Archive for the 'fatherhood' Category

Dreaming as the Summers Die

Published
by
jess
on September 6, 2010
in adoption, family, fatherhood, motherhood and parenting
. 0 Comments

An essay by Terri Elders

“Still she haunts me”-Lewis Carroll

I figured something special might be happening that July morning in l948 when Mama appeared in the bedroom doorway, brandishing her boar-bristled hairbrush in one hand, my not-too-faded red plaid dress in the other.

“Skip the shorts and shirt today,” she said, handing me the dress. “Company’s coming for lunch.”

“Who?” I asked, puzzled. I couldn’t think of anybody important enough to wear my Sunday dress for, but I slipped into it, and stood quietly while Mama tugged the brush through my snarls.

I had just turned eleven. No longer in pigtails, I hadn’t yet mastered pin curls. So I wore my hair shoulder length and loose around my face, with bangs that forever needed trimming. Maybe I’d learn to set it with bobby pins before I started junior high that fall.

I waited for Mama to answer. “It’s Nana,” she finally said. “Nana, and maybe Jean.” I looked up sharply. Jean was my “real” mother, and I hadn’t seen her for years. I glanced across the bedroom at my older sister. Patti and I, just a year apart in age, had been adopted by our “real” father’s sister and her husband in l942, when we were five and six. Patti yawned, and then threw me a wink. Nearly a teen, she was more interested in boys than family gossip.

“Can I go over to Jimmy’s?” I asked, as Mama patted my bangs into place.

“Okay. I’ll send Patti over to get you when they get here. Just don’t get too dirty.”

Jimmy lived three doors down and was my best friend. The two of us would climb a towering maple tree to his roof where we would sit for hours, endlessly arguing. I favored the Brooklyn Dodgers and Doris Day. Jimmy loved the Giants and Peggy Lee. I liked Jack Benny, he Fred Allen. Though we rarely agreed, we relished our debates.

A few days earlier we had perched on the roof to watch the July 4 fireworks from the Los Angeles Coliseum. Some evenings we sat up there for hours with Jimmy’s telescope, searching for UFOs. We even argued about the merits of the planets. I favored Jupiter, he Mars.

I’d be glad to see Nana, Jean’s mother, who always wore sweet gardenia perfume and talked about how she conferred with spirits at her spiritualist church. But I barely remembered Jean. I knew my Daddy Al, of course, Mama’s brother, because he visited from time to time. Jean, though, was just a shadowy background figure, referred to in disapproving whispers. She drank, I’d heard. Or she had mental problems, whatever those might be.

She and Daddy Al had married when she was just a teenager, Mama said, and then Patti and I came quickly. Jean just couldn’t manage.

More important to me, I knew she was the daughter of a world famous organist, Jesse Crawford, known throughout the ‘30 as “The Poet of the Organ.” Grandpa Crawford sent Christmas cards with photos. I’d heard that he’d had radio shows in Chicago, and was the featured performer at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. My sister had inherited all that musical talent, but none trickled down to me.

“Jean could have been a concert pianist,” Mama said once. Jean’s brother, Howard, was a musician, too. My taste in music ran more to Vaughn Monroe, than classical. Ballerina was my current favorite that year. I’d hum it all the time, but wished I could play it on the upright. Not fair, I used to think. I was the one with the middle name, Jean, so I should be the one with the family talent.

Jimmy and I argued well past noon until Patti eventually appeared. “They’re here,” she announced, with a smirk and a roll of her eyes. I shinnied down the maple, careful not to tear my red plaid dress.

Jean looked younger than I expected, and prettier, with hair the same dark brown as mine, and freckles, just like mine, sprinkled across her nose. But during lunch she never smiled. Not once. Nana talked of the séances she conducted. Mama talked of how Patti and I soon would be starting junior high. Jean just sat, nibbled at her tuna sandwich, glanced about our tiny kitchen, and looked as bored as Patti.

I wanted to ask if she had seen Easter Parade, my new favorite movie. I wanted to ask where she lived, if she traveled, if she liked to play Parcheesi or Tripoley. I wanted to ask if she remembered when I was born. Which did she like to read, Coronet or McCall’s?

But soon everybody was saying goodbye. Jean gave Patti and me each a hesitant hug. “You girls look great,” she said, the first words she’d spoken directly to us all afternoon. I wanted to tell her that I liked her freckles, but before I could speak, they were all piling into Nana’s Studebaker.

Later that summer, Jimmy’s family moved away and I never saw him again. I, nor anybody else in our family, ever saw Jean again either. She just vanished. Nobody ever knew where she had gone. One afternoon a couple of years after that visit, I heard on the radio that my Nana, Olga Crawford, first wife of famed organist Jesse, had died in an apartment fire at the age of 57.

A few years later I sent for my birth certificate, which had been altered when I was adopted, to show Daddy and Mama as my parents. Astonished, I found my middle name was spelled Jeanne, not Jean. Was this how my “real” mother spelled it?

Grandpa Jesse came to my high school graduation and gave me a Smith Corona portable typewriter that I treasured all through college. Throughout the late ‘50’s, I visited him frequently. He hadn’t seen her since she was in her early teens and was uncertain about how her name was spelled.

I saw Daddy Al from time to time until he died in l992. He had been married to Jean for such a brief time and so long ago. He had neither their wedding certificate nor divorce papers, so couldn’t help me with the spelling.

Across the decades I think of her. Was she Jean or Jeanne? Did she read Hemingway or Fitzgerald? Would she choose pistachio or burgundy cherry if she were at Curries Ice Cream Parlor? Did she ever marry again or have more children? Did I have half-brothers or -sisters that I didn’t know about?

Later, at UCLA, I spent a year interning for Los Angeles County Department of Adoptions while I worked on an MSW degree. I learned about the adoption rules of earlier days, about sealed birth certificates and efforts to protect birth mothers. I also learned why many adult adoptees feel an urge to know, a need for answers.

Even now, in my seventies, I’d like to see my original birth certificate. Every time I sign my name, Theresa J. Elders, I wonder if that “J” really stands for Jean or Jeanne. And I still dream about climbing maple trees…and about my mother’s freckles.

 

“Dreaming as the Summers Die,” will appear in Dream of Things: Saying Goodbye, in October 2010. The Fertile Source is reprinting it with permission of the author.

Terri Elders, LCSW, lives near Colville, WA, with two dogs, three cats and a stable spacious enough for four unicorns, should such an astonishing quartet appear. Her stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including multiple editions of Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Cup of Comfort and Patchwork Path. “Dreaming as the Summers Die” will appear in the debut volume of the new Dream of Things series in October, 2010. Elders received the 2006 UCLA Alumni Award for Community Service for her work with Peace Corps. She serves as a public member of the Washington State Medical Commission, and is the current president of AAUW, Colville Branch. Editor Jessica Powers has interviewed Terri over on She Writes. Please check out her comments on writing, adoption, and the mystery of birth mothers.

Birth Day

Published
by
jess
on April 12, 2010
in abortion, birth, birth control, family, fatherhood, motherhood, parenting and pregnancy
. 0 Comments

by Stephanie Tames

I

On the Epiphany my father went fishing. It was the day I was born, January 6, the day the Maji reached the Christ child in Bethlehem laden with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. He drove to the Chesapeake Bay to an area he favored with a rock jetty, carefully picked his way along the sharp-edged rocks until he found one flat enough on one side to make a comfortable seat, and settled his gear and canvas bag into various crevices nearby. It was a bright and windy day, neither too gusty nor too cold, a perfect day for winter fishing for striped bass. The surf pounded against the rocks but it was still low tide when my father arrived so the spray from the plumes of cold salt water did not reach him. He kept a careful watch on the tide and the sea’s slow progress as it covered the rock jetty. He had come close many times to being stranded on the jetty as the tide rose and it was too cold that January day to risk getting soaked by the winter sea.

The story has become a family favorite. Everyone thinks it’s funny: as soon as he was told my birth meant another girl - the third in a row - my father gathered up his fishing gear and took off for the two hour drive to the bay. I guess he thought that since family and friends were watching his two older daughters and son he could take advantage of the time. He loved fishing.

I don’t think my mother thought the story was funny. Whenever it was repeated she would set her jaw tight and her lips would thin into what for my mother was neither smile nor frown but the expression she assumed often and which I imagined meant she was somewhere deep inside her head. She would stare at my father who would be telling this story, acting like he was George Burns on stage before an adoring audience.

I can imagine other families with this story: the father, like mine, guffawing, puffing out his chest as he told how it was just another kid, no big deal, the mother interrupting, telling her side like she was Gracie Allen, how she was screaming with labor pains and told him to get the hell away from her and he took her literally; how he’ll pay for that trip for the rest of his life (audience laughs), how he was really only gone a half-day and was back by evening visiting time to take all the children to see their mother and lovely baby sister with long dark hair.

II

My mother says that she and my father agreed on two children: a boy and a girl. And it happened. My brother came first, then a few years later, my oldest sister. My mother was happy. But just three months after my sister was born, my mother found herself pregnant again. She was depressed. Her health suffered. So when the baby came she asked but was denied a simple operation to tie her fallopian tubes, to wrap the tubes with thread pulled tight like a present so sperm swimming with speed and purpose can not reach the waiting egg. For my mother, it was the only thing she ever wanted.

