“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience...of which the purpose is too deep for mental explanation or description." - DH Lawrence

PART TWO OF TWO: MYTHOLOGY (Creation)

Pushed: The Painful Truth about Motherhood and Modern Maternity Care by Jennifer Block was NOT a book I couldn’t put down. In fact, I put it down several times, rather forcefully, and the only thing that kept me from flinging it across the room at least once was the fact that it is a library book. When I realized that Block was not only making me feel like a horrible mother for wanting crazy things like pain relief and reliable medical care for my baby, but also like I was somehow betraying motherhood in general, and my maternal instincts in particular, I put the book down for good. Aren’t pregnancy, childbirth, and babycare hard enough without strewing the already hazardous way with more doubt and expectation?

Yes, yes, wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all just crouch down in the backyard and pop out our babies without medication and having to be hooked up to machines? Wouldn’t it be lovely if we were all confident enough to have a breech birth in a wading pool in our living rooms? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if, when you decided that you are perfectly ok with giving birth in a hospital and would like some relief from those vomit-inducing, screechworthy labor pains, that you could do so without feeling like you are subverting nature?

I am all for natural childbirth. I tried it with Primo. But apparently my first sin was having my water break before I had dilated at all. Then my second sin was calling my doctor who, because it was my first baby and we’d had some touch-and-go moments earlier in the pregnancy, asked me to come in so she could keep an eye on me. Apparently my third grievous sin was then proceeding to shake uncontrollably and vomit copiously, causing some worry about fever and infection, at which point my doctor asked me – ASKED, not demanded or assumed – if I would care to be induced. (Would I LIKE to have a root canal? No. Is it possible that one is indicated and therefore it might be a good idea? Better question.) As it turns out, I WOULD care to be induced, if only to make the dreadful gutheaving STOP sometime in the next two days. I mean, yeah, it would produce my baby, but oh my god, I wasn’t even really in yet and already I was dying for labor to be over. My fourth sin – oh why keep counting, apparently I broke every rule in the book. But I came home relatively unscathed – my doctor tries very hard to avoid episiotomies and was successful – and with a healthy, howling baby. You know what? In MY book, that equals a successful birth experience.

As someone once pointed out to me, you could have dental work done without Novacaine, but WHY? I’ll tell you why NOT – there’s no great dental governing body out there declaring that root canals are perfectly natural and if we could just let go of all our medically-demanded and socially-pressured expectations, we could just BREATHE through our root canal and go home and cook up a steak and eat it that same night.

Do I sound pissed? Because I am.

I see both sides. I have a friend who had a dreadful labor experience in a hospital, contracting and pushing for close to forty-eight hours before she finally agreed to a c-section. I also know a couple who wanted to have a homebirth with a midwife and did so, but the baby (a breech) got stuck in the birth canal, the midwife and mother did not call 911 soon enough, the baby suffocated, and the mother nearly bled to death. Both moms went on to have another healthy, successful pregnancy, and are wonderful mothers to their children. Both of those mothers chose to deliver their second babies, respectively, in a hospital again, and in her living room again. This time all went well. As long as you can live with the consequences of your choice, without giving in to expectation or deluded ideas of what is “right” and/or “natural,” then you should do what feels right for you and your child, and what works for you.

Here is what I am for:
Any birth experience that works for you and gives you peace of mind, and that results in a healthy baby and a healthy mother.

If what works for you is having your baby in a paddling pool in your family room and cutting the cord yourself, then I say go for it. More power to you.

If what works for you is having your baby under a doctor’s care in a hospital, then do it.

Heck, while I don’t personally get it, if what works for you is scheduling a c-section so you can get back to work in time for the big client presentation, well, I kinda feel sorry for you and your kid, but what the heck, it’s your birth experience.

Why does everyone feel as if they have the right to dictate women’s bodies and what those bodies do? What man in his right mind would pay the slightest attention to anyone telling him that, for example, kidney stones are perfectly natural and he should just grit his teeth, relax into his pain, and pee blood until the damn stone sees fit to pass?

