Archive | 2011

Separation Anxiety?

Who is that looking at me?

I’m starting to notice some signs of what is traditionally called “separation anxiety” with Alaina—she starts to call/complain if she can’t see me, turns away from other people if she doesn’t want someone else to hold her, flops around at night until her hand is touching me, that kind of thing. Anyway, it made me think of the following quote that I had saved to post about it. From an article by the same name by Naomi Aldort in the May/June 2011 issue of Natural Life:

“By nature, there is no such thing as ‘separation anxiety.’ Instead, there is a healthy need of a child to be with her mother. Only a deprivation of a need creates anxiety. If we honor the need for as long as their child needs it, no anxiety develops. The concept ‘separation anxiety’ is the invention of a society that denies a baby and child’s need for uninterrupted connection. In this vein, we can deprive a child of food and describe her reaction as ‘hunger anxiety,’ or we can let her be cold and call her cries ‘temperature anxiety.'”

I loved this. What a strange society we have that defines a baby’s normal and wholly biologically appropriate need to be with its mother, as “anxiety.” I always call a baby that wants to be with its mother a smart baby, not a baby that has “separation anxiety.” 🙂

Book Review: Doulas’ Guide to Birthing Your Way

Jul27

Book Review: Doulas’ Guide to Birthing Your Way
Authors: Jan Mallak & Teresa Bailey, 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-9823379-7-4
$15.37 – $21.95, 188 pages, softcover
Hale Publishing: http://www.ibreastfeeding.com/

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Geared towards pregnant women, Doulas’ Guide to Birthing Your Way is written in a simplistic manner using short, direct sentences. While in some ways this approach makes the information readily accessible, it can also feel unsophisticated in places. However, while the writing style is basic, the content is not. The Doulas’ Guide is a book that really “goes beyond” the information traditionally offered in birth preparation books, covering topics many parents typically may not have considered prenatally such as natural birth vs. birthing naturally, physical comfort preference styles, visualization, being a savvy consumer, blessingways, and taking pictures of the placenta. The information is refreshingly practical and hands-on. Chapters cover the critical importance of the human environment, “five arms of doula support,” birth preparation, one chapter for each stage of labor including separate chapter for immediate postpartum, a section about cesarean birth and VBAC, and a breastfeeding chapter. There is an excellent section on postpartum care including a PPD symptoms chart. I was a little taken aback by a blithe comment, “Just think of it as an alternate birth route!” regarding cesareans.

Doulas’ Guide contains good, helpful snapshots throughout the text. Dads will like the plethora of labor support skills and ideas and the accompanying photographs. The book advocates preparation of a “birth vision” and includes examples at the end of the book (including cesarean birth options).

The variety of checklists, key questions, tables with reference information, bullet points, and pictures keep the pace of Doulas’ Guide to Birthing Your Way snappy and digestible. This book covers lots of ground and packs a lot of information into under 200 pages!

—–

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Rainy Wedding

Jul25

Wedding Day, 1998. Cake is a homemade cheesecake also made by Lynn 🙂

Today is our thirteenth wedding anniversary. We planned a lovely outdoor ceremony at Meramec Spring Park and this time thirteen years ago, it was pouring down rain. While we still got married outside (in the dirty old pavilion rather than by the Iron Works as we had imagined), our wedding site was actually evacuated later in the afternoon!

When we returned from our honeymoon in August, there was a copy of a newspaper article in our mailbox. Our family friend, Lynn, had a newspaper column at the time and she’d written this beautiful poem about our wedding day:

Rainy Wedding

by Lynn Saults

We cannot know what will bring perfection.
They had supposed that it would be a day
of exalted blue heights,
a tree-columned cathedral day
in the loftiest, most elegant
sapphire domed summer.

Sun blessing stone,
birds blessing sky
and in the gentle benevolence of that day
the bride and her ribboned maidens
would drift, pale and clear as flowers
toward the welcoming arms of her groom.

To wed in the blue and white
softness of a summer morning
would be perfection.

But the day hung like an iron bell
tolling rain, rain, rain
all down the metalled sky.
The stones stood dark and forbidding
as thunder upon the earth,
and all our tinseled plans
for a bright and delicate day
were washed away in gray cascades
above and below us.

Yet, there was another kind of beauty there:
Small boys slid like silver minnows
in that heavy green light between the trees.
Garlanded little girls yearned
toward the coming of the bride,
tugged at their mothers’ hands,
pulled at their mothers’ hearts
with the brevity of their innocence.
Family and friends gathered
and sheltering, made a chapel
of their bodies and faces and wishes.