She knew then she couldn’t take any chances. And she didn’t. But the diaphragm failed her and so did counting the days when an egg floated inside her and she was pregnant again. My father liked the idea of a big family; it was proof of his virility although he would have preferred that his virility made baby boys instead of girls.

After I was born my mother asked again, she said she begged, but the doctor refused to tie her tubes and two years later my brother was born. Whether it was her pleading that softened her doctor’s heart or my brother’s congenital heart defect, my mother finally left the hospital happy: three gifts, a boy and a knot around each of her tiny tubes.

III

We wanted to be Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. It was the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and we talked endlessly in a fog of pot about giving up our pampered city lives to live in communes, bake bread, reject the values that made our parents complacent and uninformed. We went to protest rallies, experimented with drugs, and took many lovers to beds on old mattresses thrown on bare wooden floors. We didn’t think about birth control. At least at first. But one friend, then another, got pregnant and we realized we didn’t want to be Ladies of the Canyon just then.

They must have sensed my mother as a kindred spirit, these young women, friends of mine but mostly of my older sisters, who always ended up at our house where my mother would help them not have babies. You had to know how to work the system and you had to have money. My mother had both. All it took was a psychiatrist who would certify that a pregnancy would be detrimental to the mental health of the mother and a doctor willing to perform the procedure. In the city it was easy to find both. It took time, however, and once it was too late. It was my cousin and she had come to live with us the year before. She hadn’t been getting along with her mother, my mother’s sister, but she fit perfectly in our big house and big, loud family, until she got pregnant. The other girls came to our house in their flowing long skirts and layers of beaded necklaces, sat at the kitchen table, and gave my mother all the details. But my cousin waited, withdrew. She didn’t want to tell her story. I don’t know why. Her mother came to take her back to South Carolina where she stayed indoors so the neighhbors wouldn’t know what she had done. There’s an old proverb: “a small town is a vast hell.” The next time we saw her she said she never looked at the baby, that it was wrapped up tight in a white blanket and given to someone waiting nearby, that the nurses gave her pills to dry the milk in her full breasts and sent her home. She didn’t come back to live with us.

My mother and I didn’t talk about whether or not I was having sex, or whether she approved. All she wanted was to make sure I wouldn’t get pregnant. I guess she didn’t trust birth control pills or trust that I would take them. She talked to her doctor and together they decided I should go to the hospital for a procedure and while there the doctor would place a tiny piece of metal shaped like a “t” in my uterus. There was no need for remembering. Pregnancy would never be an issue.

That night, still groggy from the hospital, I had a dream where I opened the front case of the big grandfather clock in the hall of my parents’ house and out tumbled hundreds of chubby naked babies smothering me under their weight.

IV

It’s barely a twinkle in his father’s eye, that’s what the doctor said to me from his seat between my legs. All I could see were eyes: his head was hidden under a white cap pulled low over his forehead. I could see his mouth forming words behind a mask that came up well over the bridge of his nose and tied high on the back of his head. He was old. It was his eyes, the only thing I could see, that told me how long he had lived.

The waiting area was crowded. There weren’t enough seats, people stood, leaning against walls. Some were so young, others looked old and worn out. Boyfriends and husbands and maybe some brothers looked uncomfortable, out of place. They kept pushing their sweaty palms down the front of their pants like they were trying to wipe away this place and glancing at the clock on the wall, counting down the hours until they’d be out in the pure light of the day away from the oppressive room, outside where they could finally breathe deeply and fill their lungs full to bursting, relieved that for them it was over.

The week before I had come in my Joan & David heels and Evan Picone suit and carried a small jar of pee in my purse. My purse was the same color as my shoes. You had to have a test before they’d put you on the schedule. I walked from the subway station but couldn’t find the office. Now I was late for work and my feet hurt. I was afraid my pee had gone bad but I had to give it to them, hand my little jar to the young woman at the counter and ask please if they would confirm what I already knew. When I walked in everyone shifted, looked up from the magazines they weren’t really reading or stopped their whispered conversations. I felt their furtive gazes. We all knew why we were there. The next week as I sat in the room in those same seats waiting my turn, I looked at every new face that came through the door and watched as unsteady hands held out jars of pee as bright as the sun.

You don’t have to take off all your clothes. Just from the waist down, that’s what they say, but leave your socks on because your feet will get cold. Lay down on the table and put your feet in the stirrups. You’re draped in white. I looked down my sheet-covered body between my legs and could see the doctor’s head, his mouth moving under his mask but I couldn’t hear anything he was saying. I looked at the nurse, she took my hand, said it was alright.  That night I dreamed again of the grandfather clock and babies, all plump arms and legs like tootsie rolls, tumbling out and spreading across the floor.

V

When we got married, my husband and I didn’t talk about if we would have children, or when. There were a lot of things about our lives together we didn’t discuss. I had long since given up the tiny “t” in my uterus, been on and off various brands of birth control pills, used condoms and diaphragms, not used anything. Didn’t really think about it. I dressed in my suits, high heels and matching bag, went to work every day happy with my job, the paycheck, the way I felt. When it happened, I knew immediately and I knew it wasn’t right. Like my mother I did not want it, did not want it in the deepest part of my being.

I don’t remember how we made the decision. I don’t remember what my husband thought, if he needed convincing, if I threatened to leave, if I screamed and cried.  I know he didn’t make the decision. It was me. Just me. I knew that it wasn’t a twinkle in my eye. I don’t know if it was in his.

VI

In Japan women visit Buddhist temples to pray to mizuko jizo, tiny statuettes that represent the babies they aborted.  It’s not that they brood over whether they made the proper decision to have an abortion but to help the spirit safely cross the river that separates the worlds of life and death. Sometimes women dress the mizuko figurines like newborns and pour water over them to quench their thirst.

My mother was afraid of the water but she went with my father to the bay to fish and after some time she came to love fishing, too, although she never lost her fear, a fear of drowning of one sort or the other.

When I was young I liked to stand at the edge of the surf and feel the pull of the water and the sinking sand under my feet and dream that the earth wanted me and to prove it with each wave I sank deeper as the earth drew me to its core. I wasn’t afraid of filling my lungs with sand and salty water. But before I slipped beneath the surface I pulled myself from the earth’s sucking hold and dove into the waves and played in the surf as my father stood fishing nearby.  Later, he taught me to fish and I too came to love standing by the water and casting my line as far as I could, from one world to the next.

Stephanie Tames is a writer, longleaf pine needle artist, and yoga instructor living in southeastern Georgia. Her publications include Self, Parenting, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She has essays forthcoming in the Nature Conservancy Magazine. She is also a regular commentator on Georgia Public Radio.)

Lydia Stewart on child abuse, parenting, and children’s rights

Published
by
jess
on March 29, 2010
in family, fatherhood, motherhood and parenting
. 1 Comment

In 2008 Sonoma County received 10,051 calls to their child abuse hotline. 2,638 reports were serious enough to require investigation. 174 children were removed from unsafe and abusive homes.

 

April is Child Abuse Awareness Month in the United States. One organization that works directly with families and children on this issue is the Santa Rosa based non-profit California Parenting Institute (CPI). Lydia Stewart has been on the Board of Directors for the past 8 years and board secretary for a year.  A recipient of the CPI Volunteer of the Year Award, Lydia lives in Sonoma County with her husband and three boys. Lydia started off by admitting she’d just recently stopped referring to CPI as a non-profit agency, but a “social profit” agency. By the end of the interview, I understood what she meant, given CPI’s array of community class offerings from Teen Parenting to A Star is Born to Parenting with an Ex-partner.

 

How did you become involved with the California Parenting Institute?

 

When my first son was 6 months old, I took an infant massage class offered by CPI. I was interested in taking parenting classes, but I noticed they were all listed to run for times during the day. So I said, “Why don’t you call yourselves a stay-at-home parenting organization?  How are working dads or moms ever going to be able to take your classes?”

 

The instructor I made the comment to said, “Why don’t you join our board? We could really use someone with that kind of direct input…” And so I did (join the board). Making weekend and night classes available was my first focus-and now we offer night and weekend courses.

 

And while I’ve always loved being a stay at home mom, I’ve noticed that one’s focus is limited. You still want to feel like you’re able to do something and be able to broaden your focus. Volunteering at CPI makes me feel I’m making a difference in the whole community and in the world at large.

 

Can you talk about some of your favorite projects you’ve been involved with?

 

We started a program called “Open Closet” with the understanding that we served a broad spectrum of families from the wealthy to the homeless. For awhile we had a 1000 square foot warehouse our parent educators could walk into and pick and choose items from high chairs, strollers and books to toys and pacifiers for families in need. A family, for example, might be just about to get their children back from foster care and need furnishings or equipment for the children or even clothing for the parents.

 

At the end of the year we’d have a garage sale, earning up to $2000 dollars we reinvested in CPI to broaden our offerings. “Open Closet” not only gave people the opportunity to give, but provided relief to families in need. We no longer run open closet because two years ago we merged with another non-profit, Children’s Care Counseling, and found we needed to use that space for offices. Now in addition to parent classes, we are able to offer therapy. We have 12 licensed therapists ranging in cost from free to a sliding scale. We get many referrals for severely abused children. We have the ability to send licensed therapists for in-home visits for parents and children in a variety of traumatic situations.  For example, in a recent incident involving a car accident in which both parents were seriously injured while the children looked on from the back seat, CPI was able to send a therapist to the home.

