When I looked over the island counter in the kitchen and saw two young beaming faces my heart melted and I was charged to sustain the joy they were feeling. They weren’t opening a Christmas gift or watching Dora walk through our house, they were watching my husband and I kiss. (more…)
I’ve had a flood of memories of fecal matter strewn about the room since reading recent entries from Her Bad Mother. I love how shit stories connect mothers via the funny-bone where parenting styles might otherwise separate them. (more…)
Eyes bright with wonder and excitement, my daughter looks to me to explain to her the many contradictions of the Christmas season. She doesn’t describe them to me that way, but they feel that way coming out of my mouth. At the heart of it is my on-going concern — that my kids will take for granted their good fortune, now and all year. (more…)
In my part of the world the winter is slowly creeping up on us. We’ve moved in the last few days from double digit autumn warmth, to low single digits with many millimetres of rain falling. Our northern neighbours are getting freezing rain, snow and high winds. Clearly it’s time to bunker-down for the true trials of winter: common illnesses. (more…)
I’ve had a number of people e-mail me requesting the prescription for lying-in which I talk about in the September-October 2006 issue of Mothering. The “prescription” comes out of Bridget Lynch’s many years of clinical work, research and post-doctoral writing and I was blessed to have received the lessons as part of my experience. I look forward to one day reading about the history and clinical results she observed, and if and when that time comes, I will write here about where to find it.
Etched in my memory are the feelings — trepidation, excitement, FEAR and quiet contentment — which jerked my body around in the final weeks before my first child was born.
When I began to wonder who was in charge of my state of being, I was 7 months pregnant. I had expected to feel the presence of my baby by that point, but the eye-wandering distraction which came to envelop me, caught me off-guard. One day it was upon me and I could not get back to “myself”. My laser sharp focus, intuitive observations and crisp synthesization slipped through my grasp, seemingly gone forever.
The downside of all the sharing we do with our pregnant sisters is that it’s really hard to filter our advice and experiences as so not to allow negative emotions — fear, sadness, guilt or regret — in our own experiences to seep into the conversation. I found when I was pregnant, I was so open to everything floating by that it was easy to absorb the emotions behind the stories that were being shared in good faith (hence I donned the emotional flak jacket). How can you stop your cervix from pulling in when you hear about 32 hours of labour, petocin drips and tears which seemed never to end? It kinda burns a hole in your no-yet penned birth plan!
I found an enormous sense of excitement in wanting to be part of the collective consciousness of motherhood as the baby inside me began to grow and my body showed signs of change. I could hear the little girl in me saying, “Here I will belong. Here I will be welcomed”. But it was as if old wounds were being brought up to heal because while I yearned to belong, there was that old companion, nervousness in my stomach. Hoping to avoid the let-down of feeling different again, I began approaching “the news” with women cautiously, listening to the personal stories while filtering for gems of knowledge and common values.
I was questioning things from my pre-pregnancy life I had always accepted as fact. Moving into the second trimester of pregnancy, I was increasingly uncomfortable with what appeared to be popular rites of pregnancy for their lack of connection to the bigger questions of becoming someone’s mother. While I was open to learning how to behave from those who came before me, I was beginning to sense there were decisions lurking around every corner about which I knew absolutely nothing; and I had yet to scratch the surface of the medical pregnancy.