Why should pregnant women buy “Becoming Mother”?
In this video, I share my thoughts on what makes this book a truly unique read for first-time mothers. I also explain how it’s different from reading typical motherhood blogs.
Becoming Mother
A book and a blog for first-time mothers
Category: Book Discussions
November 5, 2015
What was the most surprising thing about new motherhood?
Here’s what I thought:
What was surprising to you? I’d love to hear from you!
October 9, 2015
Talking about the hard stuff: Teacher as agent of social change
**Disclaimer: This post is quite off-topic compared to my usual posts about motherhood, but, hey, I happen to think a lot about other things, too.
Every now and then, some topic comes up in my advanced speaking and listening class that causes me to put on my social-justice-superhero cape and tackle an issue head-on. Sometimes, the topic is the death penalty. Sometimes, it’s death with dignity.
This term, it was rape.
First, some background: I teach English to international students in an intensive English program. In other words, I’m teaching adults who want to earn a college degree… but don’t have strong enough English skills to do so yet.
Our students primarily come from two countries, but, trust me, we have all kinds of students. The motivated. The goofballs. The hapless wanderers. The spoiled rich kids. The budding scholars. The “I-here-for-vacation-only-Teacher”s. The lost. The dreamers. The future politicians. The victims of their own self-doubt.
We have them all.
Some days, I leave my job feeling like nothing that I do makes a difference. Some days, I feel that my students don’t care about anything besides this grand illusion that they can just extract the essence of this “academic knowledge” from the university and then infuse themselves with all of it, like a patient hooked up to an IV. (And, hey, there are days when I totally wish that I could simply transfuse all of them with a healthy dose of phonics).
It’s hard for my students to understand that all knowledge is culturally situated. No knowledge is pure of the context and culture in which it is taught, so they can’t simply absorb academic knowledge at an American university without absorbing pieces of American culture along with it.
Hell, it was hard for me to understand this when I was their age (and I was struggling with these ideas in my native language). In my freshmen English class in college, I struggled particularly with an excerpt of Paolo Freire’s Pedadgogy of the Oppressed, for two main reasons:
1) I couldn’t understand the excerpt because–even though I had been an Honors English student in high school–my reading ability wasn’t developed enough to easily parse out academic English
2) I had no personal experience to understand Freire’s “banking concept” of education.
With the help of some in-class discussions, I finally understood Freire’s “banking concept” of education.
Yes! I get it!
But why did he write about this? Everyone knows that this is how people learn. You listen to your teacher, memorize, and repeat.
Well, maybe not in English, but for math and science, that makes perfect sense.
Oh… wait. Freire thought the banking concept was bullshit?
Oops.
And even though I eventually understood that Freire was decrying the widespread belief in the banking concept of education, I still couldn’t quite understand what he meant about critical pedagogy or transformative social justice. What did any of that mean? How did empowering citizens to transform society have anything to do with getting an education?
Wasn’t an education just learning how to do your future job? Wasn’t that why we were all studying in college? To become teachers and doctors and lawyers and business people? That was why were studying, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
This is where I got stuck. And I think this is where my students get stuck, too.
***
As a teacher, now reflecting back on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I not only understand Freire’s argument to move education into the realm of social justice, but I also understand how limiting the definition of “education” to “technical skills for a job” keeps a population from making societal change.
It keeps us believing in the American dream, that if we just work hard enough, all of our dreams will come true. Even worse, it keeps us believing that the poor, the uneducated, and the imprisoned are in those positions for the sole reason that they chose to be. That they have earned their lot in life solely because of their lack of enterprise and effort. In this extreme sense of individualism, no other factors are strong enough to influence a person’s life as much as his/her individual ability and effort.
I believe that teachers are especially situated in society to confront these myths.
***
At the same time, I am an agent of this very narrow view of education.
I deliver language lessons.
For the purpose of increasing my student’s English language proficiency.
For the purpose of them preparing for jobs.
My job description does not include any language about the necessity of teaching for social change. Although my particular university does boast about its Marianist values–one of which is social justice–my primary job is to deliver instruction that helps my students improve their English, and (hopefully!) develop their ability to be independent learners.
***
And yet, I found myself in a classroom of international students with a teachable moment ripe in the air. One student had just said that he thought boys and girls should be taught together until they are 10 years old.