 

We also have a literacy program, work with the Boys and Girls Club at Southwest Health Clinic, and provide space for the Breastfeeding Coalition of Sonoma County (which does advocacy work and employs lactation specialists). Some of our classes include Dad’s classes for teenage Dads, and Raising Daughters, Raising Sons; we also host Teen Mom classes at Southwest Health Clinic in Santa Rosa. In addition, we provide supervised visits for parents who do not have custody of their children so they can visit in a safe, supervised space. Our “Star is born” program helps families with their newborn infants up until that infant has become 2 years old. You can take a class at 0-3 months, bring your baby and get to know other moms while you learn about ages and stages and child development. Classes continue for 3-6 month olds, 6-12, and 12-18 month olds, and you can form your relationships with other moms. As we all know, it is those relationships that help you get through motherhood.

 

We do a lot of advocacy work, lobbying for children’s rights. Birth certificate fees are the only monies in California earmarked specifically for preventative care for children. Our Executive Director, Robin Bowen, presented at the legislature and drew attention to how important it was to reserve this money for preventative care like the classes offered at CPI. Grace Harris, Director of Programs, is also a part of the Sonoma County Mental Health Coalition on behalf of children’s mental health.

 

How do most families come to be served by CPI’s programs?

 

Some are court ordered. Some come on their own; they may have lost their kids, or be a family going through divorce, or simply struggling with one particular issue (positive discipline, sibling rivalry, tantrums; maybe they have a new baby and want information on how to be a better parent).  Most of the Sonoma County judges will order parents filing for divorce to take one of our courses, such as Parenting with an

Ex-partner which helps people learn how to parent as divorced partners. Through the Kid’s Turn program, therapy is available to everyone in the family.

 

A good number of women come our way via The Living Room, which is a Women’s Day shelter, as part of getting back on their feet. The Living Room opens at 6 a.m. to provide breakfast, then offers lunch as well, since most shelters aren’t able to offer much past a bed to sleep in. Computers are on-site for the women to use while they put their lives back in order.

 

Where do you see CPI heading?

 

Given the economy, we’ve had to lay some people off and cut some programs. Donations are down. But the backbone is here-I mean, CPI has been here for over 30 years. We are able to still offer services. And here’s an interesting fact: 80 percent of all donations come from people who make less than $50,000 a year, so often those with money don’t donate.  And you have to think about the trickle down to families and children: as the economy goes bad, the need for our services becomes greater.  When the money is gone, parents have less patience and there’s likely more yelling, more temper flares. So it is sad we actually have more kids we need to see and less money to pay the caregivers.

 

Can you share an inspiring story or two with us?

 

As you know, April is Child Abuse Awareness month. Once we invited Victor Rivers to speak to a room full of health professionals, sheriffs, detectives, etc. Rivers, an actor well known for his role as the Hulk, spoke about his childhood during which he was severely abused (tortured, hidden in the closet, his food withheld).  His message was that it takes only one person to change a child’s life. For him it was a teacher who told him he was valuable. Today he is a father and a successful hero.

 

Another speaker we featured once was the father of a son murdered in a gang execution. The son, while delivering pizzas as a college student, was killed by a 14 year old gang member. At first, the father, a world banker, was angry. Then he started thinking about it: “You know it was my responsibility too…what am I doing to help these kids who feel they have no other opportunity. I am just working and giving my kids what they need…We are actually responsible for all children…” And this father eventually became best friends with the grandfather of the 14 year old who killed his son and the two of them lecture together on forgiveness.  The 14 year old was the youngest boy ever tried as an adult. The father has forgiven him and made it clear the day he gets out of prison there is a job waiting for him in his firm.

 

You can take a tragedy and make it joyous, and make something good of it. You get to choose when something bad happens to you how you want it to play out.

 

Can you share a story or two about individual client successes at CPI?

 

I can refer you to Director of Programs Grace Harris, MFT. Here are two stories from her files:

 

1. One mother we visited earlier in the year after referral from a medical provider seemed anxious and worried.  She said she was losing patience with her son and he wouldn’t listen to her.  It turned out that this mother was grieving after the death of her own mother in [another country].  She had wanted to go see her, but was in the process of getting her permanent residency papers and was told she could not leave the country.  Our parent educator referred her to a Spanish speaking hospice provider to help her deal with her grief and the mother found that quite helpful.  The mother later admitted she was not playing with her son as much as she did before the death and she felt guilty about that.  Our parent educator told her about going to the library with her curious son and also gave her ways she could let him help her around the house.  It really helped their relationship improve.  As the mother began to feel better she was encouraged to participate in our Kindgergym classes.  This gave her an opportunity to meet other mothers.  By the time the holidays arrived, she was feeling a lot better and was able to bring a traditional dish [from her country] to the Kindergym Posadas celebration and to tell everyone how much she loved that dish when her mother made it for her.

 

The case that most touched me this year was that of a mother who had been an addict from the age of 13. She became pregnant when she was 27 and although she was very bonded to her daughter, she struggled to overcome her addiction to drugs. Her daughter was placed in foster care and then in kinship care with an aunt. The mother continued in her recovery program and began to take classes at CPI. She has been clean and sober for 2 years and requested extra help with her now 7 year old daughter. The mother felt very guilty about the years her daughter had spent in alternate care and thus, had a hard time setting limits with her when she behaved badly. She wanted her daughter to know that she really loved her. The mom benefited by viewing [a video] about Positive Relationships. She did not have a model of affection and positive attention. She learned to really pay attention to her daughter when she wanted to tell her something. She loved learning to praise the positive things her daughter did and said it was easy to find those things. “She is polite to other adults, she gets herself ready for school in the morning on time and she helps me pack her  lunch.” She also was “getting used to” sitting close to her on the sofa when they are watching movies together. Mom also bought some board games they could play together and found out that her daughter still enjoyed being read to.

 

Mom also learned that she could guide her behavior by giving clear and calm instructions. She learned how to think of consequences that would fit misbehavior and how to apply those consequences consistently. When her daughter really misbehaved, she enforced time outs in her room. Mom continues to be committed to being clear about her directions. She said she now understood that being a mom meant “being the one who makes the rules.”

 

This mother and her young daughter are doing amazingly well. They have a close and affectionate relationship. The daughter feels safe in her home with her mom and the mother feels more confident in her role as a parent. The mother is grateful that she was given more than one chance to be in a recovery program and feels that parenting support has let her turn herself in to a good mom. Our parent educator described this mom as “very caring and responsive to  suggestions and feedback.” She believes this mom and her daughter will continue to have a happy and fulfilling life together.

–Grace Harris, MFT

Director of Programs, CPI

 

Any personal experiences for you Lydia, with your work over the years you’d like to share?

 

I had an experience once with Open Closet. This family got their kids back, and I helped them move in their furniture. I felt that sense of one degree of separation. This mother had started using drugs at 13, got pregnant at 15, made a few bad choices. I just felt how close it was: I could have been her. That was really hard. But it sure made me happy to come home to my husband and my kids and my duplex.

 

What is your vision for you?

 

Every time a paying job position comes up I consider it, but I still have young children. In two years maybe I’ll be ready! I feel like as a stay-at-home, you don’t always see the opportunities.  But let me end with a quote which hangs in my kitchen above my sink where I can see it and remember it, not only about my child, but all children. Every year we have a Harvest Dinner and Live and Silent Auction at Rodney Strong Vineyard to raise money for CPI where we give out a 100 Year Award, which consists of this framed verse: A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, the car I drove, the kind of clothes I wore, but the world may be much different because I was important in the life of a child.”

 

Lydia Stewart will be speaking at The Twin Hills Union School District Faculty Meeting and the PTA  to present all the upcoming activities for the month at CPI and will be hosting an informational outreach table at the 2010 Non-Profit Conference by the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County: March 26, 2010 at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel. For more information on the conference: call the Volunteer Center: 573-3399

 

For Child Abuse Prevention Month, CPI will be offering a number of free events, such as Disciplining without Spanking, Grandparents Parenting Again Luncheon, and the Toolbox Class. Speaker Robin Karr-Morse, author of Ghosts from the Nursery, Tracing the Roots of Violence, “offers a shocking but empowering message: to understand violent behavior, we must look earlier, before adolescence, before grade school, before preschool-to the cradle.” For more information on Karr-Morses’s presentation, email anneb@calparents.org.

 

CALIFORNIA PARENTING INSTITUTE “Happy Childhoods Last a Lifetime”

Grace Harris, Director of Programs

3650 Standish Avenue

Santa Rosa, CA 95407

(707)585-6108 x 103

www.calparents.org

 

 

Into the Weeds

Published
by
jess
on March 1, 2010
in fatherhood, infertility, miscarriage, motherhood, pregnancy and sex
. 0 Comments

Fiction by Curt Alderson

So I stop by the apartment during my lunch hour the other day, and there’s this little yellow slip in the mailbox telling me Sonny’s at the downtown branch and I’ve got to go sign for him.  I got, like, thirty minutes before I’m supposed to clock back in, so I drop the rest of the mail on the kitchen table and hot-foot it to the post office. 

