went back to work, the other of whom will go back in about two weeks. Neither was ready. Why do we rush our mothers back to work so soon?

My recent insight was that as much as I dread long births (like, 20+ hours long), those are invariably the births at which I feel most useful and from which I form the closest bonds with clients. A special bonding happens when you cover epic birth ground together. It's just not the same when you're with a client two or three hours and the baby's born. NOT that we complain about those births. And not that I've had so many of them on which to base my judgment.

Knitting Doldrums

2008-08-13T13:13:00.004-05:00

I'm adrift. Casting about from feeble project to half-hearted swatch. For everything I think to knit, I lack either the right yarn or the right pattern.

It could be the post-sweater let-down. Since finishing Snorri in June, I just haven't been able to pick up anything else meaty. This often is the case when I finish a book I've really liked. I can't jump right into another one. I read periodicals or children's fiction instead.

The new house also could be to blame. My knitting time has always been in the evening, on the living room couch, while my spouse watches a ballgame on the other side of the room. In our new house, the TV is in the basement, the couch is in the living room and my evenings are filled with the seemingly endless tasks of getting settled. There are no routines or physical prompts conducive to knitting.

Regardless, the result is this:

and -- yawn -- this:

Do these not scream knitting apathy? "What the hey, give me some yarn...any size needles...leave me alone here to garter stitch..."

The first project is really just playing. A log cabin progression in Noro Kureyon. The second project is some cotton dishcloths using the tried and true pattern and my random balls of 1824 Cotton.

I've also swatched for the start of a sweater for my spouse. But I tried Addi Turbos for the first time and would rather not remember the experience. Needless to say I returned them for some Clover Bamboos the next opportunity I had.

I don't worry this will pass. It just disappoints while it's here.

nightly blood sucking or monthly metamorphoses?

2008-08-07T09:36:00.003-05:00

I know: what's up with 3 posts in the same week? Am I getting back in a groove? Wouldn't that be nice?

I have to share with someone this conversation from last week. We were at the home of friends having some beers (well, I wasn't. I hate beer. I was having a Smirnoff something or other, which is flavored beer, but works for me).

These were Molson (or Labatt?) beers with "conversation questions" on the label. A kitchy idea with just enough genuine merit that we found ourselves reading and answering them. The one that divided us and nearly started a marital spat or two?

"Who would you rather be, a vampire or a werewolf?"

We all rolled our eyes. Easy. No question.

Vampire, right? Except, no! The men said werewolf.

Looks of shock and outrage were exchanged. Then we settled down and explained ourselves. It was clear that sex appeal drove those of us in the vampire camp:

vampires are seductive
they are drawn to that most scintillating of areas, the neck
they have orgies or group somethings (who saw the movie with Tom Cruise?)
they're attractive, if undead

The men werewolf contingent thought it obvious that the appeal came from having that animal strength and general reprieve from symptoms except for the monthly full moon. Never mind that we are subject to our own monthly symptoms, the strength argument held little weight.

And that was without taking THIS phenomenon into account, which will no doubt persuade me even more (and is already working on fellow blogger Peacock Chic).

My random Thursday question to you is if you're with me in the vampire camp? If you vote, please include your gender, so I can test my hypothesis that this is very much a men are from Mars, women are from Venus thing.

The Sweetest Little Face

2008-08-06T10:08:00.005-05:00

No matter how often you've seen it, the appearance of the baby's head in the birth canal is exciting. Encouraging comments ("you're doing so well," "what amazing work you're doing") take on a new level of sincerity and intensity when non-maternal skin shows up.

Many partners become emotional at seeing this first glimpse of their baby:

Oh my gosh! I can see her! You're doing it! Yes...pushpushpushpushpushpushOmigod! Sweetie, She's right there. She's coming! Again? O.K. Pushpushpushpushpush. OH! I can see her little face [sniffle]. She's beautiful! She looks just like-- O.K. YES! PUSHPUSHPUSH. She's so close now...

I've been there. I've ridden that climaxing wave of emotion. It is a big part of the payoff for us doulas, that high.

However, after a few births we learn to take a second look when someone announces they can see the face. Face presentations are rare. In fact, when they occur, the face can become so swollen, that it is mistaken for a bottom! And because it takes the brunt of the friction and force, face presentations often aren't pretty (at first).

Nor is the "face" in the canal pretty. On closer inspection, it seems rather disfigured, often with lots of dark lanugo.

What's going on?

It took me a while to realize I and all these thrilled (or horrified) parents were seeing not a wee face, but a wrinkled patch of scalp.

As the baby comes down the vaginal canal, she usually does a two-steps-forward-one-step-back progression. Overall each push moves her down, but she slides back up a little once the pressure is off. At that point, her skin is pressed tight against the vaginal wall. It doesn't slide all the way back. As the skull bones pull back and slacken the scalp skin, it folds and wrinkles. Try this with your arm: grab it a few inches below the elbow and push toward your hand. See the wrinkles near your grip?

Put those wrinkles under some mucus, down a narrow tunnel, and they could be anything. Especially when all the thoughts of love and anticipation are projected onto them. They could indeed be a face.

When the baby truly crowns, when the perineum is stretched to snapping and the head is moments away from fully exiting, the scalp is stretched taught. There are no wrinkles and no mistaking what is face and what isn't.

Unless they look upset, I don't explain to a partner what that "face" really is. When they are so happy to see it, so full of affection for it, who am I to get in the way? I try to see a face, too, as they are seeing it. Their sweet baby's face.

Front lawn birth

2008-08-04T12:28:00.003-05:00

This has probably made the rounds already -- the baby born in an Ann Arbor front lawn. If you haven't read the story it's really a fun one. The doula on-hand, Beth Barbeau, is a local homebirth midwife, doula, and breastfeeding educator. And a delightful soul on top of all that.

Says the article,

Barbeau arrived at 10:50 and found that Jennifer was still in the early stages of dilation, but her water broke as she was getting out of the shower. By the time Jennifer was helped out to the car, she could feel the baby coming. "We won't make it!" she shouted.

Barbeau needed to examine her. In the dark in the front yard, she mistook Jakary for her daughter.

"She grabbed my mom's crotch," said Jennifer.

I can only imagine how crazy things were there for a few minutes.

The one potential negative I can see to the story is that it perpetuates the common misperception that doulas are involved in the woman's medical care. As a doula, I am not permitted to check for dilation. In the situation above, I would have (as my partner T$ did at her client's unplanned home birth) called for an ambulance and helped catch the baby if it arrived before the ambulance.

The DONA Standards of Practice actually say, "If doulas who are also health care professionals choose to provide services for a client that are outside the doula’s scope of practice, they should not describe themselves as doulas to their client or to others." I don't read that to mean that you CANNOT use your skills in an "emergency" situation that calls for them. It seems Barbeau should be able to use her midwife skills if a client is delivering a baby.

I just don't want people to think, "I'm not going to have a doula because I don't want one more person with her hand up my hoo hoo."

Quid pro Quo (Part II)

2008-07-22T11:07:00.005-05:00

The thought of trading a sweater for art filled me with joy. It meant my knitting was not only a hobby I enjoyed, it was something other people found value in, too. (I will spare the whole side reflection on whether a hobby should be more than enjoyed, whether my need for others to find value in it means it's not a hobby, but another performance arena, etc. That thought is there, though.).

I poked around on-line, sent images of different styles (cardigan, pullover, bulky, slim silhouette, cabled, gansey, etc.). He settled on Snorri, from Reynolds. I'd never knit cables before, but why not start with this? Actually, it gave me a welcome excuse to jump in.

Six months after I finally "got gauge," I finished the behemoth. The friend is six feet tall with even longer arms. Thank heaven the yarn was bulky.

Without further babbling, I give you my "will knit for art" sweater, modeled by the recipient:

Pattern: Snorri from Best of Lopi.

Yarn: 12 skeins Cascade 128 in colorway 7633 (brown tweed). This is GREAT yarn. All the Peruvian softness of Cascade 220, but in a beefed up size. I will use this again.

Needles: Clover bamboo circulars, size 9 and 10.

Notes/Thoughts: I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. The knitting went quickly, cabling was a snap, and the pattern read well. I was a bit intimidated by sewing the thing together and let it sit in pieces for about two months. When I got down to it, even the assembly went well. I added 4 inches to each arm to make sure it would fit the ape-armed recipient. It ended up with just a little extra length in the arm. Whew!

This barter equation:

=

Quid pro Quo (Part I)

2008-07-18T11:22:00.007-05:00

I realized the other day that I have been a runner for more than 25 years now, starting with middle school track. I was never a standout, but ran, even then, for other reasons: wellness, the feeling of air moving past my body, beginning to know my physical limits. Also all my friends ran track.

Never a sprinter, I moved from track to cross country in high school. I didn't fare any better in the races, but the workouts were better. We practiced in the park and ran our long distances on the various unpaved or skim-shouldered roads around my small hometown.

To this day, a pleasant and deep memory is of running in the country when the corn was at its full height on both sides of a narrow road. It crowded in and provided physical relief in a midwest landscape otherwise unbroken except for remnant forests.

One particular stretch of road had a tree that I loved for its loneliness among the corn. Some years ago I started wanting to capture its image and something of my sentiments about it. I took photographs with my small digital camera, but only when I happened to remember it on a trip to or from my parents' house. In short, the photos weren't great:

Last summer we were at the home of some friends. He is an amateur painter (in addition to a very useful furniture mover, as he proved this past weekend). I had a brainstorm. He could PAINT my tree. Then I would not only have it memorialized, but also have some original artwork for our house.

He was very open to the idea. Within a few weeks of my sending him the photo above, he produced this canvas, much to my delight:

We're not in the position to buy art, which meant the issue of payment had to be negotiated. I thought about barter. They are done having kids, so volunteering doula services was out of the question...what else? What else? Knitting of course!

Up next: the knitting commissioned by the artist.

What did I tell you?

2008-07-16T21:34:00.002-05:00

The mantra, the mantra, the mantra. You gotta say it, you gotta believe it.

For this doula, the mantra is, "This will all work out."

Say it with me, 'cause you KNOW I was saying it Saturday morning when, as I did my final walk through of our new house, my client called to say she was in early labor. We'd already picked up the moving truck. Our friends were showing up in 1/2 hour to start helping with the move. But did I freak? Nah. I just said the mantra and finished the walk through.

And wouldn't you know, her partner called me just as we were finishing unloading the last items from the last truckload to say they'd like me to come over. My spouse was about to order pizza for the moving crew. All I'd miss was dinner. And bedtime. And unpacking.

Still, I had faith. "This will all work out," I said, as I changed clothes, put on fresh deodorant, brushed my teeth and jumped in the car.

When I got to my client's house, she was just deciding it was time to go to the hospital. I was only at her house 15-20 minutes before we left. She was at the hospital less than an hour when she pushed out her precious little one.

It was a great birth and she's written a great account of it that I'll see if I can share. In the meantime, I couldn't be happier that my fastest birth to date kindly happened on a day when I most appreciated it. It really all worked out.

I'd Rather Give Birth...

2008-07-11T10:16:00.004-05:00

...than move. But as with labor, the time comes eventually. Inevitably. For me, that time is now.

Tomorrow will find doulicia loading that moving van and hauling her possessions to a new house. Don't get me wrong. I'm excited to be in the new space. I just hate moving.

Plus, my births were pretty darn easy. So it's not saying much to prefer birth to moving. If it weren't for having to keep the baby and raise it, I'd "do birth" over again in a heartbeat.

Which leads me to another insight I've developed the past few months. Realty should have its own doulas. House selling doulas. Wouldn't it be nice to have a reassuring presence by your side as you meet with your agent and learn what your house (that you paid X for) is likely to sell for in this down market (X-Y)? A house selling doula would tell you what to expect and give tips for making things go smoothly. For example, "Don't wipe down the bathroom for an open house until after the boys have peed and been banished to the yard for the remainder of the morning."