There, in the unplanned darkness,
was unlooked for wonder,
joy beyond ornament,
song beyond instruments.

At last the bride came and like a white flame
blazed among her maidens,
in brilliance more stern and starlike
and vastly more magnificent
than the ribbons and confections
we had planned for that day.

She blessed us as she passed,
toward her waiting bridegroom
in the unadorned steadfastness of her love,
and in the wake of that radiance
we turned to one another,
a silent hymn of faces
now wet with more than rain,
having glimpsed in that lambent bride
the flaming sun heart of human love.
Small, fallible, mortal,
we could not have dreamt or designed such a day.

It was Perfection.

——-
I read this poem every year on our anniversary and it makes me cry every time! Before we got married, people would say things in semi-ominous tones like, “just wait. After you get married, everything changes.” We still laugh about this—nothing changed except for that it felt really fun to be married instead of just dating 🙂

I occasionally read articles that say things like, “marriage is lots of hard work” or, “parenting and marriage are both very, very tough.” I’ve truly never felt like our marriage was hard work. And, while I daily feel that parenting is tough and emotionally very complicated, I would never describe my relationship with my husband as “tough” or difficult in any way. I actually feel like he is my oasis of calm, peace, and love in what sometimes feels like lots of chaos. He is steady and even and I always feel as if I can be completely and totally real with him—there is no feeling or thought or experience that is too awful to share with him. He has seen the places where the “meat has been chewed off my bones” and he still says I’m the greatest person in the world. So, while it is fully possibly that being married to ME is tough—I’m pretty intense—being married to him is not. It is gentle and sweet and whole.

After the ceremony and before the rain re-started, we were able to get some pictures in front of the Iron Works after all.

Self-portrait taken on his birthday this year.

Book Review: Ben Behind His Voices

Jul22

Review: Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope
By Randye Kaye
ISBN: 978-1442210899

Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.95; Kindle, $9.99
http://benbehindhisvoices.com/

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Ben Behind His Voices is a mother’s poignant memoir of her young adult son’s struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. It was instantly engaging and kept my attention throughout. The author, Randye Kaye, is a radio personality and voice actress and the mother of two children. When her oldest child, Ben, is 17 he begins exhibiting increasingly strange, confusing, and disturbing symptoms. After being shuttled through a variety of diagnoses and treatment providers while steadily becoming worse, he is diagnosed at age 21 with schizophrenia. Randye is obviously a devoted parent to Ben and a committed advocate for her son and the book chronicles a roller coaster of experiences with psychiatric hospitalizations, medication challenges, bright spots of hope, relapses, group home placements, and readjustments of expectations. Perhaps most touching are her struggles to accept the “new normal” of her family’s life and to let go of her old expectations and hopes for her son, while still celebrating the caring and worthwhile person he is, albeit one who is coping with a formidable disability.

A particularly nice feature of this book are the textboxes inset throughout containing facts and information for family members of those with mental illnesses. Much of this information is based on Family-to-Family peer support materials from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Randye becomes a trainer for this program).

Though written about very emotional events, there is a dispassionate quality to the writing that kept me from feeling fully connected to the narrator.

A fascinating character study as well as an exploration of family adaptation and coping skills, Ben Behind His Voices would be a particularly interesting read for students in psychology, social work, or human services as well as anyone who has a family member with a mental illness. As a mother of young sons, Ben Behind His Voices was a difficult book to read—Randye’s thoughts and reflections about her own son as a young boy, made me look at my own little guys with a pang of “what if.”

——-

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Telling About It…

Jul19

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

-Mary Oliver

I saw this quote on another mother’s blog yesterday and loved it. To me, it sums up the reason why I continue to write this blog. I have so many things going on in my life and I often wonder why I bother to continue writing blog posts. Does it matter at all? Aren’t I just adding to the general cacophony of voices and wild, information overloaded chaos of the internet (and even of the birth activist sphere in general). I feel almost compelled to do so though. And, really, the reason why is to tell about it. There is a lot to be astonished by in one’s everyday life. While I can get distracted and frantic and lose my present moment orientation, I do pay attention a lot. To a lot of things. A friend told me at my blessingway that I live my life with more intention than most people she knows. I considered that to be a great compliment—and, I also think I live my life with a lot of attention. Sometimes that attention may seem like excessive navel-gazing and very often it is excessively self-critical (and, isn’t that being self-centered, she says critically and self-evaluatively?), but I feel like I am a generally observant person, paying attention to my place in the world and the manner in which I walk through my day. And, the paying attention is intimately involved with then wanting to tell about it—here, on my blog 🙂

Here’s what feels astonishing about my life today. Six months ago today I gave birth to a little treasure. I feel like every day for the past six months I’ve experienced astonishment that she’s here—where did you come from, I ask her. She’s magic. I can hardly believe it has been six months already and yet, it also feels like she’s been here forever. And, guess what? My friend who has been waiting for her rainbow baby to be born, gave birth to her own precious daughter this morning. So, now our journeys share one more point of connection.