Sonny’s there, waiting, all bubble wrapped and stamped.  I hand my little yellow slip across the counter to the clerk.  She slides another one back at me.  I sign the thing, scoop up the package, then race back across town.  By the time I make it to the office, I’m ten minutes late. But nobody seems to notice.

I take the package in with me and prop it against the wall of my cubicle as I check the messages on my voice mail.  I lean back in my chair and stare at the row of stamps in the upper right-hand corner.  There’s no name on the thing (other than my own), but the return address is from Richmond so I figure it’s from Megan.  We talked the other day.  She called to tell me all about it.  This was two days after the service.

She was wrung out-you could hear it in her voice-and I really felt bad for her.  But I was put off too, at first.  Genuinely pissed.  I mean, my best friend dies and gets planted; he’s six-feet-deep and cold before I so much as hear about it.  Megan says she didn’t even think to call me until it was too late.  Somebody said something at the service-asked about me-and that was the first time I crossed her mind. 

So we’re talking on the phone and she ends up falling to pieces before she can even finish whatever it is she wants to tell me.

“Look,” I say, “forget it.  It’s okay.  I understand.”  Jesus.  Her old man dies, and she’s apologizing to me?

I finish the day out.  I do my time until four, then split.  I tuck Sonny up under my arm and head for the parking garage.  Traffic is hell outside, so I decide to let things simmer down before I make my way back home.  I stop off at Leon’s for a cold one.  Out in the parking lot, I lock my doors, leave Sonny on the passenger seat.

They got the overhead fans turning inside, but it’s hotter than forty hells.  Geraldine’s tending bar.  She says the AC’s on the blink, but Happy Hour’s been extended until eight.  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” she says to me with a wink.

“Seems I heard that,”  I say back.

           

I get home close to nine.  I can smell whatever my neighbors had for supper as I move down the hallway.  It’s a weird combination:  meatloaf,  spaghetti, tuna, grilled onions.  The stale air hangs hot and heavy all around me.  It’s like breathing someone else’s body heat.  A couple of folks have their TV’s going full tilt.  I hear them through the doors.  Sit-coms.  Hollow laughter. 

There’s a cool rush of air when I open my door.  It’s dark inside.  I cut on the lamp next to the easy chair and make my way into the kitchen.  There’s some cold fried chicken in the fridge, leftovers from a couple of nights ago.  I pull the plate out, snap a beer off the six pack I picked up on the way in, and settle into my chair.

I get the TV going and dig in.  I left it on some God-awful station the night before-the Learning Channel or something-but by the time I figure this out, I’m up to my elbows in chicken grease.  The remote’s sitting next to me, but I figure what’s the use?  I just sit there, stripping meat off a breast bone, watching this geek go on and on about plankton levels in the North Sea. 

After the chicken, I think of Sonny.  He’s still out in the car, waiting like he has been since work.  I drop my dish in the sink with the others and go out to the parking lot to fetch him.

Megan’s a very meticulous girl.  That’s not something she picked up from her old man; I can assure you of that.  She’s triple wrapped everything in plastic and used up almost half a roll of Scotch tape.  Eventually, I pull the videocassette free from all the wrapping and pop it in the machine.  There’s a note-card taped to the side of the bubble wrap.  I peel it off and hold it up under the lamp to get a better look.

Ben,

It’s not the same as being there, but I wanted you to have this.  I know how much my dad meant to you.  He talked about you lots.

Look me up the next time you’re in town.  We’ve got a spare bedroom and would love to have you as our guest.  Mi casa, su casa.

Take care,

Meg

I set the note down on the coffee table.  For a second, I think about going back out, maybe catching a band somewhere.  Megan’s all heart.  I know she means well.  But I’m creeped out by the whole thing.  No other way to put it. 

I go back to the kitchen, open the fridge, and check for limes.  There’s one left.  It’s rolled behind a can of Hi-C, so I almost miss it.  I reach in and pull it out.  I take it to the chopping block by the sink, cut it into four fat wedges, and mix a gin and tonic.  The tonic water’s half-flat and the gin is rot-gut.  Just like Sonny used to like them, I think to myself, almost smiling.

 

Sonny and Tina had been married only a year or two when I first met them.  Back then, I was still living in this little three-bedroom cracker box out in the burbs.  Sonny and Tina lived next door.  Our houses were the last two in the cul-de-sac and we had adjoining backyards that ran right up to this thick stand of trees.  The woods were choked with kudzu.  In the summer, the vines turned dark green and snaked through the high branches until they formed a canopy so thick no light could get through.

Shortly after they got settled, Sonny built a big deck on the back side of their house, overlooking the woods and our two back yards.  When the weather allowed, the three of us would get together back there in the evenings.  We’d grill out, maybe have a few beers, shoot the breeze.  After dark, we’d lean back and listen to the stereo play through the screen door as the fireflies danced all around us. 

Sonny and Tina had moved from Montana and Sonny liked to brag on the fishing he’d done back there.  He’d tell me all about the cutthroat he used to go after along the Gardner.  Said how some days you’d have bighorn ram or bull elk coming right down to the waterline for a drink, with you standing just a few feet away.  I told him about Little Buckhorn and the monster browns you’d find there in the back eddies of the north fork.  Tina never said much once we got started.  She’d just sit there grinning, shaking her head every now and again like she’d heard it all before, which I’m sure she had.

A lot of nights went that way.  But this, of course, was long before the rabbits, long before Sonny and Tina’s marriage went south and Sonny followed suit, splitting for Phoenix.

As soon as their trouble started, I could sense a change.  Things got weird.  Tense.  The three of us didn’t get together as much, and the two of them started spending more and more time apart.  Tina would take these weekend trips to Baltimore, where she had people, and Sonny would stay home alone for no apparent reason.  He’d mope around for days, doing bullshit stuff just to keep busy.  I figured a fishing trip or two might help to take the edge off.  I mentioned it to him one night.  He didn’t seem thrilled, but he didn’t say no either.  We talked about heading out early-before daylight-and hitting the mountain streams, but we never made it any farther than Hollet’s Pond.

Hollet and I used to work second shift together at this ceramics factory.  One night we’re sitting in the break-room drinking coffee, and he tells me about his farm-a little fifteen-acre plot about twenty-minutes outside of town.  Said he bought the place with some money he’d had willed to him.  Hollet was what you might call a gentleman farmer.  He kept a half-acre garden, raised a few beef cows, but that was about it.  He wasn’t much on fishing either, but when he figured out I was, he told me about the pond he had, nestled in the far corner of the back pasture.  Said I could come on over and give it a try any time I felt the urge. 

“Don’t really know what you’ll find there,”  he said.  “Bluegill’s about all, I suspect.”

He was right.  After he gave me the green light, I fished Hollet’s Pond every day for a solid week but never caught anything bigger than my hand.  Still, it was nice to go there in the evenings.

Sonny liked it too.  Whenever the two of us went, we’d take our fly rods and one dry fly apiece.  Then we’d make a game of it, keeping track of who caught the smallest fish, because that was something too.  Getting a hit was nothing, but setting the hook could be a trick.

One evening, after we’d been out there a few hours and caught maybe a dozen each, Sonny walked over to where I was still fishing and took a seat on the berm. The light was fading from the sky and the bats were coming out to feed.  I wanted to get a few more casts in before we headed out. So I kept at it while Sonny sat in the grass breaking his rod down.  I knew he was right there next to me, but when he finally spoke, it made me jump a little.

“I don’t think we’re gonna make it,” he said.

I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn’t say anything right at first.  I just stripped a couple yards of line from my reel and made a cast for a cattail stand near the opposite bank.

“You remember that night I took her to the emergency room?” 

I did.  He didn’t say her name, but I knew he meant Tina. 

“It was real late,” he said.  “Past midnight.  You remember?”

I nodded. 

“Well, I told you she had the stomach flu, but that’s not how it happened exactly.”

I reeled everything in, and snipped the fly off the end of my line.  Sonny didn’t say anything for a while.  I had almost finished packing up all my gear when he started up again.

“We’d been trying to make a baby, see.  But we lost it that night.  That’s why I took her to the hospital.  That’s why we both stayed home from work the next day.  She took to the bed and I stayed home to look after her.”

“Damn.  I’m sorry,” I said.  “I hate that for y’all.”

Sonny nodded.  Then he caught a glimpse of a bat circling high above our heads.  It swooped down on the pond for a drink then flew away.  Sonny watched the little ripples moving toward him across the surface of the water.

“Thing is,” he continued, “it wasn’t the first time for us.  Same thing happened once before.  Back in Bozeman.  She was further along that time, so it was pretty bad.  We been to see a few doctors, but I don’t think they know what’s going on exactly.  They said we shouldn’t give up.  Said it was a fairly common thing.  But when it’s happening to you, it don’t feel common at all.”

“What’s Tina saying?”

“Not much.  She’s turned quiet on me.  It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking anymore.”

“So you imagine the worst.”

“Pretty much.  Sometimes I think we should try again, but I don’t know.  I’m scared to even bring it up.  I think she blames me.”

