wholesome

I try to live a wholesome life.  We strive to eat a healthy, balanced diet, to feed our daughter real foods.  We bake our own bread, make our own pasta sauce, mix our own hummus. We cloth diaper.  I've stopped using commercial products in my hair and now wash my hair (now dreaded!) with baking soda and apple cider vinegar.  Our daughter has only ever been washed in natural, organic soaps: we are big, big fans of Dr. Bronner's.  We avoid unnecessary medication and try to use herbal remedies when we can.  At nearly two-and-a-half years old, Glynis is still nursing.  We live downtown and avoid using a car or motorized transportation the vast majority of the time.

Before we conceived Glynis, I was a devoted pescatarian.  I ate a primarily lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, but with occasional fish, mostly sushi.  In the last few weeks before we conceived, I took a week-long trip to Russia in which I knew I would have very few food options.  I opted to eat chicken while there, when it was offered (usually the protein available was very grey-looking pork: ick!) knowing that otherwise I would likely be underfed the whole time I was there.  But I had every intention of returning to my veg/pescatarian diet upon my return.  I planned for a vegetarian pregnancy, researching it before conception, even buying a book dedicated to the benefits of a vegetarian diet during gestation, Your Vegetarian Pregnancy.  I found it to be a helpful book - though with its flaws, certainly - and felt very confident that our baby and I could be perfectly healthy despite abstaining from meat for the duration of the pregnancy.

Then we conceived.  And the cravings and food aversions started.

I wish I could tell you that I'm one of those crunchy moms who eats nothing but whole, healthy, organic foods while pregnant.  I wish - truly, I do! - that I could honestly say that I eat no fried or sugary or processed foods while pregnant.  I wish that I could honestly tell you that I didn't crave McChicken sandwiches nearly constantly while expecting Glynis, and that I didn't daydream about pork breakfast sausages from time to time during that pregnancy as well.  I wish that I could regale you with tales of cravings for salad and unprocessed yogurt and raw vegetables.  But I can't.

Because I'm sitting here, in front of my computer, with a small glass of Coke on my left, and a styrofoam container of chip wagon poutine on my right.  Yep.  Coke and poutine.  The Coke settles my constantly-nauseated stomach - it's one of the only things that does - and the poutine is one of the few foods I could think of today that didn't make me feel sick to my stomach at merely thinking of eating it.

I'm not happy with my diet.  It is deeply, deeply flawed.  But I'm pregnant, I'm still nursing a toddler and I'm losing weight.  And I didn't exactly have a lot of extra to begin with.  So I'm eating what I can.  I'm trying to avoid dropping any further below 120lb.  And I'm hopeful that when nearly all foods no longer make me feel violently ill, I'll be able to start eating better.

It's not a perfect solution, definitely, and I am by no means bragging or revelling in the flaws of my diet.  But I felt the need to be honest that, try as I might, this is the best I can do right now.  I know better, but sadly, I cannot, at this moment, do better.  Maybe next week.  Maybe next month.  But for right now, this poutine is making my day.

happy

Parenting, advocacy, reading about birth, various jobs: they all have their frustrations.  But focusing on simple things, simple accomplishments, is often the difference between a great day and a day of much antagonism.

Strangely, somedays, a basket full of colourful cloth diapers makes me happy.

Simple days.  Simple things.

The hollow echo of the cave (a post in which my Humanities degree exerts itself)

See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave.  They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them...
...Do you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?..
...Then most certainly...such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.  The Republic of Plato, 514-515c

I recently had a revelation, an epiphany of sorts.  For months, almost years now, I have attempted to explain natural parenting (natural birth including homebirth and midwifery care, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, babywearing, etc.) to more "establishment" parents, and never feeling like any communication was really successful.  It isn't just that we weren't agreeing - this wasn't some argument that was to be won or lost, but just discourse - it was that those who were firmly entrenched in the more established way of doing things seemed to truly not understand what I was saying at all.  It was like we were speaking totally different, unrelated languages.

The other day, it occurred to me: it's Plato's Myth of the Cave.  What I have seen of birth, of parenting, is so entirely different, so entirely foreign, it must be unbelievable.  "How can birth possibly be enjoyable?" I am asked.  How can I not resent my child for still nursing more than a dozen times a day?  How can we not find her continued presence in our bed not intrusive?

And if he once more had to compete with those perpetual prisoners in forming judgments about those shadows while his vision was still dim, before his eyes had recovered, and if the time needed for getting accustomed were not at all short, wouldn't he be the source of laughter, and wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up?  And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?  The Republic of Plato, 517a

Sadly, the response is not exclusively one of disbelief, but sometimes violent dislike and offense.  Rather than listening to one another, to hearing the truth behind each other's words, there is attack and defensiveness, on both sides of the debate as, unfortunately, the discourse and discussion has now become.

The truth behind the defense of unnecessarily medicalized birth is often fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of loss of control.  Fear of our own bodies, our own humanity, even.  The truth behind the attack of the natural birther, the natural parent, may well also be fear: fear of constant criticism, fear of losing our resolve in the face of that criticism, fear of legal action as a result of our choices.

We must - we must - keep yelling into the cave, despite this fear.  Even if what we hear echoing back to us is distorted or unpleasant, we must: after all, there may be people in there looking to escape.