When an offer finally comes in on your house, you'd first call your doula to share the flood of emotions -- excitement, disappointment, anxiety -- before meeting with your realtor. And your house selling doula would suggest ways to stay distracted (go to a movie! take a walk!) while the inspector is going through the house and itemizing all the things you have to fix before closing.

I know I could've used someone reminding me to take deep, slow breaths, to keep focused on the end goal, to remember that thousands of people do this every day and have been for years.

Then the doula would come when we're finally in our new house and coo over it, make sure we're taking time from unpacking for self-care, and bring a meal.

Anyone?

p.s. Have I mentioned I have a client due Tuesday?!! Cosmic vibes, please encourage her baby to hang in there just a bit longer!

Spreading the Good Word

2008-07-07T11:30:00.003-05:00

This past year our family has been host "Aunt and Uncle" to an AFS exchange student from Japan. I never knew that if you were not able to make the commitment to be a host family, you could still connect with and exchange student in the Aunt/Uncle/Cousin role. The involvement is minimal -- one interaction a month.

Our "niece" taught us how to make rice balls (onigiri). They remain a favorite with the kids. In return, I taught her to knit! Actually, she initiated it. She went to one of my son's indoor soccer games and asked what all the women were doing. We have lots of knitters among the soccer moms. I told her it was knitting and she said, "You show me knit?" BINGO!

She was a very quick student. One lesson and she was off on a garter stitch scarft. The next lesson and she was purling. Our third meeting, I escorted her to the hallowed halls of a yarn store and bought her her own needles, tapestry needle, and yarn. Showing excellent taste, she chose a divinely colored ball of Misty Alpaca.

Being talented and ambitious, she asked to make mittens. Great. Except that she couldn't read patterns, and I only saw her every month. I quickly had her knit a gauge swatch, then calculated a cast-on for her to knit a flat square. My thought was that at our next meeting we'd seam the squares up the side, leaving holes for thumbs, and pull a string through the top to tighten like a hat closure. Not perfect, but the best I could do.

We met for the last time in June. She brought her squares and I showed her how to sew a mattress stitch. She seamed the sides and I picked up stitches to start the thumbs. She took over (her first time on DPNs) one thumb, while I started the other.

She finished the mittens, I snapped a photo, and returned her to her host family an hour later than I'd planned. But she took a finished pair of mitts back to Japan with her, and a few balls of yarn to keep busy with on the plane.

Each one, teach one!

Where did the month go?

2008-06-29T20:48:00.002-05:00

It's almost July and I've only posted once in June? Not for lack of thoughts, news, etc. Mainly time.

We just returned from a wonderful week's vacation in Michigan's Leelanau Penninsula. I knitted lots (more on that in a future post), read a satisfying amount, and enjoyed my time with the family.

I return to what promises to be a full, challenging month. If all goes as planned we close on the sale of our house and purchase of a new one this next week. Two weeks later we're scheduled to move. Just a few blocks across town, but an emptying of domicile nonetheless.

That would be challenge enough, but it just so happens I also have a client due the same week of our planned move. Who would have guessed when we listed our house in March and I accepted a client in April, that the (most welcomed) forces of relocation would pinpoint the same time frame as the labor godesses.

As always, I'm putting my faith in the "this will work out; it always does" mantra we birth tenders cling to.

Which reminds me. Two nice twin stories to pass along. The first from someone I know through work, whose twin boys arrived roughly a half hour apart in early June. They were her second and third children. They, like their sister before them, arrived vaginally, without any pain meds in their mama. Between them, they weighed over 11 1/2 pounds.

The second is from a former client who left the area about a year ago. She, like the work colleague, was young, not on fertility medication, and completely floored by the announcement of twins on the way. Hers, too, arrived vaginally in a birth she would not have wanted to go any other way.

It is reassuring to hear that hospitals are still letting multiples, at least in some situations, arrive in their own time, through the birth canal.

Professional Hazard: Friendship

2008-06-03T08:33:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, after having lunch with a former client, and a week after having coffee with a different former client, I was reflecting on the wonderful friendships I've made through my doula work. This includes, of course, my friendship with my backup/co-doula, T$, as well as the other amazing birth professionals I've gotten to know over the years.

It also includes the growing number of mothers and families I count among my friends. When I became doula, I hoped I would occasionally get to serve as a doula for a friend. I did not anticipate that I would often become friends with someone I served as a doula. It happens.

In large part this reflects the fact that most of my clients are similar to me: college educated, mid- to late-30's, partnered, Caucasian, liberal, middle-class, etc.. I admit my practice is not as diverse as it could be, despite my sliding fee scale and willingness to work with low-income clients.

It was therefore heartening to read this news story about a doula and client who became friends despite differences in their socio-economic, marital and educational status. Their respect and inspiration runs both ways.

There is a place in all doulas that hopes for this: that we may learn from our clients and they may learn from us; that we mutually raise each other a little bit from where we were. In a profession where the hours are long, unpredictable and intense, it is a pleasant perk to meet women one enjoys being around. It is likewise satisfying to have women want your company.

Yet unspoken in the article are those boundary issues we doulas need to keep in mind. Anyone who has worked with women in crisis, transition, or just a bad situation knows the "rescues" are few and far between. It is not the doula's job to help new mothers set up housekeeping. Nor should we assume emotional responsibility for the family's welfare. The doula heart wants to make everything better. It rarely can.

The doula-client relationship is a different thing from a friendship. Sometimes the former evolves into the latter. More often -- especially in cases of need -- the former masquerades as the latter.

Fortunately for the women in the article, their friendship appears genuine and balanced. Both of them draw from it and contribute to it. Things have worked out nicely for each of them.

Part of a doula's work is maintaining self-awareness. One must recognize when the urge to help or simply spend time with another woman exceeds the doula's professional scope. When that happens, it is either time to begin closing the doula-client relationship or to embrace the newly budding friendship. Both actions, when honestly motivated, keep us invigorated and rewarded in our work.

Iaterogenic prematurity

2008-05-28T13:05:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reports the fastest growing segment of premature babies is in the 34-37 week gestational age group. Moreover, researchers suspect unwarranted Caesarean deliveries are "causing" many of these early births.

"It is often hard to tell from medical records exactly why a Caesarean was done," reports the article. Amen.

My only client to have a scheduled C-section did so officially because of "suspected macrosomia" -- big baby. That is what is in her charts. What is NOT in her charts is that she had professional experience dealing with babies who had aspirated meconium, most of whom were post-dates, and did not want her baby born any later than her due date. When she had not started dilating by week 39, her doctor told her induction would end in a C-section anyway, "diagnosed" and scheduled her.

Fortunately none of my clients have been pushed to induce or deliver before their babies were full term. Nor have they pushed their doctors to induce or deliver early. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case for the U.S. in general.

New England Road Trip Sweater

2008-05-15T11:04:00.005-05:00

A month ago we made a 2,000 mile tour of New England, visiting two of my spouse's brothers and his parents. The visits were fine, but how 'bout all that time in the car? I took the perfect car pattern, Sitcom Chic. It was lots of stockinette stitch, only a bit of counting, and relatively small (for an adult sweater).

I knit almost the entire sweater in a week's time! This is certainly a record for pokey-needled me. I cast on and off a sleeve in one day. Amazing.

Better still, I love, love, love the sweater. It is amazingly soft. The color is beautiful. Complete strangers came up to me as I was knitting and commented on the color. It's a spot-on fit. Absolutely no complaints.

To boot, I found a button I adore.

A friend says it's Edelweiss, which makes me feel better. I thought it was a poinsettia (but had determined to wear it regardless).

Pattern: Sitcom Chic by Bonne Marie Burns from Knitty.

Yarn: 7 skeins Classic Silk by Classic Elite in cobalt.

Needles: Clover bamboo circulars, size 6 and 8.

Notes/Thoughts: I followed the pattern except for making the sleeves an inch longer than called for (I have long arms) and using an i-cord edging for the button and neck band.

Also, I learned the consequences of asking one's 10-year-old son to help with photographing knitwear (or anything else for that matter):

Firsts

2008-05-08T11:53:00.003-05:00

I'm still new enough to the doula profession that many births bring me a "first:" first VBAC, first stillbirth, first twins, first delivery out of bed, first hemorrhage, etc. Many firsts have yet to happen in my experience. I am waiting for my first water birth, home birth, breech birth (right!), car birth and birth in an unruptured placenta.

I was already going to write about how my most recent client was my first client to have preeclampsia. She was diagnosed yesterday, nearly 2 weeks past her due date, and promptly admitted to the hospital.

Last night began her induction. She had gotten a gel earlier in the day. Around seven they began cytotec. At 11 she was contracting regularly so they opted not to go another round with cytotec and instead began a low dose pitocin drip.

After all this she remained dilated the same 1-2 centimeters she had been for weeks. They sent her spouse home to sleep, gave her Ambien and a little morphine so she could sleep, and sat back for the pitocin to start its long work.

At 1:00 my client suddenly found herself in serious discomfort and was quickly given the epidural she requested. When the doctor checked her at 4:00 she was complete. She called in her spouse and after less than 1/2 hour of pushing, delivered her healthy baby.

This is what her spouse told me over the phone this morning when he called to say the baby had been born. I assumed the call was for me to come in to the hospital because she was getting uncomfortable with contractions. When I heard a baby crying in the background my heart jumped. I thought her blood pressure must have risen precipitously and they'd had to do an emergency c-section. No.

Everything was okay. She just didn't call me. It was the first birth I've ever missed.

I visited them this morning. It sounds like two things accounted for my full night's rest. First, when things got uncomfortable, they did so quickly. And just as quickly the epidural eased her pain and she rested some more. Her spouse didn't even know she was getting an epidural. He was at home, resting up for the long haul.

Second, my client was very dopey. She said that between the Ambien and the morphine, she had a difficult time even understanding what was going on. She slept when they said sleep and called her spouse when they said it was time to call. No one said call the doula.

Her spouse said this morning that they'd much rather have had this kind of birth than one where they really needed a doula. Indeed, that was the birth we all were anticipating.

I have been replaying the night over and over. Despite their reassurances to the contrary, I can't help but feel like I failed in my job. I saw her at the hospital early yesterday evening, before they started cytotec. At everyone's urging -- the mother's, the doctor's, my own id's -- I went home to rest up.

No one thought this would be a quick birth. I have been an many an induction where the first 24 hours are all sitting and waiting for contractions to even start.

But I do not like leaving clients alone for this very reason. One never knows what will happen. Especially when cytotec, that jackhammer of a drug, is involved. Yes, she could have had 24 hours of cytotec and never responded. I have seen that before. Or she could have done what she did, jump all over it.

I don't think the birth would have gone differently. No one is saying it went poorly. But the thought of my client laboring alone haunts me.

I know this won't be my last missed birth, but I hope it's the last I miss from letting my guard down.

Breaking in

2008-04-29T19:35:00.003-05:00

I have met with 2 college students in the last year who have an interest in birth. More specifically, they want to learn more about being with women in birth.

This is a golden opportunity in any circumstance. Here it seems even more precious. Both students plan on attending medical school.

You're with me, right? Imagine having their first images of birth be complete, holistic, respectful. For comparison, I have the stories some physician friends and clients have told me about the births they witnessed during rotations: panicked teen mothers, women with no prenatal care showing up in the ER, families fighting in the halls or delivery room. And, of course, no sense of birth as a continuous process. Instead, they saw the snippets of cervical exams, pre- and post-epidural mothers, and a few dozen babies being caught, pulled, extracted from the mothers.

