I Wake to Sleep and Take my Waking Slow

I borrowed this post's title from Theodore Roethke's poem The Waking, a poem that continues to fascinate me even after the 100th time of rocking Oliver to sleep by reciting it. I suppose it is the manner in which the poem emphasizes intuition over reason and paradoxes over purity that has wormed its way into my mind. Lately, the line, "This shaking keeps me steady, I should know" has been returning to me as a mantra for all that I've been through in the past few months.

It's not that I've received particularly tragic news - I don't have cancer with a year left to enjoy my two favourite men, but it has felt catastrophic for my sense of self. And talking about it is part of my new project to allow myself to be vulnerable, a project inspired by a very beautiful and intelligent friend, who I hope blushes if she happens to read this. She sent me a link to a ted talk on connection and vulnerability the day before I went in for surgery. While listening to the insights of the lovely Brené Brown - seeing vulnerability as necessary for joy, I began to cry - I despise the very feeling of being exposed for all to see. I have always loved hiding with my nose in a book away from all disturbances and the grating disappointment I have often felt in my relationships with friends, family and lovers.

Joy has been a difficult thing for me these past few months as I faced a snowballing of increasingly more invasive procedures, ending with four holes punctured in my swollen stomach. The odds of this happening were apparently 1.3 in 1000 - odds that gave me a false sense of security. Of course my superstitious mind remembers the misgivings I had on the day I opted to have the IUD inserted and wishes I had listened. Neither the statistics nor the mythmaking can give me the meaning for which I am searching. Facts can be gathered to reconstruct the course of events, I have a retroverted uterus; the lining of my uterus was thinner due to nursing; so when the doctor inserted the IUD, she punctured a hole in my uterus and the IUD escaped.

This doesn't answer the question why. Nothing can. Joy has been difficult for me to find these past few months.

But not impossible. Just this morning, Oliver, my son, fell asleep before we could even leave the courtyard behind our building. I sat on my scarf on the concrete edging of the lawn and felt the cool breeze on my face. I breathed in the silence of a calm November morning and heard it spread down into my belly. Peaceful.

21st Century Biological Determinism and a Room of my Own

I took quite a hiatus from blogging as I adjusted to my new role as both a servant and high priestess to a little prince or shall we say my lil' dictator. Instead of the usual personalized Christmas presents this year, we will be sending out a calendar with all of the little facets of my son's dictorial personality. I suppose I should be concerned about losing friends from such a controversial idea ... December will be a reference to Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator.

The first blog back began to grow in importance the longer I let my garden go fallow. I have learned such a great deal about my relationships, myself and the numerous zealots who claim to know how to best be a mom - everything from the breastfeeding fascists, the cloth diaper masochists and the attachment parenting enthusiasts. I didn't know where to start - and I didn't want to start.

I expected more from my husband than I received. Because I believed the crowd of breastfeeding activists and I also wanted to experience this physical closeness to my child, I committed fully to breastfeeding. But, what I didn't anticipate is that breastfeeding would automatically designate me as the primary caregiver in all situations. Especially in the first few months, if my son cried, my husband would shrug off responsibility because he didn't have the lactational superpowers I did. After all of those years of believing my body, my particular mix of biology, is no basis for inequity, it suddenly had become a justifiable reason for my husband to hand me a screaming child as if I had the magical elixir that would transform this red-faced devil into a smiling angel. I often did not have that capacity. My helplessness in the face of his great need and my feeling of abandonment by my best friend saddened me.

I could not do it all. I could not write my dissertation, clean the house, care for a small child and clean those so-called environmentally friendly diapers. We made a spread-sheet to calculate how much it would cost to buy cloth diapers and including the costs of washing them, it turned out to be cheaper than disposables. We forgot to calculate my time. Time I have spent rinsing, washing and assembling them. Time I could have spent writing, interacting with my little boy or caring for myself. Let's also not forget the many night-wakings that could have been prevented if he had been dry. I think sometimes, perhaps I could've been more rested and happier, if I hadn't wanted to be environmentally friendly. At least I can hold onto my self-righteousness, but even that has dissipated. Left is a stinking pile of expensive cloth waste collectors.

Elimination communication has been a far better experience. The week when you catch all poops (and need not clean dirty diapers) becomes a time of sheer exhilaration - you cheer on a red faced little 5 month old as he sits on his potty and think, I have accomplished something. I can read farts.


