20SomethingMom chronicles of a young mom

Life, InterruptedPosted by admin on October 30th, 2009

When you get pregnant at a “young age,” the world stops turning. At least, that’s what everyone expects it to do. As I watch my baby approach his second birthday, I’ve been reflecting upon my pregnancy and how my life might have played out had I not been blessed with the very best of interruptions. Here’s what I imagine it would look like:

• I would still think parents are not human. I think we all hold our parents to impossible standards, and only when we are forced to make the day-to-day decisions that form a person do we understand what they went through for us.
• I would not have slowed down after graduating from college. I would likely have jumped into a 9-to-5, something I’m not cut out for. Now, I have the luxury of setting my own schedule and spending quality time with the most important person in my life. When I take the next step on a career path, I’ll be ready for it.
• I would never have found the gray area in everything. When you’re dealing with a developing person, you realize that growth, interaction, and love are not linear. There is always a different way to do things, and no one way is correct.
• I wouldn’t have as great an appreciation for my Spanish language skills. There’s a huge difference between speaking a second language in a professional or academic capacity and using it every day with a baby. I have learned so much about my abilities, and become fascinated by the process of language acquisition. 
• I would not smile as often as I do with a child around. Babies, and especially toddlers, have a knack for making frustrating moments funny. It is literally impossible to not smile when your little one says “mama” or puckers up for a wet kiss.
• I would still be wondering when I would have a baby, and feeling like I hadn’t fulfilled my purpose. For some people, having kids is something they imagine doing in another lifetime, once they grow out of the young adult phase. For me, it was a goal in itself from the time when I used to line my dolls up on the couch and read to them. Nothing feels more natural to me than being a mother.

Having a baby is just part of life — an event that holds down the fast-forward button rather than pressing pause. No matter if you are 20 or 40, a newborn’s arrival could be seen as a disturbance, but so could a job loss, a move, a death, or any number of significant moments. If we think about a baby as an interference in our well-laid plans, we won’t be open to the surprises it brings. 

And I don’t just mean surprises of the dirty-diaper variety. For me, the greatest surprise has been how watching my son grow has inspired me to go back to school and pursue things beyond motherhood, to question who I thought I was. He has pulled me out of my comfortable place in the mud, without saying a word. Everyone should be lucky enough to experience this: being blindsided by a change so human, we could never have created it with mere ambition.

Technorati Tags: baby, life lessons, milestones, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy, Spanish, young mom

Layers of PrivilegePosted by admin on October 22nd, 2009

Was I born with an inflamed social conscience, or has it simply come to overwhelm me over the years? I guess you could say it’s ironic that someone like me — more listener than speaker, more loner than star — is so preoccupied with things that require a voice.

I get frustrated with stagnation, especially in social conditions. Maybe it comes from studying human rights and political science in depth, although my concern for the oppressed existed long before college. Maybe it’s an inescapable part of the Leo-Virgo cusp personality. I just know that I’m constantly fighting with myself, and a world that seems resigned to letting things happen unfairly.

Inequity persists for obvious reasons (the drive for surplus being number one), and because there has always been a powerful-powerless dichotomy, many people assume it is human nature to exploit others to raise your own social position. I don’t subscribe to this too-bad-so-sad philosophy, though. People stay at the bottom of the social food chain because they have been ignored or used by those at the top. This can start to feel much like the biological food chain, in that we think we need to feed upon the lowliest to maintain our place — that others must be miserable in order for us to be happy. 

I am not okay with people saying that this is just the way things are, that I shouldn’t feel guilty about my place in society, or responsible for that of others. I DO feel guilty, or at the very least uncomfortable, about being a member of the white upper-middle-class in America. By virtue of birth, I am one of the luckiest people on earth. But it takes work to preserve that luck, and wealthy white people work hard at that. So, we can’t simply say that those who are born into unlucky circumstances (poverty in America, but especially in the developing world) got themselves into it, and must pull themselves out. The tiniest tweak in quantum order could have reversed our worlds, and nothing that is so dependent upon chance could be worthy of exacerbation. (Besides, What the Bleep Do We Know?)

Instead of trying to close the income gap, the rights gap, we widen it with fear. Political banter about the U.S. health care system or the state of American education is small talk, disguising the real issues underneath. If we don’t believe we have an ultimate responsibility to provide these things for all people (and I do mean ALL people), policy cannot change them significantly. We should be diving into the original mess of our assumptions and prejudices, swirling around for awhile, and revolutionizing the way we think about humanity and happenstance.

This doesn’t mean feeling guilty, because that is only a recipe for reparations. Still, it is difficult to feel anything but apologetic when there is no genuine public outlet for discussing such things as gender, poverty, the environment, and the direction of the human race. Churches and schools have their own agenda, as do private organizations. Motives aside, involvement in these groups can prove positive, but what is the underbelly of charity work? Morality. A relative concept. Thus, the difficulty in looking at the shackled from the vantage point of the free is that we apply standards that must sometimes be swept aside in order to right the wrongs that are wrong to us all.

I can live my life in a Starbucks world and appreciate its luxuries, but I never forget that there are other worlds, and I never want to. I am stuck between the ease of indifference and the cliff of hopelessness. Are you?

I know my restless nature will produce good things in the end, but I feel a burning desire to relate to people with my level of discomfort first.