Why? Because it would decrease the instances of rape.
I did a double-take. “Did you say rape?”
He nodded.
“So this is a problem in your country?”
He nodded.
I thought for a moment. “How does putting girls and boys together in the same class decrease the number of rapes?”
He shook his head for a moment, as if processing the idea. As if figuring out how to phrase something that was so obvious that it didn’t usually require words.
“It’s just, maybe it happens more when there are a lot of girls together in one room. When there are boys and girls together, I think the rape will be less.”
Oh boy.
This is the moment that language teachers dream of–that moment to engage. That moment when language takes it rightful place as a conveyor of ideas, not this monolithic body of knowledge that my students need to acquire before they can actually communicate.
This is the moment when my students move beyond the in my country, we do this, and in my opinion, it’s very important because...
This is the moment when I have a choice–to confront age-old, culturally embedded stereotypes about gender and violence–or to move on in the language lesson because of my fear of the emotions that the discussion would summon forth.
I chose to engage. Carefully. But to engage nonetheless.
“What causes rape?” I asked.
Silence.
“Anyone?”
Silence.
“Is rape going to happen if a lot of girls or women are gathered in one place and a man is teaching them?” I asked.
Slience, and then a quiet, “…maybe.”
“Okay. Here’s a question: Why do people rape?”
Silence.
“Why do you think people rape?” I repeated.
“…maybe because the woman is dress very… not nice. Maybe too sexy.”
I didn’t laugh or roll my eyes. I just shook my head. “Nope.”
Someone else spoke. “Maybe because she walk alone at night.”
“Nope,” I said.
“But I know a story, Teacher,” one student said. “One woman, she walk alone at night, and this happened to her. It terrible.”
“I agree. It is terrible. But it’s also not her fault.”
Silence.
“Listen, rape is not the woman’s fault.” (I used “woman” because for this group of students, the concept of a woman raping a man is totally impossible–but that’s another topic).
At this point, I could see the fierce agreement in the eyes of my female students.
“People rape because they want power or control over someone else. It’s not because a woman is too sexy. Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power and control. And rape happens over and over and over again… Why?”
Silence.
“Because we don’t talk about it,” I said. “Because rape is so shameful that we’d rather go to our graves not talking about it then to invite that shame onto our families.”
At this point, the heaviness in the room was palpable.
“Isn’t that right?” I asked.
Around the room, heads nodded. Even those of my male students.
“Rape happens because of power and shame,” I stated emphatically. “And unless we start talking about it, it’s going to continue to happen. Can you imagine if this happened to your daughter? Your sister? Can you imagine how you would feel if you couldn’t do anything about it because you didn’t want people to know about the rape? Can you imagine this?”
And at this point I could see on their faces that they could imagine this horrible reality–because some of them had lived it.
One of my students softly said, “It’s happen in schools sometimes, but also it’s happen a lot in families. Like between cousins.”
Heads nodded.
***
Some days, I leave work feeling like nothing I can do makes a difference.
Some days, I leave work feeling like this is the only thing that I can do that makes a difference.
July 17, 2015
Book Club Discussion # 3: My Body, My Choice?
37 weeks pregnant
In this post, I include an excerpt from my forthcoming book,“Becoming Mother: A Journey of Identity,” (coming in August 2015) followed by commentary. I intend this post to be a springboard for a book-club-like discussion, so feel free to contribute!
When I return for my next appointment on a Monday, my doctor’s first words are, “You were supposed to have your baby this weekend!”
“Ha.” I give a forced laugh, but I’m not amused at all.
She turns to me and I get into position for a cervical check.
“Can you please not sweep my membranes this time?” I ask. “That was really painful last time.” God, I hate my words. I don’t want to be polite. I’m angry at her for not asking for my consent to do that. And yet I’m still making requests instead of just saying what I don’t want.
“Sure, no problem,” she says as she probes me. “Three centimeters, seventy-five percent effaced,” she announces. She turns away from me and toward her laptop, which is resting on the counter.
“So what I’ll tell you is that if you have an induction this week, you don’t have any factors that would increase your risk of a C-section.”
“I really don’t want an induction,” I say. Ugh! My words! Why can’t I be assertive?
