Motherhood

My Mother’s Day started with a serenade from Guerita.

I woke at 6am to find her sitting in bed next to me singing “You are my Sunshine”, a song she’d learnt at school. It was so sweet and she was so heartfelt about it. It ranks right up there as one of the best ways to wake up. A little bit later than 6am would have been quite nice, but oh well. A sleep in was never going to be on the cards since Rocky was away for work and not due back till 9am this morning.

As well as the song, I received a number of beautiful pieces of artwork

and this one made at school

It says “Happy Mother’s Day! I give you this and much love. I love you.”

I had to laugh though because apparently they were told to cut out a picture from a magazine of something they would give us as a gift and stick the picture in the card. Guerita chose a jar of wrinkle cream to stick in my card! Do you think she’s trying to tell me something??

As well as the card, the school made a CD of the kids singing a few songs, including my morning’s serenade and a few songs in Spanish. It was pretty impressive! It reminded of when I was in primary school and our school choir made a recording (for a fundraiser, I think). From memory one of the songs we sang was Feeling Groovy and it was recorded on 45s!!

Perhaps I do need that wrinkle cream after all.

After we collected Rocky from the airport we went straight out for breakfast and then spent the rest of the day lazing round playing Junior Scrabble and splashing in the paddle pool.

Of course, we couldn’t forget the Grandma’s but had to call them the night before because of the time difference. I’ve never really gone for the purchased Mother’s Day present, either to give or receive. I’d rather I or the kids produce a craft or specially made card and given our distance from the Grandmas, we opted for a digital greeting. The obvious choice for me was a photo gift so I made these up in Photoshop for my Mum and Mother in Law. We’ll print them for them if they want, or they can just enjoy them on the computer. A new screensaver perhaps?

I hope all the Mothers out there had a great Mother’s Day too!

Tomorrow my little girl turns 5. How did that happen? Where did the time go?

It seems like just yesterday she was born, but then life before her is a blur. A world that doesn’t seem real anymore.

In 2003, when she came into the world, we were living in Saudi Arabia. We’d been there for just over a year and thought my enforced career break (not being employable given I was female) was a good opportunity to start a family.

My pregnancy was a little stressful. There was a lot of morning sickness and a lot of vomiting right up to 31 weeks. There was also some high blood pressure and after an abnormal result on the triple test, we had an amniocentesis to find out if our baby had Down Syndrome. The results were clear, but in the ultrasound they picked up that she had talipes equinovarus (club feet) which would require treatment immediately after birth.

As the birth drew closer, the situation in neighbouring Iraq grew more and more heated. We tried to get a visa for my mother to visit for the birth, but it was impossible in that tense political state. When I was 36 weeks pregnant the US and allied forces invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. We didn’t know how this would affect our safety in Saudi and whether the locals would direct anger or worse at the visible foreigners in their midst. We didn’t know if we would have to be evacuated from the country and if any airline would agree to fly a pregnant woman so close to term. I had always covered myself in the traditional abaya (black cloak) worn by Saudi women but for several weeks I went further and covered my head when out in public to avoid drawing attention to myself and my blonde hair.

The “official” period of the Iraq war (supposedly about 4 weeks) passed without incident and we relaxed, thinking that life would probably continue as “normal”, at least until the baby was born. 40 weeks came and went without the slightest twinge of labour pains and by 41 weeks my OB/GYN, a lovely Syrian woman would would delicately say that she was going to examine me “Down There”, was keen to get things moving.

The next day I was booked in for an induction. First thing in the morning I presented at the hospital. Weighed, poked, prodded, undressed, examined, IV inserted, enema delivered, gel applied.

So we waited. And waited. And not a lot happened for he first 6 hours. More gel applied, still nothing much - a few twinges here and there. We played a lot of backgammon and emailed our family, saying “Not yet”.

In the afternoon the doctor was keen to sweep the membranes, but apparently my body was having none of that and they broke of their own accord. The first time I had actually made a step towards having the baby without medical intervention!

That’s when things started to get interesting. Induction drugs cranked up, the contractions start making themselves known. The pain took my breath away. Like someone had put my pelvis in a vice and was tightening and tightening and tightening…

And I am only 2cm dilated. The despair and disappointment is shocking. All this for only 2cm!

Time to rethink that lofty no-drug birth plan. I don’t think I ever thought I would make it without pain relief, but it’s the thing to do, isn’t it? It’s shameful to write on your birth plan - “I don’t want to feel pain. I just want to get the baby out!”

The gas does nothing. Except make me throw up. And give me something else to concentrate on while I am desperately trying to suck enough in to actually make a dent in the pain that is coming 2 minutes apart. I give in on my “no-pethidine” stance, even though I know it will make me feel sick.

