Rock Stars

April 19, 2006 | Everybody's got one

Besides being an undervalued employee for J-O-B, I am a doula. A doula is a birthing assistant that a woman hires to help her to have a satisfying birth. I can provide assistance with massage, positioning, visualization techniques, or just another pair of hands. There is always LOTS to do at a birth. I have attended many hospital births as well as homebirths, but to me, the location doesn’t much matter. What matters is helping the birthing mother to do what our bodies are made to do.

So many women are afraid of giving birth and it just makes my heart hurt. They are convinced they need all kinds of medical support and interventions to do something that women all over the world accomplish every day. I wish I could scream from the rooftops, “WOMEN! YOU CAN DO IT! YOU ARE STRONG AND POWERFUL AND CAPEABLE!”

An aquaintance of mine is pregnant right now, and is due in a couple of months. This woman is a powerhouse business executive who kicks many asses daily, yet she is afraid to give birth. I wish I knew her a little better so I could give her a peptalk. I wish I could remind her that she is a strong and powerful woman in other aspects of her life, there is no reason to believe that she wont rock her birth experience as well.

Back in the day, before a woman gave birth herself, she had ususally attended the births of her siblings, family members, and neighbors, not to mention the barnyard animals. She would have seen for herself the power of women and the support provided by mothers and grandmothers and midwives, and that birth is a NORMAL, everyday, process. Today, birth is scarier, I believe, because we have not had these experiences. I could go on and on about modern birth practices, but the fact that a woman who labors in the hospital labors alone*, contributes to the scariness of her birth and her belief that she needs interventions.

Believe it or not, I am getting somewhere. What I intended to post about today was my irratation with the Hollywood portrayal of birth as an emergency. In the movies, one minute a pregnant woman is enjoying a candlelit dinner, looking glamorous, and the next, she is clutching her belly and screaming in agony! Get her to the hospital! The baby is going to fall out RIGHT NOW!

That is not how it works**. Labor does not hit you like a freight train, it is very well designed. It builds slowly, giving you time to adjust. That is never how it happens in the movies though! NO WONDER women are afraid. NO WONDER women expect birth to be quick. And no wonder, the average bear believes pregnancy and birth to be a sickness and an emergency***.

* Not all the time, and not everywhere, but the average is about 6 minutes of attention per hour. I don’t think anyone imagines themselves laboring alone, so this is surprising.

** Rarely, of course, it does. But NEVER with first babies, that’s for sure.

*** GIANT POST DISCLAIMER: I am a DONA trained doula, I have attended many births, I have a GREAT faith in the ability of healthy women to have powerful, satisfying birthing experiences, but I have not done it myself. So, if you like, you may consider me full of poo. (Atleast I’m a woman, though. There are plenty of MEN out there tellling women the exact opposite. )

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Speaking of births, I am having a baby shower this weekend at my house. I am SO excited about it. I literally begged my friend to let me throw her a shower. We lived in my parent’s basement for a year to save for our house and it killed me to not have a proper place to entertain. She has invited about 30 people and only one has RSVP’d no, so it is going to be a full house. I LOVE throwing parties, but getting to have them in MY house? It’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven.

This party will feature a special guest star coming up from Sacramento for the festivities as well as my BFF from Portland. I am sitting here just giddy about it. The older we get, these times when all my ladies are together are just so precious.

New Shoes!

April 12, 2006 | Everybody's got one

Over the weekend, I bought a new pair of shoes. I was looking for a pair of sneakers that didn’t look too grubby that I could wear with jeans. I found these and I LOVE them. Really. I have spent the last two days admiring my feet. I like to take them off and look at all their nice stitching and I will admit to sniffing them more than once.

Here they are:

Here is the Born website. I apologize for any addictions I may be triggering.

Anyway, something wierd and funny just happened. I was getting in the elevator at J-O-B, when I saw two women approaching the front doors. I decided to be a good citizen and hold the elevator for them, even though they were SLOW MOVERS*. When they were coming through the front doors, I heard one say to the other in an unmistakably bitchy tone, “Who is that?” The other answered, “I don’t know but she is holding the elevator for us”. I smiled at them, to let them know I had heard them, but they ignored me. Then, while the elevator began lumbering upwards, the first one with the bitchy tone whispers to the other, highschool girl style, “Those look like bowling shoes.”

Isn’t that funny? Some people just shouldn’t be let outside. I should have said something to her, but really, I couldn’t believe that she thought she could WHISPER in a metal box about someone standing two feet away.

These two were clearly the critical types that spend too much of their time putting other women down. The kicker is, they were both 50something, frumpy, office types. When I am 50 and I see someone younger than me wearing something I think is ugly, I will just assume that it is fashionable and that the youngster knows better. Hell, I do it now, when I see what teenagers are wearing these days**. At the very least, I will wait until they are out of earshot to mock them.

* Gah! Slow movers get out of my way!
** What? Where’s my cane?