Category: Insight

Posted in Fragile Life, Insight, New Mother

My Homebirth–at the hospital

Posted on by Kelly (of rituals)
Beardsley (visipix.com)

I never dreamed of a homebirth, never even imagined it or knew it was something that people chose to do. I had been brought up in a medical family–with three generations of allopathic physicians, and I assumed births took place as they should–in the hospital. This is where my mother gave birth to each of her nine children, and where she enjoyed the few days break from keeping house and caring for a newborn (not to mention siblings.)

By the time I got around to wanting a child, I was the same age my mother was as a parent of four. Having grown up in this large family, “blessed” as the eldest, I was in no rush to become a parent. I had my share of diaper changing and late night feedings by age of fourteen, and I had few illusions about the institution of motherhood; and loads of skepticism; that is until I was denied entry into this vocation.

Up until that time, I had viewed motherhood as some necessary evil, some hurdle I had to cross in order to pass into proper adulthood. Thus, I took it for granted that motherhood would be there waiting in the wings, whenever I was ready to succumb.

I was somewhere in my mid-twenties, unmarried, when it hit me. BABY HUNGER. All of the sudden, I HAD to have a baby. It didn’t matter that we were still renting and that my boyfriend had just gone back to school. The urge came on so strong and so unreasonably that I had to restrain myself from thoughts of swiping one.

As the primary breadwinner, it was completely impractical for me to get pregnant until my partner had his degree so instead I read everything I could on pregnancy and motherhood and being READY.

During that time we planned a wedding and fantasized about relocating to the mountains and living in a log home.

At 28, I couldn’t wait any longer so I convinced my husband to “start trying” before he graduated–since babies took nine months to be born anyway.

A year later, we still weren’t pregnant–and when we finally did conceive, I miscarried at the end of the first trimester. I hadn’t known that that was a possibility either.

Suddenly plans and jobs and certainty made less sense to me. We left our home at the shore and moved to the mountains of Vermont where we conceived–right away–only to miscarry again at 6 weeks.

When we were emotionally prepared to try a third time, we knew we needed something different–and that’s how we found Mary. Mary was a Naturopathic physician and a midwife–but mostly she was smart and caring and attentive.

Although she only attended homebirths, Mary agreed to work with us into the second trimester when she would turn us safely over to an MD. By that time however, we had fallen in love with her–and couldn’t imagine anyone else delivering our long-awaited baby–even if that meant we had to have a homebirth.

This third pregnancy was just as tricky as the previous ones–with a month of bleeding in the first trimester, early contractions in the second, and a challenging delivery in the third.

My son’s labor began at home on a rainy Tuesday morning–two weeks earlier than expected. It started with a sharp kick and the breaking of waters, followed by minute-long contractions, five-minutes apart. By the time the midwife arrived, I had already dilated 8 centimeters.

It was then that Mary discovered that the baby was breech–so she made arrangements for us to be transported over the mountain to the nearest hospital.

When I was rolled into the Emergency Room, the staff couldn’t believe that I was in labor–let alone in transition. With Mary at my side, I was calm and present and clear despite the mounting anxiety.

After some negotiations, they permitted Mary and my husband to accompany me into the operating room where my exquisitely planned homebirth was transformed into an emergency c-section.

The doctor on call had to yank my son out of the birth canal–along with all of my preconceived notions about how motherhood and I would become one.

Posted in Fragile Life, Insight, Mid-Life Mama, Milestone Moments, Violence in the home

Aladdin’s Lamp-a poem on spanking

Posted on by Kelly (of rituals)

There’s a lot of talk about the “right way” to use spanking as discipline–and to my beloved father’s credit, he always used it in a disciplined manner–only my body/spirit didn’t register the difference.

My family (before the fall), Circa 1981
My family (before the fall), Circa 1981

“The past is an Aladdin’s lamp which (we) never tire of rubbing”
Phillip Lopate

Sitting in Amy’s Bakery next to a plate smeared with jam and butter,
a half mug of hot cider in my hand,
the fog drifting over the river, and yoga in my
bones, I am the only one who jumps when a man drops his umbrella.
No one else even flinches.

I ask myself:
“What’s up?”

