I feel barfy and tired (and I miss my cable, sniff), and I haven’t felt the baby move yet, so I’m a little disgruntled, but I had several things I wanted to mention. Here they are:

My new favorite blog: Women in the Scriptures. This is from a Mormon/LDS perspective, but I think would be of interest to anyone in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I’ve seen a lot of Old Testament meditations so far, and when I first discovered it, I thought: Wow, so you could, like, research and think a lot about one relatively narrow topic and then post on the Internet? It is rare (to me) that something is so theologically thought-provoking, and yet so immediately relevant to my daily life at the same time. And we could always use more discussion of the women in the scriptures.

LDS Reader Survey: Rebecca Irvine, author of Family Home Evening Adventures and Adventures with the Word of God has a quick (8 question) survey up. You should totally go take it if you’re LDS or read or have a pulse.

A Writing Contest: Rixa sent me the link to that blog (because it has fascinating thoughts on the importance of birth, something I was thinking of last Sunday, talking about Rebekah/Sarah/Leah/Rachel/Hannah/etc), and she (Rixa) is having a writing contest on her blog right now, with some fabulous prizes. The topic is Becoming a Parent, Becoming Transformed, so that’s pretty open-ended. Rixa also sent me the link to a blog called The Gift of Giving Life (also LDS and focused on birth) but I got stuck on the Women in the Scriptures one and haven’t done it justice yet.

Family Engineering Night: Thanksgiving Point is working with BYU’s engineering students to put on these family engineering nights. They’re actually half over, but we haven’t been yet, so it’s like those other ones didn’t really happen. When I got the flier from my PR contact (who was a friend at BYU) I had just finished reading The Female Brain, which my father-in-law sent me because he is under the pleasant delusion that I am a Serious Reader. I highly recommend The Female Brain, because it doesn’t try to say that women and men are exactly the same or any such nonsense. Instead, we are equal, but quite, quite different, and I learned a lot about why my three daughters make me so crazy sometimes. The book pointed out that women and girls are just as able in the sciences and math, but that they often at some point decide to enter a field that allows for more meaningful, daily interaction with others. Either way, I want to expose my girls to engineering-type things, so we’ll be going on March 15th (6 pm). There’s also one tomorrow (Thursday, 6pm).

More About that Book: In The Female Brain is this passage:

Baby girls are born interested in emotional expression. . . . You can imagine, then, the negative impact on a little girl’s developing sense of self of the unresponsive, flat face of a depressed mother — or even one that’s had too many Botox injections. The lack of facial expression is very confusing to a girl, and she may come to believe, because she can’t get the expected reaction to a plea for attention or a gesture of affection, that her mother doesn’t really like her. She will eventually turn her efforts to faces that are more responsive.

This isn’t new (the idea that girls are promiscuous sometimes if they don’t get attention/affection at home), but I thought about this a lot, since I read it during the month I was completely listless from pregnancy sickness (let’s not even talk about the disastrous afternoons I tried phenergan, which is completely depressing of all systems). But this book isn’t judgemental or anything (ok, maybe of “too many” Botox injections, but the depressed mother needs help for her sake first, for her kids’ sake, second). It examines the hormonal and neural changes that take place in a woman’s brain at each stage of life, and I will be re-reading it in coming years, as my daughters become teenagers, and as I go through the change.

Beautiful Bloggers: Stephanie was kind enough to award me this award (after I kind of shamed her into it), and I want to pass it on, but I always get award-forwarding-block. What if I forget someone? What if other people are as fragile in the ego as me? I was going to copy Charlotte’s method, but then that seemed too plagiaristic.

I stopped doing buttons and a blogroll at least a year ago, and then I feel guilty when I see someone else has my button up. So then I took down my cute buttons that Alma made for me, and now I can’t remember how to write the stupid code for one of those dumb scroll boxes and even for the code that would link you back to here if you were so inclined to put up my button. Which I’m not really expecting, because I already told you I don’t put up buttons in return. And even when I had the buttons up with code it didn’t work because I am code-impaired, so I don’t know what to tell you.

But I do have cute buttons. Here they are:

And you should, like, totally put them up on your blog and I will love you forever, especially since you have to make up your own code, and I may never reciprocate.