 

That was August.  By December of that year, Tina was pregnant again.  She and the baby made it through the first trimester without a hitch.  But the doctors ran a sonogram the first week of March, and things didn’t look good.  The baby died before the month was out.  The doctors said they couldn’t do anything with it on account of  Tina being so far along.  So she carried it, dead inside her, a solid week before her water broke and she finally had the miscarriage.

Sonny and Tina missed a lot of work through all this, and money started to get tight.  The doctor bills piled up, aggravating an already miserable situation.  Their house fell into disrepair.  The bushes and shrubs along their property-line grew wild, ragged.  One gray afternoon, a storm blew through the neighborhood and knocked down a couple of limbs from an old Dutch elm at the edge of their driveway.  The limbs stayed right where they fell in the front yard.  Weeks passed.  The green leaves withered and slowly fell away. 

Weeds took over the yard, out back especially.  Come May, when the days grew warmer, they started blooming.  It was a strange scene, peaceful almost.  The buttercups would bob and sway in a gentle cross-wind.  The purple clover came alive with bumblebees.  I said something to Sonny once-offered to push mow for him, clean things up a bit.  But he just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and disappeared back into the house.

A couple days later, I noticed Tina’s car missing from the driveway.  But I didn’t bother going over to see Sonny.  This once, I figured some time alone might do him good.

Later that afternoon, I’m stretched out on the couch watching a ball game.  It’s halftime and UNC is whipping the piss out of Virginia.  They’re getting ready to sound the horn for the second half when I first hear the commotion outside.  It’s Sonny.  He’s dragged his push mower out.  He yanks the rip-cord ten or twelve times before the engine finally comes to life, choking and wheezing at first, then gradually smoothing out to a steady hum.  I lay there on the couch a while longer with the volume on the TV turned down low, listening to Sonny tackle his back yard.  I hear him grinding away for a moment or two before the inevitable “CHUNCK” of the mower locking up.  I raise up and peek out the window.  I can see him, creeping along, an inch at a time.  When the mower starts to bog down, he tips the front of the deck so the blade can spin freely.  I think about getting my mower out, maybe starting on the far end of Sonny’s yard, meeting him in the middle.  Then I remember the look he gave me the last time I said something.

I give up on the ball game midway through the fourth quarter when UNC starts running four corners.  It’s not quite suppertime but getting close.  I go to the kitchen to see what I can dig up.  I’m standing there looking through the perishables, listening to the refrigerator motor buzz, when I realize I haven’t heard Sonny for a while.  I swing the door shut and walk over to the kitchen window.  From where I’m standing, I can see him.  The bright sunlight glares against the curve of his bare back.  He’s sitting in the tall grass, hunched forward, shoulders trembling.

I rush out my back door and cross over into Sonny’s yard.  He doesn’t turn when I call his name.  The mower’s sitting right beside him.  I can hear it pinging as it sits there cooling.  The heavy scent of burnt motor oil hangs in the air.  Sonny just sits there, shoulders hunched, eyes red, face wet.  He’s trying to say something, but his lips are drawn tight so the words never make it through.

Then I hear something rustling. I catch faint hints of movement out of the corner of my eye.  They lay there, squirming in a tangled heap, inches from where Sonny sits.  Baby rabbits.  He’d run up on a nest of them.  Some are cut clean in two, others lay thrashing, half-dead on the grass.

I get Sonny to his feet and help him into the house.  He’s crying but he doesn’t make a sound, only jerks at the shoulders some.  Inside, he sprawls out on the couch while I go over to the stereo and cut the tuner on.  I get it set on something mellow, but crank it loud.  Sonny never so much as looks my way.

I leave him there, go back to my place, and head straight for the nightstand next to my bed.  I open up a box of shells and fill the chamber of the .38 I keep stashed there.  I drop a couple extra shells in my pocket for good measure then cross back over to Sonny’s yard to finish the job.

After I find a spot for them deep in the woods out back, I go in to check on Sonny.  He’s up from the couch, sitting in a recliner.  The music’s still blaring through the speakers, but Sonny just sits there, staring dead ahead at a stack of magazines on the coffee table.  Zoned.

I turn down the volume and move into the kitchen.  Sonny always kept his fixins up under the sink.  I pull everything out, get some tumblers, and mix us up a couple.  Sonny snaps out of his trance long enough to latch on to the highball I hand him.  I turn the stereo down a click or two then sit in a chair opposite him.  The shades are drawn, and it’s good to be in from the heat.  We don’t say nothing, just sit there listening, drinking.  Then the music stops all of a sudden.  An announcer comes on with the weather forecast.  He’s talking in this whispery voice, makes some remark about the barometric pressure or something.  He’s trying to be clever, but I don’t catch the gist of what he’s saying, and my lack of understanding depresses me.

 

Next thing you know, Sonny and Tina are packing their stuff in two separate

U-hauls-a his-and-hers set.  Hers heads for Baltimore, his for Phoenix. 

I stayed put a few more years, got new neighbors.  But things never were quite the same. And after a while, I put my house on the market too, got the apartment I live in now.  I’m closer to work this way, which is nice in the winter when weather hits.

I kept in touch with Sonny through the mail mostly.  The first letter I got from him was signed “Your Pen Pal.”  I chuckled when I saw that.  But really, that’s how it turned out for us: friendly but distant.  After he moved away, it was like there was always something between the two of us, something more than miles.

We were still friends, sure.  When Sonny re-married, I rented a monkey-suit and booked a flight.  Never thought twice about it.  I was there when Megan was born too.  But those visits never came off the way I thought they would.  Sonny had moved out there to make a fresh start, maybe forget a few things.  Then, every two years or so, I’d show up.  New salt for old wounds.  Of course, Sonny never said as much-treated me like family, in fact-but I knew what my being there did to him.  So I decided to more or less phase myself out.  I pulled a disappearing act.  Sonny’d made a good life for himself out there.  I just left him to it.

 

Now he’s gone.  Now, this thing’s all I got-Megan’s video.

 

I sit back in my chair for a time, stirring ice cubes with my index finger, listening to them clink against the glass.  I press play on the VCR remote.  The TV goes black.  Everything’s quiet.  Sonny’s name flashes up on the screen, followed by two dates.  Then they start up with the organ music.

Next comes the picture, a full view of the casket.  There’s flowers piled high on top of it, flowers to either side on wire stands.  I can see the backs of the heads of all the people in the first couple of rows.  I scan the crowd, over and over, but can’t seem to recognize a soul. 

They’ve got the lid up, but with the angle of the camera, I can’t really get a good look at the body.  I figure it’s best that way.  It’s not exactly Sonny they got boxed up anyhow.  I been to enough funerals-enough “viewings”-to know that much.  Wax dummies.  That’s all I ever manage to think.

The camera must be mounted in a far corner or something, because the shot never changes.  Every so often, somebody comes in frame, walks over to the casket, peeks in, then walks off the screen.  Some are clutching hankies.  They walk up, dab at their faces, then move along, their shoulders all hunched up.  A few people walk by with their hands stuffed in their pockets.  Real casual, or so it seems.  Like they do this every day or something.  After ten minutes of this, I still don’t recognize a single one of these people.  The family’s most likely in another room, out of view, hidden.

The organist plays all the old regulars:  “Just As I Am,” “Peace in the Valley,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”  I take another swig.  The gin sits cold on my belly. 

They finally lower the lid and a preacher comes into frame.  He stands behind the casket, offers a few words.  Says he didn’t know Sonny but that, over the past few days, he feels like he’s gotten to know him some.  Says he’s talked to family and friends.  Says he’s heard stories.  He tells a few and I watch a couple of heads nod up in the front pew.  The preacher does what he can, but he misses a heap.  A life’s a big thing, and he’s pressed for time. Gotta get on with it, clear the room for the next set of grievers.

He says a few words about Jesus, closes with a prayer.  Someone says “Amen.”  A couple fellas in dark suits show up.  They each take an end of the casket and wheel Sonny down the center aisle.  Then the music starts up again.  But it’s not the organ this time.  They got pickers somewhere, guitar and autoharp.  They play “The Old Gospel Ship,” and I think how it’s about the only good thing to come out of the whole damn production.

I watch as the last part of the casket slips away from the bottom of the TV screen.  The people in the pews all stand up.  I stand up too.  I hold my glass up high, tip it to one side, and let the rest of the highball fall to the carpet.  I don’t spare a drop.

 

Curt Alderson has been writing stories and poems for fifteen years. He lives with his wife and two sons on a small family farm in southwest Virginia. His work has appeared in various publications, including Currents, Red Crow, Pitch Weekly, and Aura Literary Arts Review. For additional stories, poems, and readings visit curtalderson.blogspot.com

Womanhood, Fertility, and Identity

Published
by
jess
on January 25, 2010
in adoption, family, fatherhood, infertility, motherhood, pregnancy and sex
. 1 Comment

by Jessica Powers

In college, my best friend once described her hips as “child-bearing hips.” She knew back then that she wanted children and, indeed, now has six beautiful and healthy daughters. 

Me? I didn’t even know what hips were. Literally. If somebody had provided me pictures of two headless bodies-one male, one female-I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the outline of hips on the female body.