Should midwives be certified, and a legal, viable option for a pregnant woman? Absolutely.
Should you be able to pick a hospital or a birthing center or the comfort of your own home? Absolutely.
Should you have pain relief? Absolutely, if you want it.

Should you be free to give birth how you want to? ABSOLUTELY.

But Block’s book just perpetuates the “REAL women give birth without intervention” myth.

If you want to read a more interesting and much more levelheaded view of childbirth, and how the choices made by mothers and doctors affect maternal and neonatal mortality rates (which is where the real story is), read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Birth. I am not arguing that there are not doctors out there who only want to pop out your baby in time to make the second round of golf that afternoon; I am certainly not arguing that sometimes mothers are pressured into medical procedures they’re not comfortable with and don’t want (I should write a post about my numerous run-ins with the genetics counselor). I am merely arguing that these “exposes” of the maternity system in America always seem to fail to take into account that some mothers are happy to give birth in a hospital rather than their backyard, and that for some of us, epidurals are God’s gift to moms. And we are not lesser women or worse mothers because of it.

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie- deliberate, contrived & dishonest- but the myth- persistent, persuasive & unrealistic.” - JFK

PART ONE OF TWO: MYTHOLOGY (Greek)

Alexandra Robbins’ Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities is a weirdly compelling book. I find myself not wanting to put it down. Robbins does a terrific job of helping us get to know the girls she has undertaken to follow throughout a year of sorority membership, and rather than perpetuate mindless stereotypes, she intelligently and thoughtfully explores, dissects, and exposes the stereotypes and the truth behind them, both by in-depth, research-based investigative reporting and though a careful character analysis of her four subjects and her relationship with them as well as their relationships with their sorority sisters.

God, am I glad that I never rushed a sorority (not that any of them would have taken me anyway, probably, I apparently didn't worry nearly enough about how I looked).

But some of the other stuff this author talks about - I just don't know. I guess it takes all kinds. But now I get why people look at me funny if it ever comes up that I used to hang out at a fraternity when I was in college, and that my boyfriend was one of the brothers. Maybe there's some truth to all the stereotypes of Greeks. It's just weird, since it so doesn't gel with what I experienced - but then I wasn't deeply involved, like being in a sorority.

I always liked being at the house, I always felt safe there, I liked most of the brothers (actually, the other girlfriends were more the problem, what is with women hating other women?). Most of the brothers - I mean, really, most of them - were all right guys.

It's hard to reconcile my memory of fun parties, and being involved in events at Carnival that I might have skipped otherwise, and even more ritualized events like formals (even if I never did get my lavaliere - but I wasn't bitter. Ahem.) with the crazy stuff the author talks about in this book. Maybe I was just naive. Maybe it's because my boyfriend never seemed to take a lot of the stuff all that seriously. Maybe the house I frequented really was different from the norm.

I remember how heartbroken I was when I wasn’t selected to be an official little sister, before national outlawed little sisters. Later, some of the bigs officially made me a ‘friend of the house,’ but I still couldn’t wear letters. I LONGED to wear those letters.

I would have killed for a lavaliere from J. He either didn’t love me enough to be bothered, or, looking back now, what I think was probably the case, he didn’t take much of fraternity ritual very seriously at all and probably had very little idea how very very badly I wanted to be lavaliered. Yet when he proposed - with his fraternity pin AND his grandmother’s ring - after college, I turned him down. (Although I have to admit I did fondle that pin a bit…I had wanted it for so long. I mean, the ring was pretty, but that pin…)

But I knew from the get-go that sorority membership wasn’t for me. I have never been a woman’s woman. I’d have imploded in the hothouse atmosphere of a sorority house. This book merely proves me right in that regard. Some of the girls assert that they have found lifelong sisterhood with their sorority sisters, but others are as dismissive of the senseless rules and political playmaking as I would be. The sex, the drinking, the drugs, the partying and casual hook-ups, all ring very true to me, and that’s just from this GDI’s college experience in the early nineties. I am not sure how much being in a sorority contributes to these girls’ behavior, and eventually that is the conclusion Robbins reaches as well. But in the meantime, what a heck of a read. Like "Dynasty" meets Little Women, with a dash of The New Girls or "Clueless" thrown in for good measure.