It was the kind of night where it is almost a relief to see the light out the window and give up trying to get anymore sleep, and a bigger relief to know that doctors and pharmacies and steroids will soon be available. I called my dad for a prescription, and decided that Lucy’s preschool feast would be getting instant mashed potatoes.

I drove Callie to school, grabbed potato flakes at the store (pharmacy not open yet), then ran home to boil over the easy directions (it was my first time), got Lucy into her carpool with an acceptable offering, drove Avery’s carpool to her school, and then, finally, stopped by home before my second pharmacy attempt to grab my forgotten phone and saw I had five calls and two messages from Tom.

He was worried I’d forget that Avery had to go to school and that when he left for work she’d leave too and Molly and Lucy would be home alone. This is how I usually feel about Tom when it comes to parenting logistics: touched that he is aware and concerned about the kids’ welfare, frustrated that he doesn’t remember that it is our week to drive carpool, so of course Avery won’t be leaving the house until I am home to take her there. And baffled that he didn’t just ask Avery if she knew what was going on. (she did) (I had warned her she might be in charge of her sisters for 5-10 minutes after daddy left and before I got home).

This morning my reaction was, “Oh honey, I got this.” I got this in my asleep. I got this with one hand eaten by a crocodile and the other doing a magic card trick.

Not that I never make mistakes. I’m* right about Molly having croup today, but Avery’s swimmer’s ear turned out to be twelve-year molars (two years early), wax and a $35 urgent care copay, and Molly’s cold six months ago was walking pneumonia.

And it’s not like I would ever want to try it alone. Tom changes a mean diaper, and I’m writing this now because Chrysanthemum is a saint of a friend who took my carpool/playdate shift (and because nursing and typing is more handy than skiing and doing your taxes).

I need a nap and/or an extra Mountain Dew, but when it comes to comfort for croup and mediocre mashed potatoes, I got this.

*Technically Tom is right; he stuck her head in the freezer first.

I’ve got a cold, so I took Molly home after the first hour. Chrysanthemum and I were talking about how whenever we’re home sick from church we feel guilty (or the house is blessedly quiet) so we usually end up cleaning or cooking something special even though it’s a day of rest and even though we’re not feeling well. So when the family got home a little after two p.m. there was freshly ground wheat bread in the oven and a pork roast with carrots and potatoes in the crockpot for dinner.

There was also leftover homemade Thai hot and sour chicken-mushroom-red bell pepper-coconut soup ready for the immediate heating. Tom looked around, disappointed, and said, “I hoped you’d put in chicken nuggets for us.”

I think this is the part where I get to say, demurely and modestly, of course, that thank you, thank you, yes, no applause please, I birthed that baby without any pain medication. But all I can really say is that that is some PAINFUL stuff, and if I hadn’t been blessed with a pretty quick labor, who knows what I would’ve been asking for. Epidural? Demerol? More like a morphine cluster-bomb, please.

On Wednesday morning I had a bad feeling. I wanted to sit and wrestle with it, to make sure it wasn’t just my own impatience coloring how I felt. I was fine, I could go longer, but the baby wasn’t moving as much as usual, which is okay and normal for the end of pregnancy, but still. I felt bad. I was comforted by the blessing Tom had given me ten days before, and by the re-reading of several chapters in Rixa‘s books, and by the quote Mrs. Potts left on my last post, but as I drove to my non-stress test and midwife check at 41 weeks and 5 days, I couldn’t stop crying. (Until I did, because who wants to be the pregnant lady crying all over the reception desk?)

Baby Molly “passed” the NST, but she did have several decelerations that weren’t explained by contractions. I met with one of my midwives, who wasn’t pushy but seemed uncomfortable with the idea of waiting longer. I was 4+ dilated and 90% effaced. I agreed to a biophysical profile (ultrasound) to just check on things because by then I was wavering back towards wanting to wait, wanting so much to have the totally natural experience as long as the baby was fine. And knowing that inducing with Pitocin (which is known to cause heart decelerations due to stronger and more frequent contractions, especially in concert with broken water no longer cushioning the baby and cord) is a little illogical when the original indicator was heart decelerations. Like when they broke my water with Avery because my amniotic fluid was too low. Somehow ten years ago that made sense.

While I waited, the midwife who was on call that day came into the office and we talked at length about my hopes and her recommendations, what I was comfortable with and what she was comfortable with. I guess in the end it was about me trusting her, that when she promised to turn off the Pitocin as soon as possible, to unhook me from all the machines and let me do whatever I wanted, I believed her. I had packed all my stuff in the car, because of that bad feeling, but she told me to go home, arrange everything with my kids and come back to the hospital with my husband in a couple hours. I called my mom on my way home, realizing I’d have to wait for her to go home first to get her things for staying at our house, but she, too, had had a feeling that morning, and she’d packed a bag before going to school.

I called Crysanthemum and told her it wasn’t urgent, but if she wanted to come to the hospital after her husband came home from work, we’d probably be getting things going by then. I called my sister Marcy and told her she was welcome. Karin ended up coming too, with my dad, who stayed for awhile then left to see my mom and kids.

Before we left home, Tom gave me a blessing, with the girls and my mom looking on. Things felt right. When we got to the hospital, I was excited and a little bit apprehensive, mostly excited; however things went, I’d have a baby today! Or tomorrow! At the latest!

The nurse got me a room and offered me a gown. I told her I’d brought my own clothes and she said “great.” She got me hooked up to the fetal monitors and asked me questions; when she asked me to rate my pain I said that it was a one, but that I was planning to not have any pain medication, including no epidural. Then without prompting she said, “So would you like me to not ask you that again then?” and I said yes. She made a note of that and when I expressed my concern, my caveat that with the Pitocin I didn’t know how I’d do with the pain, she was very encouraging that I could do it.

I told Marcy on the phone to bring her card games. Roberta, my midwife, showed up and never left. We were all sitting around and talking, Marcy, Karin, Dad, Tom, Roberta, Chrysanthemum, the nurse and me. We had the Pitocin on at 4 and I started feeling contractions. I was hooked up to the monitors and the IV, but I was sitting on a birth ball next to the bed. The monitors kept slipping but we didn’t worry too much about them. I bounced and talked; I was feeling much too good, but we didn’t play games. We talked a little about Roberta’s experience as a labor & delivery nurse in Alaska before she became a CNM, and about some culture issues that she’s encountered living in Utah the past ten years — she said that watching movies like the Singles Ward and Pride and Prejudice helped her understand Mormons better.

After awhile the baby’s head had descended a bit, so Roberta broke my waters and then I was back on the birth ball, making a mess of the floor even with the pads under me. I started feeling the contractions, checking out of the conversation then coming back in. An hour after starting the Pitocin, I felt really in labor and Roberta ran a bath for me. We unhooked the monitors and the IVs and I hobbled to the bathroom. Mostly I just wanted to be on the toilet. I was still 4+ dilated. I got in the tub, but it wasn’t so great, just a regular-size tub. I was most comfortable on my hands and knees, draping my arms and head over the side. I clutched at Tom’s pants and moaned. I had Tom shut the bathroom door all the way. I could hear my sisters and Crysanthemum and the nurse and Roberta, all laughing and talking. Didn’t they know I was dying in here?

Roberta knocked on the door and came in to ask if I was pushing. I said no. She said, are you sure? Because it sounds like you are. I said no, but I was definitely rethinking all this stupid natural stuff, wishing I’d never read a single book, never heard of Rixa’s blog, that I’d remained in happy ignorance. A while later (fifteen minutes?) she brought a large bath sheet in and said she wanted to get me on the bed to check me. I was happy to get out of the tub, it just wasn’t that comfortable, too small for a whale anyway.

I got back on the bed and heard the best news ever. I was dilated to 9, and it’s true that if pain is productive, if you can say, look, this is really doing something, we’re getting somewhere, then it is much easier to bear. I had shed the towel somewhere between the bathroom and the bed, and now I climbed off to stand facing the bed, bracing myself on it, and doing awkward deep plie-type movements, sticking my butt high in the air. Crysanthemum closed the blinds at the big window, saying something about my privacy, but I could have paraded naked down Fifth Avenue at that point. I had spent a great deal of time and energy worrying about what I’d wear in labor, how I’d feel naked or wearing this camisole or that nightgown, and as soon as I really was in labor, the thought of putting clothes back on was not even a thought my brain could entertain. I don’t think the door to my room was even closed — the curtain was pulled so no one could see in, but the actual door was open, I think, the entire time. I didn’t care, in fact, I think I liked the idea that even with my loud vocalizations, the hospital wasn’t trying to shut me up in any way.

Roberta threw some sheets and towels on the floor and said I could have the baby there if I wanted, but maybe I’d like to try kneeling on the bed. She raised the back all the way up, almost 90 degrees, and I knelt facing it, so I could rest against the top of it between contractions. That was a pretty comfortable position, and reduced the strain on my legs, was soft on my knees. It felt good to sag against the pillows between times. I think it was at that point that Tom asked when I would start pushing. Roberta laughed and told him I already was. I stayed that way for awhile but started to tire. Roberta encouraged me to lie down on my left side. It felt so good to lie down.

Then she told me to hold my right leg up, bent at the knee. I was almost furious, incredulous, flabbergasted. Things were starting to really hurt, I was doing all this work, and I HAD TO HOLD MY LEG UP. Couldn’t someone else do that for me? What did they think I was, Superwoman? But I did it. I was really too occupied surviving and breathing to demand that Tom hold my @#$% leg up.

Other nurses came in, with their yellow paper smocks on. One of them brushed my hair away from my face and I grabbed her fingers and slobbered all over them, pressing them to my mouth. I never saw her face, she was just there for me to hold on to. Tom was at my back then, I think, putting pressure down low. He was fabulous the whole time, except once when he delicately scrunched his fingers towards my spine. More pressure! Firm! Don’t Stop! Roberta showed him where to press on my spine, but I actually liked it better with dual points on my pelvis.

I was breathing too fast at one point, trying instinctively to stay ahead of the pain or something and Roberta reminded me to slow down, make deeper noises, I was going to hyperventilate if I couldn’t relax just a little. That was the hardest thing, trying to not tense and tighten against the pain. Pushing was a relief because it was something to do, not something to allow or endure. I started wailing that I just couldn’t do it. Roberta told me, “you can do it because you already are doing it.” Which didn’t make any sense, but I was too far gone to think what alternative there might possibly be to just getting this thing done, getting this baby out of my body, just doing it.