I really, really wanted to write an effusive blog post about my baby today in honor of her sixmonthabirthday. However, the end of the summer session is wrapping up and I had many papers to grade instead. I spent naptime working on them with the plan to reward myself with a blog post after finishing my grades (though, since I planned to grade 22 papers and 11 exams, you can see that something was awry in my calculations!). She woke up of course, after my only having graded 11 papers, and needed me to hold her rather than to write about her and so now I am here at almost midnight, needing to go to bed rather than to gush. Anyway, my happy, BIG, smiley, adorable, friendly, charming, unflappable, cooperative, sitting-up-and-working-on-crawling-and-pulling-up girl is six months old today. Her head smells like apricots and flowers. She loves watching her big brothers. She loves watching chickens and cats. She loves watching me. While I’ve written a lot about what an easy baby she is, she also likes to be held and toted along pretty much everywhere I go—maybe some people would define that as “high need” (i.e. “I can never put her down!”). I, however, think that is biologically appropriate baby genius. She is very grabby and reachy lately. My mom described holding her like “holding a bag of snakes,” because she is constantly on the lookout for something to snag. She has begun pushing up on surfaces so that her legs are standing (but her hands are still on the surface—so, not pulling up exactly, but pre-pulling up). She LOVES to find and eat paper and tear up catalogs. She laughs like crazy if I make monster noises on her belly. We tried to give her some solid food, but she gags and spits it out, even though she appears captivated by other people eating food. We still do EC (elimination communication) and she sleeps all night with a dry diaper. She always wakes up with a smile. She thinks Zander is hilarious, but isn’t very comfortable with him holding her. When Lann holds her, she snuggles down on him with total trust (even though he staggers under her weight—she weighs almost 18 pounds now and he weighs under 50). I love having a baby while also have a 7.5 year old. He carries her to the car for me. He watches her while I take a shower. He can hold her while I cut up vegetables or do something food-prep related that needs two hands. It is awesome.

Despite grabbiness, she strokes and pats faces very gently. It is very sweet. She likes to ride in a pouch on my hip checking out the action. She likes to nurse best while lying down in bed—she tucks her feet up on my legs and puts her hands on either side of my chest. She has beautiful skin and beautiful eyelashes and her eyes sparkle with the delight of life. She is chubby and not petite. She is my most relaxed, settled baby—she rarely gets scared, hurt, or upset by things. She’s tough! When something makes a loud noise, she jumps, but then looks at me (to gauge possible severity) and then gives a big grin (the boys would both cry). If she tips and bumps her head or gets bonked or scratched by something, she usually doesn’t cry about it—my older son would have screamed and my younger son would have had a fit of rage. Her temperament is very steady and even. She has started to get more displeased if you take something away from her that she wants though—sometimes that provokes a protest. She also growls to herself while she plays with toys lately—she loves to empty a basket of toys and will sit on the floor working on this task for about 30 minutes. We think the growling sound is from listening to the boys play. I cannot believe how fast she is growing and changing. I try to take mental snapshots every day—her soft hair, her round cheeks, her little neck when her head is bent looking at something, her dark watchful pools of eyes, her careful and still clumsy hand movements and swiping grabs, her big gumbly smiles, her eyes fluttering closed at the breast. I pay attention. I am astonished. And, I tell about it.

Telling you all about it...

Book Review: Healthy Eating During Pregnancy

Jul18

Review: Healthy Eating During Pregnancy
By Erika Lenkert with Brooke Alpert
ISBN: 978-1-906868-41-3
Softcover, 144 pages, $16.95
http://www.healthywomen.org

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Co-written by a cookbook author/food writer and a nutritionist (both of whom are mothers), Healthy Eating During Pregnancy offers 100 recipes with the nutritional needs of pregnant women in mind. The first part of the book contains specific nutrition information for pregnant women, including a short section on coping with morning sickness, as well as good information about the micronutrients and macronutrients that are essential for growing a healthy baby. The remaining two thirds of the book is a collection of tasty recipes, organized into categories beginning with breakfast and concluding with desserts. The book is very colorful and contains many appetizing photos.

