Babywearing - Without It, I'd Feel Naked

A few days ago, I read a blog post criticizing those of us who call ourselves “babywearers.”  The author claimed she’d rather go naked (literally as the post was headed by a tasteful photo of a mama holding a baby, both naked) than “wear” her baby.  Apparently, I’ve been ignoring and dehumanizing my children for fashion and convenience’s sake and encouraging you to do the same.

Ouch, that smarts.

On second thought, it smacks of extremism.  I do agree that it would be great to do nothing by hold my baby day and night.  At my house, this means that I would be completely non-functional.  Caring for the home and children is in large part my responsibility as my loving, helpful husband works full-time.  Unfortunately, I do not have the luxury of a housekeeper, nanny, chef, personal shopper, or stylist to coif me and ready my house for daily life.  Heck, we don’t even have a babysitter after a year of living here.

If I were never guilty of “wearing” my babies, we might not all still be here.  That is a slight exaggeration.  My house certainly wouldn’t be clean or neat, there would never be any food, and my older child might be running across the country like Forrest Gump.  Wearing my second child from the first days saved my sanity and confidence.  I had a way to keep him happy and safe while simultaneously entertaining (or chasing) my older child.  She was not quite two when he was born, so she still needed a lot of my hands-on care and attention.  I do not know how I would have been happy, healthy, or functional without our “mama pouch” during that 4^th trimester.

It’s true that a well-worn kiddo is super cute, even chic at the moment.  Does that lessen the well-documented fact that your baby has a biological need to be close to you?  Wearing your child fills physical and emotional needs for you both, and it helps you to meet the needs of other when necessary.  

Watching National Geographic confirms that wearing your baby is as instinctive as it gets.  I have never watched or read about a tribal culture (never will you catch me labeling them “primitive” as they are incredibly sophisticated societies, many more “civilized than our own) in Africa, the Philippines, South America, etc… that DIDN’T show mothers carrying their newborn to toddler-age children in some sort of sling or wrap.  These women indubitably meet more challenges and hardships in daily life than I do, but we all end up babywearing.  It is a way to keep that child secure and get by.

Modernity is a blessing and a curse.  We ask so much of new mothers and so often push them to “get back to normal.”  There is no more old normal.  Everything changes with a baby.  I envy the cultures who do not allow a new mother to lift a finger for the first 30 days of her baby’s life.  Instead, the mother’s female relatives take care of the household, provide meals, and make it so that the mother’s only job is to nurture her baby and rest.  It’s a stretch in my birth classes to convince an expecting mother to spend 5 days in, 5 days on, and 5 days near her bed.  That’s about as basic as it gets for postpartum recovery.  It’s mostly to let the ligaments that hold up your uterus draw back up, allow all of the organs supported by your pelvic floor to settle back into the proper place, and work out the kinks of early breastfeeding.  

That’s another post for another day.  Back to babywearing.

I do not make time to sew rings slings for others as penance to the gods of fashion.  I did not make your sling to marginalize your child to the level of the season’s hottest new purse or a pair of hot, red-soled heels.  If you choose a baby carrier, my slings or otherwise, that screams “you,” you will use it more.

This, in turn, means that your baby will spend less time in baby “appliances” and more time in physical contact with you.  Even the priciest carrier purchased only for its looks and popularity is better than expecting to put your baby down all the time.  I would rather see a baby in said carrier snuggled against a caregiver than sitting all but forgotten in a carseat while mama chats with her friends over lunch. 

We are carry mammals, not cache mammals.  The baby constantly expected or pushed into “appliances” is the ignored baby not the “worn” baby.  Not to mention, tying to “teach” your baby to like things like bouncers and swings is stressful.  It sure was at my house.  I didn’t want to carry or wear my babies all of the time.  Nobody loves holding a baby 24 hours a day.  We all need a break and a safe, secure place to put that baby.  It’s all about balancing your needs with those of the new addition.