Molly was born at 10:15 pm, four hours and fifteen minutes after we checked in. Roberta put her on my tummy, what a relief to roll to my back and flop there. I’ve never felt such relief, such . . . blessed, relieving . . . relief. She was posterior, which I didn’t think about until the next day when I felt like someone had used my tailbone for kickboxing practice. She rested on my tummy for several minutes with the cord attached, what a weird feeling — I tried to pull her up to my breast and felt the tug of the cord between my legs. Tom had been too squeamish to cut the cord with our other girls, but this time he did it. I got her up and offered her my breast, hoping nursing would help with the placenta, but she wasn’t interested yet.

Roberta asked for a push for the placenta, promising that there are no bones in it, but I still felt it; I’d never felt the placenta delivery with my other kids, that’s another weird (not bad) feeling. They re-hooked up the IV and gave me some more Pitocin to help my uterus clamp down. I don’t know if that helped a lot, but after having after-birth pains that got stronger with each kid, I never felt any with Molly, even while breastfeeding. I had one stitch and then lay there for about an hour and a half with Molly on my chest. My dad came back just as I got her to suck, and then everyone but Tom left. The nurse gave her the vitamin K shot and the antibiotic ointment while she fed. I had been interested to see if she was more alert than my other kids, but it didn’t really seem that different. I breastfed all four of them within the first hour of birth, but she was the first one that I had continually on my body until I agreed to hand her over for weighing and washing and getting checked out. By then I wanted a shower and food enough that I didn’t mind sending Tom off to the nursery with her.

One of the best parts was getting up off that bed all by myself and walking, first to the bathroom, and then down the hall, past the nurses’ station where they all congratulated me (and I thanked the nurse whose hand I’d commandeered), and to the elevators where we rode down to the room we’d sleep in. Tom and Molly were back by the time I’d showered. Oh, and right before I left the delivery room, I accepted some Percocet, feeling I dang-well deserved it! We slept pretty well that night, with Molly swaddled and in the bed with me, and with me throwing things at Tom over in the father’s bed, trying to get him to stop snoring. We left early the next afternoon, after a 19-hour stay. I was anxious to get home to my own stuff, but it sure was nice being able to ring at any time for fresh ice packs and Lorna Doone cookies.

In the weeks following, I sometimes regretted that I got induced. Molly weighed 8 pounds 15 ounces; she was my second-largest baby, but she had a small-ish head, so we could have gone another week and probably delivered without trouble. The placenta was all intact and healthy, the cord was strong and not wrapped around anything. It was definitely a subjective judgment call, and I’m sad I never had the experience of going into spontaneous labor, feeling those contractions slowly build, being at home and being in labor, but looking back now, I wonder, even knowing how healthy she came out, if I would have done anything differently. As one of the midwives said, about my bad feeling earlier that day, that you have to start trusting those maternal instincts sometime.

The most important thing for me is that I feel like I did something here. I accomplished what I set out to do. I studied, I made a plan, I was flexible, it hurt really bad but then it was over, and in the end, I had a healthy baby AND the satisfaction of knowing that I did what was best for both of us, with our individual set of circumstances. I’m really, really glad that it went quickly because that is a blessing that cannot be overstated in terms of foregoing an epidural. I honestly have no idea if I could have gone natural with my first baby (though for sure I would have at least postponed both that induction and that epidural). My sister-in-law read several of the same books I did and practiced Hypnobirthing with her first baby who was born a few days after Molly. She had a much longer, harder labor than I did and got a shot of fentanyl towards the end. I think that is a really great compromise, and I’m in awe that that was all she needed to help her get through it.

Two things helped me succeed in both having an uncomplicated vaginal delivery with induction and with not requiring pain medication. The first was being really prepared and working really hard, mostly mentally, but some physically — though I should’ve practiced more — for the birth. It might seem silly to spend so much time getting ready for something that’s only going to last anywhere from four hours to twenty-four (or more, but usually not much longer of real hard labor), but I feel like I’m still using what I learned — I should remember what I learned more often. Like, patience, and trusting God and nature, listening to my body and what it needs e.g. more sleep, water, good food, exercise, etc. And also, patience.

The other thing was a wonderful midwife who completely justified my trust in her and a very supportive hospital and nursing staff. If you want a natural hospital birth, I cannot recommend American Fork Hospital highly enough. They were fantastic from start to finish. To some natural birth purists, it probably sounds from this birth story that I had a somewhat directed labor, what with Roberta suggesting I do this or that, and with the intermittent monitoring — at one point when I was kneeling on the bed and pushing the nurse was reaching up between my legs to hold the monitor to my pubic bone and I just wanted to kick her out of the way. But I didn’t, and it really didn’t interfere with me feeling the next contraction anyway.

Every time Roberta suggested I try something new, it turned out to be a great idea, and I never felt like she was insisting I do it her way. I always felt like she was offering me different options, and especially towards the end, I was grateful there was someone there who was making sure everything was going okay, because I was too busy just doing it. In abdicating some of that mental and physical responsibility at the end, it helped that this was a woman who I’d come to know and trust, who always listened to (and heard) me, who asked before she did an exam, who wanted me to have the birth I wanted, almost as much as I did.

And finally, I was surprised and very happy about how effectively supportive Tom turned out to be. I always knew he would support me in doing what I wanted, but it was great how actively supportive he was. I ended up almost feeling bad that Crysanthemum, who acted as my doula through my pregnancy and labor, didn’t have much to do, because Tom was there, and he really stepped up. In talking it through later, he was impressed also that it had been a much different, more immediate and urgent and big experience than before. I’m not sure, but it seems like his involvement in her birth is probably why he has been even more engaged with Molly, in the small but significant parts of her care like comforting her. He has always changed diapers and such; with Avery he stayed home with her for eighteen months while I worked and he went to grad school, but with all of them, at the first sign of distress he would pass them off to me for feeding and comfort. With Molly I am still the only one who can feed her, but he is much more likely to attempt to comfort her if food isn’t what she needs. And that is what I need.

Tom’s version.

I guess I am writing about it, a little. It was intense, and the whole process of learning about childbirth in general this past year was immensely satisfying and worthwhile. I always have big plans to do courses of study in different subjects (gardening, ancient carpets, the history of Scandinavia, cheese making (which turns out to look like way too much trouble)), and then life gets in the way. But with this there was a physical and chronological imperative, plus a compelling interest. Chrysanthemum, who had three c-sections and went above-and-beyond as a sounding board and pregnancy-and-birth companion, now wants to train as a midwife once her children are a bit older. That’s how convincing and inspiring our discoveries and shift in perspectives have been. ‘

Anyway, these are the books and movies and blogs that I studied. I have to thank Rixa, once again, for getting me interested in the first place, and for sending me a box with several of these resources (and apologies again for keeping them so long!).

Baby Catcher by Peggy Vincent

I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading, whether interested in childbirth or not. It’s a hilarious, gripping memoir of a nurse-turned-midwife (CNM) in Berkley in the 70s and 80s. It’s totally story-driven and entertaining, candid, and moving. It’s also full of the sights and sounds and movements of natural, normal birth, which gave me a frame of reference for imagining what my birth might be like. Vincent doesn’t shrink from addressing difficult topics like birth injuries and getting sued; it’s not a rosy fantasy about home birth, but a real record of an astonishing array of births.

Birthing from Within by Pam England

I preferred this how-to-prepare book to Hypnobirthing. It makes no promises about being able to avoid pain completely in birth; instead it teaches several coping techniques and gives good advice about how to practice them enough to be helpful. ( I should have trusted the book and practiced more.) England also encourages the creation of birth art. I was skeptical about this; I’m not an artist, and I hate doing things poorly. Then I turned a page and read that sometimes the people who are most resistant to the idea of creating birth art (drawings, paintings, etc) are often those who would most benefit — because if you think of childbirth as art — as something that you only want to do if you can do it perfectly, well . . . that’s not a helpful way of viewing childbirth. You don’t give birth a certain way (or prepare to give birth a certain way) in order to impress people or to do it “perfectly,” and neither should those concerns stop you from doing art — your best art even if it doesn’t turn out “perfectly.”

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin

I bought this book on Rixa’s recommendation during the pregnancy that I miscarried last August. I remember putting it down after a few chapters, thinking it was just too hippie and crazy for me. When I picked it up again just six months later I read it straight through, nodding over and over, thinking how obvious it was, how much sense it made. If some of the birth stories in the first half of the book seem far out, skip to the second half which is full of good common sense information. I went back again and again in the weeks right before the birth, reading a couple stories at a time. After a lifetime of being afraid of the pain or hearing so many horror birth stories, it’s good to crowd those out with positive accounts of successful natural births (unmedicated and un-interventioned). Much of the natural birth information is more reactive or “what not to do”  in nature. Balance that with beautiful stories of how it can happen, how it actually does work. And again, this is no fantasy where nothing ever goes wrong, but stories where most of the time everything goes as it should, and when it doesn’t (because this is real life), appropriate medical help is something to be grateful for.

When I set this book down after my first full read-through, I immediately got on the computer to check airline tickets to Tennessee. I would’ve given anything (okay, except going into debt) to give birth at The Farm. One of the most significant testament’s to Ina May’s credibility is her excellent relationship with the hospital and doctors who treat The Farm’s infrequent transfer patients.

The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer

This is a very straightforward and well-substantiated collection of best practices, including advice on how to have the best epidural or best c-section possible if they’re required or desired. It’s a great comprehensive introduction to what and why and how for a first-time mother or an experienced mother who wants to know more about her options and the risks and benefits of each.

Pushed by Jennifer Block

This is an expose-type book about maternity care in the U.S. It’s a quick read and includes fascinating anecdotes, including a section on the disservice done to women in states where home midwifery is illegal. One of the first stories was about a Florida hospital during hurricane Charlie (that was the first summer we lived in Florida). With only minimal power and resources at the hospital, all elective inductions and c-sections were cancelled, and women in early labor were sent home to progress on their own (as used to be standard). When women in real labor were admitted, things occurred in a natural way by necessity and after that experience, several of the labor and delivery nurses changed their employment or career trajectories based on what they had learned.

I skimmed a lot of the middle because by the time I read this, I was already convinced that our maternity system in the U.S. is whacked, it was kind of preaching to the choir. But for anyone who’s skeptical or on the fence, I think this book would be pretty convincing and eye-opening.

