Tag: parenting

Baby o’Clock

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

We got back from California almost two weeks ago now. Every time we go, it feels more and more like going home. Something about the hills rising up out of the earth, crumpled and creased and golden. The highways, wide and flat and sinuous. The ocean, beating against the sand.

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Going away was good for us. For me. I feel like I’m finally starting to settle into life with the baby. Sure, everybody said that life would change, but I didn’t think it would be that different. Call me naïve, but I thought I would finally have time to get things done. As anyone reading this who has had a kid knows, that didn’t happen.

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The reality is that her favorite place to nap is on me, or her dad. That even though she can’t speak, she has plenty of ways of getting across what she wants. And what she wants is to be right where I am.

So I blog with my phone while she’s nursing. I read books with one hand while walking around holding her with the other.  But mostly, I accept that the to do list is limited to one item per day.

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And some days, I’m even okay with that.

There’s No Such Thing As Gender Equality

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

We dress our baby like a boy. It’s partly because the clothes were free, courtesy of her six-month old, male cousin. It’s partly because we like the clothes in the “boys”section better. (Monster suit, I’m looking at you!) But it’s mostly because, unless she’s in a dress or wearing neon pink (and sometimes not even then), people assume she’s a boy.

It’s not just other people. We do it too. When we put her in her first dress, for a party my mother in law had last weekend, I looked at my husband and said, “Wow, she looks like a girl.”

Babies are baby shaped. They don’t look male or female – they look like little balls of adorable. Any gender identification that we impose on babies comes from us. Including the default assumption that a baby is a boy until proven otherwise. This is at the root of our difficulties with gender, our need to dichotomize into girl/boy, male/female and all the baggage that goes along with that.

And there’s no way we can live in a world in which gender doesn’t come with a pre-packaged set of assumptions and norms, until we can let babies be babies. Without attaching a label.

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It seems that I’m not the only one thinking about gender norms and preconceptions today. Chuck Wendig has a great blog on the subject here, and Kat Howard’s thoughts are here.

Orange Tangerine Pearl*

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I’m writing this with a baby on my lap. My baby. She is a week old, and she’s perfect.**

I’m not going to go into all the labor details here, but there were a couple of things that happened during the birth that really interested me from an information processing point of view.

The first is that, according to my husband and our doula, I didn’t start talking about an epidural until after the anesthesiologist came in. My recollection is that I started talking epidural when the contractions became unbearable – query whether there’s any link between what I was experiencing before and after the hospital reminded me the epidural was available.

The second is that I wanted to do a natural childbirth because I thought it would lead to the best outcome for me and Zed. Everything I was reading and hearing pretty much said the less interventions you do, the better – less chance of a C-section, better breastfeeding, etc.

Suffice it to say, I ended up having two interventions – I got an epidural, and the OB broke my water. Both were exactly the right moves at the time, and both made the labor much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

The thing is, I was so focused on the potentially negative effects of interventions, that I hadn’t bothered to consider the positive. Although the teacher in my birthing class discussed pros and cons for everything, I didn’t really pay attention to the pros because my mind was already made up.

I didn’t do this consciously. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as very open-minded. But when I was thinking about the way labor had gone post-birth, I realized that I hadn’t really factored in the potential benefits of interventions.

It made me wonder what other things I might have missed because I only paid attention to the information that supported my point of view. And I’m hoping, as A and I confront the myriad of choices and decisions that is child-rearing, I’ll remember to pay afternoon to all the information out there.

*The color of our new car. Also our code word for “I actually mean that I want the epidural now”.

**In case you’re wondering, you didn’t miss the pregnancy announcement. A and I decided that we’d like to keep little Zed off the internet for the most part. So I probably won’t be talking about her here very much.   Incidentally, Zed is also the reason I haven’t posted much – for some reason, pregnancy has been my main focus for the past nine months.

Also, if you’re doing the math, by the time this goes up Zed will be about 2 weeks old. We call this the newborn effect – everything takes twice as long as it does in normal time.