A boyfriend once pointed out a transvestite, then said, knowingly, “You can always tell the difference between a woman and a transvestite. A transvestite lacks hips.”

My response? “Huh?” The transvestite looked like a perfectly beautiful woman to me!

***

I was never one of those women whose overwhelming desire in life was to have children, what some childless men and women have sneeringly referred to as a breeder.

Motherhood was simply never one of my goals.

One of the reasons I left organized religion, in fact, was the emphasis it all too often places on motherhood. I always felt devalued as a woman in the Christian church, and it never comforted me to have my feminist concerns pooh-poohed with a well-meaning, but completely off the mark, comment like this: “But women are completely valued in the church. There’s nothing more important than motherhood. That’s the most important role in life, male or female.”

I heard a preacher one time say that he was sick and tired of hearing people say that God doesn’t value women. “God chose a woman to carry his only begotten son,” he said. “That should prove how valuable women are! They’re more valuable than men!” (I didn’t have the guts to raise my hand and ask if he actually thought God would have chosen a man to give birth to his only begotten son, which would have truly been a miracle….but I definitely thought about it.)

Whenever I heard the emphasis on motherhood in sermons, I wanted to ask: If women are valuable because they are mothers, what happens to a woman’s value if she’s infertile? Or if she can conceive, but her body is incapable of carrying a baby to term? If women are valued precisely because they are mothers, does a woman cease to be valuable if she is unable or unwilling to contribute to the ongoing human gene pool? And are women to be valued for nothing else? Can’t they be valued as scientists, artists, educators, and healers? What about being valued because we’re funny, smart, thoughtful, or we make a good friend?  

I never got around to asking those questions. I just stopped going to church. I was tired of crying all the time, tired of fighting people with stupid ideas about what constitutes a person’s value.

I’d go as far as to argue that this strong correlation between motherhood and saintliness, and the conflation of our value as women with our fertility, can be labeled as spiritual abuse.

A person is valuable because of who they are, not because of the fertility-related identity role(s) they assume in life, roles such as wife, mother, grandmother. A woman should never be valued simply because of her ability to conceive and bear a child, just like a man should never be valued simply because he produces viable sperm.

So why do so many women’s self-images founder on their ability to conceive and bear a child, to successfully raise functioning members of society-at-large?

***

I never thought of myself as a slow learner, but when it comes to parenthood, I’m definitely a late-bloomer.

Throughout my twenties, I was grateful that I didn’t have children. The life of an artist is hard enough without adding babies to the mix, I thought.

When I first got married in my mid-twenties, my husband (now ex) and I planned to remain blissfully childfree. I hadn’t anticipated, then, that my biological clock would kick in with a vengeance as I approached thirty. Suddenly, to my surprise, I wanted kids. Oh, not the goobery, snotty-faced, diaper-rashed babies that grow up into delightful, creative, intelligent young people; no, as I approached thirty, I suddenly realized that I’d be thrilled if my children could emerge from my womb, already 10 or 11 or 12 years old. Talking in complete sentences. Potty-trained. Relatively independent already. You know, little adults.

This was an impossible dream, of course, unless I was willing to adopt an older child and deal with the potentially debilitating emotional problems they might have-always a crapshoot.

In lieu of heading down that path just yet, my husband and I have recently been trying for the flesh-and-blood variety, a normal baby conceived in the normal way pushed out of a normal vagina at the normal age of 0 months’ old. I guess I’m willing to subject myself to sleepless nights, poopy diapers, and sore breasts so I can get that pre-teen, teenager, college-student, and adult child I long for down the road.

But even as I embrace my identity as a woman “TTC” (a popular internet acronym that stands for “trying to conceive”), I still vacillate in my desire for children and it has to do with that fragile thing called identity.

There is always one solid reason for me to give up on the idea of motherhood: my identity as an artist. I’ve worked hard to get to the place where I am. I write five or six hours every day, and then teach college writing classes and run my small literary press on top of that. Recently, I’ve started working as a writing coach, and offering private writing classes in my home for children, teenagers, and adults. I easily put in twelve hours a day. It’s hard to imagine how I’ll balance all of that with motherhood.

It’s when I contemplate the vast gulf between what I desire to do with my life and the reality of raising children that I begin to wonder if I really want them.

Yet just when I think I might be “okay” with foregoing the pleasures of parenting, I realize I’m still captive to the idea that being a woman means being a mother. Intellectually, I know that this is a false belief. Emotionally, somewhere deep inside of me, I still believe that to live a full life, experiencing the full range of human emotions, requires adopting the role of parenthood, however your children come into your life.

Why the hell do I continue to associate my value as a woman with my fertility?

And so, I’m on the verge of giving up, of saying, “No more. I don’t want to try to get pregnant any more. That doesn’t mean I’ll try to prevent pregnancy, but I don’t want my life to be dominated by cervical fluid, basal body temperature, and that period that comes late but inevitably comes.”

It’s true that I’ve only been trying for eight months but I’m already tired of the emotional roller-coaster. Twice, my period has been a week late. In those days when I think I might be pregnant, my mind jumps to sugary fantasies of what it’ll be like, and I’m overwhelmed by the I can’t wait-ness of it all.

And then the disappointment sets in when my basal body temperature drops, menstrual blood arrives, and I discover that I’m not, after all, pregnant.

I wonder how women do this over and over and over? You know, those women that try to conceive for years and years and years? Those women that go to heroic efforts, spend all sorts of time and money, all in their quest to have a child?

I don’t think I can keep it up.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m willing to give up on the so-called “fullness of life experience” b.s. I was just blathering on about if it means some emotional sanity.

I’m fortunate. A few days ago, as we were having yet another discussion about my on-again off-again desire to get pregnant, my husband looked at me and said, “You are my world. I don’t need anything else.” And we once again talked about what we will do if we don’t get pregnant-move to South Africa or Mozambique, to the Caribbean, to Ecuador or Argentina or Brazil, or maybe to all of those places for a few years apiece. Or we could take in foreign-born foster children, generally teenagers by the time they make it here after spending years in refugee camps.

Without children, the world is our oyster.

But still, it all comes down to this crux issue: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean for me to feel valuable as a person?

We all, we all, need to learn to value ourselves apart from these roles we assume in life. For me, that includes the role of artist. If I replace motherhood with artist, am I really any better off? I’m still valuing myself by something that is transitory, fleeting. We don’t achieve immortality through our art. Nor do we achieve it by bearing offspring.

As I move forward TTC, or not TTC, I hope I can learn to value myself as Jessica with no titles attached to my name.

***

Last November, I had a dream about motherhood and identity. In the dream, I was in a house, surrounded by women I know who have young children. I wandered from person to person, but I couldn’t relate to any of them. In fact, I felt inferior as I talked with them-there was a sense in which all of them had experienced a part of womanhood that I lacked, and so we couldn’t connect. I felt, well, robbed.  And even as I tried to interest them in non-motherhood-related topics, I realized what I was doing: they seemed to think I was inferior because I wasn’t a mother and so, subconsciously and nastily, I was trying to turn the tables by demonstrating that I’d had an interesting career and had traveled to so many exotic locales and done so many interesting things that they would never do, encumbered as they were with snot-faced babies and dirty diapers.

 Eventually, not liking that dynamic one tiny little bit, I separated myself from the mothers with babies and went to another part of the house. There, I was joined by my many African friends, and we discussed Africa, and politics, and health, and religion, and we ignored the issue of motherhood. Though many of my African friends are also parents, I felt none of the distance I’d felt from my mother-friends, who were treating me as though I was less of a woman because I wasn’t a mother.

I woke up and felt a moment of grief, like the dream was telling me I’d lost my chance at motherhood, that I’d traded it in for Africa and my writing.

On reflection later, I realized that of course, I have never given up my dream of motherhood-until the last few years, I didn’t have a spouse with whom I could have children. Instead, the dream was speaking to me about my hidden desire to be a mother as well as the obvious calling on my life to Africa and as a writer. My desire to have it all.

It was also reminding me of this unassailable truth: While all the other women in the room had chosen motherhood first-and let me add, they are all young women I admire, who have made the choices they wanted to make by choosing children over career, at least for the time being-I had chosen it second. And ultimately, I found myself in a room with the people I had chosen: Africans.

It was a revelation.

As I embark on this next stage of my life, trying to get pregnant, I’m constantly filled with doubts. Sometimes I wonder if motherhood is what God intends for me, or even if motherhood is something I want to add to my mixture of things I’ve already chosen (or that has chosen me)-Africa and writing. Sometimes I feel desperate to be pregnant, now, and sometimes, I secretly hope I’m not pregnant, so that nothing needs to change.  In fact, I worry about how motherhood will prevent me from doing the things I feel I’m supposed to do, in Africa, as a writer-those vague, hazy outline of things that make up my future. I’m still waiting for the clarion call from God, the angel of the Lord appearing to me in a dream, the way he did with Mary and Joseph, and telling me, “This is what you’re supposed to do. I’ve arranged everything for you. It won’t be easy but at least there’s no doubt about it.”

But that’s too easy and, in all likelihood, false. The path that God marked out for Mary and Joseph must have seemed hazy and uncertain to them. It is only clear in retrospect, when written about as a narrative, a narrative that brooks no other possible paths.

