Birth Stories

In the natural childbirth class I am taking, there is a lot of talk about how we aren’t familiar with birth in our modern world. It’s true that I haven’t witnessed any births, but thanks to bloggers who somehow find the time to write about their experiences giving birth even though they now have babies to take care of, I have read a lot of birth stories: everything from home births to emergency c-sections. The strange thing is that, although a lot of my friends have had kids in the past few years, I know less about the details of their birth experiences than I do of the ones linked below.

In case it is helpful to anyone else, I’ve made a list of links below to some of the birth stories from blogs I read. Some I read when they were posted, some I read in people’s archives, and a couple I came across via links from other blogs while I was doing this post.

I want to note that I haven’t linked to stories in which the babies did not survive. I honor those mothers and their labors and their children, but it didn’t feel right to me to just put their stories on a list of mine, subsection tragedy.

Julie: Charlie arrives, away from home

Jo: Sophia’s birth in four parts, plus discussion

Jenex: Boo’s birth story

Arwen: Camilla’s birth story

Jolisa: Rocket Baby

Cecily: Tori’s arrival

Emma Jane: short and long versions of Tabitha’s birth

Dooce: Leta’s birth

Mrs. Kennedy: Jackson

Moxie: El pequeño

Anna: Two parts for the Bee

Alice: Henry

Linda: E and L

Suz: Henry and Tyler

Lisa: Naim and Aaron

Special bonus, from One Good Thing: Instructions for mothers who gave birth in an Army hospital in 1956.

I am also very moved by adoption stories (most recently AmFam and Johnny), but at the moment I am, due to my own circumstances, most obsessed with reading about birth.

If This Keeps Up…

instead of “just relax” or “if you adopt, you’ll get pregnant,” people are going to start annoying their infertile friends and relatives by telling them “I heard that if you do ivf, it won’t work, but then you’ll get pregnant afterwards” or “you’ll have twins, and then get pregnant again naturally.”

Nothing Bad Has Happened Yet (tm getupgrrl). May all the pregnancies go well and end with healthy mothers and babes.

Blogs in Transition

Going, going, gone. Karen’s blog is password protected while she archives it. Lisa V is going to do the same thing. I’m not even counting the people who have mentioned that they might possibly be slowing down or stopping soon.

Back to blogging. (Soper, if you were wondering who has been reading all your archives this week, it’s not a weirdo, or at least not a scary weirdo, just me.)

I did a lot of blog binging the last couple days of 2006, so it might be just as well for me if everyone I read stopped writing. On the other hand, I demonstrated my ability to procrastinate before I ever discovered blogs.

I thought setting up a Bloglines account might help, since I wouldn’t be clicking on every blog in my bookmarks whenever I wanted to check for updates. Now, however, anytime I look at Bloglines, somebody has updated. More efficient, but not necessarily more conducive to getting work done.

Inept

1. I got tired of having so many “uncategorized” posts, so I added the category “life, the universe, and everything,” but I forgot that WordPress uses commas to separate multiple categories, so now I have three new categories:  “life,” “the universe,” and “everything”. Oh, and I haven’t looked up how to alter or delete categories.

2. After stumbling upon a particulary mean blog, I decided to join Karen’s “Kind Blog” list. I was very proud of myself for getting the button in the right place, complete with image. Then I realized that there was no link in the button, so I have to re-do it. For the record, the Kind Blog page is here.

End of Year Meme

I’ve been reading this as it has moved from the academic women’s blogs I read to the mothers in academia to the mothers outside of academia. I think I saw it first at See Jane Compute and most recently at Snickollet.

The rules:

1. Harken back to your archives.
2. Collect the first sentence you wrote every month for the whole year.
3. Entertain us.

I’ve only been blogging since August, so here is not quite half a year of firsts.

August: I have been writing elegant introductions in my head, but nothing profound enough to post.

September: Yesterday, I was so tired that I walked to the subway station and then realized I was not up to going anywhere.

October: Though Orthomom’s post on preimplantation genetic diagnosis I found a piece in Slate on pgd, “Better than Sex: The Growing Practice of Embryo Eugenics” by William Saletan.

November: We had one group of trick-or-treaters.

December: (the first two sentences were dated Dec. 1 but posted Nov. 30, at least in my time zone. I got a little grouchy about that because of NaBloPoMo.)

1. I had my second official ob appointment today.

2. 14w1d was November 30, and it was posted Nov. 30, and in fact it is still Nov. 30 here.

3. (The one actually written in Dec.) Mr. Luo is re-reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

So, an introduction, a post about my medical tourism in NYC, pgd, pregnancy, and a bit of home life.

The ivf-pgd to pregnancy trajectory is what I had hoped for, but not really expected, when I started writing this blog.

Back in August, I would have anticipated seeing  more posts about my work by the end of the year, but the absence reflects my progress in that area, unfortunately.

Griffith Observatory

Clifford at Asymptotia has posted his observations about the newly re-opened Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. It sounds great.
Even before I decided that I actually did want to have a kid or kids, I thought that the fun part of being a parent would be taking the kid(s) to places like Griffith Observatory.  (The non-fun parts plus my own insecurity were why I used to think I couldn’t handle parenthood.)

Not that I have  denied myself all the fun up to now. I volunteered at a small Science Center for kids in Grad School Town mostly because I remembered liking the science museums so much when I was growing up. This one had a playground that was all supposed to be illustrative of scientific concepts (things like swings with different lengths of chain). If I’d learned my stuff there better (or remembered it better), I could explain it all. I can say that it was a fun playground.

Vote!

That is, if you are in the United States or someplace else that is voting today.

While you’re waiting to hear the results:

Take a look at Johnny’s post on voting.