The problem is, it is very hard to find clients willing to add another body to the birth room. I can't blame them. I certainly wouldn't want an additional person at my birth. One of the primary reasons most clients contact me is that they want to preserve a high degree of intimacy around their birth. It is often a concession to that wish to add even a doula to the plan. I can barely bring myself to raise the question: "Would you be receptive to a prospective doula observing your birth?"

I do raise the question, but couch it in very deferential language. I make it clear that my expectation is that they'll say no, but I always as just in case. I have never had someone say yes. Even the clients who were pretty immune to crowds -- who had 6 family members in the birth room and even permitted an EMT trainee to observe -- did not want another doula in the room.

So what do we do? How do we, who have access to amazing women and amazing births, who frequently work with physicians, midwives and nurses receptive to the supportive, respectful birth, who can introduce budding caregivers to birth as a normal, healthy process, how do we do this?

Renewal (or, the best news I've heard in a long time)

2008-04-24T12:38:00.003-05:00

Yesterday a baby girl was born, alert, eyes-open, a healthy 7 lb. 6 oz., to my former clients whose first child was born still nearly two years ago. I know many of you have followed their story. I couldn't wait to share this happy new beginning.

There are all kinds of families

2008-04-14T09:44:00.001-05:00

Family construction is an interest of mine. I thought this was a short and (perhaps too?) sweet account of 3 people's decision to make a family.

Baby Surprise

2008-04-11T21:34:00.002-05:00

So a few (many?) weeks ago I promised a birth story. It's brief, as mine are these days -- all in the interest of client confidentiality.

However, I love sharing the happy ones, especially if they stick in the back of someone's mind at a future birth and inspire them as they've inspired me.

The short version is this: my client, at 41+ weeks, began having contractions the night before she was to get induced. We all arrived at the hospital happy things started on their own. More joy as she was found to be well into labor (5-6 cm). This was not her first baby and she appeared to be on the fast track.

An hour later, she was 8 centimeters. Then pushy. But, whoops, still 8. So she worked hard to manage those intense contractions from a very low baby. More time -- hours, in fact -- still 8 centimeters. The confident promises of a baby by lunch were replaced by those birth platitudes: things take their own time, the baby is fine, she'll come when she's ready, don't look at the clock, we'll change positions...

And still 8 centimeters. The exhausted, discouraged mother got an epidural, a little sleep, went through more painful contractions as the epidural bolus wore off, then was complete.

Friends, in half an hour's time, she pushed out the biggest baby I've ever seen. 10 3/4 lbs. Fat rolls on his legs and neck. Cheers and tears all around.

Sometimes things DO come in their own time and for good reason. Patience is such an integral part of a good birth.

Hand Washing is Alive and Well in Holden Women's Hospital

2008-04-08T16:27:00.002-05:00

I was at a birth a while back and was struck by the proliferation of hand-washing signs. The door to each patient's room had an 8.5x11 image of a faucet and bubbles. In the hallway restroom I counted 3 reminders, each a coloring page completed by a child and laminated AND a more professional sign encouraging visitors to wash hands.

Of course this is a good thing. I'm always happy to comply and appreciate the reminder. I didn't pay attention to whether nurses and doctors were following their institution's advice.

_________________________

The birth stories continue to trickle in. Thanks all. It is very touching to read them.

Cervical length as C-Section indicator.

2008-03-31T12:09:00.001-05:00

Sorry I don't have time to reflect on this. Mainly I find it interesting and am, as yet, without opinion...

Penny Simkin ROCKS!

2008-03-24T08:30:00.002-05:00

Whether you know Penny as a friend and mentor or have never heard of her, you'll appreciate this profile of her life and her work as founder of our doula movement.

I had the honor of attending one of Penny's sessions at a DONA conference several summers ago. She is amazing. I find myself wishing I could have her combination of gentleness and strength. She is the sweetest, kindest person. But when she talks about the rights of laboring women, you hear ferocity in her voice. I have no doubt she'd be a graceful and effective advocate.

It was such a welcome, upbeat read on this Monday morning. I hope you enjoy it too.

Charity Ad in Lieu of Content

2008-03-21T13:17:00.006-05:00

It's been so unbelievably busy that I haven't had time to post. Fear not. In the hopper, posts on: a recent birth I attended, doula mentoring, knitting updates.

For now, however, let me offer you all the chance to win an afghan, hand-knitted with beautiful Briar Rose Fibers' yarn. Here's a teaser:

photo courtesy of Kniterella

I knitted the army green box in the lower right corner and 3 others like it. Seven others supplied their own squares. Kniterella is seaming them all together into one masterpiece.

The finished product is being raffled to folks to make a donation to the Grand Rapids, Michigan Hope Lodge, a support center for families of cancer patients. More info on Hope Lodge, the afghan and the raffle is available here.

It's not so much the 10 years as a parent...

2008-03-14T14:09:00.004-05:00

Yes, my elder living son turned 10 today. Around 1 this morning, to be exact.

A few years ago, my friend Bookworm wrote about how she wasn't as freaked out about her son's turning 10 as she was at the notion she'd been a mom for ten years. [She was also more positive about the experience than I am, but that may just be genetics. Mine, hers, our sons'.]

That's not what gets me. What squeezes my heart is the thought that in all likelihood I have fewer years left with him in the house than have already passed with him in the house. We're on the downhill side of sharing a roof.

That is a sobering thought.

Even when we start most mornings with him antagonizing his brother. Even though he can take 20 minutes to tell a story and at the end one still isn't sure what the point was. Even if he cannot be awake without waking the entire household.

I'm sure when he's moved on, I'll miss him. Tonight, over the cake of his choosing, we'll celebrate him.

The Good Enough Blog Mother

2008-03-11T10:42:00.003-05:00

I am trying to be a good mother to this blog. It is hard to do at times, isn't it, fellow bloggHers? But then I remember that bit of therapy: You don't have to be The Good Mother, just be a good-enough mother. I think I can do that.

Hence, today's post is in the vein of old skool blog posts: collections of links, web logs of visited sites, articles, etc. I want to comment on them,but each would take more time than I can spare at the moment (work is threatening to crush me, our house is for sale as of this past weekend, I have a client due any day now, my elder son turns 10 this week and the younger one has strep...). So I give you these:

1. A documentary I had not heard about, A Walk to Beautiful.

2. An article on the present state of 70s feminists' families and family lives, including Sheila Kitzinger.

3. The annual article giving doulas a bad rap, this time in the New York Times.

4. A support group for "other mothers" in the Bay Area. If you're interested in some good first-person reading on the subject, I recommend, Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All by Harlyn Aizley.

Birth on!

quick update

2008-03-06T11:30:00.003-05:00

The internet service is out at home and has been for 5 days, so this is a quick post from work. I also want to keep it short so we don't lose sight of the previous post, which is generating such a fabulous set of birth stories. Each and every one is touching and dear. Thank you all!

I have a client due in 2 weeks and another just signed on for the end of April. That may be it for a little while as May and June are nutsy with the end of (the boys') school and the start of (the boys') vacations. Plus, we are putting our house on the market this weekend. I won't go into the details here, but we've pumped more energy, time and money into our wee bungalow the past 10 days than we did the previous 7 years we've lived there!

More soon.

Your birth story in abbreviated form

2008-02-29T13:28:00.002-05:00

Another piece from The New Yorker got me thinking. The new book "Not Quite What I Was Planning" is a compilation of six-word autobiographies from famous and run-of-the-mill people. Its inspiration was the ominous Hemingway sentence, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Both the title of the book and the Hemingway sentence made me think of birth stories.

So I'm curious to know what you readers can do. Tell me your birth story (stories?) in six words. One tip from the book's compiler: use specifics.

Here's a (neither funny nor clever) try:

Told the midwife to "DO SOMETHING!"

or

Doctor and nurse watched from the corner.

I hope some of you are more inspired!

My Kind of People

2008-02-20T08:48:00.002-05:00

I know I have an odd sense of humor, but it's reassuring to know there are others in the world who share it.

Reading and bidding

2008-02-18T11:31:00.003-05:00

Thanks for the support from folks who understand or at least empathize with the winter blahs and other stresses.

In my reading travels I saw this article about a documentary entitled, "“Fifty Nude Women: A Musical Montage.” Margot Roth, the film's creator, made it in response to a male friend's confessed shock at seeing a date's breasts hang down once released from their push-up bra. Roth says she responded, “You just need to be barraged with, like, real boobs.”

She went on to recruit "real" women -- of all shapes, sizes and ages -- to appear nude on film.

My initial thought was positive. We all need to hold in our minds realistic images of unaltered (or naturally altered!) women's bodies. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty attempts to combat the uniform thinness and bustiness of media models.

But then I got irritated. Get over it! I wanted to say to the guy. Are you really dating for a pair of good boobs? How refreshing to hear him say, "She seemed interesting, but then we got back to my place and some serious talking -- I mean, we were getting deep -- and then she shed her date persona and I was horrified to see how shallow she was. I mean, she had nothing to support her positions."

Should we really go out of our way to "educate" men about real women, when they really only want realLY HOT women'S BODIES? Bang, bang, bang goes my head against the desk.

In more positive news, I have been picking up some exciting knitting patterns. A clear downside (or upside, depending how much cash flow bothers you) of Ravelry is the way its "queue" feature facilitates stockpiling. I thought it would be enough to see a pattern I liked, pop it in my queue and hold it there until I felt like knitting it.

Nope! Instead I want to have the pattern in-hand NOW. Heaven forbid I decide I want to knit it and have to wait a week or two while I track it down. This means for some of the high-ranking queue patterns, I've been aquiring their sources. For knitty or IK patterns, I'm set. They're free or I get the magazine. But what about Alice Starmore's Aran Knitting? Out of print. Or Adrienne Vittadini's Fall 2003 pattern book. Good luck.

So I've turned to ebay for the first time. So far, the results are mixed. I got a Dale of Norway pattern book (#132) that has some patterns I really like. And I paid less for it than if I'd ordered it new. Likewise for Elsebeth Lavold's Book One (Viking Knits).

I also got a Noro Knits pattern book for less than retail. But it was the wrong book. I miswrote which one I wanted and now have a pattern book I'll never use. Looks like I'll be SELLING on ebay next!

I also used a gift certificate to pick up Jackets for Work and Play, a collection of patterns from Knitters.

So. Lots of new patterns, lots of startitis, lots of knitting commitments to wrap up before I start something new. I can't be the first knitter to put the cart before the horse.

Warm it up Kris. I'm about to.*

2008-02-13T10:46:00.003-05:00

I have wanted to be more regular with blogging. I was in a good run for a while. I have fizzled. Call it the winter blahs, SAD, perhaps just good-old-fasioned depression. Doulicia ain't got so much to say.

We are hoping to put our house on the market in a few months. That calls for a flurry of work around the house that I feel utterly unable to do. This is deep psychological territory for me: the maintenance and appearance of one's living quarters. I come from a family of cleaners, fussers, skilled fixers, doers. Also critics. Which is why the voices in my head have risen to deafening levels: "You think anyone is going to buy this heap?" "You can just paint over that, you have to scrape and sand it first."

And the real subtext: "Your house sucks as do you."

So my efforts the past week -- and for several more to come -- will be to rail against that self-talk. Against the antagonism of bitter cold and ceaseless snow. Against a work situation where I feel undervalued and about which I am, of late, uninspired. Against anxiety about an upcoming trip south with my parents that is primed to rival if not surpass the one of two years ago.

On the bright side, my wrist is feeling better so knitting is back to regular levels. And I just read a fun book. "Focus on the little joys." That's as good place as any to start with the affirmations.

*courtesy of Kris Kross, "Warm It Up."