Hair Envy: Unless you have some physical or mental attribute I super-covet, in which case I will hound you for pictures or scientific proof and then never do anything with the pictures I told you I so desperately needed. Friends, my hair is in such a dark, dark place right now. I have two-inch dark brown and gray roots, faded highlights, bushy mullet and a wavering commitment to growing it out. So far I am standing strong, because the only way I would look as awesome as Emily with her short haircut is if I lost 50 pounds and learned to shop at Forever 21.

Doesn’t she have the best hair (long or short, but especially short) ever?

And Finally: I’m probably supposed to being doing more to pimp out this Casual Blogger Conference happening in Utah on Memorial Day Weekend (that Friday and Saturday), since I’m speaking at it. I’ll be honest — I love speaking in public. I might get a little butterfly-y right before they clip on my lapel mike (or even better, hand me the heavy, important microphone), but I can’t claim humble nerves or anything. I might not be the biggest (or seven-millionth-biggest) blogger in the world, but, dude, I have opinions on just about EVERYTHING. So, maybe that’s why they haven’t been after me to pimp more? I don’t know, but it’s too late to un-invite me! Ha! ha-ha! huh.

You should, like, totally come and stuff.

Dad: I’m betting you didn’t read to this point because this is one of my “business”-type posts, so I just want you to know that if you ask me anything that’s already been covered here, I reserve the right to not repeat myself. Love you!

please?

(How Spot gets my attention, shaking the Aspen Mills Honey Whole Wheat at my elbow while I sit at the computer, and once I turn to acknowledge her, she tacks on the please? in a high, placating voice with a fake smile.)

—

Daddy’s Girl

Susan informed me yesterday that she puts both of her socks on first, then her shoes, not one-sock, one-shoe like I do.

(I have a horror of getting interrupted in the middle of putting on my shoes — Hi, I’m a Mother — and then getting my socks wet, so one-sock-one-shoe-and-then-the-other-sock-other-shoe, is my motto. Which I didn’t realize until Susan pointed it out to me.)

But Susan is sure her method is right, or at least equally valid, because: “That’s the way Daddy does it. Daddy and I do it the same way.”

—

Sally came home from Activity Days where they did mysterious, secret things with yarn (“A potholder for Mother’s Day?” No.) and went straight back out to roller skate with the neighbor girls. At 6:15 (she was late for dinner, but dinner was even later, so I skipped the caning) she rushed into the house, flushed and breathless, having tryed Megan’s older sister’s in-line skates and not fallen once.

Why am I so relieved, ecstatic, jubilant when my kids find something easy? Wouldn’t it be better if they learned now what a hard, miserable slog life is?

(kidding.)

—

Teaching kids to do chores (cheerfully, without being asked, without nagging, without criticizing good-faith efforts) is the hardest thing I’ve done so far as a parent — even harder than potty-training and getting up at night (which is saying a lot). On Monday, before my nap, I asked Sally to do her dish job and the other kids to try not to mess up the downstairs much, because we were having guests for Family Home Evening. I staggered downstairs at 5:30 pm, to a clean kitchen, and to Sally directing the other two in picking up toys and putting away shoes (and she wasn’t yelling; they weren’t rebelling!). They even had the vacuum cleaner out. I almost cried; I just about had time for it, because they had saved me so much work.

This, this once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of how things could be, is why I have hope for the future.

Yesterday on our Sunday evening walk, Susan had to go to the bathroom. The upside to having three toilet-independent children is that I don’t have to change any diapers. The downside is that I now forget to make everyone go before leaving the house (even though I usually go twice during the shoes-and-socks ritual, just in case).

I was feeling the evening-queasies, so I begged Tom to take her. They ran from the playground we’d just arrived at, in the far corner of the park, across two softball fields, to the other end where the bathrooms are. The bathrooms that were still locked for the winter. (Sunday evening walks in Florida were balmier on the beach in January.)

I watched from my perch on the cement wall at the playground as they ran kitty-corner across two more softball fields to the church that sits next to the park (welcome to Utah; this is the closest park to our house, but only the fourth-closest church). The church was locked. At six pm on a Sunday. (They weren’t really dressed to pee at the church on Sunday, but still.)

They crossed the street back towards us and then disappeared for several minutes. A convenient ditch runs on two sides of the park, and then they were loping back towards us, slower and less-urgent-like.