I wonder how fearful and frustrated Mary and Joseph must have felt as they walked down that road, wondering all the time if they could veer in a different direction, or if they even wanted to, or if this was really the path they were supposed to be on and if they weren’t just fooling themselves.

I wonder how much of this path I’m following I charted myself, and how much has been charted for me.

I suppose I’ll never know.

And, at least some of the time, I’m okay with that.

 

Jessica Powers is the author of The Confessional (Knopf, 2007), a novel that explores racial tension and school violence at an all-boys Catholic high school on the U.S.-Mexico border; editor of Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, editor of The Fertile Source, and publisher of Catalyst Book Press.

To Let Go

Published
by
jess
on January 18, 2010
in fatherhood, miscarriage and pregnancy
. 0 Comments

A short story by Jeff Bowles

     I can’t cry. The worst thing to ever happen to us and I can’t cry about it. I’m tired. My mind is shot. Jagged black spots flutter in my peripherals, my bowels gurgle, loud noises make me wince. I tell myself that sleep deprivation must be keeping the pain at bay. I still feel ashamed.

     I hate the hospital, hate the emergency room. I cuss every time I have to come. Before I met Stephanie, I’d only been here once. This is my sixth visit, and it’s all because of her. Abscessed teeth, Bronchitis, stuff you usually go to a doctor’s office for. The only good thing about the hospital is that they accept Stephanie’s crap insurance, worthless coverage that the state of Colorado hands out like “How was your visit?” questionnaire cards.

     I glance at Steph. She’s curled up on a double-wide chair. Her bare feet dig into the light-blue vinyl cushion, causing it to pucker and stutter and hiccup rudely. She rocks uncontrollably, twirling her red hair with a finger, breathing as if she were in a Lamaze class.

     “I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I shouldn’t have stayed up all night. I do it too often. Maybe every weekend is too much-”

     “It’s okay.” It’s more of a coarse grunt than fluid speech.

     The cramps had begun in the afternoon, just before I was about to go to bed. We worried, began to panic as they intensified. I called a nurse hotline. The woman told us it was okay, that light cramps and a bit of spotting were normal. Then Stephanie started to bleed, and the cramps grew until her face paled and she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning.

     She’s not the only one in pain here, of course. A family huddles around a kid with a broken arm over by the soda machines. A woman in a neck brace behind us cries and wails. An obese man with an oxygen tank and wheelchair is being led past the security guard. If I weren’t so tired, all the pain and suffering gathered in this waiting room might really get to me. I usually have a hard time dealing with this kind of stuff. For an instant, I’m glad I haven’t slept.

     Calm, pulsing tones sound from the hospital’s speaker system. Another ambulance coming in; we’ll have to wait even longer. The sound forces my mind to sharpen. I glance at Steph.

     “You doin’ okay, baby?” Somehow I feel like I’m only pretending to care. “Do you need anything?”

     “It hurts.”

     “I know it does.”

     “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t eat…right or I got too wound up about…work.”

     I can’t tell if I’m imagining the faint sting behind my eyes. “It’s not your fault. Maybe it was me. I read that smoking does something to men genetically, you know, reproductively. Maybe that’s what did it.”

     She touches my hand, almost speaks, but her face suddenly contorts. She whimpers and her hand presses into her abdomen. It’s another two hours before we’re taken to a room.

#

     Finding a good ER doctor is like playing a game of Go Fish. You keep asking for hospitality or a bit of humanity and they keep sending you back to the deck. Sure, occasionally you’ll get a decent one. They’ll speak to you like you’re a human being instead of trying to rush you out the door. Still haven’t pegged our doctor tonight. He gave Steph pain killers, said comforting things. He said Steph might see some tissue but that it wouldn’t be the fetus. He let her wear her coat over the hospital gown when she said she was cold. He tried to comfort, but it didn’t seem to register in him that we might have actually wanted a baby.

     The doctor ordered a vaginal ultrasound because Steph wasn’t far enough along for the other kind. A nurse led her from our room ten minutes ago. I wasn’t allowed to come with.

     I have no hope, no illusions. I know it’s over and done with. It’s been a weird two months. Stephanie had time to come to terms with it. It was in her body; it was a part of her. I was just the guy being asked to rub feet and prepare meals. It was never real. That’s it. I can’t cry because it was never real. It was a game of pretend, like playing dress-up. I was never going to be a father. It’s time to take off our mommy and daddy clothes and go home.

     This notion is comforting. My mind tosses it back and forth, allowing it to strengthen and fade along with the waves of fatigue. There’s no shame in feeling nothing if you were never attached to begin with.

     The curtain parts to reveal the nurse. She says something I don’t catch. Steph follows and replies, “Thank you.”

     She doesn’t seem sad. She looks at me and gives a bitter smile. She still clutches her abdomen, but I think she might actually be okay. I think that maybe neither of us will be in much pain.

     Then the nurse lets go of the curtain, leaves, and Stephanie’s face changes. Her smile vanishes, trembling slightly before it does. Her eyebrows lift, her free hand passes through her hair. She starts to cry.

     “I’m so sorry,” she whimpers. “I couldn’t leave it there on the floor. It was ours. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

     She climbs into the hospital bed, won’t stop repeating herself. I slide my chair closer and wrap my arms around her. She lays her head against my chest.

     “It isn’t your fault,” I say. “These things happen. Maybe…maybe it was just a bad pregnancy. Maybe it never really had a chance.”

     “I know I did it. I ate wrong, too many sweets. I forgot my thyroid pill for a couple nights. I didn’t take my prenatals as much as I should have.”

     “Babe, please stop.”

     She sobs for a time. I can feel that stinging behind my eyes again, but that’s all. She speaks again.

     “I couldn’t leave it on the floor.”

     “Couldn’t leave what on the floor, baby?”

     Steph wipes her eyes. “She put that thing inside me. It was so cold. It hurt. There was nothing left. I didn’t see the monitor, but she said there was nothing left. She pulled it out and went to get me some pads. I looked on the floor and…”

     She begins to cry again. She tries to speak through it, but I can’t understand her.

     “Slow down,” I say. “What happened?”

     “It was on the floor. Just lying there. Bloody. Small. I wrapped it in a napkin and stuffed it in my coat before she came back. I didn’t know what else to do. They would have just mopped it up.”

     I suddenly feel so tired, like I’ve been awake for weeks.

     I brush her cheek. “Baby, he said you might see some things, but that it wouldn’t be-”

     “It was our baby. I know it was. It’s still in my pocket. I don’t know what to do with it.”

     The stinging intensifies, but still, nothing. I want so badly to feel and to let that feeling out. I want to be miserable with her. I want a connection. A jagged black spot flutters in the corner of my vision, my bowels gurgle, I just want to sleep.

     “What do we do with it?” she asks.

     I’m silent for a moment, but I don’t need the time to think.

     “Throw it away.”

     She raises her head. “What?”

     “Throw it away. It’s not the baby. It isn’t anything. Don’t do this to yourself.”

     She stares at me. She isn’t angry or offended. She isn’t accepting and she doesn’t say no. She stares long, unblinking.

     I shrug. “What are we going to do with it, Steph? We can’t take it home. That’s not good. That’s not healthy. Throw it away.”

     She finally blinks, reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out the waded napkin.

     I don’t look at it. I take it, stand, and walk to the garbage can. I don’t pause or think or let it bother me. I let it fall, hear the light rasp as it makes contact with the plastic bag. I move back to my seat and don’t feel any different. Still tired, still pent up, still ashamed of both.

     Stephanie’s stopped crying. I can’t tell if she’s angry. Can’t tell if she ever will be, if she’ll ever resent me, if she’ll ever forgive me. For now, at least, she isn’t crying. I take comfort in that.

     The doctor enters. We tie up the loose ends. Follow up information is given and discharge papers are filled out. Stephanie asks if she should see her doctor, have a pelvic exam. He says she could, but that he doesn’t think there’s any danger. It’s all gone. He’s sure of it.

     Steph changes back into her clothes and we stand to leave. As I make my way to the curtain, I look at the garbage can. I start to wonder if Stephanie was right. I start to wonder what kind of boy or girl it would’ve been, what kind of man or woman. I think of all that potential nestled against the plastic sack, cradled next to Styrofoam cups and discarded Kleenex. I think these things to force the tears, but I’m not surprised when they don’t come. Maybe that’s the good part of not sleeping. I don’t have the choice to feel or not to feel. I’ll cry. Tomorrow I’ll cry. Tonight I’m that man who rubs feet and prepares meals. Tonight I’ll sleep.

 
Jeff Bowles is currently pursuing a BA in English from the University of Colorado Denver. He spends his nights writing creatively and his days preparing for a hopefully not too boring career as a technical writer.

A New Language

Published
by
jess
on November 9, 2009
in family, fatherhood, miscarriage, motherhood, pregnancy and sex
. 0 Comments

by Jazmine Green

Had she known, she would have said no right from the start.  She would have left no room for negotiations.  But he was careful. 

“It’s your decision.  Whatever you want to do, I will be here for you.  I will support you.  You know I love you.”

“I know.”  He rubbed his hands along her upper arms and kissed her on the forehead. 