Resentment is a two-way street

2008-02-06T12:32:00.000-05:00

What I said to my [single, childless, mid-30s] sister was, "What childless people don't seem to realize is that when we parents leave work, we are not done working."

What she said to me was, "Yes, but it gets a little old having the parents leave 15 minutes early because the day care is closing or not be able to stay a minute past 7 because of Pookie's recital. Just because I don't have the excuse of children, I am always the one to close up the office and wrap up the event."

I said, "But when you wrap up the event, you can go home, drink a glass of wine and read for two hours if you want to. Sleep in the next day if it's a Saturday. I am cooking for and feeding the masses, listening to their arguements, overseeing the cleanup of 417 Legos and aiding with baths, then getting up at 7 a.m. the next day -- no matter what day it is -- to do it all over again."

She said, "You chose to have children. Should your personal choices matter to me at work? What about the THREE MONTHS you were at home after J was born. If I'm your employer I have to watch that work go undone or hire a replacement while you're having a three-month pajama party."

Me: [silence. She knows it was no pajama party, though not nearly the degree to which it was not a pajama party.]

O.K. She didn't actually say "pajama party" at all. But she did say childless people have a legitimate beef with us breeders in the workplace. And "my sister" is actually a composite of childless relatives and former bosses.

How, oh how to diffuse the tension and create mutual understanding?

More Stem Cell Fear-Based Profiteering

2008-02-02T08:16:00.000-05:00

So now women are given two opportunities to buy cellular insurance. The first is with their babies' cord blood. The second is with their own menstrual blood.

I have the same problems with the latter as with the former. Companies are charging a steep fee for a service one hopes never to need. And should one need it, there is no guarantee the product will help.

In fairness, there are some diseases that cord blood can help with. Especially blood diseases like leukemia or aplastic anemia. However, the times when families have had to retrieve cord blood are few and the number of times where that was the only route to treatment are even fewer. I hashed through a lot of this a couple of years ago.

Everything I said then I would apply to the menstrual blood storage idea. It is expensive, highly unlikely to ever be needed, and rarely the only successful treatment option. Add to that the uncertainty around the vitality of menstrual blood's stem cells ("The healthiest stem cells would come from the part of the menstrual cycle when the uterine lining regenerates," the article notes, not when the endometrium is shedding and dying) and the fact that any woman with a uterus can have stem cells harvested from her endometrium via biopsy, and the whole thing starts to look like a scam.

Random Roundup

2008-01-21T09:54:00.000-05:00

1. Apologies to all the folks on Ravelry who were peppered with my overly-enthusiastic comments Saturday night. I got home from an indoor soccer game at 10:30 p.m. and was totally keyed up. Ravelry's a great way to calm back down, but I bring others of you in the frey with me.

2. Apologies to the dear spouse for all the money I invested at iTunes AFTER tiring of Ravelry. I think I learned that I should refrain from clicking the "Buy Now" button for at least 3 hours after any athletic activity.

3. Any Ann Arbor area doulas looking for a client at the end of February? A very sweet person contacted me and I can't help her out. Neither can a lot of other doulas apparently, because she sent me a second appeal this morning. If you might be able to lend a hand, let me know and I can pass along her contact info.

4. I'm getting startitis for some other knitting. And it may be in the form of lace. After working a month solid now on cables (don't worry -- I'm still feeling the cable love), the thought of a few YO, k2togs is appealing. We'll see.

Friday Fun

2008-01-18T12:00:00.000-05:00

Get your tea or your knitting and take a 10-minute break to watch Dame Edna interview k.d. lang.

I was saddened to hear earlier this week that Dame Edna has canceled her upcoming American tour to allow additional recovery from an appendectomy. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to this consummate entertainer and vibrant spirit.

What about ventriloquists' dummies?

2008-01-16T13:05:00.000-05:00

A coworker forwarded this to our staff as rebuttal for our making fun of her fear of clowns. She's not alone apparently.

Certainly as doulas we have to work at not assuming anything. Just because your past six clients have liked foot rubs does not mean this one does. Women love to labor to Enya...except for those who prefer Eminem or Nine Inch Nails. That's why we're trained to ask lots of questions.

...And to leave our white face paint, red noses, and kinky blue wigs at home.

p.s. Anyone else out there ever have bad dreams about the clown in Poltergeist? That's the one that got to me.

Food and Culture photo essay

2008-01-15T12:14:00.000-05:00

This came to me as an e-mail with the photos and text pasted in. It actually worked nicely that way because I could scroll down to less and less expensive (but usually more nutritious) food collections.

Nonetheless, you might enjoy the photo essay of what people eat and what it costs weekly on several levels. What stood out to me was the number of countries where soda pop figured in their beverage consumption, the amount of bread in the Sicilian family's diet, and the fresh vegetables in the "poorer" country's diets.

What I've been knitting lately

2008-01-14T15:15:00.000-05:00

My Christmas present from the cosmos was getting gauge for the Snorri sweater. I had tried it on the recommended size needles, plus up and down a size, always being a little too large or too small. And because this is my first foray into cabling, I didn't want to have to worry about any pattern modifications.

Once gauge was achieved (with size 10 bamboo needles, BTW, where size 10 Bryspuns had left me cold), the knitting just rolled beautifully along. Despite the fact that I'm making size XL, I have already finished the back:

and am on to the front.

For those cableholics in the audience, here's a little closer-up view.

Keep your womb intact and in situ!

2008-01-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

A new study says that women who have a C-section are twice as likely to have a hysterectomy following a subsequent pregnancy than women who do not deliver surgically.

Not sure if this is bad news or not

2008-01-08T12:24:00.000-05:00

Until last week I was not aware that enrollment in childbirth education classes is dropping. I didn't see any researched explanation for the decline.

If it is for any of these reasons, I take the decline as a bad indicator of current birth culture:

Women do not want to learn about birth
Women cannot afford (financially) to learn about birth
Women feel learning about birth will not affect the outcome, so back to the first reason...
Women are learning about birth from television (Baby Story, etc.) or books (What to Expect...)
Women are learning about birth through informal networks of women who've birthed "normally" (i.e. the usual medical/crisis/interventionist birth).

If, however, the decline is for any of these reasons, then I'm not as worried:

Women are learning about birth from their midwives, doulas, friends who've birthed from a position of empowerment.
Women are forming their own birth "study groups," informed by a variety of written materials and videos (e.g. Birth in the Squatting Position).

I suspect it is the former reasons, not the latter. But the traditional class format is not for everyone. For my first birth I ended up relying primarily on Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way and Mind Over Labor. My spouse and I worked together on the exercises in both books and, lo and behold, it was exactly the preparation we needed to labor through a great, unmedicated birth together. I think we actually learned more about working together by practicing in the quiet of our own home than we would have in a group setting, where my spouse would have been especially inhibited.

Every pregnant woman should have some sort of balanced, honest, childbirth education. The format of the education should match her and her support network's style of learning and preparing...

Doctor in the House

2008-01-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

In poking into an interesting radio series on CBC radio, I found this essay intriguing. How do you feel about doctors using their title when referring to themselves? The essay's author, himself a doctor, says that when health is on the line, we prefer to know we're with Dr. Soandso, not "Jane."

I have bristled at my children's pediatrician starting his phone calls off with, "Hi, this is Dr. Smith." We've been seeing him for nearly 10 years now. Couldn't he say, "This is Paul Smith from Your Pediatrician?" Or, if he's afraid I won't know who he is --though who else would I know from the pediatrician's office, how about, "Dr. Paul?"

I similarly bristle at hospital births when the rotating cast of residents and student doctors flow through, each introducing herself or himself as Dr. This or Dr. That. I understand that one needs to say who they are, to explain why they are in your private birthing space (though do they really need to be there if you don't know them???). But what about using the same introductions nurses use: "Hi, I'm Kenneth, I'll be your nurse today." Try it. "Hi, I'm Karen. I'll be the doctor taking care of you today."

It works, don't you think?

Antidote

2008-01-02T14:39:00.001-05:00

On the day I learned Christina Aguilerra is planning to birth by elective Cesarean, I enjoyed reading these tales of celebrity breastfeeding.

Birth Messages II

2007-12-30T15:15:00.000-05:00

A few posts back I said I'd write about my awful lesson in birth messages. I have started this post repeatedly and can't find a satisfactory way to tell it. In the interest of getting it "out," I'll just go with this one.

Several years ago I posted on this blog my account of a Cesarean birth I'd witnessed. I attended the birth as a doula. I was very upset about the birth and wrote candidly and angrily about it.

My anger was directed at the doctors who had, in my opinion, pushed the mother into an unnecessary C-section. These same caregivers then treated the surgical birth (again, in my assessment) very disrespectfully. I had wanted a different experience for my client. I tried to say this in my post. Because of my anger, I spoke in very harsh terms about this birth, ultimately comparing it to "a fuck." Not words I usually use, but they conveyed how vulgar I'd perceived this experience to be.

More than a year after I'd written the post, I ran into that client. We had a friendly chat. I was happy to see her and her child thriving. In telling her about my doula work I mentioned that I wrote about it in a blog and gave her the name of it.

Four months later I received certified mail from DONA saying I had had a grievance filed against me by a former client. I thought it must have been a mistake. I hadn't been at a birth in many months and couldn't think of a client with whom I'd had negative interactions. Even when I turned to page two, the official grievance letter filed by the client, and saw that it was the client from my story above, I couldn't imagine what I'd done to cause her to file a grievance. Hadn't I just seen her recently and gotten a hug from her?

Her letter told the story. That night she had gone home and found my blog -- this blog. She went through my archives to the time of her birth and read the posts leading up to and including the one detailing the birth of her child. She said she felt "horrified and betrayed" to have her birth defiled by such ugly words.

I, too, was horrified. I re-read my post through her eyes. I would have been shocked to read about the birth of one of my children told this way. Even if it had been a "bad birth," I would not have wanted anyone else to say so without my consent.

This posted a dilemma for me as a doula and a blogger:

To what degree am I able to blog about births?

The answer is not easy. DONA provides some direction. Its code of ethics and standards of practice instruct that we must keep confidentiality for our clients. Hence, I not only refrain from identifying clients' names, children's genders, occupations, home cities and hospitals of delivery, I also blog anonymously myself. This is all intended to keep someone from reading this blog and saying, "Hey! She must be writing about my sister-in-law!"

Still, applying those standards to my posts didn't really help. I had kept confidentiality by not revealing my client's identity or mine in any way. But I still had been deeply hurtful.

One could argue (and several friends did) that as long as I kept my client's identity secret, I could write whatever I wanted about her birth. After all, my experience as a doula was as important as hers as a mother. I am permitted to have my own reactions to births -- including anger -- and this is a forum for sharing those reactions. Another friend pointed out that a lot of non-fiction writing makes people angry, in large part because they do not like how they are portrayed. This disconnect is unavoidable and I am not under any obligation to mediate it.

While I agree with the truth of these viewpoints, they do not sit right in my doula heart. Just because one can do things that may ultimately be hurtful, does not mean one should do these things.

The best argument I can think of for writing about births, consequences be damned, is that advocacy involves telling the truth. I believe the birth system in America is messed up. I can provide first-hand accounts of how the status quo is not always in women's best interest. If those who witness birth wrongs don't talk about them, how will people know things need to change?

Yet even this argument ultimately pales to the sanctity I with which I want to approach birth. I ultimately decided that I will not post birth stories on this blog without the mother's approval. In effect it means I have stopped posting birth stories. I can't quite bring myself to say, "hey -- now that you've given birth, will you read my account of it and give me permission to put it on my blog?" It makes me feel less like a doula and more like a voyeur.

I miss sharing birth stories. Many of the stories I told were wonderful ones. Stories of strength, joy and satisfaction. I do no miss the voice in the back of my head saying, "what if she reads this? Will she know it's her? Will she be surprised you noticed X?"