My ability to sew slings allows me to ease this transition for new parents.  Whether it’s your first or your 8^th baby, there will be some changes.  I have a skill that can boost the confidence and lower stress of mothers around me.  The benefits of attachment parenting are many and backed by much research.  For some, wearing a baby is the only tenet of AP they will ever embrace.

I, for one, would feel naked NOT wearing my baby.  “Babywearing” will never be a pejorative in my personal vocabulary.  I hope to be that wizened, smiling, elderly lady in the grocery store driving all of the young mamas up the wall talking about how smart they are to follow their intuition and wear their babies.

What We're Eating

I had visions of this lovely month listing of all of our delicious meals.  Reality set in--for almost a whole week we either ate out, ate leftovers, or the kids ate nuggets or hot dogs for dinner.  You know how it goes.  Oops!  It certainly wasn't a blog post worthy of my original idea.

In my former life before kiddos, I claimed to be a foodie.  It's sometimes hard for me to get excited about or even think of something for dinner that will be well-balanced, quick to make, and happily eaten by the whole family.  I love cooking, I love my children, and I love food that tastes good--really good.  

Being stuck in a food rut is no fun, so please share your favorites with me.  Here is a random assortment of recipes we've tried over the summer and loved.  We aren't as super healthy as this looks.  These are interspersed with many pizzas and some shameless snacking not listed below--that would be too embarrassing.  Enjoy!

Green Salad with Roasted Pears and Blue Cheese

Garlic Spaghetti

Sauteed Cannellini Beans

Warm Butter Lettuce Salad with Hazelnuts

Spiced Kettle Corn

Rolled Turkey and Apple Quesadilla

Carrot and Zucchini Mini Muffins

Grilled Asparagus and Melon Salad

Round and Round Pasta

Berry Lemonade

Basil Turkey Sliders

Pork al Pastor Tacos

Thai Peanut Chicken

Mix and Match Quiche ~ Asparagus, grape tomatoes, and bacon

Ginger Soy Shrimp and Snap Peas ~  Thank you, fellow blogger, for doing such a lovely job posting this recipe.  It was on the package of my grill basket, nowhere online through Williams-Sonoma, and too yummy not to share.

Pumpkin Pie Pancakes

Canadian Bacon and Potato Quiche

Banana Quinoa "Rice" Pudding

Paleo Herb Buns

Corn with Lime-Sage Butter

Eggplant Ricotta Bites

Everyday Advocacy

How I'm meeting one of those first resolutions, the one about doing more in my community for mothers and new babies--a recent letter sent to a local hospital:

I recently learned that the lactation program at Singing River Hospital in Ocean Springs was eliminated.  I am extremely concerned about the ways in which this will reduce the quality of care for new mothers at your hospital.  This is a worthwhile program.  Every hospital that provides services for birthing women needs a highly-trained and experienced lactation staff.  Almost all new mothers plan to breastfeed, but very few make it to their own goals.  A recent study published cites unnecessary supplementation in the hospital as the number one undermining factor. 

I do understand that our current economy necessitates tight budgeting and review of all programs for improvement and efficiency.  There are several easy, mostly free ways to decrease costs in the LDRP programs.  As you will see on this mPINC survey, the CDC agrees with my suggestions.

Healthy newborns should be placed skin-to-skin with their mothers immediately.  All routine newborn procedures may be performed this way easily.  All babies, even those born by cesarean should be nursing within the first hour of life.  The neonate’s instinct to root and suckle are strongest in that first hour to two, so delaying skin-to-skin contact results in a missed window of ideal breastfeeding initiation. A baby who is given formula, or artificial breastmilk substitutes according to UNICEF and WHO, or glucose water is likely to have a harder time latching appropriately to the breast to express its own mother’s milk.

In Memphis, TN and Jacksonville, FL where I have lived previously, mothers who give birth by cesarean are offered lactation support in recovery and never separated from their babies.  I have not seen or heard of this anywhere in the state of Mississippi.  Immediate skin-to-skin and unlimited access to nursing on demand are the standard of care in states whose overall healthcare outcomes far exceed our own.