Birth Reborn by Michel Odent

I asked Tom to read this book because it wasn’t by a crazy hippy woodwoman — so this is a good book for someone who needs a traditionally authoritative (male, medically trained, hospital-affiliated) take on the safety and desirability of natural childbirth. I liked the historical slant, describing how Dr. Odent and his staff in France stumbled upon several of their methods for improving childbirth and postpartum care in the hospital setting. Recently Dr. Odent has become less and less supportive of having the father in the birthing room, suggesting instead that the mother be supported by women (which is good, of course), but there is no way I would’ve wanted to give birth without Tom.

Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie E. Davis-Floyd

I probably wouldn’t have pushed through the heavy academic chapters of this book if not for our electricity fast, but it was fascinating, and reminded me of being in college. The exploration of birth as ritual and rite-of-passage and as a way for society to initiate women (and their husbands) into a technocratic worldview (where we trust and revere technology over nature) was well-thought out and effectively cautionary. I did feel severe cognitive dissonance by the end — because much as I want to say and believe that I “trust” nature over technology, I chose to give birth in a hospital — obviously core beliefs are more deep-seated and changing a whole philosophy requires more than a summers’ reading.

Birthing the Easy Way by Sheila Stubbs

Back when I was first interested in birth, I titled (and never finished) a post: “Breastfeeding is my gateway drug” about how my enjoyment of and success in breastfeeding was what made me think maybe I could do birth more naturally too. It’s also just about the only facet of attachment parenting or natural family living that fits me (well, that and composting). So I was delighted to see a chapter in this book called “Everything I needed to know about birth I learned from breastfeeding.” Now I could almost make the argument that “Everything I needed to know about parenting I learned from birth”: be patient, you’re not in control (of natural processes), you can take control/be autonomous (of “the system”), surrender, be patient, be flexible, be patient, after great pain comes the reward, be patient.

This book is also great for those interested in VBAC and/or HBAC. Stubbs describes a progression from c-section for CPD (baby “too big” for vaginal birth) to homebirth attended by a doctor (this is in Canada several years ago) to unattended (accidental bec. it happened so fast) homebirth.

Oh, and one of the things I liked best about this book in particular was that Stubbs doesn’t intend “the easy way” to imply “easy” as in “without pain” (more like “simple” or “straightforward”). She emphasizes several times that her births were painful and that if she could handle it, so can anyone, because she’s a self-described wimp.

Rediscovering Birth by Sheila Kitzinger

This book explores birth art, beliefs, and practices around the world and historically. Sometimes the author’s disdain for the West and modern birth practices frustrated me, especially when she was unwilling to criticize “native” beliefs that are pretty clearly dumb. Like the culture (now I can’t remember where — Africa?) where babies are wet-nursed for the first week of life because colostrum is thought to be poisonous. If we can ridicule Americans for our crazy ideas, surely we don’t need to excuse “natural” superstitions that are just as unsupported. But I would still recommend the book, especially for people curious about other cultures. The illustrations alone are well worth a look.

Hypnobirthing by Marie F. Mongan

I know several people who swear by this method. I think I should practice the relaxation techniques for everyday living, because a quick temper is one of my problems, but as for avoiding pain in childbirth? Not buying it.

Birth Without Violence by Frederik Leboyer

This is a weird, stream-of-conscious description of labor and birth from the baby’s perspective (culminating in the soothing Leboyer bath). I checked it out from the library and thought — if this is what people envision when thinking about home or natural birth, no wonder it seems too New Age-y. On the other hand, it was a quick read, and it is interesting to think about birth as the baby experiences it, especially in light of the new in utero studies.

Mothering the Mother by Marshall H. Klaus

I got this for Chrysanthemum and me to read; it’s all about the benefits of having a doula, a female birth attendant who is with the mother the whole time, provides non-medicinal pain relief (massage, etc), and helps her understand and make decisions about interventions suggested/required by hospital personnel. It makes a strong case that if you’re attempting a natural childbirth in a hospital, a doula could make the difference between success and succumbing to medical pressure or pain in the moment. There’s an appendix that describes a doula’s role and responsibilities that was instructive. I chose not to hire a licensed doula because Chrysanthemum was such a help to me throughout the entire process, and also because I trusted my midwives and had heard such great things about my hospital’s support of natural birth (which all turned out to be justified), but I would definitely recommend a doula for any first-time mother who had less idea of what to expect or what the challenges might be in a hospital setting.

Rixa compiled a similar list of suggested books for a natural hospital birth; see the comments for other recommendations.

Here’s a list of Rixa’s favorite breastfeeding books. I should’ve read some books on this before my first kid, but luckily after a rocky couple weeks, it’s almost always been pure pleasure.

Obviously, I cannot recommend Rixa’s blog enough. I can’t think of any other aspect of my personal philosophy that has changed as drastically as my views on childbirth have since first starting to read her. Here are three posts I wrote ridiculing unassisted/home/natural birth before I knew any better (just to give you an idea of how much my thinking has changed — if I were sure of having that much influence over my kids’ thinking about the world, I’d be a happy lady).

Heather’s blog is also a delight of crunchy wonders. I may not be (anywhere near) as committed to living naturally as Heather is, but I love reading about her latest crazy experiment, and she may be the only person on earth with wider feet than mine. I love how she questions the rationale behind just about every everyday behavior. Like, she doesn’t like wearing shoes so recently she just stopped wearing them. Awesome!

Tom was very impressed with Ricki Lake’s documentary The Business of Being Born (it’s on Netflix instant play, too). Again, they don’t shy away from showing what happens when a baby truly needs medical intervention (there’s a c-section for a growth-restricted baby). The point is, you learn as much as you can, you hope and plan for and expect the best, and you’re ready for anything, just in case.

Orgasmic Birth was a little stranger. Tom said as long as I promised not to roll my eyes up into my forehead like the one lady in the tub who is clearly experiencing what the title suggests. Then, since he was immersed enough in the possible sounds and sights of birth and ready to support natural (messy, loud, strange) processes, he said, “or whatever you want to do is great.” Orgasmic Birth has a lot of valuable stuff in it, even if I still can’t imagine really getting that much happy from it.

The one thing I really wanted to do before giving birth this time was attend a natural birth, and my cousin-in-law Karin was gracious enough to invite me to hers. I got the call from my cousin Jared that her water had broken and contractions were starting on a nice Saturday evening in July that just happened to follow a perfectly horrible day and a half of a perfectly awful stomach bug. So I missed the birth, and that’s my biggest preparation regret, that I didn’t get to be present for an actual live (home) birth. I think that would be an invaluable experience, though maybe even more so for a first-time mom.

In some ways I’m still doing things conventionally — like having the Group B test at all, but a) I’d like to know if I am positive, and b) at least this time I did a couple homeopathic things to reduce my chance of getting a positive (I took Vitamin C and acidophilus supplements every four waking hours in the two weeks leading up to the test; you can be a lot more aggressive in preventing/treating Group B, but I had both of those on hand, and they’re good to take anyway, especially for, uh, digestive tract health, if you know what I mean). I don’t think I was ever positive before my three other births, but as an example of how much I relinquished responsibility, it’s possible that I was positive but wasn’t told or didn’t give it any thought because I had epidurals with each, and so always had IVs through which the antibiotics could be given without any disruption to my plans.

My appointment was with one of the midwives I hadn’t met yet, which isn’t ideal of course; ideally I’d fly to The Farm this week and give birth in Ina May’s shadow next week, but all things considered I’m happy with this group of midwives and I don’t begrudge them the life-convenience of sharing call, especially since it is their habit to stay with the mother for the entire labor. I reviewed my plans and hopes and fears with this new midwife, and after telling her how quick Lucy’s birth was (6 hours) even with an induction and epidural at 39 weeks, she supported me in staying home as long as possible but encouraged me to be prepared for things to go quickly and to maybe go from hanging out one minute to being ready to hop in the car the next (it’s a 30-minute-plus ride). Of course, anything could happen; I could be in labor for three days two weeks after my due date, but hopefully not.

Either way, it’s probably time to start getting ready. I have a lot on my To-Do List:

1. Write my birth plan (mostly a list of stuff I don’t want done, like an IV (I’ll sign a waiver to forgo the hep-lock the hospital requires in case of emergency; given my low-risk history my midwives are comfortable with this), taking the baby out of my arms (much less to the nursery) before I’ve had an hour to bond and breastfeed, cord clamping before it’s stopped pulsing, continuous electronic fetal monitoring (I’ve agreed to the initial twenty-minute baseline by telemetry which allows movement, then 90-second checks at 30-minute intervals).

I’m still researching the eye ointment and Vitamin K shot business; since Tom and I are life-long monogamists there should be no need for the eye ointment and since I’ll be producing tons of colostrum for a full-term baby the Vitamin K should be unnecessary too. On the other hand, these are relatively minor things (I think) and I don’t know how strongly I feel about them. Things like enemas, shaves, and episiotomies aren’t routine, but maybe I’ll include them just in case. 50% of the women who see my midwives have an epidural, and I plan not to — what I need instead is praise and encouragement, offerings of physical and emotional support, NOT of drugs (I know what’s available and can ask for it if I need to; Tom knows it’s his job, if that happens, to remind me that I want to wait 15 more minutes and see how I feel then, repeatedly, if necessary). Things I do want to have happen are harder to write down. I want things to go how they go; I want to feel comfortable in vocalizing (loudly if I feel like it), moving, bathing, drinking (I probably won’t want to eat if I arrive in active labor/close to transition), squatting, etc).

2. Pack a bag (with my own nightgowns, music on the iPod, a birth ball, juices and light snacks, a note for the door and maybe some cue cards for Tom and Chrysanthemum from Birthing From Within, stuff for the kid, 3 or 4 versions of Pride and Prejudice to watch (you know, the usual); Mockingjay if it’s after August 24th).

3. Wash some onesies and blankets, buy some diapers and a nursing bra or three (any recommendations? I was never very happy with my previous ones, and I’m bigger this time around — 38DD and not looking forward to engorgement).

4. Arrange babysitting, though Avery (9 /12) has expressed a lot of interest in being present. I’d like to have her there, but a lot will depend on the timing (and how I’m coping; I’d love her to see a natural birth, but not if I would scare her).

5. Finish reading the books and watching the dvds Rixa sent me (The Business of Being Born is available for instant play on Netflix,and I think Tom was surprised how interesting it was). Right now I’m practicing the stuff in Birthing From Within; it seems more helpful and realistic than Hypnobirthing, though I’m sure they could be complementary.