Deep breath, and I hear the hammers banging away at my therapist’s office–yesterday–and the sound of my dad’s footsteps coming up the stairs–a lifetime ago:
belt snapping
heart seizing
muscles tightening across my back and chest.

i cower in the corner of my bed;
while my vertebrae freeze with rage.

A voice rises from deep in my gut:
GET AWAY FROM ME!

But that is now;
Then, i only plead,
“No, Daddy, no!”
as I cover my thigh with my hand,
and scramble to fit even further into the corner
till my spine burns itself into the wall
and still,
i don’t disappear.

The belt slaps, once,
twice,
three times,
and i am…
Silenced

Like a dog

Some day…
SOME DAY!
i will escape this tiny body, this whimpering tone, and rise above him, like an evil genie out of a bottle,
green and black
terrifying
overbearing
booming with power and threat
and he will be vanquished
turned to dust.

Until then, I
speak up;
I fight injustice;
even though it always ends the same
spanked or sent to my room for hours

Until
the fall
of my freshman year at college;
home for the weekend;
playing the white baby grand in the parlor;
the theme song from “Endless Love.”

As he calls to me from his room above,
“Kelly Ann, Time for bed!”

My back bristles and hardens.

“Kelly Ann, did you hear me: Time for bed!” he hollers again

As I continue playing, finally dismissing his voice like he dismissed mine.

“KELLY ANN!” he booms, shaking my entire life.

I pound the keys.

I hear his footsteps down the stairs,
his 6 foot 4 body appearing in the doorway:

“If you want to see what happens then you can just keep on playing,” he says,
childishly, exposing his hand.

I twist from the keys and throw down all my cards.

“And if you want to see what happens you can just keep on playing…” I say back, mocking him, my hands on my hips, just like his.

Silence.

In two strides he crosses the room.

I rise to meet him in my power;

But i am not the genie;
i am 5 foot 2.

He strikes
once, twice…

Swiping my eye, my cheek

I fall

Stand up again

Hot words fly

We move from the piano
toward the couch
beside the marble table
where my grandmother, his mother, in what was once her house, lined pretzel gold fish to entice me to toddle across the room on my feet instead of my knees

He swipes a third time
and leaves me there
on the floor

I do not cry

I have won

or have i?

He has never hit me
like this before;
not like a wife.

I have always been
subordinate;
splayed out over his lap
pants down, age 4, 7, 9;
or bed shirt lifted above the thigh, age 10, 11, 12.

I stumble toward the kitchen for ice;
for a drink of water;
for my keys.

My mother arrives there in the dark, shrouded.
I hold back tears, knowing she’s come to comfort me;
but she doesn’t even look up when she says,
“You shouldn’t talk to your father that way.”

I am stunned, and suddenly I see her, really see her:
cloaked in a robe of fear,
unable to feel, anything,
leaving us each alone, in this dark kitchen, where we have laughed and confided and cooked his meals together.

“You need to know how to make mashed potatoes,” he once bellowed at me when she was gone.

He has hit her too: “Only once or twice when she couldn’t get control of herself,” he explained.

I drive the empty island blocks
toward my boyfriend’s house on Palm;
where everyone is sleeping.
He’s not home.

I lie down on the sectional under the bay window;
and stare at the street lights
bringing my fingers to my swollen cheek, my eye,
until the cold of the ice I placed there moves inside.

When my boyfriend arrives, he offers to go in my defense,
but he’s not much bigger than me,
and it is over now anyway.
I have swallowed it whole.
Alone.

My father often remarks
that one of us will leave
before I turn 18, adding,
“And it ain’t gonna be me,” he says with a snarl.

Didn’t his mother say the same thing?
In the same room?
Of the same house?

But it is he, who leaves, again,
when my mother takes a lover,
half her age,
my boyfriend’s best friend.

She thinks she’ll escape from her frozen life,
until she realizes;
that it’s her life’s pain that needs to thaw.

I return
to college;
and when that’s is enough distance between me and the pain at home,
when my sisters still call
to say,
“Mom is lying, drunk, on the front lawn,”
or
“The car window is smashed and there is blood,”
or
“Dad has called us horrible names, shouted terrible things about her,”
or that
“He’s threatening to send us back to her if we don’t behave,”

I open the doors onto Overbrook Avenue in Philadelphia,
and scream…
and then return to my studies,
putting an Ocean between me and that pain,
with a semester abroad;
so far away, that no one calls,
not even to say,
that my grandmother has died;
that her funeral has already taken place.