And Jody’s post on class, income, values, voters.

Anonymity, Blogging, Privacy, Safety

There have been a few posts recently about a cluster of perennial issues for bloggers that involve our desire to build community in a public space (the internet) while maintaining our blogs as safe and private spaces.
Squid would like people she knows to tell her when they are reading her blog.

Terminal Degree has had some unwanted attention from a commercial site.
Some of the doctors at Thalia’s clinic found her blog. She has been posting on why she blogs, her reaction to the doctors’ reaction, and what to do about it all. On a selfish note, I really hope Thalia finds a way to continue blogging.

A while ago, Dawn posted a “Blog PSA” (and a follow-up post ) on the subject of anonymity.
I chose to blog pseudonymously because I didn’t want people to find the blog by Googling my legal name. On the other hand, I chose not to limit myself in the ways necessary to maintain real anonymity (such as those listed by Dawn, with getupgrrl as an example). I assume that eventually somebody I know will find the blog. They may or may not tell me that they are reading.

I self-censor a bit, but I am also aware that something that seems fine to me might not seem so to someone I write about. After all, Dr. Uncommunicative might not appreciate the nickname, even though it was simply descriptive-he was the one who referred me to my RE for all my questions when he did my transfers. As the daughter of a published author, I have some experience with this issue.
Although I don’t always succeed in following them, I set a few rules for myself when I started blogging.

The most important is not to use the blog to get out of a confrontation in real life. I am a person who really, really prefers to avoid conflict. I don’t want my blog to cater to that weakness. This is about me, though, not whether other people should or shouldn’t use their blogs to vent. I just don’t want to encourage a tendency on my part to deal with the conflict passive-aggressively. On the other hand, sometimes it is better to vent in “private” on a blog than to talk to someone about an issue right away.

This means not posting much about issues within my family, and trying not to argue with my husband by way of the blog (although since he is my most loyal reader, it wouldn’t be avoiding a confrontation to complain about him here ).

I also try hard to remember what is and is not my story. Obviously, I can’t post about my eating disorder group. I signed a list of policies that include privacy for all of us. I don’t even tell my husband much beyond it went well or not. The TFD support group doesn’t have an official policy, but their stories are not my stories either, so I try to keep it vague or general when speaking of my friends there.

Once I am teaching again, I’ll try to remember Rudbeckia Hirta’s policy: that an administrator with a class list should not be able to tell whom she is talking about.

I don’t know what the answer is to the public/private nature of blogs. You can’t really control who reads you or links to you without withdrawing behind password protection, which takes away part of your ability to build a community.

In “real life,” I have people I can talk to about my research and teaching, but that isn’t the case with my attempts to have a kid. Without my passive (as a reader) and active (recently, as a blogger) involvement with blogs, I would not have had nearly as much support during my ivf cycles, because I have chosen to tell very few people about them. I value the community, and it seems worth the risk so far, but I don’t have that many readers so my blog is in effect still quite private.

Matchmaker

Do you ever want to match up bloggers you read from different parts of the blog world?

I mean, the infertile blogosphere is pretty well connected, and the feminists read each other, as do a lot of the academics, and of course there is a lot of overlap amongst those categories. But some people probably don’t know about each other.

For example, as far as I can tell, Chris Clark and Johnny have nothing in common aside from their gender-and their love for their ailing dogs (Zeke and Blue) . Warning: those posts might make you cry.

Has Michael Bérubé read Lisa’s blog, especially the posts on disability? (Have you read it? Why not?).

When I read Jolisa’s birthstory at Busytown, I wondered if she knew Jo (both former New Yorkers, wrote about homebirth, their husbands may be in the same academic field) or if she’d like to meet Jaime at Selkie (because she mentioned Ina May).
When I read about the frustrations that people adopting internationally have dealing with the background checks and fingerprints and so on (Karen wrote about this, but I can’t find the post), I think of Bruce Schneier’s blog on security issues. He doesn’t talk about adoption, but some of the basic problems are the same. How can a government or agency determine who is the best parent for the children/ infants in their care? Which requirements are useful and which are what Schneier calls “security theater”? After Rivka mentioned him in Respectful of Otters a couple of years ago, I read his book Beyond Fear, which explains the concepts that are the basis for his opinions on specific issues first. I recommend it

I think Schneier and PZ Myers probably already know each other and are privy to a secret cephalopod-fanatics’ handshake.

I know Bitch, Ph.D. probably reads Cosmic Variance, because her links led me to Sean Carroll at his previous blog, but has she read the posts there about navigating Los Angeles by foot and by bus? (I think Clifford wrote them, but I couldn’t find them when I searched, so maybe one of the other authors did.) Anyway, I hope she gets a chance to take Pseudonymous Kid to the Griffith Observatory this year.

Say a Little Prayer for You

I’m not a strict atheist. When I go to a Catholic church as a tourist, I light a candle for my Catholic grandparents. When I see an accident or roadkill, I say “om mani padme hum.”  I love the hymm “Amazing Grace,” *especially* with bagpipes. I celebrate Christmas, and play the Messiah as much as I can without driving Mr. Luo crazy. That kind of thing.

So today at the ceremony led by Nobel Prize Winner and Religious Leader I said a little Om Mani Padme Hum for all the women I read about who are cycling or waiting or in limbo right now. And then I visualized Julie’s Big List and the CycleSista page, and sent it out to all of you.*  So for what my  prayers are worth (my guess is, at least as good as sending out my normal secular “thinking of you” and who knows, maybe more), you’ve got them.

*This was the part of the ceremony when 500 people were muttering the mantra while NPWRL was doing preparatory ceremonial things, not the part when I was supposed to be listening to him talk, or the part when we were supposed to be visualizing other things.