“Okay, but what I can tell you is that I won’t be able to deliver this baby past Friday afternoon, which is August 10.”
“But I still have five days for the baby to come, right?”
“Yeah…” she trails off.
“So… let’s say you’re not here for the birth. Should I meet with these other doctors?”
“If you go past your due date, you’ll need to schedule an appointment with them for a non-stress test to make sure that the baby is okay. So you’ll have a chance to meet them then. But you know, these doctors may not want to let you go all the way to forty-two weeks, the way that I would. They may not let you go past forty-one weeks. And then you may have to have an induction anyway.”
“Right…” I think about what she is saying. But you won’t let me go to forty-two weeks because you’re not going to be here anyway. So my choice is be induced at thirty-nine weeks with you or be induced at forty-one weeks without you? What if I go into labor naturally? Isn’t that still an option?
“But whatever you decide,” she crosses her arms, “I hope that you also respect the desires of these doctors and not go past the timeframe that they are comfortable with. Okay?”
“Oh. Okay.” I say quickly.
I feel like an inconvenience, like I should feel badly that I’m creating a hiccup in this plan, but I’m starting to care less and less about what this doctor and the other doctors think about me. Who is having the baby here? What should take priority? Having the baby by a certain date or having the baby when the baby is ready?
Author Commentary
In this discussion, we hear two key factors come into play about whether or not to induce labor: scheduling and doctor’s preferences. The doctor doesn’t cite positive outcomes for a labor induction–instead she frames her comments from a standpoint of the unlikelihood of negative outcomes.
Missing from this conversation are any references to the effects of this induction on my health or on my baby’s health–specifically in regard to birth weight.
I dare say, we let doctors take these kinds of liberties with us all too often. Because we trust them. We think that they know what’s best. Because we think that they will prioritize our health and safety over other concerns. (Don’t worry–this isn’t turning into a post that bashes doctors or questions the importance of vaccinating your kids (and, yes, you should. For goodness sake…))
Why do we allow doctors to push and pull birth in all different directions?
I think that it has to do with authority. Pregnant women often don’t feel that they have any authority to make the calls during pregnancy, especially if they are first-time mothers. What do I know? I’ve never had a baby before!
I get that.
But at the same time, this is your child. Not the doctor’s child.
That seems obvious, right? But it’s really not.
After going to all the prenatal appointments, laboring in the hospital by their rules, and relying on the doctor to catch my baby, I felt an unexpected shock when the nurses start asking me when I last fed the child. Oh. Me? Wait? Shit, the doctor’s gone.
And then it sinks in–I had really been depending so heavily on everyone else–nurses, doctors, ultrasounds, fetal monitoring, etc–to be responsible for my child’s well-being. And in reality, it was me all along. And when I finally saw through that illusion, I was even more certain that it is my responsibility to advocate for this child–not my doctor’s.
You can see why this is a difficult frame of mind to occupy before giving birth. Everything in our system for giving birth encourages mothers to trust their doctors for positive outcomes. You don’t have to worry about anything. We got you. But this is not always the case.
And so in those last weeks of pregnancy, it is more important to be protective than to be polite. It’s your body. It’s your baby’s body.
And for those two bodies, there is only one voice.
Yours.
Be heard.
What about you? Have you ever experienced clashes like this with your doctor during those last weeks of pregnancy? What happened?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
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July 10, 2015
Book Club Discussion # 2: Who should intervene when women have trouble breastfeeding?
In this post, I include an excerpt from my forthcoming book, “Becoming Mother: A Journey of Identity,” (coming in August 2015) followed by commentary. I intend this post to be a springboard for a book-club-like discussion, so feel free to contribute!
From the chapter entitled, “Feeding”:
“So…” the pediatrician looks at the computer screen before she turns back to me. “Your daughter has lost eleven percent of her body weight in four days. That’s cause for concern,” she nods as she says this.
I am so relieved. I’m not crazy. I knew that she was hungry. I’m not crazy.
“Do you have any idea how much milk you’re producing?” she asks.
I shake my head. “We’ve just been trying to keep our heads above water, so I haven’t even tried pumping.”
“Okay… okay.” She is quiet for a moment. “Have you tried hand expressing any milk?”
“The lactation consultant said that I have flat and inverted nipples, so that’s why I wasn’t able to do that.”