The most recent International Doula included a piece on internet ethics. I was excited to see it, hoping we could begin to establish some norms for blogging in the birth community. But the example they used was a much easier one of someone referring to a client by first name and other identifying information in a chat room.

Please feel free to weigh in and also link to any relevant posts out there. I know many of you have been writing and thinking about this (as well as the disappearance of many great birth blogs including FP Mama and Red State Moron).

p.s. I long ago removed all old birth stories from the blog except a few for which I had permission...so don't bother trying to find the one above or any others.

Christmas Knitting Composite

2007-12-26T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'd hoped to get all the recipients in one place at one time, but that proved impossible. So instead, here are the 4 hats I made for my co-workers:

clockwise from top left:

Basic Hat Pattern from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns in Knit Picks' Main Line (brown) and Debbie Bliss's Cashmerino (pink);
Amy King's Fake Isle Hat (minus the crown pattern) in Noro Kureyon and Lion Brand Wool-Ease;
Knit Flat Hat from Sally Melville's The Knit Stitch in Lorna's Laces' Bullfrogs and Butterflies;
Doulicia's own pattern hat in Briar Rose Fibers' Sonoma.

There are two things about the hats that especially pleased me:

1. ALL are from stash yarn! No new yarn was harmed in the process of making these hats.
2. The recipients either were fine actors or genuinely liked their gifts.

Thursday night quarterbacking

2007-12-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

as overheard in our kitchen at 10:00 last night:

me: These cookies are taking a LOT longer to make than I expected. I mean, the dough was a snap to mix but baking and cooling each batch...c'mon!

spouse: Well, you know what they say.

me: Yeah. The really great ones can always step it up a notch...

spouse: Dig a little deeper...

me: Build on a small change in momentum...

spouse: Fight through adversity...

me: Move. I gotta get to the oven.

I am a holiday baking warrior.

Season of Hope

2007-12-11T11:55:00.000-05:00

I hope you will share my joy in learning that my clients whose son was stillborn in September, 2006, are pregnant again and eagerly anticipating the live birth of this child in late April. Hold them in your loving thoughts.

What to Expect when You're Expecting...Menopause (and Beyond)

2007-12-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

Of course I jest. I would NOT want a book patterned on the infamous What to Expect series.

I would, however, find it interesting to know what lies ahead for this womanly body of mine. Just as people only share the horror stories from birth or puberty, aging women only lament hot flashes and whiskers.

How prevalent are these things? Like monthly bleeding for young women, are hot flashes unavoidable for aging women? Am I destined to grow facial hair (or take estrogen to counteract it)? Are the effects variable? I have to think they are. My periods are crampless, 2-3 day affairs. My sister's are week-long near-hemorrhages. Will one of us gently recalibrate our hormones in 15 years while the other rushes -- as our mother does -- from one temperature extreme to another?

I also wonder how much I don't even know about. I still remember the evening 5 years ago when my aunts were together for an annual gathering and the eldest, near 80, talked about her "pussy lips hanging down to my knees." Ever since I've entertained that image with a mixture of horror and fascination. Do labia lengthen? What else happens that no one talks about? I've seen one elderly vulva and was surprised to find it largely bald. I have no idea if most women lose pubic hair or just the woman I saw.

So elderbloggers (are you reading, LRH?), let us younger gals know what lies ahead. Give us stories of strength and hope...and honest accounts of the changes to expect.

Doula : Midwife :: :

2007-12-04T13:03:00.000-05:00

You remember these from the SAT, right?

communication : telephone :: _____ : scissors

a) blades
b) metal
c) cutting
d) tool

I LOVED those kind of questions. And I just learned they're a lot easier to answer than to compose! But I digress.

In a previous post Kim asked what the merits/overlap would be in having both a doula and a midwife. I get this question from prospective clients all the time.

The answer (chime in doulas, midwives, moms with experience in this arena) is that because the midwife is responsible for your and your baby's health and well being, and the doula is responsible for your comfort and confidence, there's little overlap in the written job descriptions. The merits of hiring a doula -- continuous physical and emotional support during labor, education and empowerment in advance of labor -- are the same whether your health care provider is a midwife, family practice doctor, or OB/GYN.

In reality, things aren't exactly that cut and dry. If you are planning a homebirth, your midwife is likely to bring a team that includes her assistant and an apprentice. Because you're at home, your overall level of anxiety is probably going to be lower than at the hospital. And because you're planning a homebirth, you can handpick your birth support team to include the family and friends you think will best encourage and hold you through the process.

It is quite likely that in this environment, a doula will duplicate much of the support you'll already have present. Your need for reassurance will probably be lower and you'll have more people to provide it. I'm hoping this is the reason I have never gotten an inquiry from a prospective doula client planning a home birth. She doesn't feel she'll need anyone else.

While this is likely true, I would argue that doulas have a place at homebirths. Midwife friends have said to me that a common misconception is that your midwife will also be your doula. She will not. The midwife has a unique charge that includes making judgement calls about what's best for the mama's and baby's health. She might want to rub your back or hold you in the birth pool, but if heart tones are low, she'll have her ear to the doppler. At that time, the extra presence of a doula could be invaluable.

Similarly, some small number of homebirths end with an unplanned transport. When the midwife takes a patient to the hospital, she (usually -- see my midwife-blog-heroes for some hopeful counterexamples) loses any status as care provider. Depending how hostile the hospital is, the midwife may not even be allowed to go in with her patient. The doula might be one of the few people who could be present at home AND in the hospital to provide that continuity of care.

If you are talking about having a hospital birth with a nurse midwife, then the doula is every bit as important at that birth as at a physician-attended birth. CNMs in the hospital setting may be juggling multiple patients. Nurses definitely will be. Hospital policies will take priority over your and the midwife's preferences in most cases. For these reasons, a doula is a good idea. She can help you advocate for your wishes. She can help bring new CNMs and nurses up to speed at shift changes. She can be there with you every minute, even as the midwife pops back over to the clinic to see patients and the nurse checks in on her other beds.

A big advantage to having both a doula and a midwife is that they tend to be favorably disposed toward each other, at least from a professional point of view. Midwives usually view doulas as an ally. Doulas are more inclined to trust midwives' motives than O.B.s'.

My two cents is that the decision to hire a doula should be determined by where you plan to birth, rather than whom you plan to have catch your baby.

And now, any thoughts on completing the analogy above? It's hard because each of them has a relationship to the birthing mother but not to each other. Give me your best shot, but I think there is no relationship analogy between them.

speaking to and sitting in classes

2007-12-02T22:06:00.000-05:00

Friday I gave a presentation on doulas to a "Childbirth and Culture" class at the U. Discussing doula work is one of the easiest things to do for me. I could do it at length without any prep. I did prep, of course, only to spare the folks in the class a disorganized rambling.

Besides the typical things you'd expect -- how I became a doula, what doulas do, what doulas can't do, how I find clients -- I talked about tensions in doula work. Tensions are where things get interesting. Tension is key to any story, even one about the work of a doula.

Some of the tensions I discussed (in no particular order) were:

There are so many others, but these came easily to mind. For "comments" fodder, what else am I missing?

I then spent yesterday at a day-long training on post-partum home visits and how to make the most of them. It was a very good session. The morning was all about postpartum depression and psycho-emotional adjustment to motherhood. I now am armed with the EPDS and plan to screen all clients postpartum. And when I find one who may have PPD, I know what to do in terms of helping with referrals, etc.

The afternoon was about maternal recovery, infant care and safety and other more routine postpartum situations. Much was a review, but I picked up some good tips as well as new ideas for how to structure my postpartum visits.

I'm a bit "doulaed" out at the moment, but glad to have had some significant chunks of time devoted to thinking about this work.

Thanks all for the recent comments. I'm reading up on the sources you suggested, am planning to follow up to Marianne's tagging, and will definitely expound on Kim's question about doulas at homebirths.

Dear Abbyblog,

2007-11-30T09:15:00.001-05:00

I have a 9 1/2 year old son. Increasingly he is given to hair-trigger eruptions of anger and invective. He seems to feel slighted by the whole world and is moody.

Could this be the start of adolescence? Isn't 9 1/2 too young?

Any insight you could offer would be most appreciated.

--Anxious in Ann Arbor

Belated Blogiversary to Me

2007-11-26T14:37:00.000-05:00

All month I was thinking the 30th was my blogiversary, but no. I peeked back at my November 2004 posts today and see that the 30th was (not surprisingly!) my LAST post of that month. The first, which I'd have seen if I'd bothered to scroll down a few months ago, was November 10.

So let me reflect for just a minute on what this blog has been for the past 3 years and 16 days.

I started this blog because I was a relatively new doula, fresh from my eigth doula birth. I had lots of birthly things in my head and no regular forum for venting them. I wanted to talk about birth things with other like-minded folks.

Coincidentially (or cosmically), my seventh doula client had a blog. I became a reader and fan. I began toying with the idea of starting my own blog. doulicia was born. (Actually "doulicia" was born when other former clients dubbed me that.)

It has been what I hoped it would be. I have written about, explored, challenged my thoughts on birth and reproduction.

For the (few) long-time readers who came for the birth content and have endured the increasing level of knitting content, I apologize. But I also think that trend isn't going to go away soon. Above all, a blog is about personal expression, not obligation. If I had to write only about birth, I'd stop doing it. I like it that I can write about both.

Plenty of other bloggers have written -- and far more eloquently than I could do -- about the changing relationship of an author to her blog (most recently January One). I won't repeat their sentiments. I'll only say that I plan to keep writing, I don't know what directions I'll head in, and I hope a few of you stick around for the ride.

Little Projects and Leftovers

2007-11-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

Here are 3 quick projects I've been working on lately.

First, a korknisse. There will be more. I started a mate to this when another project got in the way. I'll be back to these because this one was so much fun.

Next, a fun little hat I made with some Briar Rose Fibers' Sonoma that I've had for over a year. Isn't it pretty?

And a gratuitious top view to show the richness of this perfect fall colorway. The pattern as such is just my own fiddling.

Finally, some mittens I've decided to call "Leftovers." This is because they were knit from yarn left from other projects and because they have all the lackluster of yesterday's feast. My spouse kicked off his Thanksgiving vacation by losing his only pair of gloves. With a cold snap forecast and shopping off our radar for a few days, he lamented the cold hands he'd have until next week.

I surprised him (and myself) by whipping up some mittens -- my first ever. They took less than 48 hours to make. The first mitten is horrible. I made the thumb both too long (or too high?) in the gusset and too short in overall length. It's not so much a thumb casing as a backpack. Then I knit the finger length too short. My sweet spouse kindly said, "well the hand has a natural curvature." It sure does when it's curled into a too small mitt.

The second one (which I've placed on top for aesthetic reasons) went much better. I found out several places where I'd misread the pattern the first time and I trusted the pattern (Ann Budd's from The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, a great investment) and my measurements more...both to positive effect.

I've put the details about needles and yarn on ravelry (I'm "doulicia" there, too).

Thanks!

2007-11-21T12:10:00.001-05:00

For the support. Things are better this week.

The friend does not have breast cancer.
Our son has mellowed for a few days.
My blood test (for bruising -- I didn't even write about that I was so freaked out) came back fine. Well, not fine, but also not life threatening. At worse I have a mildly slow clotting reaction. More tests, but none that have me nauseated with worry).

My friend's marriage is still in a bad place; I still haven't heard from my client; there's no change with the sibling-in-law's father; and nothing can bring back our first son. But I feel I have much to be thankful for headig into tomorrow's holiday.