Susan ran off to play and I asked Tom how he managed to help her go without getting any on herself. (I am a girl, I have been camping: these things are complicated.) He said he held her arms and had her lean way back. (The Seagull Fountain version of the Trust Fall.) And he foraged some dry leaves for her to wipe.

I have seen those sorry leaves from last Fall. It is hard to weigh the danger of butt-leaf-mold against the value of a man so accomplished.

When I was young, a little younger than Sally, my parents left us with a babysitter. This wasn’t a common occurrence, but while they were gone, I sprinkled a bunch of baby powder all over the carpet. Mom came home and freaked out a little at the baby powder (probably close to a whole container’s worth), and made me vacuum it up right away. While I vacuumed, I sang a song about how I was such a bad girl who had done such a bad thing. Mom heard me, stopped the vacuum and told me I wasn’t bad, she was just worried we’d breathe in that powder, she still loved me, etc, etc.

I hate when my kids feel bad about themselves (except at the end of a long day when Sally clobbers Susan’s feelings ten minutes before dad walks in from work and I stare at her blankly, thinking: what is wrong with you?).

But in the general swim, kids feeling bad about themselves is just the worst. Time enough for that in middle school, when best friend cliques rally, breaking off a little chunk here and a little chunk there of everything you liked about yourself.

Yesterday Sally came home with her second trimester report card. Three of her grades were great, and then her eyes fell on her math grade. And kept falling. It was a “C”. Wasn’t quite what I was expecting either, after her B+ at parent-teacher conferences a couple weeks ago.

So now I need a good 3rd-4th grade math book (any recommendations? I’ll look on some homeschooler sites) for us to work through this summer. Because it’s important to me that my kids do well in school, that they understand and learn and excel and feel confident. But even more –

Sally sat on the couch a couple hours later, her report card lying next to her, and sang a song about how she isn’t good at math and math is too hard for her, and if I told you that didn’t break my heart a little (or a lot) –

I’d be lying.

Say you or your husband lose your job tomorrow. Catastrophic loss, emotionally, financially. Will it make a difference if you are in the habit of budgeting, if you have learned to budget your resources and save what you can or pay down your debts?

Creating a budget is like creating a birth plan. All the planning in the world cannot ensure that something unexpected (wonderful or horrible) won’t necessitate emergency overriding of your expectations and desires, but that doesn’t mean that planning is valueless.

Everyone’s budget is going to be different. For some people, having an emergency fund is all-important. For others it’s important to give their kids the kind of childhood they dreamed of. Some people have debts from school or house or car or a bad housing decision or comfort trips to Disneyland. Some people earn a lot of money, some people scrape by, but a budget can help both of them.

A budget has to be flexible: you plan for as much as you can, but then someone needs a root canal or the housing market plummets or — you lose your job, and then, no matter how carefully and smartly you have prepared, the budget has to change, and maybe it even changes for the better, because after months of looking you find a job even better suited to you or you lose money on your house but decide it was worth it to move your family to a safer neighborhood.

Having the budget, the very day-to-day act of practicing self-reliance helps you think about things more carefully, even if it turns out to be unnecessary — what if you win the lottery some day and never have to worry about money again? Would the budget be of any use?

Sometimes you change your budget because the things that used to be important no longer are, or you realize that you have a crazy dream you need to start saving up for.

Everybody’s budget is different, but there are some sound financial principles upon which anyone can build, and there are some unscrupulous get-rich-quick hucksters who will try to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. There are advisors you can trust, and there are people you would give anything to have by you in case of disaster, or to celebrate with you when you buy your dream cottage.

But here’s the thing: although I know a budget is a good thing to have, I don’t. Sure, I try not to spend too much, but I’m not as frugal or mindful as I could be. A budget isn’t really necessary to my day-to-day peace, or to my vision of the future. I get along just fine without it. I have friends who would be appalled at my apathy, my ability to shrug it off and say, sure, I should do that, but it doesn’t really compel me right now. And the sky hasn’t fallen. If my husband lost his job tomorrow, I doubt I’d think: this is all my fault, if only I’d had a budget! But probably, if we did go through an experience like that, the first thing I’d do with any money coming in was make sure it got budgeted wisely. (or — take off for the Riveria, you know, whichever.)