Lonely and adrift and estranged,
I anticipate
my father and his soon-to-be stepmother’s trip visit.

They check out of the modest hotel that he had me meticulously find;
and move into the Savoy at Her bidding.

My sister sleeps on my floor while they go shopping without us, and later, when they are out to eat, she orders room service from their palatial accommodations, delivered
in a silver tureen; and is later scolded at the price (and the audacity)
though they know nothing of the luxurious bath she took in their tub,
or how she lounged in the thick terry cloth robe.

At the restaurant, the next night, before he leaves,
we fight;
my father and I;
our hearts and tongues loosened by the succession of wine,
that my stepmother orders,
in the hope of dulling our connection.

We scream about my mother, my sisters,
about everything that’s been lost, needing someone
to blame, to hold accountable for all the pain.

I leave our velour booth
and stumble into the dark lobby, sobbing,
at the disarray of hearts that I cannot put back together.

I am 20 now.

My father follows me in quick strides;
Comes at me in the empty lobby;
Towers above and raises his hand;
To strike…

and

My Genie

Finally

Appears

I become twice his size,
no three times,
and a hiss leaps from my gut…

“DON’T you touch me!”

Stunned, he retreats
to the dinner party,
tells them,
in me,
he has seen both–
his (dead) mother
and his ex-wife.

Alone again, I crumble to the floor;
it is too much to be so strong
too hard to hold so much pain inside.

But he will never touch me again
and of this, I am sure.

~

Companion pieces:

Resenting Motherhood

daddy

That’s My Daddy!

Posted in Insight, Takes a Village

Beware the SPORTS Gene!

Posted on by Kelly (of rituals)

A book lover gives birth to a sports junkie~

 

It is said that some things skip a generation, and I think I’ve got the proof that this is true.

You see, I’ve never played a team sport in my life (outside of PE), and the last time my husband was on a team was the obligatory little-league stint of his suburban boyhood (unless you count the highschool golf club.)

But somehow the two of us conceived a child obsessed with sports. Before our little one was born, my husband announced that no child of his would play competitive sports at a young age. As an educator, he argued that it was developmentally unhealthy to teach children to focus on winning. It put too much pressure on them at an age where they should just be having fun.

Did you ever hear the expression,  We were great parents… before we had children?

While becoming a father didn’t change my husband’s mindset, having a son who thrived on competition did wear him down.

At two years old, we could get our little one to do just about anything by telling him not to do it.  At three and four, he’d dress for preschool every morning in an attempt to “beat us” doing the same. In kindergarten, with no other outlet for his competitive drive, he took to harassing friends and cousins with his quick wit.

When he grew tired of this game, he mastered others: dominoes, backgammon, chess–and even canasta–fearlessly taking on the adults in his life after his peers gave up.

Although my husband continued to deny his son’s true nature, it soon became clear to me that whether or not we exposed him to sports, this child was driven to compete.

I began to press Casey to involve our six-year old in some kind of team athletics.  “He needs the physical outlet,” I said.

My husband eventually succumbed to enrolling our son in the local soccer league with the plan that we would avoid any other teams until he was much older. But as you might guess–as soon as that kid got a taste of sports, he couldn’t get enough.

In the next season he begged to play t-ball, and in the following, basketball.  We soon found ourselves on the sidelines of sporting events every season of the year, standing next to parents who seemed to know what to yell when their kid got up to bat.

Even our son’s grandmother was a savvy sports-parent, bellowing “SAFE!” from the bleachers whenever her grandson or his teammates made it to first–or even when they didn’t (a technique that was surprisingly effective on the calls of young umps.)

And just when I thought our lives couldn’t be more saturated with this alien world, our son learned to read.

Once through the first set of chapter books in his classroom, our little reader discovered the library’s collection of books on sports.  He began with the “how to” section, improving his understanding and skills with chapters on:  how to dribble, how to hit a homer, how to pass and score a goal.

Soon after he discovered the sports section of the newspaper and then, Sports Illustrated for Kids. A whole new world opened to him then: the world of fame and glory–filled with millionaire players and winning teams.