This includes a great time knitting with some friends last night, a cup of tea shared with T$ yesterday, the antibiotics that are evacuating strep from my younger son's system and plans for a meal tomorrow with just my spouse and two kids.

I hope to post some knitting F.O. and do some birthy writing as well.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Life...getting...too...intense...

2007-11-15T14:13:00.000-05:00

...must..[gasp]...find...outlets...

Oh, right. I knit. Thankfully.

Among the things on my mental plate today:

a friend who goes to the doctor this weekend to learn if she has breast cancer (I learned this today).
another friend whose marriage is in a sad and shakey place (learned this Monday).
a sibling-in-law's parent who had a brain aneurism rupture 2 weeks ago and is in need of care at a facility during his recovery (and who, coincidentally, lives in Ann Arbor, so we have been enlisted in the facility search).
our older son's continuing "reactivity" to any sort of limits on his behavior, including a full-scale blowup last night that left 3 of us in or near tears. I am beginning to consider enlisting professional help and/or medication.
not hearing from a doula client who ended up scheduled for surgical delivery this week because of persistant breech. Is she just too busy to communicate with me or have I let her down in some way?
11 years ago today I had the ultrasound that revealed our first son's developmental problems. The Thursday before Thanksgiving always has this sad association for me.

I'm also not particularly motivated at work. I don't know if this is SAD starting, or is related to all the above crap. Blech. No wonder my fingers are itchy for yarn...

Black Apple Scarf

2007-11-13T11:23:00.000-05:00

Even the simplest piece of knitting can have a story, right?

I'd love to say I whipped up this little scarf, but the truth is that I struggled mightily with it. Once I settled on a stitch pattern and dimensions it went very quickly. The settling, however, was another story.

Our friend who goes back long enough to have been the best man in our wedding and, before that, my spouse's tight pal through college, recently moved to New York. I wanted to give him a scarf as a moving present and he gave me the following scarf requirements:

-dark (black or brown) yarn
-air-tight knit
-four feet long

I was mulling it over when Little Knits had a half-off sale on Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere. I did some on-line research for amounts and settled on 4 skeins (at $11/skein sale price).

I took these 4 skeins with me to Paris, planning to make the scarf en route. In fact I didn't even open my knitting bag until I'd been in France for 3 days (I was too busy doing this:

).

Then I started swatching. My sister could not believe how many times I'd knit 3 inches worth of a pattern, decide I didn't like it, and rip all the way back. I ripped on the Metro, in cafes, in our room. I finally settled on the tried-and-true double moss stitch.

Then the question was how to maximize my yarn. I was knitting on size 5 needles to make a tight fabric. I started with 28 stitches cast on and knitted about 4 inches before realizing I'd used up half the skein already. So I ripped back and tried 24 stitches. This looked good for width and was using less yarn per row. I had a pattern and a width.

It was with this swatch I boarded the return flight. I knit my first ball of yarn and measured: 9 inches. I couldn't give this man a 3 foot scarf. Rip, rip, rip and rewind the ball. At least I was watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for distraction.

I cast on for the last time somewhere over the Canadian Maritimes. It's 20 stitches wide (about 4 inches) and 44 inches long. Not quite 4 feet, but better than 3. I'm hoping that the Cashmere and pretty stitch will compensate for the length.

Pattern: Double moss stitch over 20 stitches.

Yarn: 5 skeins Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere in black.

Needles: Clover bamboo circulars, size 5.

Notes/Thoughts: This was my first experience with cashmere. It didn't do much for me. It was soft, yes, but it still irritated my neck a little bit. It also wasn't great for stitch definition, which I probably couldn't learned in advance with some better on-line research. Still, I'm pleased with the result and hope it will be a warm hug to our friend in the Big Apple.

Temp-ta-tion

2007-11-09T10:53:00.000-05:00

Ooooooh, I have me a yarn-buying itch somethin' bad.

It helps not one whit that a little insidious postcard arrived a few days ago from Chris at Briar Rose advertising her trunk show tomorrow. I just can't go or I'll exceed my stash limit (i.e. my closet, which is already packed to the gills).

For those of you in Ann Arbor with a similar yarn itch (or those who've not yet found the beauty that is Briar Rose Fibers), go to the open house:

Saturday, November 10
10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
218 Pine Ridge St.
Ann Arbor

You will not be disappointed. This is a semi-annual show for women entrepreneurs in a variety of fields and products including truffles (to die for), jewelry, aprons, stuffed animals, and pastries. It's just a blast.

If you can't make it tomorrow, there'll be a repeat (same time and place) on December 15.

Birth Messages, Part II

2007-11-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

Several of your comments on my last post raised a great point: there are GOOD birth stories out there. Thanks to those of you who shared yours.

Two of my own three birth stories are good ones.

Many of my clients have great birth stories.

I HATE it when people rush to tell pregnant women their birth horror-stories. So why so much negativity here?

One reason is the birth advocate in me can't let bad stories pass unnoticed. When women are being told their bodies can't labor, something is WRONG with our birth culture and with our attitude toward women generally.

Another reason is that I have self-imposed a ban on telling my client's birth stories here. The reason for that is long and painful. It is also one I have been wanting to tell when the time is right. I think it is right.

I will work on a post with that story. For now, know that I love happy birth stories. In fact, let me leave you with one:

A friend of my sister was expecting her first baby over the summer. At her baby shower she announced she was having a scheduled Cesarean section delivery. Then she pointed to my sister and said, "And don't you tell me what your sister would say. I don't care what's best for my baby or me. I am not going to feel that pain."

She didn't take childbirth classes. She planned her summer and her leave time around her surgery date.

Then her water broke 3 days before the surgery, she arrived at the hospital dilated to 5 centimeters, got an epidural, pushed out her 8 pound baby 3 hours later. The next morning she told my sister, "That wasn't bad at all. If I'd known that was all it would be, I wouldn't have been so scared and I'd never have scheduled surgery."

THAT is the message we need to share. This woman could be recovering from surgery now (or worse) just because she didn't know birth could be manageable!

Birth messages

2007-11-05T12:27:00.000-05:00

Anyone who's given birth or worked with new mothers knows how open to suggestion we are at and around the time of delivery. Women who are told how strong they are, how well they are doing, that they CAN do this respond. And not only in labor. Birth satisfaction is positively linked with less postpartum depression, increased breastfeeding initiation and duration rates, and increased confidence about parenting abilities.

So why was a colleague of mine told after the Cesarean birth of her child, "You should never labor again. Your body is just not designed for it?"

The circumstances of the birth were that she had been leaking fluid for days but not having contractions. Her doctors brought her in to induce labor (she was maybe a few days overdue). Twice they tried cervadil, but the applicator wouldn't stay in place in the vagina.

Guesses anyone? What next? Yes, cytotec. Except, of course, as she described it, "then they tried this little pill." No explanation of what it was or what the risks might be.

Subsequently, she went from 2-10 centimeters in about an hour and a half, with them placing an epidural as she got the urge to push. Once the epidural was in place and she gave her first push, the baby's heart rate dropped to the 60s. I'm guessing this was a late decel because they took her immediately to the OR for her to try the next push. With this push, the heart rate fell again and did not recover, so they put the gas mask over her face and hurriedly cut the baby out.

DO YOU SEE ANYTHING IN THIS STORY THAT DEMONSTRATES HER BODY CANNOT LABOR?

I see lots of intervention -- merited or not, I cannot say. I see possible overreaction. I see a woman who, if anything, responded too well to induction.

Nothing in the story makes me think she couldn't or shouldn't try labor in the future. Except maybe that in their hurry to cut the baby out they compromised her uterus in some way that makes her at risk for VBAC?

It doesn't matter. She heard the message and considers herself defective now. She "can't" labor.

And apparently it doesn't matter that this is her second child and her first was born vaginally after a perfectly normal labor.

doulicia's news from Paris

2007-11-01T08:12:00.000-05:00

I did not expect an impulsive trip to Paris to have much birth content. I was wrong. Hype was building everywhere for the October 31 opening of a documentary, Le Premier Cri. I couldn't go through a Metro without seeing posters for the movie. And somewhere -- though I have no recollection of being anywhere there was a television -- I saw a trailer for it. Women around the world in the final days of pregnancy and then giving birth. I wish we'd been there one day longer and I could have seen it!

I will admit to being suspicious of the fact that it's a Disney release...

In catching up on news when I returned, I see that one study has confirmed what so many of us know: laboring in the hands and knees position is a good way to relieve back pain. Using the position late in pregnancy is not, apparently, influential in turning a posterior baby. The researchers did not reach any conclusions on the position's usefulness turning posterior babies in labor.

And in other news, amniotomy (or AROM or intentionally breaking a woman's water) was found NOT to be effective in reducing labor time. However,

[t]he report, published Oct. 17 in The Cochrane Reviews, did find that the procedure might be associated with an increase in Caesarean sections and a reduced risk of a lower reading on the Apgar scale, which rates the baby’s condition at birth. But neither finding was statistically significant. [emphasis added]

The C-section link is worth exploring more, don't we think? And regardless, spread this word from the study's lead investigator:

We advise women whose labors are progressing normally to request their waters be left intact. There is no evidence that leaving the waters intact causes any problems, and there is not sufficient evidence to suggest any benefit to either themselves or their baby.

There comes a time in a woman's life...

2007-10-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

...when she just has to hop on a plane and go to Paris with her sister.

Be back next week.

Au revoir.

New Doula Prototypes

2007-10-16T11:38:00.000-05:00

I was thinking the other day about a solution to the situation I often encounter: being contacted by someone who cannot find a doula, but who I can't take on myself for whatever reason. I worry about these women wanting doulas but not being able to find one.

My solution: the Drop-In Doula. It would work like this. I would give the woman all of my contact numbers, tell her to call me when she's in labor, and agree to come if I can. If I come, I charge an hourly rate (sliding scale...maybe $20-$50/hr?) with a maximum equal to my regular fee. I would provide postpartum care as I usually do.

If I couldn't come, the woman is in no worse a position than she originally was.

This is only a solution when the woman can't find any other doula. Obviously it's not optimal. There are no prenatal meetings to build rapport and learn the woman's needs/preferences. But it would provide a better than 50/50 chance she'd still get the support she wants in labor.

After my last (long, as usual) birth, a colleague proposed another type of doula. The Doula Drill Sargent. This would be the doula who comes in -- good cop, bad cop style -- when labor has reached a plateau or the mother, for whatever reason, isn't responding to "typical" doula encouragement and support. The Doula Drill Sargent would enter and begin barking out things like, "Do you think this is pain? I'll give you pain. Drop and do 20 pushups." Or, "Your mama ain't gonna help you out of this one. You gotta do it yourself. Now let's cut the crap and have a baby." It is probably worth noting that this colleague has not given birth herself.

Whaddaya think?

Lost in a Ravely Reverie

2007-10-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

I haven't wanted to rub it in for those of you still waiting, but I got my Ravelry invitation last week. I was a little slow to start -- making sure not to do it at work. But now I'm trapped tighter than a fly in a spiderweb.

I used the 15 minutes of good light between when I got home yesterday and sunset to begin photographing my stash. I spent more time before bedtime than I'm willing to share uploading photos to flickr. I even DREAMED about Ravelry last night.

Others with new toys (or new to Ravelry) have probably had a comparable revelation, but as I was heading to bed late (I mean late) last night, I thought, "Do I want to electronically organize and chronicle and photograph my knitting, or do I want to KNIT?" There is only so much time and one can spend it doing or thinking about doing and having done.

Knit Flat Hat

2007-10-08T10:42:00.000-05:00

Pattern: Knit Flat Hat from The Knit Stitch by Sally Melville.

Yarn: 1 hank Lorna's Laces Bullfrogs and Butterflies (85% wool; 15% mohair), color 12 (Iris Garden).