6. Finish cleaning and organizing the house. I’m not overdoing things; I nap most days and my blood pressure was a nice 107/67 yesterday. I mostly want things clean and organized because I feel so much calmer when they are. If I’m lost in reading or writing, I can ignore clutter or dirt for weeks. But if I want a soothing, comfortable environment for early labor, I know I’ll want things pretty clean and minimally distracting. This will be just as important in the sleep-deprived newborn months, especially with school starting for Avery and Callie just five days after my due date. Part of my organizing is a chore-training campaign with the girls. They’ve always helped in the kitchen and in caring for their personal space and belongings (though not terribly consistently), but now they’re old enough to do more, and more independently. Mom, if I whined as much as these hooligans do sometimes, all I can say is, I’m being sufficiently punished for that.

7. Get a priesthood blessing from my husband and maybe my father too. I read this call for stories about spirituality in birth, and realized, again and anew, how inadequately I prepared for birth previously. One of the tenderest moments of my life was when I asked for a blessing from Tom in Cairo before my first miscarriage, but I did not even think about asking for a blessing before my three deliveries. I hope this doesn’t mean that I’m not a very spiritual or faithful person, but the alternative, that I viewed childbirth as something that would just happen to me, something that would be “done” by my doctor and therefore not anything I needed help in “doing” is just as incompatible with my vision of who I am.

There are two things I’m worried about as the birth gets closer. I’m worried about the pain, and I’m worried about feeling inhibited in acting instinctively/naturally and asking for/receiving comfort measures for the pain other than a socially-acceptable epidural. Despite the numerous reassurances I’ve received from almost every single woman I’ve spoken to who has some experience (as a laboring women, nurse, or midwife) with the hospital I’ll be at — that it is a natural-birth-friendly institution, I can’t forget the things I’ve heard and read about the  significance of the fundamental decision I’ve made to give birth in a hospital, despite being pretty convinced after extensive reading and research that both the baby and I would be more comfortable and just as safe at home.

Still, that’s the decision I’ve made based on Tom’s and my feelings/perspective/experience, and other circumstances such as what our health insurance covers and our distance from a hospital in case of true emergency, etc. It’s a bit disconcerting (in a cognitive dissonance sort of way) to read (and believe) a book like Birth as An American Rite of Passage and still plan to give birth in a hospital, but no other compromise presents itself to me as more reasonable given all the specific factors of my present life and understanding.

I feel lucky to not be worried about my body’s ability to give birth vaginally. Especially after reading Birthing the Easy Way and talking to my cousin who’s had two c-sections and three homebirths, it’s clear that many natural-childbirthers have more logical reason for concern; I admire their courage. I got lucky three times: despite welcoming any and all interventions, things went as well as possible. So it’s not my body I’m worried about, but my brain’s ability to turn off, surrender, relinquish control not to an institution or authority figure but to my own body’s natural wisdom and design.

For half of the fast we used no air-conditioning; it was cool most of June, so this wasn’t a hardship, except the day it was 92 degrees. A week later, Tom’s allergies (probably the cottonwood trees) were so bad he took a sick day and ponied up for prescription Allegra. We shut our windows and installed a high-tech air filter. I’m ashamed to admit just how happy I was to have that excuse for using the a/c. I said at first that we’d set the thermostat at 80, so we’d still be doing something, but that cool air is seductive (especially in the third trimester of pregnancy). Soon I had it set on 78, then 76, and finally 74. I can now say that I would rather do without internet than air-conditioning. (Obviously) I am weak, but physical discomfort is utterly disruptive to any sort of thought process.

Our fast was initially prompted by a high electricity bill that led us to lower our thermostat in winter to 60 degrees and cancel our TV. It was astonishing how easily and quickly we adapted to those two changes — and how much I liked it (especially how the kids act when there’s no TV; though Tom and I continued to spend too much time online and watching hulu). We wanted more of that. I also especially wanted to re-set our expectations and habits to a more “natural” standard, waking with the sun, sleeping with the sun, paying attention to each other and the world around us, instead of all the wonderful things available electronically. Summer time was perfect for this, with school out and everyone eager to be outside anyway, and with the solstice (longest day of the year) falling right in the middle.

Here are some of the things I learned (see 1. Old-fashioned sorrows are (maybe) easier to bear in old-fashioned settings.):

2. Kids (and husbands) are impressionable; make rules wisely (and sparingly). A few days into the fast, Callie (5 1/2) walked up the bare basement stairs towards the kitchen for a glass of water. Near the top she stumbled and hurt herself. Her cries pierced the darkness and Tom told her to turn on the light. She wailed that she couldn’t because we were doing our electricity fast. I said she could make an exception because  she was hurt (and I was too lazy to get out of bed). She insisted that no, she could not.

A few weeks later Tom was home alone for one night while I slept over at my moms with the girls (Grandma has a swimming pool, and a dog). He told me later that, in addition to missing us, he had the strongest feeling of guilt over even thinking of turning the lights on. Even though it was my fast, and it was a completely subjective thing, not a sin or an objectively “wrong” thing to do, the imposition of guilt was a real thing.

3. Exceptions are a slippery slope. A couple Sundays ago as we walked to church, Callie shouted, “Mommy, you’re wearing flip-flops.” I don’t let the girls wear flipflops to church; it’s one of my very few clothing rules. Lucy’s (3 1/2) sparkle jeans under her dress get a pass because she is a little obsessed with layering, even in summer. Callie and Avery (9) are sometimes ball-gown fancy, sometimes playground pinafore casual. But there are no flipflops. Except, I told Callie, when you’re eight months pregnant. When you are eight months pregnant, I told her, you can wear flipflops to church too. Callie thought about that for several moments then proclaimed, “Mommy has a lot of exceptions.”

4. Maybe you’re a night owl, or maybe you’ve just never gotten a good night’s sleep. Tom has never woken up on his own (without an alarm or serious nagging) before 9 am in our twelve years of marriage. He’s always been a stay-up-until-this-one-last-bug-is-worked-out kind of guy. During our electricity fast, he still used his laptop to do freelance projects, but there was no TV on hulu, and I was asleep by 10:30 every night (except the few nights I stayed up to finish a book).  So even though he often was  up later than the rest of us, within a week, he started waking up around 6:30 every morning. The habit (what he thought was his natural rhythm) of his entire adult life was broken in a matter of days. And? Now that we’ve been catching up on Friday Night Lights? It’s 9 am less than a week later, and he’s sound asleep.

5. There’s more light outside even if you think your house has good windows. The sun goes down around 9 pm before and after the summer solstice in Mountain Daylight Time. Twilight lasts another half an hour. Before it got really hot, I resented nightfall. It meant I couldn’t see to read anymore. I was quickly resigned to not being able to finsh the dishes or hang the laundry if I waited too long, though some nights I did both by candlelight if I was in the mood. Other times I could shrug and say, I’ll do it tomorrow. Now it’s time to do something else.

Most nights I go walking with Chrysanthemum at the beginning of twilight. It’s simply gorgeous. The silhouette of the mountains, the perfume of the relieved grasses and trees sighing into the dark, the silvery fountains of the powerful sprinklers on the golf course. If we’re not walking, I usually end up angling my book towards our south-facing windows for the last smudge of light, or join Avery outside on the porch swing, because it is always surprisingly lighter outside.

6. Kids will take all the time you give them. I thought I’d have tons of free time once my computer was off. I knew I wasted time online. I knew it was bizarre (unhealthy, robotic, unnatural) how I’d head straight for the computer upon waking or returning home, during breakfast and lunch, hypnotizing myself out of hearing anything said around me until I’d gotten a hit from the internet. I was a little worried that I’d be bored. I read several books, books I might not have picked up or stuck through if I’d had easier entertainment options available, but I tried not to become lost in them as a substitute for the internet, but to instead really experiment with being more present (if you can forgive the phrase).

I trained my kids early to be self-entertaining (actually, I just selectively-neglected them into it). They play together or alone, they had already adjusted to no TV, and they coped with no movies and no computer games easily. How they ever had time for TV before is a mystery. They are busy from waking to sleeping playing, playing, playing. But I found myself suggesting card games (Uno, Skipbo), and reading more books to Callie and Lucy. Avery has her Saxon math to complain about, and Callie is more confident reading, looking to me for confirmation of a word less and less often. Lucy wants to read her books to us at naptime, and she is adorable. We all agree she is adorable, and when she smothers the baby in my tummy with kisses, I’m even more impatient for August.

But I need, and deserve, time of my own. I love to wake up before everyone else and read or write, or water the garden or even weed when it’s still deliciously cool. My kids won’t be harmed if they know there are times I can’t help them right now or even play with them all afternoon, but it was nice to not hear, not once in six weeks, dimly, outside my bubble, “Mommy’s on her computer.” It’s about balance, of course (all these buzzwords; sorry), and about not doing anything simply because it’s habit (unless you’re sure it’s a great habit), but because it’s something you’ve conciously, recently, decided to do.

7. It’s really frustrating to write longhand. It’s freeing to write where no one will ever see it, to record the day without thought of elegant structure or narrative meaning. But after awhile, it’s a little unrewarding to write only for yourself. Perhaps I have lost all my readers (it appears so from the dearth of comments on my last posts), and I don’t plan to do any of the things you’ll learn to do at blogging conferences to attract readers (besides try to write better), but somehow the act of making something public is enough, in itself, to lend significance. Perhaps if the fast had gone on longer, I would’ve learned the opposite.

8. It’s just as easy to lose your temper with the lights off. I’ve written a lot about my anger problem. For the first little bit of the fast, the novelty was enough to temper my impatience. That, and I read the fabulous book Soft-Spoken Parenting: 50 Ways Not to Lose Your Temper With Your Kids. A few days after finishing it, I realized I need to read it again, and again. The point is — no change of scenery or circumstance lets us escape ourselves, our habits and vices. I noticed when the kids spent an afternoon watching movies this week (I was the first one down with a nasty stomach virus) that they then fought for two hours afterwards. Of course an occasional movie isn’t bad, but something happens in their brains when they’re plugged in like that for long periods of time.

I had hoped that the same sort of purging of aggression would happen with me when I unplugged. But somehow little things still bugged me (though I reacted a lot better to interruption). It helped when I was fully rested (almost impossible at this point in pregnancy, no matter how much I sleep, but something I have to work on as we head into the newborn months), and when I took the time to write in my journal, to record the good things that happen.