Though marketed specifically for pregnant women, the recipes have appeal to anyone. My family enjoyed the zucchini and parmesan frittata and the “totally tasty breakfast muffins” and we look forward to trying more of the recipes in the future.

This book would be well-placed in the lending libraries of midwives, doulas, or childbirth educators. Anyone in need of healthy recipe ideas during pregnancy will enjoy exploring the new book Healthy Eating During Pregnancy!

——-

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Women and Knowing

Jul16

I read an interesting article by anthropologist and birth activist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, in the summer issue of Pathways Magazine. It was an excerpt from a longer article that appeared in Anthropology News, titled “Anthropology and Birth Activism: What Do We Know?” In the conclusion, Davis-Floyd states the following:

“Doctors ‘know’ they are giving women ‘the best care,’ and ‘what they really want.’ Birth activists…know that this ‘best care’ is too often a travesty of what birth can be. And yet on that existential brink, I tremble at the birth activist’s coding of women as ‘not knowing.’ So, here’s to women educating themselves on healthy, safe birth practices–to women knowing what is best for themselves and their babies, and to women rising above everything else.” –Robbie Davis-Floyd

I believe that every woman who has given birth knows something about birth that other people don’t know. I also believe that women know what is right for their bodies and that mothers know what is right for their babies. I’m also pretty certain that these “knowings” are often crowded out or obliterated or rendered useless by the large sociocultural context in which women live their lives, birth their babies, and mother their young. So, how do we celebrate and honor the knowings and help women tease out and identify what they know compared to what they may believe or accept to be true while still respecting their autonomy and not denigrating them by characterizing them as “not knowing” or as needing to “be educated”?

Additionally, with regard to education as a strategy for change, I’m brought back to a point I raise in my community organizing class: People often suggest “education” as a change strategy with the assumption that education is all that is needed. But, truly, do we want people to know more or do we want them to act differently? There is a LOT of education available to women about birth choices and healthy birth options. What we really want is not actually more education, we want them to act, or to choose, differently. Education in and of itself is not sufficient, it must be complemented by other methods that motivate people to act. As the textbook I use in class states, “a simple lack of information is rarely the major stumbling block.” You have to show them why it matters and the steps they can take to get there…

She knows

Mother Blessing Quotes

Jul15

For the mother blessing ceremony I wrote about recently, I also went through my birth quotes collection (which is becoming quite extensive!) and picked out some special quotes that reminded me of things I wanted to share with the birthing mama-to-be.

“For each of us as women, there is a deep place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…Within these deep places, each one holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us…it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” –Audre Lorde

While some people have said they don’t like the use of the word “dark” in this quote, I think it is perfect. In the darkness is where wonderful seeds take root and grow.

“It is so easy to close down to risk, to protect ourselves against change and growth. But no baby bird emerges without first destroying the perfect egg sheltering it. We must risk being raw and fresh and awkward. For without such openness, life will not penetrate us anew. Unless we are open, we will not be filled.” –Patricia Monaghan

Since, as I mentioned, this recent ceremony was for a PAL-mama, I included the above quote. While I don’t really like the image of the egg being destroyed (if I relate the quote to birth), I feel like this is a good quote to describe the bravery involved with consciously undertaking the pregnancy after loss journey.

I also included my top two favorite quotes about birth and pain. The first:

“When I say painless, please understand, I don’t mean you will not feel anything. What you will feel is a lot of pressure; you will feel the might of creation move through you. Pain, however, is associated with something gone wrong. Childbirth is a lot of hard work, and the sensations that accompany it are very strong, but there is nothing wrong with labor.” –Giuditta Tornetta

I love the part about the might of creation. How is that for a bold summation of the potency and power of birth. While some people object to the inclusion of the word “painless” in it, to me the takeaway message of the quote is that birth is too big for the word “pain” to adequately contain or describe it. We need more and better language for it! And, that brings me to the second quote:

“So the question remains. Is childbirth painful? Yes. It can be, along with a thousand amazing sensations for which we have yet to find adequate language. Every Birth is different, and every woman’s experience and telling of her story will be unique.” –Marcie Macari

From the same author, two more quotes, this time describing the transformative power of birth:

“Birth is an opportunity to transcend. To rise above what we are accustomed to, reach deeper inside ourselves than we are familiar with, and to see not only what we are truly made of, but the strength we can access in and through Birth.” –Marcie Macari

“A woman in Birth is at once her most powerful, and most vulnerable. But any woman who has birthed unhindered understands that we are stronger than we know.” –Marcie Macari

And, then, a helpful reminder, that birth is our gateway to conscious, active, full-on parenting for the rest of our lives!