Well-baby nurseries are unnecessary, undermine breastfeeding, and require costly additional staffing.  Healthy mothers and babies should room-in.  As the mPINC survey shows, 0% of MS hospitals report healthy newborns being with their mothers for 23+ hours a day.  This is shocking and upsetting to me.  I was not ever separated from either of my two children, both of whom are extraordinarily healthy and breastfeed well over their first year of life.  The hospital at which my first child was born did not even have a well-baby nursery.  Their staff truly supported breastfeeding.

The “transition” period should be an in-room service.  Science consistently confirms that neonates, even preterm babies, regulate both breathing and temperature best when placed skin-to-skin with their mothers.  In addition, they are first colonized by bacteria from their mother’s skin rather than what happens to be floating about the newborn nursery.  Namely, they thrive while infants routinely separated from their mothers experience greatly increased stress.  There is no reason for healthy babies to be separated from their mothers for up to 4 hours.  In fact, research supports eliminating routine separation of healthy mothers and babies as the ideal way in which to support the mother-baby dyad.

Staff should be truly trained in lactation support.  Nursing school does not provide adequate training, nor does any program sponsored by a formula company.  We are so close to New Orleans, where the annual Gold Standard conference convenes and literally world-renown breastfeeding experts share their knowledge and experience in teaching workshops.  Key staff should attend that conference.  Several groups offer breastfeeding specialty workshops designed for nurses.  There is no excuse for hospital staff not to be better trained to support the needs of their mothers and babies.

These changes and strides towards evidence-based care would drastically impact the number of mother and babies who enjoyed the often hoped for exclusive breastfeeding relationship.  It would, thereby, positively impact the patients of your hospital and families in our community both in terms of physical and emotional health. 

I am very concerned at the lack of breastfeeding knowledge and support within the hospitals of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and our great state at large.  I am committed to serving the women around me through support and education, but I cannot do it alone.  Eliminating lactation at your hospital is a step backwards.  I would be so proud if any of the Singing River hospitals began to implement the UNICEF/WHO Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative.  Mothers in our area would absolutely change care providers willingly to receive care at an officially designated baby-friendly hospital. 

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing back from you and working together to enact positive change.  I am happy to schedule a meeting to brainstorm ideas on this subject or provide you with additional resources and research.  Also, if it would be best to contact another individual in regards to this problem, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Kate Fillingim, LCCE

kate@betterbeginningsMS.com

Additional resources for your perusal:

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/details/collection/1018443/Breastfeeding.html

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/05/29/peds.2011-3633.abstract

http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223%2811%2900639-1/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1045982

Beginning the Blog

1 January 2012

Ah, the blank page.  Fresh, open, mine.  Tonight, the quiet clicking of keys is peaceful and familiar.  It's been years since I sat down to write.  As 2012 begins, the days lengthen and I resolve to do a few things for myself, including finally putting my English degree to good use.  Bear with me as I tentatively touch my toe to the blogging pool.  Here's hoping it's warm and that sometimes my words stir a ripple.

My children are asleep; my husband sips scotch at the other end of the couch.  He laughs, shaking his head as he says that he's been trying to get me to write as long as we've been married.

Today is a day for keeping resolutions.  My goals are simple this year: be positive, satisfied, peaceful.  Then there are the everyday things...

Make time to "date" my husband again and get back the pre-parenthood romance.  
Be a more calm, patient mama.
Sit and watch my children play in the mud without worrying about how to get them into the tub and how much more laundry they are making.
Miss the friends I've moved away from without feeling resentful that we moved because my husband has a steady, secure job.
Sew more for my own babies.
Obsess less over mopping the floors and keeping the house spotless.
Get back to yoga--I need the workout, serenity, and time to myself.
Do more in my community as a childbirth educator and doula and advocate for better maternity care and breastfeeding in Mississippi.
Read a few "smart" books, not just mysteries, vampire chick lit, and birth/breastfeeding books.