When that doesn’t work, I beg for an epidural and wait for the anathestist to be called in from his dinner table. By this stage the contractions are coming 1 minute apart, so his instructions to “hold completely still”, while he inserts the needle big enough for a horse into the precise space in my spinal column, are… well… *difficult* to comply with. It take several goes to get the needle inserted, each attempt bringing excruciating pain to rival the contractions. Once it’s in, relief is quick and I relax for the first time in about 8 hours. For a blissful hour, I labour away, happy in the knowledge that the worst of the pain has gone. That yes, I will get through this and will be having my baby soon.

But I am only 5cm dilated.

And then the epidural starts to wear off.

I receive a top up, which lasts for 15 minutes before the pain comes back. As strong as it was before the horse needle went in.

And my dilation - now 3cm.

Yes, I have gone backwards.

My OB/GYN tells me its probably because I am getting stressed and tense.

Well, I’ll just relax then shall I? After 17 hours of labour, now with no pain relief and none on offer!

Of course, you know what’s coming next, don’t you?

Caesarian delivery.

But the epidural has failed!

General anaesthetic it is, then.

The wave of relief is palpable. And end is in sight. It is the complete opposite of my birth plan, but I don’t care. The baby is coming out.

When I find out later that the time between deciding on a Caesarian under GA and being anaesthetised is 15 minutes. I am shocked. I could have sworn it was hours.

I am transferred to the operating table in the middle of a contraction. I have no idea how they managed to lift/drag my writhing, whale-like form. I remember seeing the anesthetist who I simultaneously hated for screwing up my epidural and loved for bringing the divine general anaesthetic. The last thing I remember is screeching “Just stick the f***ing thing in” at him as he fumbled with the IV tube. Those nurses tiptoed around that foul-mouthed foreign lady the next day, I tell you. Nothing like those quiet Saudi women.

Minutes, hours later (no sense of time) I wake up whilst being wheeled to recovery.

Rocky is there with a little bundle wrapped in pink.

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I stayed in hospital for a few days until the stitches could come out. Feeding was difficult to establish, but we got there in the end. Rocky was keen to get away from the hospital environment and get home to start creating a new normal. I was…nervous and apprehensive about leaving the security of a team of medical staff. The day we arrived home, he bustled around the house like an excitable child, while I quietly freaked out at this immense responsibility. The first 12 hours were a dream - Guerita ate and slept like an angel. Then all hell broke loose and she realised we had no idea what we were doing. The second night at home culminated in a midnight dash to the supermarket for formula after all latching and expressing attempts ended in tears from Mother and Baby.

We settled into some sort of routine over the next few days and the feeding started to sort itself out. We were too preoccupied with our new bundle of joy to think of life outside the walls of our house.

So we were surprised to be awoken one morning, about a week after she was born, by a phone call from a relative in New York, making sure we were OK and hoping we weren’t affected by the latest terrorist attack. A militant group, affiliated with Al Q, had driven explosive filled trucks into a residential compound in another city, gunning down the security guards and detonating their bombs in an effort to take out as many westerners and western-sympathisers living there. 35 people were killed and 160 people injured, including a colleague of Rocky’s, a friendly Canadian bloke we had had dinner with a few months before.

Although the attack took place in another city to where we lived, the targeted compound was very similar to ours and almost immediately the security around our gates was increased ten-fold. Every time we left the house and saw the concrete bollards and National Guard with rifles trained we were reminded of what might have been; what could happen. We could barely make sense of it through the fog of caring for a newborn.

For the next month we carried on our tense existence, counting down the days till our planned trip back to Perth to show off the new baby. Rocky kick-started his job search while were home; by this stage we were eager to cut our 2 year contract short. Thankfully, he found work quickly and we returned to Saudi for one month to pack our house and move on.

Looking back on Guerita’s birth, it all seems a bit unreal. For so many reasons it was not a “normal” or straightforward experience.

Thankfully, my second attempt was much less dramatic.

There’s lots of good reasons for breastfeeding our children. We all know that, and I’ve recently read some great blog posts about breastfeeding toddlers at My Little Drummer Boys and Olive Juice. There’s also some great information on the benefits of breastfeeding from the World Health Organisation.

All of these factors are part of the reason why I breastfed Guerita until 2 years old and plan to continue feeding Chiq for at least that long.

But I have to admit that another factor in choosing to breastfeed my kids and to continue into toddlerhood is that I am lazy!

Yes, the nutrition and health benefits of breastmilk are better than formula, but more than that - who can be bothered sterilising bottles and mixing formula? I seriously think all that hassle would drive me crazy. When my kids woke during the night our system was always the same - Rocky gets up to fetch her out of the cot, hands her to me in bed, I feed her (she usually falls asleep on the breast) and put her back in the cot. It’s a shared responsibility but neither of us is up for long and we barely need to wake up. There’s no standing in the kitchen at 3 in the morning cursing that we forgot to sterilise the bottle or that we’ve run out of formula. (I’m sure there’s lots of very organised parents who would never have this problem, but I have no doubt we would regularly face this hassle if we bottle fed!)

