Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
Maybe writing about the dim past will ease me back into writing.
When I saw this prompt, memories pushed themselves up from forgotten synapses and I remembered giving birth and the first day I became a parent. What a strange and incomprehensible new world it was for me.
How I wish babies showed up.
I’ll gloss over the birth part, which involved my spouse barfing all over the place and having to go to the ER, leaving me to labor alone (no family or close friends nearby), then included every possible birth intervention I thought I’d never have, leading up to an unplanned cesarean due to my “incompetent” cervix. I never felt so powerless and out of control.
Then, after the anesthesiologist nearly paralyzed me (and I TOLD him I had a slight scoliosis), I was presented with a small person who used to live inside me. I felt like I already knew him.
Being a new parent who’d just been drugged up, I mostly remember smells from the hospital, from me, and from the baby. I’d never been hospitalized before, and it was a smelly experience.
I fell asleep after the lengthy labor and being surgerized at 6 am, and they took the dang baby away from me. When I woke up, not only did I have to listen to some woman with no pain tolerance screeching about needing more IV meds, but there was no baby. How the heck was I supposed to get colostrum in him?
Well, I could tolerate pain. And I figured out how to drag my IV with me and went to find my damn baby. I’m sure that was a lovely sight. Too bad.
I found the nursery about the time some nurse ran up and said I shouldn’t have walked unaccompanied. But no one was paying me any attention at all thanks to Old Screechy and I wanted my child.
Not gonna go find actual photos.
That got me the child, who I would not put down henceforth except to hand him to my spouse. He was in charge of diaper changes, which also came with new smells. I can smell breasted baby poop right now. Neither of us had ever changed a diaper before. All new to us.
I left that place as fast as I could and vowed to do everything possible to avoid getting cut open like that again, surrounded by people who just wanted me to hurry up before the shift changed. (Didn’t work out, but I sure tried.)
One photo. Me immediately upon coming home, with newborn.
That birth experience was the first time I felt like my body failed me. I asked it to do something, breathed like a yogini, and did everything right, but I got the surgery anyway. I’ve always said I’m grateful to La Leche League for helping me succeed at breastfeeding after it taking 5 days to get my milk in and having babies who had to learn to open their mouths. It was healing to know my body could do something I asked it to do, after all.
This may have been garbled. I’m having some internal weirdness going on after being around a lot of negativity. Not the fault of anyone in my immediate family!
Daily Bird
There weren’t enough birds around to pick one! It was a dreary day with morning drizzle. I heard no birds this morning and only five when I tried again in late evening. Even the owl was quiet. Even the house sparrows were quiet! Gads! The loudest bird was the kingfisher, so I salute that bird for being out and about no matter what.
Today’s topic is something I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and I think I finally have come up with a way to present my thoughts coherently. I think it explains why I have close to zero tolerance for bullying in volunteer organizations and presents an alternative way to make valid points and open people’s minds to new and different ideas.
When I was a new mother, my lawyer and one of my mentors, Roberta Bishop Johnson, encouraged me to attend meetings of the mother-to-mother breastfeeding support group, La Leche League (and if talking about breastfeeding gets you all giggly, you can try to remember you’re a mammal and make an effort to be mature). I didn’t know any other new mothers, since I was older than most of my friends and the first to reproduce.
That’s right. We’re mammals.
So, I bravely went into the home of a stranger and sat down on the couch next to a woman who seemed nice. And I listened. At these meetings, only one of the people was speaking for the organization, an accredited La Leche League Leader. But, when people asked questions, all the other mothers were very welcome to chime in and share their experiences with their own babies. One thing that got repeated often in these meetings was to please share information, not give advice. Not even the Leader told women what they should do. The mothers were considered smart enough to make their own decisions based on their experiences and to use the experiences of others to help them. That led to the second thing I heard a lot, which was to take what works for you and leave the rest.
No matter what picture I chose, someone will find something wrong with it. She should lift her shirt from the top! Why is she white? Is her positioning right? Image by @nslebedinskaya via Twenty20
By getting to know all these different mothers with all their different babies it became very obvious that the best answer for one of us would not work at all for another one, and that was OK! We had lots of areas where we differed. There was cloth versus plastic diapers. There was jarred baby food versus “whole foods” only. There was the “family bed” versus having a crib for babies. There were vaccinators and non-vaccinators. Some mothers weaned promptly at one year (or earlier), while others kept a-goin’ until the child didn’t want to anymore.
The thing is, those of us who learned the LLL philosophy (which is a list of ways to be a good parent) mostly got the point that there’s more than one right way to parent AND that for some folks, ways other than ours make more sense to them. If a mother asked for help, we gave it and helped her work out a solution that made HER happy, not us.