With three cats, a dog, a busy three year old girl, and a one year old boy, our house will never be perfect, nor will I.  While writing tonight, the image of  Mu Qi's Six Persimmons kept coming to mind--the little (I'm assuming) Buddhist monk working his brush as an act of meditation.  In keeping with that sort of Zen philosophy, I hope to remember that enlightenment ultimately comes with an emptying of self, letting go of expectations and just Being--being Present and Open to the richness of life without passing judgment.  The more I let go, the more I will be able to give.  May my words be spontaneous, expressive, and clear like those carefully placed persimmons.

Percolating Percussion

*It's July, and this was written in February...forgotten in the files.  I have plans to write more consistently soon*

Tonight it’s raining, drumming against the gutter.  If I close my eyes, it almost sounds like steady, hollow music of a tin roof.  The rhythm appeases my Aquarian sensabilities—the water bearer, the creative spirit, the “heavenly bohemian.”  I march to the beat of my own drum.  Trite, but satisfying.  Its baseline a steady thump that keeps me on track.  Its tempo the pace of my daily interactions.  I dance and hope its hook strong enough to draw those around me into its chorus.  

Lately this means I’m running on caffeine, idealism, and a head full of ideas looking to escape onto the page or into the ear of the first willing victim, be it human, feline, canine, or technological.  I catch myself jotting the most random in my phone.  Reading the first line note titles is like reading random sentence from the walls of Faulkner’s brainstorm bedroom—a little crazy when you scratch the surface, but there is solidity, cohesion beneath (I hope).

Quiet nights with my whole house sleeping, excepting my persistent cream-point feline shadow, are a treat.  I should be sleeping, or finishing Raising Your Spirited Child, a title that understates the comical and exhausting ins-and-outs of daily life with Isabelle.  She needn’t know that her mother and grandmother were (are?) unruly, gloriously defiant girls, too.

Bedtime is one of my favorite evening rituals.  She loves the undivided mama attention, and I love the things she blurts out.  My little Scorpio goes out with a bang.  Tonight, she announces that she missed me.  I was gone with a birth recently, so I told her that I was working.  She immediately laughs and says, “No, Mama.  Only Daddy goes to work.  You don’t have work clothes.” 

Got me there.   Okay, so I just wear my regular clothes to my work, no blue digicamis to guarantee the Navy will never find me if I end up in the water. 

 “I help mamas having their babies,” the oversimplified kid explanation.

“You’re a good doctor, Mama.”  Strike two.  

“I’m not a doctor, sweetie.”  

“But you helped my eye feel better today.”  Take that victory lap around the plates.  

“Well, I am good at doctoring things sometimes.”

We rock for a while and she says, “You had me like that time Will just came out of your tummy in the bathtub .”  So she does remember those pictures.  She loves seeing the pictures on our computer.  We pull up her baby pictures and let her click around.  One day we looked up to Will emerging into the world with her delighted exclamation of, “Look, a baby!  Oh, it’s just Will!”  

 Tonight I tell her that she was born in a hospital. 

“Why?” 

“Because Mama wasn’t brave enough to have you at home.”  I finally have the opportunity to tell her how much I wanted to give her that same start.  She is three, but she brought it up and is following her original idea like a hound on the hunt.  

“It’s okay, Mama, I just didn’t want to come out when I was a baby in your tummy.”

Where did that come from?  Oh, little girl, you have no idea.  We evicted you.  It wasn’t nice, and I’m still sorry for doing it that way.  You showed us, fist pressed to your cheek at your debut.  Possibly, there was a finger up, telling everyone present what you thought of our ideas of what should be and when.  Who could blame you.

I love her boldness.  I love that my passions are shaping her ideas about motherhood and the amazing capability of a woman’s body.  I love that the qualities I nitpick the most in her are my own weaknesses, that her intensity is most matched to that of my own.  I love that the flood of emotions from her birth still carries me in tow, that a tiny new life changed my course and fixed my center all at once.