“The natural process of birth sets the stage for parenting. Birth and parenting mirror each other. While it takes courage and strength to cope with labor and birth, it also takes courage and strength to parent a child.” –Marcy White

And, finally, I shared the quote that to me was a touchstone describing my feelings about Alaina’s entrance into my world. She did this for me.

“A baby, a baby, she will come to remind us of the sweetness in this world, what ripe, fragile, sturdy beauty exists when you allow yourself the air, the sunshine, the reverence for what nature provides…” – Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser (in Literary Mama)

Speaking of that sweet baby of mine, here she is at my friend’s mother blessing ceremony. I’m so glad she’s here! And, my heart is full for my friend as she is soclose to her own fresh baby girl. I’m glad my daughter is going to grow up within a circle of strong, empowered, healthy women and girls and I love taking her to blessingways with me, knowing that I am socializing her into a model of womanhood and life that values the feminine 🙂 (and, yes, that is a bindi on her forehead).

The Blessingway Connection

Jul15

Last weekend, I attended a mother blessing/blessingway* ceremony for a dear friend. I have mentioned her here before, because she is on a pregnancy-after-loss (PAL) journey after having given birth to a tiny boy after 16 weeks of pregnancy last July (my own Noah was born at 15 weeks in Nov., 2009). My friend’s baby had been due in January, the same time my own “rainbow baby” was born. So, I’ve spent the last year being a couple of months “ahead” of her on the very complicated and emotional path of pregnancy after loss. And, now she is preparing to give birth to her own new baby girl any day now. It felt very, very good to come together with friends to celebrate this strong mama, her journey, and her babies. I so clearly remember the feelings of “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” when it came to things like doing a belly cast, having pregnancy pictures taken, and, yes, having a blessingway—each of these commemorative events was tinged with a fear of possibly being a sad memory instead of a happy one. I remember worrying, “what if I look back at my blessingway and have to think, ‘but I was so happy.'” These thoughts aren’t necessarily rational or logical, but they featured prominently in my PAL experience. And, while I truly loved being pregnant and I was happy much of the time, I was so glad for it to be over and for PAL to be behind me. This is the feeling I had for my friend during her ceremony as well—pretty soon PAL will be over and you will be so glad to leave it behind and snuggle your new baby girl (I’m also very familiar with the companion fear of, “but what if my PAL journey ends with another loss? I’m not holding my new baby yet…”)

For many mother blessings, I pick out a quote or a poem or a reading to give to the mother. Considering how much writing I do in my life, it is kind of surprising to me that I usually choose to give women other people’s words rather than creating something new for them (I do say original things aloud to them during the gifting time, in which we each take turns kneeling before the mother and telling her what she means to us). After some looking for perfect quotes, I knew that for this friend, I needed to write something to her from my heart and not from someone else. So, on one of my womb labyrinth postcards, I wrote the following:

Nine months ago you entered into the long, challenging labyrinth of pregnancy after loss. You have walked with courage, strength, and grace. You have been SO BRAVE. And now you prepare to take the final step on the path—to greet the power and intensity of your birthing time. All of your love and hope and fear will become concentrated on the task of opening your body to welcome your precious new daughter into your arms and your life. She is coming. She is okay. And, sweet mama, so are you. This is a time of openness and surrender–in body, mind, heart, and soul. May you give birth with confidence, strength, bravery, vulnerability, and wild sweet joy and relief.

One of the special things about blessingways is the sense of connection with other women. The ritual space creates an opportunity to speak and share with each other with a depth that is often not reached during day to day interactions (and definitely not usually at baby showers!). This winter, my friends and I started having quarterly women’s retreats. One of my reasons for wanting to do so was to bring some of that sense of celebration and power from our Mother Blessing ceremonies more fully into our lives and to celebrate the fullness and completeness of women-in-themselves, not just of value while pregnant. For these same reasons, I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in women’s spirituality—while birth work is still important to me, I feel very “called” to celebrate, work with, acknowledge, and respect the full cycle of a woman’s life.