Needles: Bryspun circulars, size 6.

Modifications: began crown shaping at 4 inches height instead of 5; cast on 100 stitches instead of 110.

Notes/Thoughts: I love the yarn. This is the first I've ever used yarn with any mohair and I like the little halo it gives. I wouldn't want this yarn for a sweater because of the itch factor, but for a hat, it's great.

The color is also good and not completely represented here. The purples look too blue in the photo. Better representation here.

It was fun and easy to knit. All garter stitch. I've nearly finished a twin to it (same yarn, pattern, etc.) for my Christmas knitting; I think I may keep this one for myself.

Too many cooks?

2007-10-08T10:14:00.001-05:00

My client had her baby over the weekend. All went well, though it was a very long induction.

When she delivered, the following people were in the room:

birthing mother
mother's husband
1 midwife
2 nurses (mama's and baby's)
2 pediatricians (some low heart tones and meconium)
1 doula
2 grandmothers-to-be
3 great aunts-to be
3 second cousins once removed-to-be

At the moment of the baby's birth, one of the girls (maybe 11-13 years old?) fainted. It was completely chaotic.

I think women should have whomever they want with them at a birth. But do they really know what they want?

For all the effort we put into "informed consent" for medical procedures, we don't put much of any into the ramifications of a crowd at a birth. Moreover, familial pressures and expectations can be far stronger than those we worry about from the medical establishment. It's one thing to say no to a procedure; it's quite another to say no to your mother!

In this case, my client repeatedly had to ask her guests to quiet down so she could concentrate. I have seen this at many births with a crowd. Folks are bored or nervous and turn to small talk to pass the time. The birth room becomes the equivalent of a breakfast nook.

What do you think? Should there be limits on birth guests? How does one deal with guests who are disruptive to a birth if the mother isn't asking them to leave?

creativity on the internet

2007-10-03T10:39:00.001-05:00

I went to a work-related session yesterday on the latest trends in environmental careers. Guess what one of the most desirable characteristics for new hires in the Climate Change/Sustainability field will be in the coming years?

Technical knowledge? no.

Communications skills? no. (well, yes, always, but it's not at the top of the list.)

Creativity? you got it!

Environmental problems present a new challenge because of their complexity (and interconnectedness among fields). Companies, government, non-profits will need workers who have experience making up totally new things, or applying old things in new ways. This trainer's advice to environmental students: take a painting class; do improv; join a writing circle.

Is it wrong that I thought, "Teach all students to knit?"

If you think knitters aren't creative, check out these solutions to everyday challenges:

Thumb sucking.

Where to put the sleeping baby while you garden (o.k., neither knitterly nor new, but wonderful).

Keeping your yarn untangled while you do stranded knitting.

What am I missing? What ingenious things have you knitters been up to?

Updates all around

2007-10-03T08:57:00.000-05:00

Running: The race Sunday was excellent. I can't remember having fun at a race in a long time. But the weather was perfect (sunny, crisp), I felt great (and ran a respectable time) and my son ran with me the first 3/4 mile (he finished 3 minutes behind me but enjoyed the race, too). And I raised $540 for the Center* to boot.

Knitting: I finished the knit flat hat over the weekend. I will post photos as soon as I take them. It was such a delight that I immediately cast on for a second one in the same yarn. Twins!

Doula work: I gave my client her footbath last week and seem not to have done any long-term damage to our trust relationship. She is nearing 42 weeks' gestation. I really REALLY want her to deliver before the weekend. I'm scheduled to go with a few other moms on an overnight getaway. If she hasn't delivered, I'll have to stay home to wait. I'm embarassed to say that I just assumed she'd be induced before the weekend. I can't remember the last time a client "got to" go past 42 weeks.

I met last week with a college student who plans on going to osteopathic medical school. She had just learned about doulas and was very interested in our wholistic approach to birth. She asked if she could observe a birth.

I'm always torn about these requests. On the one hand, the more people who observe normal birth, the better, especially when these are future caregivers. On the other hand, they become yet another person in the birth environment. And no matter how supportive or unobtrusive an individual is, she is another body in the room, a diminisher of intimacy.

Obviously a doula is this also. In the doula's case, we hope that our support and assistance outweighs the degree of lost intimacy our presence may create.

In this case, I asked my two current clients if they would want an observer (not "would you mind"). I also say that I expect their answer to be "no," but will let them answer for themselves. My November client said she would welcome an observer.

Baby Steps

2007-09-29T21:32:00.000-05:00

This has to be given better treatment elsewhere, but I took heart from two pieces of this story.

First, that one corner of the legal system recognizes the importance of breastfeeding and the unique situation lactating mothers are in.

Second, that this future doctor is bucking the system for her and her baby's rights.

Minnesota woman needs a doula. Anyone able to help?

2007-09-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

If you're willing and able to be a doula for this woman (at Radical Doula), please give Radical Doula your contact info as directed on her website.

birth benefit events THIS WEEKEND (and a contest)

2007-09-25T08:59:00.000-05:00

This Saturday (September 29) at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor: benefit screening of Ricki Lake's documentary "The Business of Being Born." Ricki won't be there, but some great local midwives, doulas and doctors will be, for a talk-back session after the screening. Proceeds benefit BirthNetwork.

Our neighbor town south of the border, Toledo, recently screened the film, too. Here's what Ricki had to say in their paper.

On Sunday, mere hours after the movie screening, I am running for charity in the Big House Big Heart 5K. It's a fun race idea. As usual, the entrance fee goes to a cause -- this time ALS research and the new U-M Mott Children's Hospital.

BUT runners and walkers are also encouraged to organize a team and independently solicit donations for their own charity. So I'm running as part of the Center for the Childbearing Year's team.

What's that? You want to support doulicia's fundraising efforts? You want to make a tax-deductible donation to the Center because of all the good* it does for pregnant women and new families in Southeast Michigan? Bless you! Here's how:

Either here or via the "Donate" section of the Center's website, use PayPal to make a secure, on-line donation directly to the Center. Then e-mail me (doulicia at gmail dot com) to let me know that you donated.
More slowly, you can mail a check payable to the Center for the Childbearing Year to the Center at 722 Brooks St., Ann Arbor, MI 48103. Again, e-mail me to let me know that you donated.

To make it exciting, I'll randomly draw a name from among donors and send you your choice from among Style Your Own Kids Knits (for the knitters in the crowd), Pushed (for the birth enthusiasts), or Pastoralia (for anyone else).

I need notice of your donation by this Friday, September 28 to include you in the drawing.

*among the Center's services: free doulas for low-income women in a five-county area; birth and postpartum doula training classes including scholarships for low-income women; expectant parent classes on childbirth, breastfeeding and infant care; continuing education lectures for professionals who work with pregnant women; a lending library for parents and doulas. All this with a woeful budget of less than $225,000!

Something Tells Me I'm into Something Good

2007-09-24T19:20:00.000-05:00

Cast this on last night. All the garter stitch going 'round lately coupled with lots of seaming on my nearly-done-WIPS got me itchy for something pretty, easy and soothing.

Hopefully soon I'll have a Knit Flat Hat to show.

The importance and fragility of doula trust (part I)

2007-09-24T10:23:00.001-05:00

Last week I had another reminder about how important our trust relationship is with our clients. I had vaguely committeed to do a footbath with my current client once I "checked with the home schedule." In my mind it was an iffy thing. I like to do the footbath when I can, but it's not part of my official package.

A few days later I got an e-mail from my client saying she was disappointed that she never heard back from me about the footbath. She had really been looking forward to it last week.

Whoops.

I do not take my responsibility to clients lightly. I feel very badly I let the call slide. It was a very busy week last week, including in the evenings, but that was no excuse for leaving her in a lurch.

The tone of her e-mail made it clear to me that the true offense of my oversight was not the omission of the footbath. It was my failing to perfom in a trustworthy manner.

When clients hire us as their doulas, in large part they are paying for reliability and trustworthiness. We are often the one part of their birth team they KNOW will be there (doctors and midwives rotate call after all). They also often seek doulas precisely because they want someone there they can trust and feel safe with.

Every step of our doula contact with women/families should foster, not challenge, this trust.

I fear my failure to call last week may have set back this doula/client relationship to where it was when we first met. Or worse.

It was hard reminder that our relationships with clients are very delicate and should be given the hightest priority at every opportunity, not just at the birth itself.

I see two victims in this story

2007-09-21T13:00:00.000-05:00

This article showed up as a little AP blip in our paper Wednesday. I've been thinking about it ever since.

A woman gave birth to a baby at home and put it in a plastic bag. The baby suffocated while she showered after the birth. This is tragic. It's probably criminally prosecutable. But my sympathies go out to the mother not the baby.

What state must this poor young woman have been in to deny the pregnancy for so long, to have not sought medical care for the delivery, and to have let the baby die. Does the combination of denial and neglect not look a lot like shock?

How does an adolescent face unwanted pregnancy, particularly when she is far from family (this woman was at college) and short on options? Did she want to abort the pregnancy but felt she couldn't for financial or religious reasons? Did she proceed with the pregnancy hoping that some last-minute solution would present itself?

I wish someone had been with her when she had this unwanted baby, to help her accept what had happened and deal with the situation rationally. Instead, she was alone and made a decision she'll likely regret her whole life.

Women should not feel abandoned, alone or afraid as they face decisions about their pregnancy.

For my entertainment only

2007-09-20T12:08:00.000-05:00

This doesn't even qualify as a post. But I saw it at Moon Tea and thought, "Yeah!" Just the kind of little mental vacation that will make work pleasant for the remaining 2 hours today. That, even though I am too lazy to find out the lists's origin or the books' significance. It's totally random. The fact that I like it despite not knowing why it was created probably says loads about me...and not necessarily positive loads. Anyway.

Instructions:
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.

Movies don’t count!!!!!

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
4. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
5. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
8. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
9. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
10. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
11. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
12. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Cute as a Daisy

2007-09-17T19:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a sweet little sweater I made for a colleague's two-year-old daughter. I think it worked well all the way around. She got a handmade sweater in the color of her choosing. I got to knit something girly for a change.

Pattern: more or less the 2-3 year crewneck cardigan pattern from Kate Buller's Style Your Own Kids' Knits.

Yarn: 6 balls Mission Falls 1824 Cotton in Lemongrass. note: I link to the Camilla Valley Farm site because they were kind enough to send a free color card for the yarn. Believing in returning favors, I bought this sweater's yarn from them and share the link here.

Modifications: I made the overall width less than the pattern called for. I also think I reduced a bit for gauge issues, but can't find my notes now so can't be sure. Oh, and I decided to continue the eyelet bands for the button band. It allowed for visual continuity AND some flex in where I sewed on the buttons (insert knowing grin).

Notes/Thoughts: First, this is a very pretty color. My photos wash it out terribly. I received a lot of compliments on the yarn while I was knitting it.

Second, I enjoyed Mission Falls cotton as much as I'd hoped. This was recommended by several knitter friends who use it exclusively for kids knits (it's machine washable). Its slubbiness made it a little hard to work with for K2togs and picking up the buttonband stitches.

Third, the buttons won my heart. I am NOT a button fan. From ages 3-23 I refused to wear any shirts/tops with buttons. That said, these little daisy buttons seemed just the thing.

Can Anything Good Come from This?

2007-09-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

We've all been there, right? You knit exactly what the pattern says and end up with a piece of cloth half as thick as it should be, with 27 more stitches and a slant where it should be straight.

I am to the sleeves of this sweater. It makes sense when I look at the shape of the piece I should be creating. But the directions DO NOT WORK. I checked errata and found one small error for the pattern, but nothing that explains the difference between what I should be getting and what I am getting.

I have fallen back on my own calculations and approximations. They go on FOR PAGES. The first adaptation I tried was too short. Rip, rip, rip.