9. Sometimes it’s easier to see in the dark. When you know it’s going to get dark soon, or hot soon or cold soon, you think about how you really want to spend your waking hours, your “good” hours, your daylight hours. I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by flickering candlelight and had some inkling of what it would mean to be rationed 1 candle per family per week. I know the majority (?) of the world’s population lives daily without electricity (or even worse, plumbing). An electricity fast is a first-world luxury, a probably unthinkably arrogant gimmick if you’ve ever experienced the real lack. I haven’t talked to Tom or the kids about this, but we need to donate our savings from this fast to Heifer International or something, in order to make it good for something real.

Summer is more than half over. Our electricity fast is definitely over, but I plan to do a month-long TV/movie/computer fast at the beginning of every summer. It’s so easy to go back to turning on lights, to putting off important things because you know you can extend the day as long as you like. It makes me wonder what else we could give up (could I give up the kinds of foods I like to eat?), how much we could do without, how our lives would be different if we thought in terms of What don’t I need? instead of How can I get that one thing I want? (I should confess here, maybe, that I love the fancy Belgian waffle maker Tom got me for my birthday in June and that I now want a breadmaker, oh, and a new vacuum.)

This reminded me a little of our first month in Egypt, when Avery was 18 months old. The power went out the first night we were there (and many subsequent nights). Avery and I were cooling off in the tub at an odd jet-lag-induced hour. We were pretty insulated from real life there, in our nice ex-pat neighborhood. But it was still jarring and exotic and reflection-causing. I’m not saying I want to impose bizarre lifestyle restrictions on myself and my family in order to be different or just to switch up our otherwise-mundane lives, but neither do I want to keep doing what we’ve always done if there’s a good reason to experiment deliberately.

I’ve also started having numb hands at night. Tara had pain with her numb hands (if I remember rightly) and they stayed numb for a long time, so she had to wear braces and get steroid injections in her wrists with her last pregnancy (again, if memory serves). I don’t have any pain and the feeling comes back within minutes, and it’s at least better (and more interesting) than volcanic heartburn, so I’ll take numb hands any day of the week and twice on Mother’s Day.

I have a new goal to not go to bed until the dishes and laundry are caught up. The rest of the chores can be put off to the weekend, but I love waking up to a kitchen empty of dirties; it’s so much easier to start stuffing my face with pancakes that way. Tom thinks my new laundry plan (which includes having each family member take up and put away clean clothes right after scriptures each night and bringing down all dirty clothes after their bath) is inefficient because it involves daily trips with the hamper and daily processing of two batches of laundry instead of a marathon of washing and drying on Saturday followed by a marathon of folding on Sunday night.

I pointed out that at various times in the past few years he has agreed to help out more around the house by doing either the laundry or the dishes. This translates into him getting his hands wet approximately twice a month (usually right after I have an emotional breakdown, which is certainly effective, but also quite exhausting). So I don’t think he should be criticizing any method that involves me doing the work.

And finally (I’m remembering why I don’t usually do random posts like this, since humorous tidbits aren’t my forte), Chrysanthemum went out of town, leaving me with no walking partner. I had such plans. To walk anyway, or to work in the yard, at least, which is good exercise because I need to move some dirt and filling the wheelbarrow halfway leaves me completely out of breath. But shockingly I have  been glued to this chair for the past two days. And even more surprisingly, I feel terrible. Why is it so hard to do what we know we should in order to feel good?

But just in case anyone else feels as embarrassed and frustrated as I do about days and weeks of wanting to do nothing, of feeling like part of me is holding her breath under water, just waiting, waiting for this to be over — this THIS that I was so excited for — well, I was never excited for the pregnancy except as a means to get the baby, but you know — I wanted to be pregnant, so it seems so awful to hate it so much, but I do. I hate feeling like my body is not my own, I hate worrying so constantly that something isn’t right, won’t be right with the person who is in my body but soon won’t be.

A dear friend sent an email today about my worrying-Tom-was-dead post, telling me kindly to stop worrying. I know she’s right, I know everything will be fine (or won’t be, but worrying won’t help anything), but I think that’s part of the problem with depression (or pregnancy-worry, whatever it is that I have) — you know things are better than they seem, you know life is better than it seems, that life is acutely fabulous and the sun is shining and your early spring garden is growing despite the temperamental hail, and yet you don’t feel that. You don’t feel as good as you know you should.

Feeling cloudy inside when it is sunny outside and part of you, the part that’s not underwater, is trying to coax the rest of you out to soak up that sun is exhausting.

I don’t know what to do, except go for a walk and let the kids sleep in Tom’s side of the bed when he’s gone and eat Marshmallow Mateys for dinner and damn the high fructose corn syrup. Or is it the artificial color #5? I forget. (Or the grating bites of marshmallow that melt sugar on the tongue but cringe the teeth?)

Spring is here. I’m ready for Easter now (before it was too cold and dead and snowy), I’m ready for school to be out and evenings to be long. I’m ready to have all my chicks about me as we wait for baby Scout. Susan told me yesterday that Sally can have baby Scout in her room for now, but when the baby is three she should move in to Susan and Spot’s place across the hall.

I just realized that the changing of the seasons in Bright Star was almost as spectacular and intrinsic to the plot as the music. Keats isn’t my favorite poet (I don’t read as much poetry as I should to even talk of “favorites”), but from his Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone

I am not a poet or musician or artist, but I have heard the song unsung, and when it is silent, muted or dim, nothing seems profitable. The kids may amuse, friends may entertain, Tom may say, unrehearsed, that he will miss me, which sounds an obvious thing but is a real, worth-mentioning thing when one has been in the habit of marriage for almost twelve years, and still, I want nothing more than sleep, though every time I wake reminds me I cannot simply stay in sleep.

My rhubarb plant merely existed last year. I planted her (if you have seen a rhubarb’s first nubile sprouts in spring you know she is a she) late in the summer and mourned her stagnant unexploding complacency. But this year, while the spring is yet locked in battle with unrelenting winter, she is bursting, before it is warm enough, before I expected or worried or coaxed or pleaded, she is there, all ruby red at crinkled heart and verdant leaf at stem.

It is disconcerting to have a winter of the mind as nature yawns and groans and my belly ripens and readies this fruit I crave. I remember (from The Outsiders, I think) Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In my front yard I have daffodils and hyacinth and tulips almost unfurled I sowed last fall. I also have some green stuff I nearly yanked this week, but Chrysanthemum thought it might be ground cover hardily growing from the last owner two summers ago. I called my across-the-street neighbor with the emerald lawn over for a consult and she agreed: it’s not quite hen and chicks, but it certainly isn’t a weed. A few days later I remembered the columbine I transplanted from another neighbor’s offering in July. Columbine that would have withered and dried before the mallow and thistle beached on the sidewalk next to it hit the trash.

I forgot, and then remembered, just in time to leave it be, to anticipate the delicate pastel blooms. There’s no sign of them at all, no bud, no hint, no taller, centered stems. Just green, and a knowing that last year there were flowers. This year there probably will be too.

The baby sat in his high chair while I ate my hot soup; he’s getting to the grabby stage and I didn’t want him burned. Then he got tired, and she took him up and laid him down for a nap. There was not even a peep from him. I asked if he always goes down for naps that easily. She has read the same sleep book I like, and said she just watches for signs of tiredness and lays him down, and he goes to sleep.

Mothers know it is not always that easy. And I said it makes me wonder, when you have a “difficult” baby, how much of it is what you do, how you act/react, and how much of it is the baby’s temperament and needs and developing stages. (And yours.)

I have always not co-slept with my babies. I might be philosophically attracted to the idea that babies can/should learn to self-soothe and go to sleep on their own, but I also like the idea — in the abstract — that babies and mothers are bonding even in sleep. Since both things seem good and sound, pragmatics decided it.

We started off with Sally’s crib next to our bed, but the first night I half-dozed while listening to her snurgle and then jerked awake each time the snurgle stopped. She moved to her own room the next day.

She still loves having her own room, now because her younger sisters can be locked out of ruining her stuff.

With this pregnancy, I can take a long afternoon nap and still fall asleep during scriptures at 8:30 pm. I stagger to bed and soon Spot and Susan are climbing into Daddy’s side. They know the rules: you can sleep in Mom’s bed as long as you hold still and don’t make a sound. And don’t touch the pillows that surround the grouchy queen.

They fall asleep quickly. Sometimes I have to warn gently: “Do you need to go to your own room?” Susan lies back, closes her eyes and they both forget the enormous amount of playing that has to be accomplished in their own bed before surrendering to sleep.

I rest my hand on Spot’s tummy and feel her breathing. (The fan from the bathroom and the fan at the head of the bed disguise any incipient snurgles). And we all sleep better, together.

Sometime in the night when I reach my hand over, it’s a harder, hairier body, and I know Tom has carted them off and taken their place. I plug his nose when he snores, or prod him to roll over. He is warm and big and fills the bed nicely. But . . .

I need a louder fan.

One thing that has made this experiment possible (besides financial necessity, which is always a great motivator) is that my relationship to food has changed this pregnancy. Instead of wanting to try new things every day, I am often just trying to get something on the table. It has to be relatively healthy, and I’m finally feeling up to making some of my favorites (bread, yogurt) from scratch again, but now that shopping and cooking are more of a chore that just has to be done on a more regularized schedule, it’s actually less of a hassle than it sometimes was before, and I find it just as satisfying to make a meal plan once a week, as it once was to get a craving and make that dish hours later. A case of restriction feeding rather than starving the creative impulse.

A couple other things: being on a strict budget ($150 a week total for all grocery/discretionary/household/entertainment spending, except gas, which I’ve cut back a lot on incidentally) makes me realize how little we need, especially in the way of prepared or convenience foods (or toilet paper. Kidding). Also, once I make a rule for myself, it becomes a matter of honor to stick to it, and since it’s not a forever thing but more in the manner of a goal, it’s almost fun. So we may not have any fresh fruit on Friday night: that’s a good excuse to eat the canned apricots in the pantry. $150 sounds like a lot to me; I’m sure many frugal people are able to live well on less, and before this month I would’ve guessed (hoped) I spent that little (though my bank account knew better).

But what I always want to know (especially when I’m in a rut) is what’s for dinner? I once made a seven-week meal plan that carefully balanced beef/chicken/fish/vegetable meals with rice/noodle/potato/bread accompaniments, but then I never felt like making things in that proscribed order. So now I look at cookbooks and AllRecipes and TastyKitchen for ideas and take things one week at a time. I usually add a salad or veggie sticks or frozen peas and corn or green beans or brussels sprouts as a side. (Costco has the best frozen corn ever. My kids like brussels sprouts so much I start to worry they’re aliens until they do something kid-like and complain about onions. In the spaghetti sauce! Call 911!)