“It will be OK.” 

“I know.”

Then the conversations changed.  She wanted to keep it.  She told him flat out.  He wanted to travel. 

“I want to take you to Costa Rica.  You will not believe the rain forests there.  It is so green.  And the sound at night-there’s nothing like it.  You will really love it.  I can’t wait to take you.”

Then later, “Let’s move to another country together.  Let’s do it.  Just leave everything here and move.  We can learn a new language together.  Don’t you think that would be great?”

“But how are we…?”  She didn’t finish, and only added, “That sounds great.”

He sent text messages all day spelling out the urgency with which he felt his life slowly coming to a close.  “I can’t wait to travel with you.”  “I love you.”  “Can I fuck you tonight?” 

The texts were left hanging without any reply.  She could conjure no answer.  She was uncommonly quiet most of the time.  Everyday she inhaled and exhaled her reality.  The thought settled in her diaphragm so that she couldn’t help but live every second with it.  Pregnant.  Pregnant.  Pregnant.

“I’ll have to drop out of school.”  He blurted it out one evening with hot, desperate breath.  She tried to assuage his worries. 

“My parents will help us.  Your parents will help us.”

“I’ll resent this child.” 

And there it was.  It took a while for it to come out so boldly.  It was his truth. 

Three days later her truth came out, without warning.  A stain that granted his freedom.  A stain that broke her heart.

 

Jazmine Green is a Los Angeles based writer and poet, currently working on her first novel. In addition to writing, she spends her time as  WriteGirl mentor, preschool teacher, and yoga instructor. Her most recent experiments with words can be found at www.jazminegreen.com.

Bossy Midwives

Published
by
jess
on October 9, 2009
in birth, family, fatherhood, midwives and pregnancy
. 10 Comments

by Erik Lee

How many bossy midwives does it take to change a lightbulb?

“Bossy midwives.”  I found that phrase in a London Times story on British hospitals (sadly unavailable online now).  The phrase has stuck with me for years.  I remember telling a friend about it and hearing that some women get so disgusted with “bossy midwives” they forego all medical assistance and give birth on their own at home.  Astounding.  I remember sitting back in sheer admiration at the audacity of the unassisted childbirth movement.

When we had our first child, my wife and I decided to work with Certified Nurse Midwives.  For years I didn’t think of it as an encounter with “bossy” midwives, but “seriously whiny” midwives.  Our first midwife rushed down hospital hallways between two clients, one of whom was screaming a lung through the ceiling during birth.  By contrast, my wife must have seemed as calm as a piece of furniture.  I certainly felt like some kind of fixture, and at times I felt our midwife treated my wife like a fixture too.  After hours of urging the fixture in a strained and whiny voice to push out our little lightbulb, she gave up.  The OB came on the scene and decided a suction cup might work.  Our little lightbulb twisted right out, but we vowed we’d never go back to that situation.  We were quite lucky our bulb didn’t get surgically extracted.  I didn’t think of the whiny behavior as “bossy” until years later when a doula mentioned the “manipulative” practices of Certified Nurse Midwives at her local hospital.  Manipulative, bossy - okay, those seem like branches on the same vine.

I can understand how a Certified Nurse Midwife could become “bossy”:  CNMs work in hospitals, which have to be among the most “directive” places on earth, as one birth care provider put it to me.  It takes serious bossiness to get anybody to take off all their clothes, put on that flimsy gown that never quite closes in the back, and then make them walk down the hallway on cold tile floors to a room where the real business begins.  Hospitals are bossy places; the attitude is bound to wear off on anyone who works there. 

Not all midwives have “CNM” after their names, however.

Dottie, a midwife-doula in Colorado Springs, told me, “We specify up front that whatever we do will only be by the client’s consent.”  She told me at times she felt she had to say “I need you to do this…” when legally required, but didn’t think midwives normally did anything that could be considered “bossy.”

I called Laura Shanley, the founder of unassistedchildbirth.com, to hear what she had to say about bossy midwives.  I expected an unassisted childbirth advocate to say something like, well, they’re midwives, of course they’re bossy, that’s just the way they are.  Instead, she expressed a positive attitude toward midwives and strong support of their work.  “I think the main reason midwives might seem bossy is the fear of losing their license,” she said.  She listed a number of ludicrous laws hampering midwives:  in our State of Colorado, midwives are required to transfer care to the hospital if labor hasn’t significantly progressed twelve hours after the water breaks (in Oregon, the law allows seventy-two hours);  the placenta has to be delivered within one hour of the baby.  Midwives in every state work under ridiculous legal limits, and jail time can be a very real consequence for using their own professional judgment.

According to Colorado law, our second child developed in an almost-anemic uterus.  My wife’s iron levels were hovering right above the legal limit for a homebirth, and fortunately never dipped below it.  Our homebirth midwife got a bit bossy about food, urging my wife to eat more and take supplements to bring her iron levels up.  That birth went far more quickly - the midwife arrived ten minutes too late.  She got to show the placenta and cord blood stem cell kit who was in control, but that was her only outlet for whatever bossiness she might have felt.  Lightbulb #2 floated serenely in our bathtub at home after a far safer, far faster, far better birth experience than Lightbulb # 1’s birth had been.

An anesthesiologist, an OB, and a midwife walked into a bar.  The anesthesiologist ordered a pitcher of stout and a double burger; the OB ordered a Reuben and a bottle of red wine; the midwife ordered their biggest plate of steak and fries with a margarita.  They all sat in a booth and shared war stories.

A long time passed, and the three realized something had gone wrong with their order.  They decided to find out what the problem was.  They found the busboy just behind the swinging double doors to the kitchen.  He was struggling to get their overloaded cart from the tiled kitchen to the carpeted dining area.  The wheels kept catching on the bump.

The anesthesiologist kneeled down and examined the tires.  “You just need to inject something here in the back,” he announced.  “Then everything will go better.”

The OB leaned down to look at the carpet.  “This part of the carpet is blocking the cart,” he announced.  “Give me a knife and I’ll just give it a little cut to help it along.”

The midwife leaned over to the busboy and whispered loudly in his ear, “You can do this!  Just PUSH!”

A male midwife in Colorado, Bill Dwelley, wasn’t happy to hear my question.  “Midwives get dumped on a lot as it is.  We provide more direct care, have better statistics… and now we’re going to get labeled as ‘bossy.’ Hmmm, I don’t know…” He was on his way out the door but gave me contact information for his colleague Rebecca Pugh. 

“Part of the skill of a really good midwife is the ability to differentiate when it’s time to give direction and when it’s time to sit on their hands,” she told me.  She didn’t think there was any connection between unassisted childbirth and a bossy midwife encounter.  “A very deep, unwavering faith in the birth process is what would allow unattended birth, not really disliking midwives.”

I almost missed our third little lightbulb’s birth.  The first two had each seen the light ten days after the medically predicted due date (that’s Method #23 for How To Make Your Midwife Legally Nervous in Colorado, as the law doesn’t allow for babies that go beyond two weeks).  We had planned for the same on this occasion.  Instead, ten days before the medically magic day, my wife felt contractions.  We brought them under control with an Epsom salts bath, and felt it would be at least several days.  Just in case, however, I took the two older girls shopping for foodstuffs.  We had allowed our supplies to run low to get ready for the mother of all birth preparation shopping trips.  When we arrived back home with a car bursting at the rivets, I spotted an extra vehicle in the driveway. 

Oh, the doula must have arrived, I thought, so things must be-. Wait, there’s TWO extra cars in the driveway!  Both doulas must have arr-. Wait, there’s THREE extra cars!  The midwife is here too!  We might be late!

 I left the two girls with the childcare doula and got to the bathtub in time for the last twenty minutes of the birth.  Again, the birth was far smoother and far safer than our hospital experience.  Thanks to helpful doulas being on the ball, the older girls watched their new baby sister being born during the last few minutes.  During the pregnancy, my wife had eaten one tablespoon of raw liver every day (not the midwife’s suggestion, by the way) and her iron levels were sky-high.  No need for bossiness there.  The midwife didn’t seem to feel she had missed out in any way.

“I grew up around doctors,” Laura Shanley had told me, “and just as there are doctors who have big egos, there are midwives who have big egos.  Some just like being the authority figure.”  

Rebecca Pugh had partially agreed.  “Some are more goal-oriented, which necessitates more bossy attitudes.”  Sometimes that varies with a midwife’s recent experiences as well.  “Midwives will be more urgent, more goal-oriented if there’s recently been a difficult situation.  A good midwife will set aside a previous traumatic birth and renew their faith in natural, normal birth,” Rebecca added.

As I sit here, typing away with Lightbulb #3 on my lap, I wonder if there’s any clever way to answer my initial question.  As with all people, midwives are complex; there may not be a trend strong enough to stereotype with a hoary old joke.

Ah - however, Lightbulb #3 has just made a sound that any parent recognizes.  As babies sometimes do, she has provided an answer to my long-pondered question.  Midwives don’t change lightbulbs, they only help you get the bulb out of the box without a 30% chance of having to use a scalpel. 

It’s the parents who change the lightbulb, and now I must be off to give my own a change.

Erik Lee is a writer, scientist, and father of three. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his family.