Technorati Tags: charity, humanity, inequity, Politics, poverty, privilege, social responsibility, What the Bleep Do We Know, white America

Fertility Treatments and Older ParentsPosted by admin on October 14th, 2009

They’ve been all over the news lately: the costs and consequences of fertility treatments, such as IVF and IUI.  Articles like this one from The New York Times explain the real concerns that prospective parents should have regarding multiple births, especially the complications that arise from prematurity.  Given the high cost of these insemination procedures, it is understandable for people to be thrilled at the idea of getting more than one baby, but the risks have a ripple effect on the health care industry, the mother’s health, and, scariest of all, the babies’ futures.  

While I believe that fertility drugs and procedures are necessary for some people who have legitimate problems getting pregnant, it worries me that so many people feel okay about putting off babymaking because they know there is a fallback plan if it doesn’t happen naturally.  Our career-focused culture encourages later partnering and delayed parenthood, and ignores the lasting effects of producing a generation of less healthy children — babies who, if they are not multiples with severe problems from premature birth, often have health problems associated with their mothers’ age (anything from asthma to Down’s syndrome).  Older mothers have a higher rate of Cesarean births and longer, more difficult labors. In addition, older moms are more likely to have difficulty breastfeeding because of the conflicting hormones of simultaneous pregnancy and perimenopause. (La Leche League International) 

Of course, there is a certain amount of common sense in waiting until you are financially secure to have a baby, but 2009 has taught us that even this kind of security is fleeting.  Because of the exorbitant costs of higher education in America, college graduates spend much of their 20s and 30s struggling to pay student loans, and are lucky if they can ever reach homeowner status (which is, ironically, also an unlucky title in many cases).  If you’re waiting until you have enough bedrooms to house your new bundles, you will likely be in the higher risk, over-35 category of parents.  

There are many unknowns when you have a baby at 21, like I did.  But I’d take the kinds of unknowns that arise from living in one-bedroom apartments and finishing college over the ones that could permanently damage my child’s (or my) health.  Even with my young age and complication-free pregnancy, I gave birth at 35 weeks.  Prematurity is often unexplained, and is scary enough when you are at average risk for its occurrence.  I cannot imagine choosing to take a greater risk by placing two, three, or more fertilized embryos in implantation position.  

Granted, I also don’t understand what it’s like to desperately want a child and not be able to have one.  That would be the most devastating news of my life, and I was lucky to have been able to conceive sans intervention.  Do we need to address the educational and economic circumstances in our country such that our children don’t have to wait until they are 40 to be comfortable becoming parents?  Or is conception by whatever means necessary just an individual decision with isolated consequences?

If fertility treatments contribute to longer stays in the NICU and lower rates of breastfeeding, I say they are a social problem at the same time that they allow greater freedom of choice. 

To what extent should we be able to dictate a biological event such as procreation?  If simply letting it happen –when our bodies are most prepared for it to happen — is fighting all of the things we have decided are good for us, eventually there won’t be any viable “us” left to climb the proverbial career ladder.  Is that really creating a better world for our offspring, or is it presenting them with the most difficult challenge of all?

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Technorati Tags: birth, breastfeeding, conception, fertility treatments, IVF, La Leche League, New York Times, older mom, parenthood, prematurity

Gender WonderPosted by admin on October 5th, 2009

I’ve always had somewhat radical views on gender, in the sense that I believe it is a mutable social construct.  It is not until we start placing bows on baby girls’ heads or putting mini basketballs in little boys’ hands that they represent gender differences.  As I watch my boy grow and change, I wonder (even more frequently than I did before I was a mother) what would happen if we never placed them on one side of the scale or the other.  What kinds of differences would emerge naturally?

Of course, it’s impossible to know because even this kind of (arguably unethical) experimentation would take place in the context of a society built upon the male-female dichotomy.  Still, many people fail to remember that sex and gender are two different things.  Sex is chromosomal, biological — a mere determinant of phenotype.  The way we dress, speak, act, work, and love are all elements of gender.  We have to act out our gender, or else no one knows what it is.  And we are all familiar with the prejudice and confusion that can arise from that kind of mystery.  

As parents, we play a special part in the perpetuation of gender roles.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with buying Tonka trucks for a boy and Barbies for a girl, it becomes ambiguous when we freak out about our kids playing with the “wrong” toys.  When I was at the store with my son yesterday, he played with such a variety of toys in the span of 20 minutes that it wouldn’t have been far off to say that he doesn’t have a preference for blue or loud toys at all.  At home, though, because there aren’t any dolls around, I tend to assume that he has an affinity for cars and balls — really, anything that can be raced or thrown.  

I’m not poised to spend money on gender-balancing my son’s toy collection, but I wonder what I will say if, when he becomes fully verbal, he asks me to buy him a toy that’s slated for girls.  I would probably get it for him and worry more about answering questions as to why my son owns something girly than about how it would affect his gender identity.  

Toys are just the most glaring part of what genders a child’s world, though.  I notice certain skills and tendencies in my son that are typically associated with males (and especially developed in the males in my family): mechanical abilities, a desire to perform daring physical stunts, and — most fascinating of all — the instinct to laugh at bodily functions.  Are these things really related to his sex, or are they simply the things I notice or value most about him because I have been conditioned not to pay attention to, for example, his love of cuddling and babies?

This is one of the larger questions that seem to take up an abnormal amount of my time.  I am a big-picture person about most things, and parenting is no exception.  Gender is one of those grand structures that seems to exist for no reason and every reason, and I cannot (nor will I ever be able to) reconcile its incredible influence in modern life.  

I wonder about gender as I play it out for myself.  As a woman raising a boy, I wonder how to make gendered choices for him until he can make them himself.  

What are your gender wonders about raising children?

Technorati Tags: boys vs. girls, children, gender, gendered toys, motherhood, parenting, pink and blue, sex and gender