Not only can I interpret his bowel symphonics, but I can understand his every mood from joy, peace, irritation and sadness as it plays across his features. It's not a rational knowledge, but intuitive as can only come from experience or getting to know someone deeply as you spend time with them. I spend most of my time holding and loving him, but have also discovered how important it is to let go. Without these quiet moments away from everyone I am not as rich a person. It is from my personal development that I will be a better parent and not from spending every waking moment with a little dude attached to me. He has two people to care for him, and to smile with him as he sits in his stroller.

It's my birthday today and the best birthday present I have received was this time to write. May every mother receive a quiet room of her own.

A Pregnant Woman's Guide to Hospital Tourism

It wasn't a complete waste of time to visit the maternity ward this afternoon, but it could have been if I were as complacent as most of the other women there. I was surprised at the general lack of questions and at the tour guide's inability to answer most of them (or rather most of mine). I don't blame the tour guide; she's a volunteer and most certainly is only feeding us the information she was given rather than providing a real insider look to the decision making process of the ward.

The tour guide's attitude to the pregnant couples there was also representative of the entire system of maternity information. Like the many books out there, I had the impression she viewed us as pregnant cows without the slightest indication of intelligence and who only needed to be fed sweet tidbits to reassure us.

She joked about how we'll feel when we arrive in labour. It's okay if we feel the need to press the security buzzer a couple of times to be let in. She downplayed the role the woman in the process of giving birth. If you have a plan (she meant birth plan) hand it to your nurse. If you don't have a plan, don't ask me what that is; you'll be delivered no matter what.

The private rooms were similar to this one, but older and smaller.

She wasn't, however, able to inform us about the room rate, the rental costs of a breast pump nor the c-section rate at St. Michael's (which I later found out to be 25-27%, which is on par with the rate in Toronto, ~28%). I didn't ask about the epidural or the pitocin rates, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were also high. Especially considering from the time of admittance, women would only be there maximum 24 to 36 hours in the event of a normal birth.

It is incomprehensible that a woman, who is about to give birth, would not want to know absolutely everything possible about the type of care she could expect. Since becoming pregnant, I have developed the rather engrossing hobby of reading and watching everything I can get my hands on. Without this information, I would be blind and scared, ready to accept everything the almighty doctor told me. This professional might have other concerns than was is ultimately best for my care.

A healthy scepticism of a doctor's recommendation makes a healthy person.

Like most humans, they too make mistakes. Many years ago, I had an earache and went to a clinic. The doctor on call remarked on the health of my tonsils as peered down my throat. When I told him they had been removed, his embarrassment was written all over his blushing cheeks. Because of that rather enlightening experience, I always ask questions.

After the many books I've read and perhaps also because of my previous experiences in the health care system in Canada, I've decided to attempt a home birth. Visiting the hospital today simply confirmed that desire to be in my own space when it comes time to face the pain.

There's Flowers on my Toilet Paper: Bataille's Design

I was in a contemplative mood this morning, when I noticed that my toilet paper has flowers printed on it and what appears to be abstract representations of leaves. The niceness of the image contrasted sharply with what I was about to do with it. With Valentine's day just around the corner, we are reminded that flowers are associated not with the more basest (and smelly) of bodily functions, but with the perfection of infatuation and the ideals of love. The end of which tends to coincide to the end of that period of time when you haven't yet smelled your partner's first fart – generally, it occurs without the kind warning of our foghorn, saying, keep your distance! 

http://www.origami-resource-center.com/toilet-paper-origami-book.html

It's amazing the lengths people go to hide one of our most common denominators. Even going through an entire pregnancy without farting once in front of her partner. In one birth story I read (I've been reading too many of those), the new mother bemoaned how terribly embarrassed she was to have farted in front of her spouse while giving birth. I would have thought she would have other concerns at that moment.


Flowers represent the tidiness of love and friendship. We give them to one another on special occasions like birthdays and Valentine's day, when both sides on their best behaviour and wearing their cleanest shirt. The stems are free from the messiness of dirt and roots – cut cleanly away to leave only the beauty of the blossom. The softness and sweet smell of its petals gives a more exalted impression of the blossom than its actual function as a reproductive organ to attract as many insect partners as possible. 

Whenever I see a bouquet of flowers standing in front of a store or at the entrance to a subway, I cannot help but think of these colourful displays as blatant exhibitions of what's between mother nature's legs. I wonder, does not anyone else notice this? 