And going out - you’ve got to remember to pack all that stuff!! If I was bottle feeding, I’m sure I would continually forget to bring a bottle or the formula or the water. Imagine what it would have been like on our recent trip? I don’t even know how you would pack enough bottles, formula etc and manage sterilising for a 24-48 hour trip. Thank goodness Chiq’s milk is permanently “packed” with me!

When Guerita was a newborn I had all the (probably normal) worries about how much to feed her. The parenting books are full of information about 4 hour feeding schedules and this many mls for each feed, but you can’t measure that when you breastfeed. A quote in Baby Love, by Robin Barker, always stuck with me though,

You can’t overfeed a breastfed child.

This might sound oversimplified but it made sense to me. I think babies have an inbuilt understanding of appetite and breastfeeding allows them to feed until they are full, rather than to a certain amount. (This is actually a philosophy I have extended beyond breastfeeding. I don’t believe in making kids finish everything on their plate. As long as you offer them lots of healthy options, I think we should let them decide when they have had enough and teach them to listen to the signals from their body about feeling full. Maybe this will help them to have healthy eating habits when they are older and hopefully go some way to avoid obesity issues.)

In those early days of feeding a newborn, we were stumbling our way through the days trying to work out how this little person worked and what she needed to keep her happy. Breastfeeding was always a useful source of comfort as well as food and I often used it to calm the baby as well as feed her. I’m not sure how I would have managed if I had been bottle feeding and had already given her her “quota” for the day. Some people take issue with feeding babies to sleep and if you read some of those “baby boot camp” style of books they are scathing about the practice of comfort and demand feeding. My approach has always been that when getting babies to sleep, find whatever works for you and stick with it. There’s no wrong way to soothe them, but whatever you adopt as your ritual, do it with the understanding that you might be stuck with it for quite a while. In other words, choose a ritual you can live with - if your ritual involves 3 songs, 4 books, a feed, a cuddle and rocking, well that’s fine in my opinion, as long as you are happy to do that every night over and over again.

Anyway, back to breastfeeding! Whenever Chiq gets sick (and Guerita in her time) breastfeeding has been my saviour. I am always amazed by the painkilling properties of it, as well as the comfort factor. Poor little Chiq is sick at the moment with a high fever from tonsillitis and an ear infection and about the only thing she’ll take is the breast. I would be a lot more worried about her lack of appetite if I didn’t know that she was still getting a lot of nutrients from the breastmilk. When Guerita was 5 months old and had an operation, the nurses advised us that she would probably be in pain when the general anaesthetic wore off, and recommended we get some Painstop medication to get her through the night. Maybe she was just a little trooper, but she needed no medication, just a breastfeed to get through the pain.

There are so many situations when I find breastfeeding is such an easy and hassle free solution to feeding/calming/healing the kids. For a lazy mother like me, it’s a lot easier than worrying about bottles.

Obviously, this is a little tongue in cheek. The serious reasons for breastfeeding are all really important, but I also know that lots of mothers can’t or choose not to breastfeed for good reasons. I am a strong supporter of it, but I don’t like all the guilt that goes with it. I have had both my kids in countries where I had to really fight to be able to breastfeed and I had to be very determined to keep going with it, with very little support from doctors and nurses. The stories I hear from friends who’ve had babies in Australia certainly give me the impression that a lot of mothers are made to feel guilty and inadequate if they can’t or won’t breastfeed their kids. If a woman is given all the information and support to feed their babies, but is unable to or makes an informed decision not to, then their situation should be respected.

What about you? What has been the best thing about breastfeeding for you?

If you didn’t breastfeed, were you made to feel guilty about it? And how did you organise yourself with all those bottles??

Recently I have been following the story of photos of breastfeeding mothers being removed from social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space. Now it seems that YouTube has removed a video of breastfeeding mothers, banning The Great Breast Fest Montage released by The League of Maternal Justice, a mother´s group whose mission is

To use the power of the mom internet community to expose the injustices perpetrated against mothers everywhere and to exact vengeance through aggressive finger-wagging and online shaming.

The video was removed by YouTube for inappropriate content and inappropriate nature. I still find it incredible that, in this day and age, people are so uninformed and bigoted about such a natural process. Bill Maher, an American comedian who hosts a late night talk show recently compared public breastfeeding with public masturbation!