My sister keeps binders of recipes and always makes notes of what worked and who liked what, along with the date and any alterations. I can’t imagine going to that much work without hoping that someone, somewhere will learn from my misadventures, so here you go:

What was  for dinner last week (I can’t remember the order, and I can’t assign days beforehand either. That just seems too regimented):

Chicken Piccata (The chicken and noodles were a big hit, but the sauce was a little tangy for the kids, and, fine, me too. I added lots of extra cream and broth, which made a huge quantity of sauce to languish in the fridge.)

Spaghetti Squash Lasagna (I make this just like regular lasagna, only I substitute baked spaghetti squash for the noodles.)

Sloppy Joes (It’s a long, tragic story, but I accidentally added about a 1/2 cup of salt to this recipe, (which I had doubled), so then I quadrupled it. It was still too salty, so nearly three pounds of sloppy-joed hamburger are in the freezer waiting for redemption. This is a good, easy recipe for serious comfort food, especially on homemade buns.I’ll make it again, once time has dimmed our memories.)

Chicken, Vegetable, and Barley Soup (This was good. I threw in the leftover sauce from the chicken piccata which gave it a lemony tang. My kids weren’t impressed with the barley. They wanted “noodles.” A couple days later I threw in some cooked ramen and they fell on it like devouring beasts).

BBQ chicken pizza and a pepperoni one for the kids, though Susan preferred the chicken. I used the 5 minute artisan bread as the crust, and it was the best pizza crust I’ve ever had, soft and chewy on the top, crusty and crunchy on the bottom. I didn’t have purple onions, and I’d used up my parsley, but I sprinkled fresh basil on it. Basil is good on any pizza.)

What’s for dinner this week (again, not in this order. Probably):

Thai Curry Chicken and Rice (I bought green curry paste for this — now I could make a rainbow of curries — and I’ll probably have cilantro and limes on the side, because it’s Thai, and I love cilantro and limes. Oh, and I’ll use chicken that we canned this summer, which means it’ll be on the shredded side, but with strong flavors like this it’ll be a fine economy.)

Stephanie’s Macaroni and Cheese (I’ve wanted to try a baked macaroni and cheese with swiss cheese even though I don’t like swiss cheese by itself. Stephanie makes good food, so this seems like a good one to try.)

Spinach and Feta Pita Bake (I have a great recipe for pita bread from Chrysanthemum, and this’ll be a nice change from the (delicious) chicken salad we’ve been stuffing our pockets with.)

BBQ chili (Yes! Inspiration strikes for my too-salty sloppy-joed hamburger in the freezer. I bought dried black and red beans and have 5 gallons of dry pinto beans. Beans will soak up that salt like nothing else. And Tom has been asking for BBQ chili ever since we had it at that church cook-off when my white chicken chili took the Honorable Mention. Ingrate. I’ll also make Marcy’s cornbread that’s really more like corncake even with the buttermilk. I haven’t found a great recipe online for BBQ chili, so unless someone has a link, I’ll just throw stuff in.)

Crab Salad (This is one of my favorite pasta salads ever. I use sugar instead of artificial sweetener, of course, and fresh herbs whenever possible instead of the dried, and twice as many vegetables as noodles. I’ll used canned chicken in this too, because even fake crab costs more than what I’ve got in my pantry, and the kids aren’t crazy about crab anyway.)

In conclusion

I hope that gives you some ideas, even if what not to do, and at the least, I can look back at this in a few months and have two weeks planned for me. If you have any (easy, cheap, delicious) favorites, I’d be most grateful for a link or notes. I try to let each child pick one of the five meals, and involve them in cooking with me. I find they’re more likely to try things when they’re invested that way, plus I can’t wait for the day when each of them has a day of the week to cook from start to finish. Five meals works out well; then we have leftovers for Tom’s lunches and ours, a night for quesadillas or breakfast for dinner, and a night for cleaning-out-the-fridge-you-don’t-get-anything-else-until-this-casserole-is-gone.

The principal said (third-hand) that kindergarten was the hardest grade to teach because the kids come in which such a wide variety of skill levels, not to mention life backgrounds (and I would add innate aptitudes and interests). One kid comes in knowing how to read, another doesn’t know her letters. One kid can estimate a grocery bill, another has spent his early years taking apart small appliances.

This was meant to be comforting, I think, to Chrysanthemum, but it is troubling to me. I loved public school, every year of it, despite needing numerous accomodations that my mother had to fight for sometimes.

But what does this say about the other grades — that all the variety and difference and interest has been boiled down to a state minimum? Even if my kids are below average compared to the standards, what of their likes and desires, their individual outlierliness in pretending?

I know I always get extra-antsy about homeschooling in the spring, which is one of the indicators that summer is on its way (just as a return to public-school-benefits-listing in August is a sign that I have had enough of kids around me every hour), but this is just . . . not right.

I looked down at myself after waving to her. I was all dressed up for my morning walk, yoga pants stretched over my pregnant bum (yes, I get a pregnant bum) and my old red fleece sweatshirt that was a hand-me-down from Mimi’s husband ten years and nine moves ago. It has holes in it from flying ashes while camping, but it is still my favorite sweatshirt.

The pockets on both sides were weighed down below the hem, sticking out, bouncing on my legs, with a small water bottle and an apple. I had my ugly beanie and funny old-lady mittens on. My face was not as clear as my pregnancy skin often is. Oh, and I was wearing my (again favorite) prescription sunglasses, also ten years old, that are quite unfashionably-shaped, but they are polarized so they give everything a soft rose tint.

And I thought, I can’t wait until I’m 50 and I can wear whatever I want, and do whatever I want, and no one will think anything of the eccentric old lady down the street. (Apologies to my young 50-year old readers.)

Then I realized two things: I already do wear and do what ever I want (obviously, mostly).

And: I am becoming my mother. (hurray!)

—

This post started out as a much-too-long comment on Charlotte’s blog.

I said that sounded good, in fact there are already several (probably hundreds of) great sites out there (including #gno and TwitterMoms.com on Twitter and pages on Facebook, and Today’s Mama and the Motherhood, and various ning social sites, not to mention local message boards and forums and pretty soon it was clear that he didn’t have a clear vision for his company, and he hadn’t done any market research (how sad is it that I think I used that term correctly in a conversation) to see what’s already out there and what he could offer different and special.

What he does have, basically, is the domain SuperMom.com, and the conviction that this could be big, really big. And you know what? It could be, with the right person (a woman who happens to be a mom probably), the right vision, the right strategy, a higher purpose (donating 10% to charity or something), the right relationships with social media gurus, and time and luck.

He wanted me to be that person. I said I’d work on it if he’d pay me. He offered me a share in the company (which is basically, share in the domain SuperMom.com), which might be an opportunity, I suppose, if I could make it my passion.

But it’s not, and I can’t.

I told him about Kalli’s quilting bee I went to last month and Sue’s new blogger charity posse and how the “networks” I participate in are all “organic.” I’m on Twitter, yeah, but only because I enjoy it and there are fun people on there who have interesting ideas or happenings to share. (Yes, a lot of it is beyond banal, but how about this tweet from @QueenScarlett yesterday: 5YO:I like going to Church to have a play date with Jesus. Me:What? 5YO:Church is His house. It’s a reverent play date & Jesus is not whiny.)*

Then I said, to be honest, (prepare yourself): The name “SuperMom” is kind of off-putting to me. I have no interest in being a SuperMom, or an AlphaMom or a Type-A Mom. I even lost interest in being a What About Mom? Mom, though sometimes I think of going back to that.

He still insisted that that person with the vision could be me. I demurred, told him about the social media club of slc and Utah Valley, where he could go and meet people who might be more visionary.

He handed me his business card, told me to think about it, and let him know if I was interested in being a part of the next big thing.

I’m interested, all right, in what people do and think they can do online.

But I lost his card somewhere on the ride home.

—

Here’s what I learned at the Seth Godin thing, for Lauren (@supermomcentral), because I told her I was writing a post about said event, and this post really isn’t much about that, except to say that I know it’s important to have passion, if you want to succeed in business (life). Seth Godin says if you can write down what your job is then “they” can find someone to do it cheaper. And that public school is a scam perpetuated by factory-minded people who want to produce a compliant, obedient, not-thinking-for-themselves workforce.

And that fear is what keeps us from doing great things, from creating great art (the kind that is being awesome at whatever you do because you’re doing it your way). And then he said that the emotionally hard work of being an artist (again, not a painter but a DO-er, a Create-or, etc) is doing it even when you don’t feel like doing it, which I need to think about a lot because I haven’t felt like writing or doing anything lately, and I like to blame my evening pregnancy sickness for that, but really it’s probably also fear — fear of failure, and also fear of success. (Which is nonsense, because really, who fears success?)

The other big take-away I got will be the subject of my post “Lessons for being a Mom from Seth Godin” if I ever get around to writing it, but since I might not, the upshot was I started thinking that probably I can be an artist as a mother, I can do it the way only I can, I can do it my way, a way that can’t be written down in interchangeable parts. I can stop demanding blind obedience (not that I am successful at that) and instead encourage making good choices and trying new things, and I can see that the messier my house is, the better, because it means those kids are DOing something.

A lot of what Seth said sounded like Ayn Rand to me, and I wonder if that means I didn’t get it at all or if he is a not-so-secret Galtist. Because he talked a lot about giving and generosity, but it sounded like non-coerced giving, not namby-pamby “giving back.”

And finally, Seth actually asked me a question, but I didn’t know the answer. I did, however, know the answer to the number one question asked at events like this: “Where is the bathroom?”

—

* If you’re on the fence about Twitter, (and Seth Godin today said it was terrible, that it was what kept people from creating their art (not arty art but whatever it is that you do that no one tells you to do), but you could say that about any distraction that has the potential, if misused, to become a time-suck), consider this:

Fun Happenings that were a direct result of Twitter:

That time I spoke at BYU about Twitter because Kelly King Anderson asked for a substitute on Twitter.

That time I met @sahans on Twitter, who happens to live just 30 minutes away and then she fed my family one night and another night we got to go to the Timpanogos Storytelling Winter Concert for free because she knows how to Direct Message me on Twitter.

All of the times I have discussed meeting at Barry’s in Spanish Fork for Malibu Chicken and the best French fries in the world, and yet the one time I drove down there I was too grungy to ask anyone to meet me on Twitter.

That time I heard about the #gno at Seo.com and I took Chrysanthemum and we ate pizza and laughed with @jet_set and @petitelefant.