I want to start off saying that if I’ve offended you by discussing my thoughts on birthing (by having thoughts that differ from yours), I am sorry. Though I feel that it matters, immensely, for me to learn and prepare for my final birth (oh yes, this will be my final birth), and though I feel it will help me be a stronger, more determined, more capable mother and woman if I stretch myself in this way, that doesn’t (honestly, pinky swear) mean I think anyone else is less strong or less determined or less capable or in any way less of a mother if she doesn’t care to think about these things, or if, having thought of them, decides to give birth hung by her toes on Neptune.

I really am self-centered enough that this is really ALL ABOUT ME. (and MY BABY).

(Though I have to tell you I’ve heard the air is very thin on Neptune, so you might want to re-think that).

(oh, I kid.)

Maybe this will explain some of my inelegant, sloppy, unintentionally incoherent analogies and plans: Reading about this labor and delivery stuff? To me it has been such a revelation . . . (I didn’t even know your body continually made amniotic fluid. My doctor told me my water was “low” with my first, and I thought, HOLY CRAP, better get the kid out before it’s ALL GONE, even though my water hadn’t broken).

It’s like suddenly I know the earth is round, and I am flabbergasted that people are still running around screaming that it is flat.

Have you accepted Jesus into your life yet? Have you been saved?

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

When I analogized that there is maybe a right way for each woman to birth at each of her births (by comparing it to finding the right person to marry), that wasn’t supposed to suggest I thought every women should birth the same way, any more than I would suggest that we should all marry the EXACT SAME PERSON. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of even one sister-wife — you think I want to think that my husband is the right person for any other woman on this freaking planet besides me? H to the no.

And while I think there might be a best (right? most satisfying? safest?) way for a birth to go, how variable that turns out to be (one woman moos in the throes of transition, another throws pies at a clown for relief)  is one of the most fascinating things about this.

My whole point (and here I will plagiarize the Dooce): There are options! and choices! God is great! Praise be to Allah!

(the Allah part I threw in myself.)

And I think being aware of those options and being involved in making those choices makes you a (happier? more empowered? more satisfied?) person.*

(There, I said it. I am judgmental. If you choose to have a c-section because otherwise you will die, I think you are a better person than someone who would refuse that choice and that option. Sue me.)

*Ack, so maybe I don’t really believe that. What if you live in a repressed society, or you’re young, or the weight of the moral/intellectual authority of the medical establishment is so convincing you feel it best to leave it up to them? I don’t know.

I just finished my second birth book and stomped downstairs to inform Dick that we’ll be needing to hire a doula, someone who can support me and advocate for my desires in childbirth. Dick says we don’t have the money for that (I know we don’t), so I say he can do it, but he’ll have to change his attitude, read at least three books, and commit to giving me the support I’m going to need.

The kind of support I need is the kind I sort of envisioned my mom giving me when I gave birth to Sally nine years ago. But instead of encouragement and inspiration she told me she was worried about me coping with labor because my pain threshold is lower than hers and that, by the way, she and my dad were flying back to Utah (from New York) the next day, so I better have the baby pretty soon. That’s completely unfair to my mom though, because I wasn’t prepared or informed about the dangers (and cascading interventions that often follow) of induction and epidurals or the alternative pain-management techniques I could practice or ask for and the benefits to mom and baby of allowing labor to be labor. And I was even more impatient than they were to get that baby here.

But now things are different, and the more I read, the more I’m sure that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Right now I feel really dangerous. I started with Baby Catcher, which is the perfect introduction to physiological/natural/midwifery-style childbirth. I had tried Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, but found it to New-Age-hippie for me. Baby Catcher hit all the right notes — a credentialed maternity RN who became a CNM and only gradually became suspicious of routine medical policies. And it’s told in entertaining story form, so I couldn’t put it down, even as I cried at the happy (and occasionally tragic) outcomes. It’s a history of maternity care and midwifery in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s and it includes being sued, which surprised me, and it profiles so many helpful descriptions of what labor can look like (instead of how it should progress).

Then I started reading Pushed, and though it has a lot of helpful statistics, like, “a woman is four times more likely to die having a cesarean section than a vaginal birth” (p. xix) and that episiotomies increase the likelihood of perineal tearing by nine times rather than reducing it (p. 30) (outcomes for baby are similarly adversely affected by interventions), I got bogged down in the dense, overwhelmingly bleak detail. Though I did learn that the problem is not that we have technology and interventions available, but that these things (inductions, forceps, c-sections, electronic fetal monitoring) began as helps for high-risk, medically-indicated situations and in spreading to low-risk, normally-progressing labors, do more harm.