Personally, I´ve never directly had problems when I’ve been breastfeeding in public, although I´ve certainly had plenty of sideways glances. I´ve always taken the view that if me breastfeeding my child makes other people uncomfortable, that´s their problem, not mine. It has bothered me more when my paediatrician has asked if I am still feeding Chiq (who´s nearly 11 months old) - with that slight but noticeable emphasis on “still”, or when my mother tries to hide her shock when I remind her I fed Guerita till she was 22 months old, and intend to do the same with Chiq. I guess she was from a generation with very little support for breastfeeding and consequently gave up when things seem to drying up after a few weeks.

The one place I did censor my feeding was when we lived in Saudi. This is a country where a flash of bare ankle, wrist or neck is considered pornographic. I have no doubt that whipping a boob out in a restaurant would have landed me in jail, probably with a few lashes to go with it. I remember once watching a Saudi woman on a plane trying to breastfeed her baby. I was amazed that she was even breastfeeding at all, as bottles and full time nannies seemed to be so common there. She struggled away, draping a heavy blanket over her head and the baby creating a cocoon for them both, so that all that could be seen was a shapeless form. I sat across the aisle, comfortably (and discretely) feeding Guerita, probably shocking them all!

My lifestyle here in Mexico means I am not as often in a position to need to breastfeed Chiq in public. Our trips out tend to be short and her routine is fairly predictable these days so I can plan around her feeds. Not that I hesitate to feed her when I´m out and about, if necessary. I´m sure it shocks some people, partly because to be still feeding a baby her age is not common here, but it all goes over my head. I choose not to notice if someone else has a problem.

I know that combating prejudice and discrimination against breastfeeding in public is not always as simple as to not let it bother you. There are loads of examples of women being asked to leave a place, to take the baby into the toilet to feed them, or generally being harassed about feeding their babies, like these examples:

• Kirstie Marshall being evicted from Victorian parliament for breastfeeding her newborn
• The uproar when Kate Langbroek breastfed her son on live national television on The Panel
• Delta airlines ejecting a passenger for trying to breastfeed her baby, prompting rolling breastfeeding sit-ins at Delta counters around the US, dubbed “lactivism” (love that term!)
• This story about a woman in the US who was harassed and bullied while feeding her baby in her local hospital

I find the Delta airlines example particularly concerning. I´ve travelled a lot with Guerita and Chiq and breastfeeding them on take off and landing is essential! Not to mention when you´re on a long haul flight, you have no other choice but to feed them - they can´t go 24 hours without food after all.

So, I´ve put The Great Breast Fest button in my sidebar and I´m now following the League of Maternal Justice´s campaigns. If only I´d known about their call for breastfeeding photos, I would have sent in a great one I have of me feeding a newborn Chiq, sitting up in bed, while Guerita sits beside me trying to feed her baby doll the same way (although the doll was aimed more at the bellybutton than the breast - we´ve since corrected her anatomical misunderstanding!).

We’re back from our holiday in Mexico City and Playa del Carmen, where we didn’t have much time or access to the internet so I haven’t posted for a while.

The holiday was great and I’ll be posting photos etc soon, but I’ll get our little last day of holidays drama out of the way first….

Saturday was an awful day. We had plans to spend our last day in Playa del Carmen by the pool, at the beach and generally hanging out before flying home Sunday. I set Chiq up for breakfast in her travel booster seat (strapped to a normal chair) and pushed her up to the table so she could reach the banana. Then I very foolishly took a few steps away into the kitchen to get the yoghurt and in those few seconds she pushed her little feet against the table and toppled the chair over backwards, bumping her head on the chair-back as it hit the floor. I feel sick thinking about it and typing it. I’ll tell you now it all ends well and she is absolutely fine (I hate that feeling of reading a story like this and not knowing how it will end!).

She cried straight away and didn’t lose consciousness or have any seizures etc, but she was quite sleepy and about 10 minutes later she did one very large vomit. At this point we took her to hospital where she had a CT scan to be sure there was no serious head injury. In actual fact about 30 minutes after the fall she was back to her normal self, smiling and crawling and clapping, but because of the vomiting the doc wanted the CT to be safe. The CT showed everything was normal but we were at the hospital for 6 and a half hours waiting for results, and keeping her for observation.

It was a very unpleasant and scary day, although thankfully she seemed to recover quickly from what was probably a mild concussion. I have been paranoid about all the hard tile floors we have in our home and most places we go, worried she is going to hit her head, but we’ve taken quite a lot of precautions to avoid that at home. It goes to show how doubly vigilant we need to be when we’re in unfamiliar circumstances. Of course, I have been beating myself up about it and watching her like a hawk ever since.

We saw our very nice paediatrician today who confirmed that she looked perfectly fine and said the only thing he would prescribe was a few doses of “try to forget about it” for me!

Easier said than done. That mother’s guilt is a powerful thing.