That time I attended the Wasatch Woman of the Year luncheon and got all inspired because Pam Baumeister asked for volunteers on Twitter.

That time I attended the Start-up Princess Seth Godin lunch because KKA asked for volunteers on Twitter.

—

I can’t list all of the Utah people I follow on Twitter because I am lazy, but here are the ones who were at lunch today. Just go to Twitter.com and add these fine folk: @jillkaufusi, @sahans, @inevergrewup, @sweetlifeinth, @JoanieAtwater,@emihill, @makeitworkmom, @wasatchwoman, @startupprincess, @bigbags, @thomallen, @newspapergrl, @cuteculturechic, @JylMomIF (I didn’t see her but I’m believin’ she was there), and if I forgot anyone it is because I am a terrible person and you should forgive me (if you even see this because probably if you read me, and if I know that you read me, I would probably have remembered seeing you there today, and so really it’s your fault. Not that all of these people read me religiously, but they should.)

You should also follow @LauraMoncur, because she is the first person in social media that I met in Utah, she’s really nice, and she makes a living online. I know! Crazy, huh?

Then I told her all about Penelope’s discussion of The Pioneer Woman, because we both love The Pioneer Woman. (Who doesn’t?) Poor Chrysanthemum probably gets a little tired of my telling her stuff during our walks. But the juxtaposition of Pioneer Woman and Penelope Trunk is absolutely fascinating. Pioneer Woman lives on a ranch, has kids, writes a popular (understatement) blog. Penelope Trunk lives now on a farm, has kids, writes a popular blog. They’re similar in age and superficial candor and charm in their writing. Penelope writes about more hard things, more sad things, than Pioneer Woman, or maybe she just writes about them more darkly.

Penelope’s post about the Pioneer Woman pointed out several things that Pioneer Woman does on her blog that make her so likeable (presumably in contrast to Penelope’s more abrasive, though equally appealing persona). Pioneer Woman never “disrespects her guy” and she’s optimistic. The difference between the two blogs boils down to this: “that [Penelope is] drawn to writing about the fights, and the Pioneer Woman is drawn to writing about pies, and feeding the Marlboro Man.”

The women differ in other areas: Penelope works more than full-time at her fancy career and Pioneer Woman homeschools her four children (though surely she also has a lot of household help, and spends plenty of time working on her blog and recipe book business). But the thing I think they differ in most is that Penelope is so unhappy much of the time and Pioneer Woman is not only happy but content and satisfied (though never smug, which would be unforgivable). If I thought their blogs were mirror images of themselves and their lives, I’d want to talk to Penelope every day, but I’d want to be Pioneer Woman.

(I’m really not a blog stalker. I just take my fictional characters very seriously. If I could choose anyone to be, it’d be Anne, or Valancy, or maybe even Emily, though she was monumentally too proud. Probably Valancy. Because of all that money.)

Reading Penelope I always think of how I want to do this little or big thing differently. Even though, like her, I am drawn to writing about the hard things. Of course I love and appreciate my husband. Since he doesn’t wear chaps and I don’t know how to work my camera, and because of course I love and appreciate him, what interests me is the things he does that make my otherwise-fairytale life frustrating in the extreme. Like, he won’t take a class to learn how to finish our basement even though our fourth kid will be squished in our current 1600 square feet.

But I want to be happy, like Pioneer Woman. Somehow I want to retain my critical, curious thinking like Penelope but gain a joie de vivre over every little thing like PW. Because what I like about Pioneer Woman most, maybe, is that even though she’s obviously rich and lucky (and talented), I still don’t hate her. Somehow she has me convinced that even if she were stuck in a dingy tenement with four rickets babies, she’d still be making a beautiful life.

So I have a goal to disrespect my guy less. Beginning with three things recently that made me glad to be once again bearing his child. (Here, if I were Pioneer Woman, I’d say something about my ovaries singing, or something.)

His touch: I have been less-than-not-interested in anything relating to connubial bliss for the past month. He brushes against me in the hall and my tummy quivers, and not in the good way. Then last week, as we lay in bed, him on the laptop, me reading a book, I reached for his hand and just felt his palm. His skin was warm and pleasantly dry. A little rough from work, but smooth and tingly. I rubbed it for a couple minutes and then turned back to my book. He laughed: “That’s enough holding hands, huh?”

His little women: Of course we want a boy this time around. Of course. But now that I know how different each child is, that we won’t be repeating ourselves with another little girl, I am eager either way. Tom said last Sunday morning that he’d had a dream we had our baby, and she was old enough to be crawling around, and she was so cute. When we think of names, at the dinner table, he says silly things like Zeus and Wolf, and then he says he really likes Mia too.

His devotion: Lucy had croup Saturday night, and Tom was up with her several times, wrapping her in a blanket and sticking her head in the freezer. She breathed easier downstairs (where it’s always cooler), and he wanted to be sure he heard her if she needed him, so they slept on the living room couch. Then he got up early and took the other kids to church.

(These are old pictures, but there’s something about snow that makes my camera not work.)

So we were talking about pregnancy last night, because I wanted an early start monopolizing the conversation. I am sicker this time than ever before, and I weigh a lot more. I weigh more at the beginning of this pregnancy than I did at the end of my first pregnancy nine years ago. Though I am only 8 1/2 weeks along, I feel encumbered when I bend over, out of breath when I climb the stairs, and nauseated beyond belief at food that smelled good an hour ago.

My body image/contentment is at an all-time low, especially as I know how important good health and activity are to my labor/delivery/recovery and mental well-being.

Also, I just feel fat and ugly, and it makes me sad.

I mentioned my friend Beth who is suffering the hemorrhoids at the end of her pregnancy, and how she can’t understand how some women love being pregnant. I love feeling the baby move, hearing the heartbeat, and thinking about the new baby, but I do not enjoy being pregnant.

So my friend who is staying here told me that she liked being pregnant because it was the one time she was proud of her body. She’s pretty happy with her legs and arms in general, but her middle has always been a trouble section, with dips and rolls and when she is pregnant and that’s all smoothed out by the baby bump, she is happy with her body. She feels beautiful.

She is in awe that her body can work so well to grow a beautiful baby, and she just feels happy and proud, Look What I Can Do!

Good point, I thought. It will sound even better in the morning, when I am on the other side of this nocturnal barfiness.

About an hour later Chrysanthemum was here to watch Fringe with us, and we came across a post inviting shocked! outrage! over these Cotton Mother Dolls that Rixa highlighted (very favorably) a year ago.

My friend obliged, saying there was something wrong about that, the dolls are gross, and why would you want your kids to see that? My initial reaction to Rixa’s post was that the dolls were a little scary, but that was a year ago, and I am always ready to disagree, even with myself.

Because life is not as neat as a blog post, I stumbled around, settling with: “Would you rather your daughters played with Cheerleader Barbie who’ll teach them anorexia?”

These dolls are graphic, anatomically correct; they’re probably not for everyday play, though it’s hard for me to articulate why. Certainly they’re better than boob-job, impossibly-long-legged Barbie. Would it harm my daughters in some way to see and hold a realistic representation of a mother giving birth, on hands and knees, to a baby? Or to play with a doll that models breastfeeding?

Why don’t I worry about it when they worship everything princess, sparkly, and fake? Why don’t I cringe when we pass mannequins at the mall with Victoria’s Secret bodies and push-ups?

If pregnancy is the one time you’re proud of your body, shouldn’t that be an image to cherish?

I understand if modesty is the main concern, the feeling that the body (and its form) is too sacred to be played with on the living room carpet by cheerful, irreverent toddlers. But I hate to tell you: our Barbies are more often naked than clothed. And my girls just really don’t need to be seeing that.

And I remembered, after several years in primary, why it is often simpler to save my questions for later, if one does not want to be treated like a . . . well, like a faith-deficient troublemaker. (When in fact one is merely curious and intrigued by inconsistencies.)

Anyway, by the time Relief Society rolled around, I was properly chastised. Chrysanthemum, having taken Dick’s spot, may have heard mutterings, but mostly I was good.

Our lesson was a discussion of New Year’s resolutions, based on the three goals in the Introduction to Relief Society: increase faith, strengthen families and homes, and serve the Lord and His children. So far, so worthy a list of endeavors.

With each goal there is a quote from last year’s Ensign or Church News. The quote under “strengthen families and homes” is:

Although parenting is hard work, it is made a little easier with the gospel, said Joselyn Akana . . . from Hawaii. ‘It helps me when I have the gospel to anchor me in the caring of my family,’ she said it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like. The key to motherhood, she said, is having patience and relying on the gospel for guidance” (Lisa Christensen, “Convert Says Gospel Helps with Parenting,” Church News, June 13, 2009, 15). [sic]

I agree with a lot of this. Parenting is hard work, and the gospel makes it easier by infusing it with eternal significance and providing both interesting examples of parenting and the desire to be a good parent. And I believe whole-heartedly that the key to motherhood is patience. What dominated our discussion, though, was the middle part, that:

it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like.

If you have read this website for any amount of time, you know that I am rather preoccupied with what a mother should sound like, or rather, my regret over too often not sounding like what I think a mother should sound like.

But, no. We discussed what a mother should look like. The teacher (also our great Relief Society president who I personally love not only because she drives Sally to school every morning) started by saying her mother always got up 30 minutes before the rest of the family, no matter how early that turned out to be, even on camping trips, to do her hair and have full makeup on before anyone saw her. And (this is why I love her) she said that that always seemed like a huge waste of time to her, and that she is personally much lazier, etc, but now (and this is where things took a downturn) she thinks she maybe  should definitely be doing this.

Several sisters shared similar stories and proclaimed the virtues of treating motherhood like any other job (you’d get dressed up for a real job, right?) and having lots of mirrors in your house so you could check your hair and lipstick and your shirt to make sure you looked good all day, especially if your husband is retired and can see you anytime.

The 15-minute to one-hour power session of cleaning the house, grooming the children, and having dinner on the table right before dad comes home was extolled, and the testimonial given that if we only cared for our appearance we’d feel better about ourselves, and don’t our children (and husbands) deserve to see us looking our best?

I think about this a lot. I think about what my children, my daughters see when they look at me. I think about what they deserve, what they need, what will equip them best for life as they look at me. Especially when Susan makes some statement of discovery and description in the car about how being a doctor like grandpa or a writer like daddy are boy jobs and being a mom is a girl job.