“Okay… So I’d go ahead and try pumping just to get an idea of what you’re producing. It’s not going to be as much as what your baby can pull out, but it will do a few things. It will give you an idea of what you’re producing. It will give you a break from these marathon nursing sessions. And it will keep stimulating milk production.”
She stands up to examine Felicity. She looks into her eyes and feels her belly. “She’s pretty jaundiced, too. We’ll need to follow up on that.”
“Can I ask a question about me?”
She turns to look at me. “I’ve gained eleven pounds of fluid, and it’s all in my legs. And I can’t sleep. I keep trying to go to sleep between feedings, and I just can’t. I’m afraid that if this continues, it’s going to affect my milk coming in.”
“Okay, so that’s something that I’d talk with your OB about.”
Oh, wonderful, I think. Her.
“Great. She’s in Italy,” I say.
“Oh… She’s in a practice by herself?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe the nurses there, then… But really your OB should be the one to consult about those kinds of issues.”
It seems strange to me how we’re talking about all of these issues: Felicity’s weight loss, my lack of sleep and fluid retention, and my milk production. It’s all related, but the pediatrician is responsible for addressing Felicity’s weight loss, not any issues with me. But the issues with me are causing Felicity’s weight loss. It seems to me that someone—I don’t know who—should be treating this problem holistically. This is the time and place where I need someone to help me first so that I can help Felicity. I thought maybe this doctor—my family doctor—would be able to help. After all, she’s also Felicity’s pediatrician. But perhaps there are some legal issues here to consider? Who knows.
“So because of her rapid weight loss,” the doctor explains, “she really needs to have formula as a supplement until your milk comes in.”
There it is. All the on-line breastfeeding forums have cautioned me about this: the dreaded supplementation discussion at the first visit to the pediatrician. But I gather all of their dire warnings about supplementing in the first week and throw them to the wind. I’ll do what I need to do in this moment—regardless of the shame that I know will befall me.
The doctor pulls a starter kit of formula from a cabinet and opens the box. She unscrews the cap of a premade bottle. For a moment, I cringe. But when my doctor hands it to me, I take it. I push aside all my thoughts about the most natural option being the best decision in this moment. Today, living off something synthetic is better than dying from the lack of something natural.
I nestle the nipple of the bottle between Felicity’s lips and she starts guzzling. Her eyes flip open in surprise.
“You want to give her breaks, every half ounce or so,” the doctor advises. “She needs some time for her stomach to realize how much she’s eaten. If you let her eat too quickly, it could come straight back up.”
“So… I should just take it away and check every now and then?”
“Yeah, until you get the hang of it.”
The bottle has useful measurement marks to keep track of how much Felicity has eaten. I pull the bottle away after every half of an ounce. Then, I burp her, and we resume the feeding. Once Felicity has finished the bottle, she is fast asleep in my arms.
“Thank you,” I say. “Just… um…” I shake my head, the heat of my tears stinging as they rise. “This means a lot.” I wish there were stronger words than thank you, but I’m too emotional to find them.
Author Commentary
Even as I share this excerpt, I know that there are plenty of mothers who had a similar experience at their child’s first pediatrician visit. What I write about here is hotly debated among mothers–to supplement or not to supplement?
There are plenty of women who can share an experience of their milk fully coming in after the first pediatrician’s visit–and then feeling like the doctors suggested supplementing too soon. And if they did supplement in the first days of life and suffered from low milk supply later on, they may blame themselves for not having faith in their bodies to do the job. Or they may blame the doctors for not trusting in the strength of women’s bodies.
In my case, I wouldn’t realize until six months postpartum that–while at was at that first visit to the pediatrician–my body was experiencing postpartum thyroiditis. This condition caused me to make about 10% of the amount of breast milk that my daughter needed to survive every day. But I didn’t know this. I could have chosen to say, “No, I’ll keep exclusively nursing.”
But I didn’t. Something just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the way my daughter looked as she strained and strained to eat, as if trying to draw water from a rock.
Before becoming a mother, I was never one to really trust my intuition. I relied mostly on facts, observations, and research to make decisions. But something shifted in those first days of motherhood and I couldn’t ignore what my intuition was telling me.