Reunion Raw

Driving north from the coast to the piney woods of Mississippi to a family reunion, my eyes tear.  I blink it away, thinking that going here is a homecoming of sorts.  Bittersweet.  I’m crying now as I write—part for the empty spot my grandfather, my Slick, should fill in this gathering, part for the idyllic childhood that’s downright enviable.  

He died two years ago this May—the most loving, annoying, persistent, present man I knew.  Self-destructive, loving, dedicated.  Such a big personality and part of my life that it still doesn’t feel quite real that he’s gone.  I still walk in to their house and have to stop myself from looking for him down the hall.  Will is his namesake.  He had to be special to pass along a name like Denson.  In the ICU, I whispered to him not to die, because then if the baby was a boy, we’d have to pass a name.  I also whispered to him that we were having a homebirth, because the eternally mischevious little brother part of Slick love being the bearer of a big secret.  A nurse tiptoed up behind me, put her hand on my elbow as I cried into my clasped hands, and asked me if I felt faint.  Please.  Nobody from this tough old guy’s line is that weak.  He is so tall he hardly fits on the hospital bed.  He shouldn’t be alive right now.  He looks almost like a pharaoh only his head is crowned with bandages.

Crossing the Bouie River, that cold spring fed river whose water is cold and sweet like sap that runs through cracks in the earth, all I can think about is riding 4-wheelers though cow pastures to the little ravine.  On foot, walking across another little creek to the river.  Sand.  The water is cold, clear.  There is a wall of root-cracked earth rising on the opposite bank.  I always wonder what’s up there.  For years, in yoga meditations, this is my “place.”  The bank is part sand, part gravel.  Shooting a snake coiled on the branch.  Part of why he’d take me to the country was to shoot pistols.  The bigger, the better.  He always laughed and said it was scary what a good shot I was, especially for a little city girl.  I haven’t been there in well over ten years.

My children squabble in the back seat, restless and ready to be out of the car.  Once we’re there and meet my parents, we sit.  Looking around, I see a few familiar faces.  It isn’t the same.  Growing up, we were always at my great grandmother’s house sweating under the massive oak in the front yard, rocking in the porch swing, occasionally lolling in the relief of the two window units inside.  It was always the kids and the old people vying for the ac.  The bathroom smelled like Dial soap and had a hook and eye door latch.

Saw horse and plywood tables line one side of the horseshoe shaped drive, filled with food.  Uncle Ermon’s farm truck is at one end filled with coolers and repurposed milk jugs filled with tea.  The pack of kids, me included, got in trouble for things like jumping on hay bales, scaring the cows, and driving 4-wheelers through the rye grass, not to mention spraying cow patties on the kid naïve enough to ride on the back.   

I remember Slick saying when his oldest brother died, “This is the beginning of the end of my generation.”  I had no idea.  Today, Joe is the last of the 5.  He stands at the podium and calls the names of those who’ve died this year, faltering a bit at Herschel, his cousin, and his last living brother, Ermon.  I’m crying.  Thank God the blessing is next.  I blot my eyes and try not to snort, feeling ridiculous and maybe hormonal.  Nobody else even notices.  

That’s not it, though.  This place is nice, but it’s not the place.  I feel so deeply rooted to the place of my childhood memories, and this is not it.  My children run and explore the little creek and bridges outside, flushed and sweaty in the June heat.  It’s cute, even pretty, but not the same.  That place was so plain, so every day.  Nothing fancy or out of the ordinary.  Where will my kids be able to go like that?  Able to go back in the woods and just be?  Get covered in mud and wash it off in the creek?  Nobody worried about us being gone.

I don’t think the place would feel right without the people, though.  Maybe it would change if the reunion had stayed there, grown into something new.  None of my cousins I grew up with are there.  I know we’re all busy and not all close enough.  Most of them came when Slick died, though.

On the way home, I realize that what I’ve been feeling is raw.  Raw is better that surprised.  Raw is open, not judgmental—remembering what it was and seeing what it is.  It surprises me.  This gathering was always fun, exhausting, over-filling as a child.  The rawness is equal parts loss, acceptance, and moving forward.