Of course, being a mom is a girl job, and in some ways I do it it the traditional girliest manner possible. But I want Susan to know that girls can be doctors or writers too, and sometimes I worry about how I can ever really teach that to my daughters if all they see me doing is being a mom. On the other hand, I want them to see that I value them and our family enough to devote so much of my time and energy to being a mother. If this is the girl job I choose to show them, then what a mother should look like becomes fraught with meaning.

What should a mother look like?

Should a mother look like a clean home and dinner on the table and clean-faced toddlers and Mary Kay cosmetics?

In some ways (surprisingly), yes:

A clean house is worth pursuing because the cleaner and more organized things are, the easier it is for kids to play, create, and feed themselves, which leads, of course, to a messy house, but it’s a worthwhile cycle because the more the kids can do for themselves, the more I can do (and the more they are learning and growing), not because with a clean house I can be “unafraid to open the door if someone drops in.”

A table set for dinner when Dick arrives home and happy smiling children is worth working towards because it means the girls have learned to cheerfully help in the kitchen and that we have successfully worked together to create something we will all enjoy, not because it means I’ve worked behind the scenes to set a pretty stage.

Three daughters groomed for church or school (or dad’s homecoming) is a triumph when it means I have exchanged meaningful words with them while the hairbrush was in my hand, not when it means I’ve harped impatiently for them to JUST HOLD STILL.

And the Mary Kay cosmetics? Few things feel better than a hot shower after a hard workout or hours spent languishing with the morning sickness in bed.

Some things do, though. There are days, too infrequent, when Dick comes home and I look up from the book I’m reading or the story I’m writing, and I see the clock says 6:30 pm, and there are legos and Barbies on the carpet, paint and glitter glue on the table, clementine peels and yogurt containers all over the kitchen. Perhaps wet snow clothes are draped over chairs and I am smelly and muzzy from forgetting I even have a body. Dick is unperturbed (I chose well), and I wonder if I look then as a mother should — lost in thought.

I think I do.

Sally, age 8, uttered that phrase all parents wait for this week when she asked if she could read Twilight. “But all my friends are reading it,” she said, when I told her no. (The funny thing about that is that she knew to ask. She doesn’t ever ask if she can read Charlie Bone or Enola Holmes, though we did have discussions about the later Harry Potter books last July.)

I said no, in part, because after watching New Moon at midnight with Chrysanthemum, who was my midnight-Twilight buddy last year, and Sharla, I went home and made my husband very, very happy.

Not that New Moon is great; it’s actually not even as good as the first one (which itself wasn’t very good at all except as a fantasy made celluloid). Oh, the makeup’s a little better, and … well, to be honest the best thing about it is Jacob’s chest. The music (one of the highlights of the first) was horrible. Either totally unsuited to the mood of a scene or completely over-the-top. (I think I stole that line from Sharla, but I was thinking it!)

Bella’s personality and motivations, never very sympathetic or believable, take a turn to the maniacally-self-destructive-self-hating, which can’t be blamed on anything but Stephenie Meyer. But the worst part is Edward, who is okay, if whiny-emo, at the beginning, but after an hour or so of reveling in the (literal) warmth of Jacob’s friendship and muscles, Edward, at the climactic moment in Italy, stepping out into the sunlight, looks like an angel hair noodle with bits of pubic hair pepper stuck to him.

Not appealing, in other words. Emotionally, mentally, or physically. Three strikes and you’re out, baby!

I’ve never bought that romance (and I read a lot of romance) is emotional you-know-what for women. I’ll take my level-headed, laid-back, not-libido-driven, loving husband any day over any fictional character, no matter how sparkly. But as far as regular you-know-what, New Moon apparently delivers (ask Mr. Bennet).

Which is why Sally may never read the books or watch the movies. (She will, but not any time soon.)

As we stood in line for popcorn last night (the outing itself was great fun and something I should probably do more than once a year), we talked to a mom and her eight-year old daughter. The girl was really cute. Cute clothes, blonde hair in a grown-up cut, dangly earrings. She loves the books, and she will probably have a wonderful life. Sally next to her would look old-fashioned, young, and probably repressed by a censoring mother.

And to that I say: you’re welcome.

—-

For Sharla, here’s the post where I compared Stephenie Meyer and Shannon Hale.

*Image from Fanpop.

I’ll be the first to admit that all children can be quite problematic under the right circumstances (three hours of church being a prime example), but I took exception to three of the kids thusly labeled. All boys, they were also all willing and enthusiastic participants in the roadshow that Chrysanthemum directed and I scripted.

Have you ever been in charge of a church theatrical production? Turns out most people would rather postpone a desperately needed root canal (it’s the pain beforehand that slaughters sanity, not the root canal itself = never fear appropriate dental work) than sing and dance in a silly fifteen-minute patriotic skit that entails simples costumes, props, and the occasional rehearsal.

And while we’re on the subject of the roadshow as Mormon phenomenon, I’d like to point out that you can have either a family-friendly, low-key production that encourages comraderie and embodies the “wholesome recreational activities” thing, OR you can have a Broadway-ready American Idol-themed showpiece with imported dancers, expensive wardrobes and elaborate sets, and high-strung directors that inspire parents to withdraw their children, but not both. — And that if you as a stake activities committee ask for the former and then privately and posthumously wish that every ward had followed the latter’s example, you’re not going to make many friends. (But I’m not bitter.) (And American Idol is a great idea for a roadshow skit.)

Anyway, I stood up to my fellow church ladies of the primary with a “Don’t you bad talk my roadshow boys. Nobody puts baby in a corner.”

Then yesterday afternoon, a little boy from two houses down knocked on my door. We’ll call him Tommy, and note that he is apparently a bit of a challenge sometimes and that he also has gorgeous shocking blue eyes and those long eyelashes that always seem to go to the boys in the family. He’s seven. And he sang his heart out in our roadshow, bless his heart.

He knocked, holding a serious-looking shovel and an open bag of rock salt. He asked if he could shovel my driveway. I hesitated. He said he did a really good job on his own driveway, I could take a look at it, and he would like to shovel mine too. I asked him how much he charged and he looked surprised, confused.

Sally and Susan and Spot were huddled around me at the door. “What do you want to get paid for the job?” Blank stare. “How much do you want us to pay you for doing it?” “Oh,” he said, finally. Thought about it, considered. “Twenty cents?”

Sally said should give him more than that — like fifty cents at least. I was feeling generous, so after half an hour of hard work we slipped him a big one.

With several grown-up books to choose from, I agreed to lunch at Carl’s Jr with the big play place. We should have driven to a play place in the next school district over, but I am blessed to block out almost anything while reading. Two mothers near me were breastfeeding their babies.

They were both modestly covered with hooter hiders.

Some women are a lot more reasonable about this than I am. I told Chrysanthemum that if women want to wear hooter hiders, why stop there? Why not go for a burqa or a niqab? Chrysanthemum says she’s comfortable, but wants to make sure other people are comfortable too. (Which is only thoughtful.)

Saturday night I held Chrysanthemum’s baby while she ate with the menfolk after the priesthood session. I burrito’d him and rocked him in the granny recliner my mom has in her living room. I had been dying to get my hands on him all day, but I couldn’t take his sweet weight drooping in sleep for long.

I promised Chrysanthemum that I really won’t kidnap him, mostly because she knows where I live anyway, but also because when he cries, I can’t comfort him if what he wants isn’t a bounce or a bundling or a burp. I am not equipped, right now, with what he needs.

—

I’ve never loved my body (has any woman?). Stupidly, even when I was in high school and thinner than I’ll ever be again, I was unhappy with this bulge and that blemish. I was also not happy to be growing breasts. They budded and blossomed, right on time; not too big, not too small, but the mere fact of them, the changing from child to woman was not welcome. I know most girls look forward to the bras and the makeup and the high heels as markers of maturity, but I did not.

I hated that I had to wear a bra. It felt like a betrayal, a shrouding of my ribcage, a constriction of my breathing, an infringement on my freedom and rights and autonomy. And no, I wasn’t melodramatic as a teenager at all, why do you ask?

I still hate wearing a bra, but I’ve resigned myself (in public). I sometimes feel frumpy and flubbery and (I don’t say “fat” around my daughters), and I don’t mind the religious obligation I have to cover up because I have no desire to show my thighs in a short skirt or my belly in a bikini.

But at some point I started appreciating what my body can do rather than what it looks like. Function superseding form, form respected for the function that follows. My hands can knead bread, my feet can peddle the bike that pulls Susan and Spot for a ride. My womb can grow a child. (It can also miscarry, but that is normal.)

And my breasts? They sag and stretch. (I even get a few wild hairs now and then. Don’t tell Mr. Bennet.) But my breasts can feed a child all she needs for the first year of her life.

Which is almost as miraculous as never once feeling self-conscious or unsatisfied with how my milk-swelled breasts looked. Even when a stranger glimpsed a patch of blue-veined flesh.

Brother W. called me after church to ask me to speak next week. He first asked how my Mother’s Day was going, and I said, “Fine. About as well as can be expected.” And he said, “Oh of course, you’ve got some sick kids at home. How are they feeling?”

Now here’s where I would normally enlighten this poor, clueless male as to the complexity of my disdain for the Mother’s Day holiday, which starts with things as petty as a husband who is so righteously helpful to unload the dishwasher for once but ignores the stacks of pots in the sink and the clothes on the floor, and ends with the nagging feeling that, short of undergoing a personality transplant, I’ll never be exactly the sort of mother I want to be to my kids.

And in the middle is this great example of why Mother’s Day never quite works: My good friend Chrysanthemum had a rare date night planned with her husband the Saturday before Mother’s Day. She had arranged for a babysitter, and the date was simple: ice cream and a walk SANS KIDS. Then her husband was called to go help with the strawberry-chocolate dipping for the mothers’ gifts at church the next day. So instead of a date night with her husband SANS KIDS, she got to stay home and put the kids to bed by herself (a chore her husband normally does himself to give his wife her one break from the kids all day).

Now of course, the one redeeming part of that story is that Chrysanthemum is blessed to have a husband so faithful to the Lord that he would give up his Saturday night to do the service that the church asked of him, a service that was well-intentioned by all involved to show appreciation for mothers.

Still. You see why Mother’s Day is a bit fraught.

But, Gentle Reader, fear not. Before I opened my stupid mouth and explained all that, I remembered that Brother W. and his lovely, lovely wife adopted their first baby several months ago after years of waiting for a child, and I bet you –

I bet you all-the-potty-training-progress-that-Spot-has-made –

that she doesn’t hate Mother’s Day.