When we visited his grandparents, he no longer begged to watch cartoons, he wanted to stay up on his grandmother’s lap and finish “watching the game.”  He learned names like Iverson and Schilling,  and when we returned to Vermont, he searched for everything he could get his hands on about these guys, researching all the greatest teams and players.

He soon traded in his Pokemon collection for baseball cards (and basketball and football cards too); spent hours organizing them, memorizing stats; spending every penny that came his way to get “just one more pack”–with the promise of getting a “good card.”

The following year he reached Sports Nirvana when my father and stepmother took us out to eat. I had hoped for that rare expensive meal, but they chose a sports bar and I spent the evening munching on fried food while my son stared at suspended television sets beside groups of beer-guzzling men hollering at screens.

Once exposed to the wide world of television sports, my son dreamed of owning a satellite dish of his own. He was devastated when the summer Olympics came around and he had no way to watch them.  To compensate, he picked up an old video at the library, and proceeded to view every minute of the ’84 games in Munich. Not a single one of his playdates would watch with him.

In just over a couple of years, our own child had transformed into a kind of kid who grows up in a sports fanatic’s home.  What had we done wrong?

My husband and I love arts and literature, film and food.  Even when we had cable before the kids, we never watched sports. Had this all been my fault for encouraging his first sports experience with the soccer team?

It soon became clear that we had lost control.

When the Red Sox made it to the World Series, our son began speaking a  language that only he and his grandmother understood.  Though we lived in Sox Territory, the series meant little to my husband and me–and the world to his mother, a native New Englander.

As the series heated up, my email box began to fill with messages that I was expected to relay from my mother-in-law to my son. As a writer I was fascinated by the phrases and references that made no sense to me… while my son? He hung on every word.

Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 05:39:38 -0400

It was a bad two nights in the Bronx.  But now that that the Sox are back in Beantown, there’s new life.  The Red Sox nation must bring forth a mighty effort to cheer on their “idiots.”. The time is now to keep the faith. Tonight must bring victory or the dark forces of evil from New York will have their way.

Stay the course.
Love, Gram


Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 06:36:17 -0400

 

This Yankee/Red Sox series is getting to me.  I thought I was used to being tortured every October, but I guess age is catching up.  I’m either going to have a heart attack from anxiety and tension or keel over from lack of sleep. As you know by now, the Sox pulled it out in the 14th inning.  It was the longest post season game ever.  Over five hours.  So the Red Sox nation lives to fight another day.Tonight it’s in the Bronx.  The home turf of the evil empire.  But, and it is a large but, Schilling is on the mound for the Beantowners.  Keep your fingers crossed that his ankle holds up.

Keep on believing.
…Gram

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 21:27:50 -0400

Subject: THEY DID IT!!!

THE RED SOX NATION CELEBRATES! HISTORY IS MADE…..THE RED SOX DEFEAT THE YANKEES AFTER OVERCOMING A THREE GAME TO NOTHING DEFICIT!  DAMON HITS A GRAND SLAM IN THE SECOND AND HOMERED AGAIN LATER ON.  THEY NEVER LOOKED BACK, IT WAS A THING OF BEAUTY.  I MUST GO TO BED NOW.

G

 

Suddenly I understood where it had all gone wrong. It wasn’t the soccer team or the baseball cards or even the sports bar that compromised my flesh and blood, it was in his DNA!  And there was absolutely nothing my husband and I could have done to prevent this current of passion.  There was a line that stretched from one generation to another, somehow skipping over the two us.

There was no way we could have known of this inheritance the morning we brought our baby from the hospital in that sweet yellow bunting.  He seemed so innocent then, so gentle, needing protection. But it was all different now. We had given birth to a sports fanatic, even without television or beer in our refrigerator.

The morning after the final game of the Series, our fanatic ran down the stairs to catch the last of the Sox messages, this one on the answering machine.

His grandmother’s voice sounded utterly exhausted but elated at the same time, like someone who’d had a sleepless night attending the birth of a child:

Thursday, October 28/  8:00 am

 

Hello, is my grandson awake ?

Is anybody awake?

Does anybody know the Red Sox Nation News?

…A CLEAN SWEEP

…WORLD SERIES!!!!

…THE CURSE IS BROKEN!!!!!!