We could get tangled up in this messy web of whether or not to supplement while nursing, but I think there is a much bigger question that goes undiscussed far too often when we talk about breastfeeding troubles.
Who should be responsible for intervening when a mother has trouble breastfeeding?
Right now in the United States, the pediatrician is the first medical professional that a new mother and baby typically encounter after they are discharged from the hospital. But as you can see from the excerpt above, pediatricians don’t always frame their advice and suggestions based on the assumption that the mother and baby are still one unit. They are thinking about the baby–not the mother. But this neglects the fact that the new mother and baby are still so integrally tied to each other in those first few weeks. They still exist in symbiosis. What affects the baby affects the mother–and what affects the mother affects the baby.
After the first pediatrician visit, mothers typically shoulder the responsibility for seeking out help if they are experiencing problems with breastfeeding. They might call a lactation consultant (if their insurance covers the expense.) But lactation consultants (LC) can offer wildly different advice–which leads mothers to calling LC after LC after LC.
So here’s a broad question that I’ll just put out there for you to think about and respond as you feel fit:
What kind of support system do mothers need when they are experiencing troubles with breastfeeding? Who should be involved? And how should they help?
I look forward to hearing from you!
July 8, 2015
Book Club Discussion # 1: Breastfeeding… or not
Felicity, March 2014: 7 months old (exclusively formula fed since 2 weeks old)
In this post, I include an excerpt from my forthcoming book, “Becoming Mother: A Journey of Identity,” (coming in August 2015) followed by commentary. I intend this post to be a springboard for a book-club-like discussion, so feel free to contribute!
From the chapter entitled, “The Conflict”:
Why did my inability to breastfeed cause me so much devastation? Was it perhaps because I still felt so connected to Felicity? Certainly, this presented a paradox: How could our needs be in such conflict while we were still so attached? She needed food, and I couldn’t provide it. It seemed impossible.
But there was another, deeper layer to my devastation—the devastation of a wounded identity, one that was still a newborn itself. That fresh identity as a competent mother—hero of my own story, defender of my newborn baby—was now at risk. I was becoming some breed of mother who didn’t neatly fall into one category or another. How could I have had an unmedicated childbirth and now be formula feeding my baby? What kind of mother was that?
Mothers like me didn’t seem to exist in mommy blogs or on-line forums. Mothers who gave birth without medication always breastfed their babies! They endured the pain so their babies would be alert after birth and latch with no problems. If they could stand the pain of childbirth, the pain of nursing cramps and chomped nipples and mastitis would be child’s play.
This is what I thought.
But again, these thoughts emerge from living in a society that emphasizes choice. When our concerns are not simply feeding our children, we can refocus our concerns on how we are feeding them. And when those feeding choices are presented on a continuum of “good, better, and best”, it’s fairly easy to jump to the conclusion of “good, better, and best mother.”
Even after I reassured myself that I was a competent mother, I knew the stereotypes that follow mothers who formula feed today. Our identities are not solely composed of what we think about ourselves. They also include—whether we like it or not—what others think about us. We may not care what some people think about our parenting, but we want those whom we respect to see us at least as good parents, if not great parents. And so this was a major psychological blow at a time when I was already bottoming out because of the fluctuations in my postpartum hormones.
So when I was unable to breastfeed, I had to reconcile many truths. I had to surrender my commitment to breastfeed. I had to accept that my baby wouldn’t be eating what everyone was calling “the best.” I had to reconcile what this decision said about my new identity as a mother. And I had to accept a very definite separation from my baby at a time when I wasn’t ready to let go.
Until I decided to wean Felicity, I had relied on evidence-based research to make decisions about labor, birth, and feeding. And while all of this knowledge helped me to avoid an unnecessary labor induction, it was not the definitive authority that I had imagined it to be during pregnancy. Because I lacked confidence in my own instincts as a woman and a mother, I placed all of my trust in this research, believing that it would provide me the best counsel about how to solve any problem that I could encounter as a new mother.
In fact, Robbie Davis-Floyd (2003) explored this tendency of American mothers to grant more authority to scientific knowledge than their own intuitive and bodily knowledge. She asserts that this tendency arises from American cultural beliefs that possessing, “scientific knowledge about medical birth” gives mothers power and control in a culture where, “knowledge… is respected… (and) enables one to be a competent player of our cultural game” (p. 31). Not only does her cultural observation explain my intense desire to read and research during pregnancy, but it helps me understand my own distrust in my body’s signals.