I eventually became a Leader and learned a lot from the women I was friends with then. It was a lot of fun and such a great way to give to my community. But, when they started begging Leaders to become administrators (there was quite a hierarchy back then), my Leader, Sharon, took me aside and warned me that things weren’t always so warm and fuzzy at the State, National, and International levels. Oh, how I wish I’d listened to Sharon.
But, no, I like leading things, and because I’d made a little website for our group (before there were images on the world wide web) my mentor, Roberta, begged me to help them get on the fledgling Internet, so I went to a conference in Chicago, met the Executive Director, and suddenly I was the webmaster and co-owner of the first email list for Leaders, where we got to meet fellow mothers from all over.
Time marched on, and I had a lot of fun and met most of the people who read my blog. But, it turned out Sharon had a point. Once I started going to meetings and conferences outside my little bubble, and once I started reading the email lists, I began to see how La Leche League got its reputation as a bunch of breastfeeding…shall we say…”tyrants” (because I prefer not to use pejorative word word other people used). You could tell that there were members who we called “More League Than League” who looked down on you if your choices happened to come on the less radical attachment parenting side of things. Woe unto the parent who used a stroller and not a sling to carry babies (even outside conferences, where strollers were hazardous). You get the drift, I’m sure.
A lot of the time I spent as an administrator, web person, and eventually as a director in the organization was trying to keep portraying La Leche League (LLL) as an organization open to all who were interested in breastfeeding and parenting, not just a few people of a certain demographic (that would be white, Catholic, home birthing, stay-at-home mothers). It was never true that this group was even a majority, but it’s the reputation that came out. And the reputation that we told people to do this and that, and such. This all got to be quite exhausting, especially when we were wanting to help mothers succeed by their own standards and meet them where they were, not make them into other people!
There were, indeed, people in the organization with agendas that were at best peripheral to the core purpose of supporting breastfeeding in the communities where we lived. The diapers, the slings, the boycotts, the sleeping arrangements…subtly pressuring people to make certain choices or they weren’t “cool” led to a lot of sadness. I always thought either they should come out and say they’re an organization for a small group of people with certain beliefs and principles, rather than claiming to be for everyone, but alienating people whose cultures and ways of life preferred to do things differently.
Indeed, as the years went by, it came to pass that things got weirder and weirder at the higher levels, and we came under a lot of pressure, no I’ll say bullying, to only organize in certain ways, and only meet in certain ways, and…after a couple of years of trying to keep my team going through all this, I ended up being asked to leave. If your job, whether paid or volunteer, isn’t fulfilling and rewarding, it’s time to find a new job. And when my closest friends started in on me…it was time to go.
I did keep what I learned, though. I’ve always found it much easier to change someone’s mind or teach them something new by offering a wide range of information and suggestions and trusting them to figure out what works best for them. I’m so grateful for that lesson. There was and still is so much good in LLL. Honestly, this is a loving critique.
Now, today, a whole lot of years have passed, but it makes me chuckle a bit to learn that there are still factions battling it out to be the “right” kind of organization. The causes have shifted from Nestle boycotts and “Ferberizing” to trying to cancel members who aren’t deemed sufficiently on board with chestfeeding and racial/cultural issues.
All of that just isn’t the helpful kind of support parents, members, administrators, and former members need. And confronting, bullying, canceling, and lobbying against people you have a problem with has never, as far as I can see, solved the underlying issue, which is education. You know, perhaps we WANT to listen, but just being called names and treated like we aren’t even worth engaging in dialog with won’t help us learn a darn thing.
I can only suggest that people with strong feelings to convey consider this information I’m sharing, just as one option. By listening to the viewpoints of others, seeing where they are coming from, finding areas of commonality, and sharing our experiences as if they are all worthy of respect, I’m pretty sure some of the newer versions of the people I left behind in 2006 might be more successful at attaining their goals. I think they want more people to be welcome and included in LLL. I think that is a worthy goal that may not require tearing down others to achieve.
Breastfeeding is a great thing, and I applaud everyone who wants to do it, in whatever way works for their culture, religious practice, or social group. Sometimes having lived as long as I and some of my long-time LLL friends have, you learn that a little bit of listening and respect go a long way. We don’t all have to do things the exact same way, and we all will learn from our mistakes and new experiences.
Please, let’s be gentle with each other. I’m simply not going to let myself be put down for being who I am, and I don’t think any of you, my friends, should, either. And I do NOT want to put down others who have perfectly legitimate complaints, issues, or ideas! We should all have a chance to grow and learn, even us old white fogies.
The Hermits' Rest 