“We are mothers, sisters, family wrapped in different cloth,
standing under the same wide sky
and we’ve come to the very end of our silence
together we’ve found our voice
and it is loud
and it is beautiful
and it sings a love song for our children”
—Mothers Acting Up

——-

*For a general description and explanation of mother blessings as well as musings on “connection,” see my friend Hope’s post.

*Out of respect for Native traditions, I continue to try to refer to these ceremonies as “mother blessings.” However, my local circle of women has been holding these ceremonies for each other for about 30 years and they have “historically” been referred to as “blessingways.” Blessingway remains the term that feels most right to me—most genuine, authentic, and, truly, is part of my own life’s “traditions,” so a lot of the time, I feel like it is okay for me to continue using the word, rather than trying to force myself to use mother blessing instead.

“You’ll Miss This…”

Jul14

We’ve all seen or heard it happen. A mother voices a complaint about something she is not enjoying about the mothering experience and someone else returns with a comment that disguises itself as “words of wisdom,” but is perhaps actually a thinly veiled criticism of the other mother: “well, you know, they grow so fast and you’ll miss them when they’re older!” I am curious if anyone actually finds this a helpful remark or thinks it is an original sentiment. While probably originally born from good intent, “you’ll miss this” based comments have become trite and cliche. While perhaps voiced in a good-intentioned way and theoretically used to bring perspective, to bring a proper sense of gratitude, and as an honest reminder to count your blessings (which are many and true), I think the shadow side and darker purpose of this “bringing perspective” is to silence, to muffle, to dismiss, to deny, and to shame. How often do we use this phrase against ourselves in exactly this manner? Perhaps we are nursing the baby and longing for it to fall into a deep enough sleep so that we can sneak away and “get things done.” And then, pop! there it is, “You shouldn’t be trying to get up, you’ll miss this when they’re older.”

Well, guess what, there are plenty of things I’m confident I won’t miss when they’re older. I know that I will miss breastfeeding. It is one of the deepest and richest joys of my life. The breastfeeding relationship is an intimate, interdependent, and profound connection that is irreplaceable. However, I also know in my heart that I will never miss having a toddler twiddle, pinch, stretch, and pick at the other nipple while nursing (and, frankly, I seriously doubt that any woman on earth has spent her twilight years wishing someone was stretching her nipple out to superhuman lengths). I’ll miss the sounds of little boys as they spin elaborate imaginary scenarios out in their play. I will not miss having to shout to be heard over this play while trying to carry on a reasonable, adult conversation with my husband. I’ll miss having warm little bodies snuggling with me. I won’t miss having someone sit on my back and chew on my hair while I try to type an article (yes, this has happened more than once!). I could go on, but you get the drift. There are pieces of parenting that are profoundly disagreeable and it is okay to name them, rather than shame yourself or others in the name of imaginary future regret. Additionally, the subtext that women with grown children spend their days pining for earlier years rankles with me. Personally, I really hope my own mother doesn’t waste a lot of her time wishing I was still a baby. I like to think she enjoys my company now!

Children grow and change. It is what they do. And, we want them to, really, and we want to continue to grow and develop ourselves as well, not to remain stagnated in memories of an earlier day or paralyzed by concerns about future regrets. A good friend once said something that has had a profound impact on me: “I parent the child in front of me.” Not the future adult, or, the memory of the baby or the toddler.

Here are some scenarios carrying a genuinely meaningful message: My older son is then three. He takes off his shirt at an event and a playgroup friend with adult children stops and her breath catches a little. She says, “Oh, Molly, make sure you take a picture of that little boy belly.” That night, I make sure to take one. Watching my sons playing in a wading pool one year, my mom says, “just look at the back of his neck and his powerful [tiny, narrow] shoulders.” I take another picture, not just with my camera, but with my heart. I visit my friend with a newborn baby. Even though I have my own treasure of a 5 month old with me, I ask my friend if I can touch the back of her newborn’s head. When I touch him, tears fill my eyes. All of these are genuine expressions of the original heart of the “you’ll miss this” message—pay attention and remember to look. We don’t need a trite platitude that summarily dismisses the potent intensity of mothering small children day to day, we need to see other mothers in the act of remembering. Those moments with our babies and our children that bring a sweet, deep ache to our hearts in the moment, those are our clues that we are savoring and cherishing their lives as they unfold. The tears that may spring unbidden to our eyes in the future when another mother’s child makes us remember this potency of early childhood, the very fact that we look back with such a pang, means that we did a very, very good job with the savoring—if we hadn’t savored, we wouldn’t know how to feel so deeply later.

Here's what I'm savoring 🙂

“It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it myself.”

–Joyce Maynard