But if I had been able to listen to my body and trust my instincts more, I would have probably stopped breastfeeding around eight days postpartum. It was at this time that I knew my milk supply was not going to increase. My daughter was already eating mostly formula despite my constant pumping and nursing. I had done all of the interventions that I could try and the outcome was the same—one to two ounces of breast milk per day. At this point, I had to start denying what was happening to me in order to keep going. Every time I nursed her, I reminded myself that breastfeeding was best and that I was doing the right thing. I refused to let myself focus on the fact that she could only draw half an ounce of breast milk during a feeding. Instead, I allowed statistics and the results of scientific studies to overshadow my own personal experience.
But it wasn’t just research that fueled my self-denial.
It was also my own pride.
I shared in today’s breastfeeding enthusiasm to the point of sacrificing my own health. I had read about the dangers of infant formula. I didn’t want processed food going into my baby’s body. Unlike women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generations, I live in a time when breastfeeding is now heralded as the best decision that mothers can make for the health of their babies. It supports their immune systems. Breast milk is more easily digested, so babies have fewer cases of constipation and diarrhea. It makes them smarter? It decreases their chances of developing obesity? Okay, those findings seemed like a stretch, but I was willing to believe them—since I was going to breastfeed.
But ultimately, it was my own pride that kept me nursing and pumping until I literally had nothing left to give.
I didn’t want to be criticized. But I also didn’t want to be wrong.
(This is only an excerpt from this chapter. Buy the whole book in August! Request an email when it’s available here.)
Author Commentary
This section of the book was extremely difficult for me to write because it required me to
1) honestly assess my attitudes before I began breastfeeding
2) honestly assess my actual experience with breastfeeding and position it within the context of modern society’s expectations and norms for motherhood
3) express the chaotic, internal dialogue that ruled my thoughts in those first months of motherhood
4) articulate the complex identity crisis I experienced with enough context for others to understand how and why it occurred
5) be vulnerable to an audience who could choose to write me off as a mother who “didn’t try hard enough”
6) not resort to sweeping conclusions about breastfeeding, but rather acknowledge the truth that other women have very different experiences with breastfeeding
To be clear, I don’t think that breastfeeding necessarily causes an identity crisis for women. Rather, I see it as one of the many ways that we–especially Americans–measure “success.” We do it in every other facet of life. We measure success by the things that we do–studying all night to get an A on that exam, practicing all year to win that dance competition, killin’ it at your job for three years to earn that promotion.
And then we reward this work: trophies, diplomas and degrees, promotions, new and better jobs, new houses. We’ve worked hard enough. Others see us as valuable. Banks trust us.
So if we do this in every other facet of life, why should we expect anything different from the process of becoming a mother? Doesn’t it make sense that we set up these goals to achieve in motherhood and then crumble when we feel like we can’t reach them?
And what happens if we don’t achieve these goals? Quite often, we resort to the fundamentals of attribution theory: If we don’t succeed, it’s because something else stopped us from succeeding, but if someone else doesn’t succeed, it’s because they are somehow flawed.
And this is crucial for understanding why it was such a big deal to me that I couldn’t breastfeed–I knew that a lot of people would ascribe my “failure” to breastfeed to flaws in my own personality. I wasn’t tough enough. I was uneducated. I wasn’t vigilant enough seek out the right help. And this is why I found it so critical to defend myself by oversharing the awful details of my descent into hell with others. If they just understood my situation, they would understand, I thought.
This happens a lot with expectations for birth, too. In my case, my expectations for birth rather closely aligned with what actually happened (with some frustrating deviations–to be told at another time). But I was able to come out of that experience with the feeling that I had “succeeded.” And so, my identity as a “good mother” was bolstered by this experience.
So I really think that the identity crisis comes from having strong expectations before you give birth, not living up to those expectations, and then feeling like the society in which you live is actively measuring your success in motherhood according to those expectations. That–I believe–is the perfect storm for this kind of identity crisis.
If you are a mother, what expectations, or even “goals,” did you have before you gave birth? Did reality match those expectations? If not, how did it make you feel and how did you cope?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
References:
Becoming Mother 