So I switched to Henci Goer’s Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth and gulped it down at once. It’s a great, simple read with appendices stretching from here to infinity of study after study that show that managed/active care (rather than supportive care) is not superior, and in most cases, unhelpful or dangerous for both mother and baby. Someone on Twitter today said “the next person to equate no epidural with ‘getting a gold star’” would be in for it, and I can understand that reasoning. I don’t want to listen to anyone brag about being a “real” woman for staying strong or being above the pain, but the problem with an epidural is not that it represents “failure” (it doesn’t — I’ve had three, and my kids and I turned out just fine, an indisputable measure of “success” if any there is), but that done as a matter of course, without study and informed choice and as a last resort, it opens the door to way too many other medical interventions that I would like to avoid.

Reading these books, it seems a miracle I didn’t end up with a c-section the first time. And before anyone leaves a “My baby and I would’ve died if we hadn’t gotten an xyz,” please preface that by saying you didn’t start out getting induced three days before your due date because your doctor was going out of town. Sure a medical intervention might’ve saved your life and your baby’s life, but unless your labor until then was medical-intervention free (or super-limited, like, to intermittent fetal tone-listening or something) , it really doesn’t mean that much. (If you were high-risk the whole time or had one of those rare complications, then thank goodness for modern medicine, because that’s what it’s for, right?)

I also feel like saying I don’t want to talk about this to anyone (Ryan, I’m looking at you) who hasn’t read the same books I have, but that’s not fair either. If someone had said anything like this to me five years ago, I would’ve slashed their sustainable-bamboo tires.

And I admit, I’m scared of the pain. I’m scared I won’t be able to endure labor without begging for relief. (So a shiny gold star would be nice to look forward to). I’m scared that when I have this baby in a hospital, someone’s going to break my waters or hook me up to a machine without my consent. About the only thing I’m confident of is that I’ll have a better birth for me and the baby this time, even if I do end up with an epidural or a c-section or anything, because this time I’ll know why.

After even the little that I have read, it seems odd to even entertain the notion “but does it matter how you give birth? Isn’t the only important thing that you end up with a healthy baby?” (odd and also absurd because going as non-medically as possible is actually safer for low-risk and even moderate-risk mothers), but I want to address it because I have a thought on it.

When I was growing up, my parents always said it was important to marry the right person at the right time in the right place. The right person would be known to you through God, as would the right time, and the right place was always the temple. I remember watching Fiddler on the Roof and my dad pointing out that he thought only the oldest daughter managed to get all three rights together. And the three rights might make God happy, but more importantly they make for easier marriages and happier people (think how sad the third daughter was to have to leave everything familiar behind to marry a nonbeliever in a time of war (when her own people were persecuted by the same group her husband belonged to); sure love conquers all, etc, but it’s a lot harder, right?).

So in the birth analogy, it’s obvious that what is important is the mornings you wake up to make breakfasts cheerfully (even if you have to fake it), and the times you tenderly comfort your headstrong five-year old when she hurts herself doing something you told her seven times not to do. Surely the twelve or twenty-four hours you spend in birth are meaningless set against the lifetime of mothering you’ll give that child.

But that twelve or twenty-four hours is the time you become the mother of that child, just as the ten-minute ceremony in the temple is the time you become a wife or a husband. In the years of a marriage, forgiving quickly and forbearing to nag over the stinky compost that sits on the deck attracting mice instead of getting stirred into your lovely compost turner are what matters, not a ritual smattering of words by an officiator you’ll never see again.

But it does matter. You can go to the right place later as long as you have the right person; you can find the right person your second time, of course you can, but the point is that your goal is to eventually have it all.

I’m not saying that the right birth for me (let alone anyone else) is a completely natural birth at home whenever the baby wants to come. I’m pretty sure I’ll be at a hospital, with a midwife, and I’ll try to do it naturally, and if I change my mind because of back labor for seventy hours or I go past 42 weeks (my current cut-off) or something changes it for me like the baby in real distress, as long as I know why, it’ll be just right.