Divorced from context and sanitized, the flower in Western society disgusted Georges Bataille long before I gaped at mother nature's exposure. In a short article at the beginning of the 20th century called “The Language of Flowers”, he wrote: 


But even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile–even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity — the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. 

Unbeknownst to the toilet paper designer, the cheap paper in my bathroom captures in a most apt way Bataille's musings: the perfection of the printed flowers return to their messy origins – leaving their form completely unrecognizable. It's cyclical and bound up in the way we deny the existence of our bodies. Where ideas or ideals fail is at their meeting point with reality or the physical. 


Wiping my orifices with an image of a plant's sexual organ seems now to be a meeting of minds, rather than a disconnect between my second brain, my bowels, and the imaginings of my first brain, those pesky ideals.

Post-Language Apocalypse: The Lonely Typist

Imagine you are on a stage and the only prop you have is your wit. The audience is filled with razor sharp tongues enhanced by megaphones, and somehow you have to mesmerise these tongues into wagging good reviews of your performance. Your chest puffs with the first winds of a brilliant thought meant to awe this crowd into submission, but instead of articulate phrases and carefully crafted metaphors, you croak. Like a prince turned into a toad, you feel masked by your animal image. Nothing is certain now, except for the bad reviews, which will crowd every web page and blaze rejection in the headline.

I expect this is what social anxiety feels like. I thankfully have a lesser version of this and just feel like an elephant with a speech defect around people most of the time. But for those with full-blown social anxiety, every encounter must be fraught with dangers. So much so that withdrawal into a social replacement may seem to be the only possible secure avenue. The inevitable result is a masked loneliness compensated for through virtual contact in even the most populous of places.

 How do we mask loneliness? I suspect many replace human, face-to-face contact with TV shows, video games and everything else the web has to offer. Communication in a traditional sense then falls out of practice and the ability to be witty or simply converse often erodes.  For those not gifted with gab, speaking with another, sharing a thought will not be forced upon them and need never be practiced with the proliferation of social aids.

I cannot possibly condemn the screens in front of which we spend so much time. I enjoy everything they have to offer far too much - I can self-publish a blog, snoop on friends via facebook and gather all the information I need to nourish my soul. Yet even as I have a voice, somehow I am still voiceless. I am disembodied and safe from any direct experience of a tongue lashing. The screen has not enabled me to communicate or share better with others, nor has it given me the tools to enrich my experience of life.

Sometimes I worry that with the erosion of speech will come an increasing gap between the solitary path we all walk and the capacity to share this experience with other solitary walkers. Are we not becoming more lonely as we forget how to speak?

It is possible that language evolved as a social tool to aid cooperation and increase our chances of survival. When we awake one day from our virtual life, will we remember how to cooperate, how to share and how to express our inner life?

Have you told your mother, you think women are lazy.

Canadian citizens, or so I believed, hold in general fairly progressive social values which enable even the weakest members of our society to contribute. Yet, after reading the comments to a globe and mail article "Should pregnancy be considered a disability?", I seriously doubt the capacity for reasonable thought on the part of many Canadians.

In this article, posted Fri January 6th, Dave McGinn, discusses a recent bid in the states to give pregnancy the status of disability, so that women in the workplace can receive basic allowances for their altered condition. Such reasonable measures include frequent bathroom breaks and drinking water while working, which would allow most pregnant women to work late into the third trimester.

The most vitrolic responses to this fairly innoculous article included suggestions that breeders should not be hired and caricatures of women as overly emotional and lazy, who slack off by going on multiple maternity leaves. Many commentors insisted that as it was the woman's choice to have children, the financial and personal burden should rest entirely on her shoulders instead of the government's or the private company's.

This seems to represent a basic merging of biological destiny and social responsibility. Such a line of reasoning reads: since it is only women who can bear children, they must be the ones entirely responsible for their care. Everyone else should be completely absolved of all responsibility. Besides for being completely selfish, this knee jerk reaction to slightest hint of shared social responsibility ignores women and children as a valuable resource for the continued wealth of Canada.

By making slight adjustments to the workplace, improving maternity leave, and supporting child care, we are investing in both a current resource, women, and a future resource, children. Without support for both women and children, we are in fact weakening the productive capacity of Canada.

Instead of dividing and conquering, in order to get a bigger piece of the pie, why don't we increase the size of the pie? Or as one commentor asked, have you told your mother what you think?