Then I got it right, but had never switched up from the smaller needles I'd used to catch my live stitches. So I had two inches of fabric at a noticably smaller gage. Rip, rip, rip again.

Then (are you thinking Three Bears?) it was too long again, so a did a few more modifications and reknit. With the too small needles AGAIN! I am nothing if not persistent in my thick-headedness.

At any rate, I finished the first sleeve, have successfully sewn it to the front panel (thus confirming that it is the right length) and am on to sleeve two.

Does this look like it should be so difficult?

You know you've been a doula a while when...

2007-09-10T11:46:00.001-05:00

...you come across the last name Foley and immediately think of the catheter.

Actually, that should be appended to read, "You know you've been a doula in a hospital...." Do homebirth midwives ever use catheters?

Like a small beacon of light, hope shines from...New Jersey?!!

2007-09-05T10:31:00.000-05:00

Amid all the clucking about rising C-section rates and accompanying risks what, really, is being done?

Word from inside sources is that the new University of Michigan women's hospital (currently under construction) will have state of the art operating bays to accomodate 50% surgical births. Presumably that means they 're planning on 50% vaginal births.

Allow me to reference the oft-quoted point that the World Health Organization aims for a 10-15% Caesarean rate in developing countries. Imagine Ann Arbor at that rate. Would the hospital even have space for all the vaginally birthing women? Would they permit their operating suites to sit empty while women slowly walked, squatted, bathed their way through labor?

To put my worry more realistically, will borderline cases more often get pushed to the surgery side?

I suggest many hospitals, not just the University of Michigan, send a crew to Plainfield, New Jersey's Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center. Somehow, it has attained a C-section birth rate under 16%.

I hoped to find clues to their rates at the hospital's website. I first noticed that they brag about their low C-section and high VBAC rates. As they should. I also noticed that CNMs deliver there. That could be part of the puzzle.

A bigger part may be that Muhlenberg does not appear to take high risk pregnancies. Not being from the area I cannot say for sure. But a search of the state's maternal and fetal medicine doctors comes up empty for Muhlenberg.

Even if that is true, I can't see how adding high-risk patients to the mix would make that much of a difference. High risk patients have to be a small part of the hospital's overall pool. So even if every MFM patient had a C-section (which they don't), one wouldn't expect the overall rate to double (which is what would need to happen for Muhlenberg to match national averages).

Anyway, food for thought. There are different ways to run hospitals and L&D units.

How about Eye Bran instead of Eye Candy?

2007-08-31T12:25:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the creep-support comments. Sorry so many of you can sympathize from personal experience.

It's been too busy to post but I have hope: we recently got highspeed internet at home. I sincerely plan to do all posting from home now, especially with the semester starting and work getting busier for those of us in the student services field.

I do not really have anything that falls in the delight-the-eye category. But for some reason, I enjoyed this photo from our August vacation. The boys' feet in a lighthouse:

Creepy Guys

2007-08-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

I am in full out wrath mode toward creepy guys and the f-d up guy culture that creates creepy guys.

Because of creepy guy on my bus I am now taking alternate transportation to and from work. This alternate transportation includes some healthier options (biking, for example). And a some speedier options (again, biking, and also driving). That is not the point.

The point is that I loved my bus routine and now I'm not doing it because creepy guy was asking way too many personal questions, telling me narratives of his "works in progress" all of which had to do with women not being sexually satisfied by their husbands and going on quests for great sex, suggesting I stop by his apartment sometime to see his paintings and, while looking for a "card" with his address on it in his wallet, inadvertently revealing to me that his wallet photo case contains pictures of women in lingere.

What makes me more angry is that I feel the need to defend myself, to say "I did nothing to bring this on." And I didn't. I rode the bus. That was it. Oh, and I didn't say "get the fuck away" when he sat next to me. But otherwise, I just rode my route, knitting or reading happily.

That I even feel I need to say something about my own culpability says to me there is some expectation -- perhaps only in my own mind, but I suspect culturally -- that if I'm being harassed, I must have somehow invited it. Which makes me really afraid of ever being raped. If creepy bus encounters must somehow be my fault, what about full-on physical assualt?

And then I feel guilty (though it doesn't stop me from doing it -- I'm not a martyr after all) about the fact that my socio-economic position provides other options for me. I can (I hope) escape creepy guy by using my car. What about other women he might harass for whom the bus is their only transportation? What about other women the world over who can't escape disturbed, low-life, unstable, misogynist, creepy fucking guys?

And all any of us is doing is trying to live our lives for Pete's sake.

Knitting Blah-Blah*

2007-08-24T11:31:00.000-05:00

Just a few knitting-related observations and rants I wanted to plunk down before the weekend.

1. Knitter's Magazine, Fall 2007? Yuck. Already dropped at the freebie exchange rack at the library.

2. 'Tis the season for knitblogger weddings. Congratulations Moon Tea, Yarn Overboard, Ellen, Philosoknitter...who am I missing?

3. I bought tweedy yarn. Thanks for the suggestions, folks. After a feel-the-yarn session, the intended recipient decided wool was not so scratchy after all, and that he would like a wool sweater. I kept grabbing increasingly rougher hanks saying, "What about this? Put it down your shirt. Could you stand THIS?" He kept saying yes. So I ordered Cascade 128 Tweed (thanks for the tip, C.). I can only assume (having worked with Cascade 220) this will be much softer than Lopi.

4. FOs in the works (is that an oxymoronic sentence?). Probably another week.

*Oblique reference to Queen's Radio Ga Ga.

Hey, it's Franklin...

2007-08-23T11:41:00.000-05:00

...comin' over to breastfeed.

Last night I met with clients who wanted to review breastfeeding before their baby is born. I had all my handouts and books ready to take when I remembered I usually demonstrate breastfeeding holds with a doll.

Of course, because I am not often asked to talk specifically about breastfeeding, "usually" refers to a handful of times I've covered the topic. How I have had doll-in-hand on these rare occasions is now a bafflement to me. For there is nary a human baby model of any shape or size anywhere in my house.

We have a few 8-inch-high Rescue Heroes, an Ugly Doll and a life-sized bear cub. None seemed remotely appropriate (indeed a few were downright creepy) to put near a breast.

But then I spied gentle, thoughtful Franklin. Franklin is SO about family and feelings. He's curious and honest. Really, who wouldn't take him to the breast?

My clients chuckled through the session, but were able to practice the various breastfeeding holds. Franklin even got a gentle burping from the father-to-be, though he also cautioned that if his child was remotely green, there would be some explaining to do.

Meme alert (8 Secrets About Me)

2007-08-22T08:21:00.000-05:00

Navelgazing Midwife tagged me (I'm flattered!).

Rules: People who are tagged need to write in their own blog these rules & the eight things. At the end of the your blog post, tag six people and list their (blog) names. Leave a comment on their blog telling them they've been tagged and encourage them to read your blog.

1. I have never smoked anything. Not even one cigarette, not even a puff.
2. I have always wanted to show up at a job interview in my 1986 prom dress (Gunnie Sax, southern belle era) just to see folks' reactions.
3. If I could sing well I would be pursuing a career on Broadway (there is the theatrical in me).
4. I scream very loudly if startled. Just ask my spouse (my parents, my sons, our newspaper delivery man...). ED: I just screamed right now: lightening hit close to our building and the thunder was sudden and very loud!
5. My maternal grandfather was an old-school Baptist minister in Alabama.
6. I am atheist.
7. I was a big skinny-dipper in college: the Red Cedar River, the fountain pools in front of the library, various apartment swimming pools (so I was a trespasser, too).
8. I take a 10 mg. daily dose of Lexapro (for anxiety); it works beautifully. Hypochondriacs of the world take heart!

SIX people?!! That's a lot. O.K., let me see:

Brown Berry
Doula Matt
The Little Red Hen
Sandy D.
Radical Doula
A Little Bit of Suburbia

If this is baby/breastfeeding friendly...

2007-08-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

...I don't want to see hostile!

A friend who recently had a premature baby at the local university hospital shared this story with me.

Her son was in the NICU and on tube feeding. While the mother worked to bringin her milk, she asked that her son be given breastmilk instead of formula. My friend was told that the hospital does not work with any of the area milk banks, so banked milk was not an option.

Then one of the sympathetic NICU nurses told my friend that if she could get her doctor to write a prescription for banked milk that she could then label as her own and bring in, they could use it.

My friend talked with her pediatrician who eagerly wrote the prescription. She called the nearest milk bank (100 miles away!). In the course of their intake questions, they learned that her baby was at the university hospital. They said they could not give her their milk because they knew the hospital would not use it.

So thanks to the hospital's policies, my friend's newborn preemie, had to have formula instead of breast milk.

This is a hospital that touts itself as both baby-friendly and breastfeeding-friendly. It may have crossed paths with the wrong woman. My friend vows to return with a vengeance once her baby is older and see if she can't motivate some change on the banked milk policy. If anyone could do it, she could.

Dr. Wonderful

2007-08-20T08:25:00.000-05:00

Need a little cheer and hope on this (at least in Michigan) dark and rainy Monday morning?

Check out Navelgazing Midwife's account of a fabulous hospital birth and the doctor who let the mother birth her way.

Not Likin' the Sound of THIS

2007-08-16T13:41:00.000-05:00

"[Vince] Vaughn has set in development 'Male Doula,' a high-concept comedy based on his idea..."

No, no, no no no, no NO! It's not that a high concept comedy about birth can't be made (though I have yet to see one). It's not even that male doulas couldn't be made funny. I'm guessing they could. Birth could even be portrayed accurately AND humorously at the same time.

But I gotta say, Vince Vaughn does not strike me as the guy to do it. Instead, what about:

--Steve Martin
--Will Ferrell
--Cuba Gooding, Jr.
--Chevy Chase
--Rowan Atkinson
--DAME EDNA!

Who else? Who would you cast as a comic Male Doula (again, assuming such a role could actually be written well enough to be funny)?

Yarn Suggestions?

2007-08-14T08:46:00.000-05:00

I have a problem. I "owe" someone a sweater (more about that when I finish it; I'm getting the better end of the deal). That someone has identified a cabled pullover pattern that he likes. Because the pattern (Snorri) was in the Best of Lopi book, he even chose a harn he liked (medium brown tweed, an excellent choice).

All was well. I was searching the internet for the best prices. Then I remembered this man's wife commenting that he never wore anything she knit for him because it itched. DANGER WIL ROBINSON. I e-mailed him and received confirmation that he wanted the sweater made of something soft, something that wouldn't require him to wear a turtleneck under it.

Knitfriends, I have been searching to no avail. Do you have suggestions for yarn I could use that fits these qualifications:

Bulky (3.5 sts/in)
Tweedy
Soft (cotton or cotton blend preferred, though perhaps a merino could work?)
Good stitch definition for cables

I plan on taking this list to my favorite LYS for consultation, too, but I'm limited there by what they stock (e.g. no Lopi). I'd appreciate any suggestions you have for substitutions. Oh -- and because this will be my first outing with cables, I'm not comfortable resizing the repeats and patterns to accomodate smaller-gauge yarn (which would open up my options greatly, I realize).

My week of R&R

2007-08-13T08:05:00.000-05:00

I'm just back from a stellar week in northern Michigan. I'll be back on the posting wagon soon as I get my other (work, laundry, doula client) ducks in a row.

In the meantime, have some fun with names at the Baby Name Wizard Blog. If you, too, have a fascination with people's names, historical and present, you will enjoy the site.

For example, did you know that in 1906 and 1956, most boys' names ended in the letters D,E,N,S and Y. But in 2006 only one of those letters was the popular ending, with 4 times as many names represented than any other. To learn what that letter is, check here.