Playing defense.

Medicated of un-medicated birth? Bottle or breast? Bed-sharing, co-sleeping or crib? Full vaccination, partial or vaccine-free? There are a lot of choices we mothers (and fathers, too) must make about which everybody has an opinion. There is a lot of information our there for us to peruse as we make our choices, but so much of it offers different, often diametrically-opposed positions. As a result, you end up feeling more like you are taking a major political stance rather than a personal choice. This can be difficult in two ways; the first is when your choices don't jibe with the advice/guidance/rules your doctors give you. I am sure I will write about this more another time, but what I'm inspired to write about is the second issue: how your choices are received by other mothers. Particularly, why are our choices or beliefs assumed to be judgments on women who make different choices?

Let me start by making some of my choices and beliefs clear on some of these "hot-button" issues:
1. I breast-fed my son and continue to do so.
2. I had an unmedicated labor and delivery, in a hospital, with a doula, nurses, and my OB.
3. I believe that pregnant women should be treated with dignity and respect and should be allowed to make their own, fully-informed decisions about medical care before, during, and after the births of their children.
4. My son slept in our bed, in his own little zone, between his mama and daddy until he was around 1 year old. He now sleeps in his own crib, in his own room across the hall from us.
5. There are a number of childhood vaccines I do not intend to give my son while he is a child. He has received some vaccines and will continue to be vaccinated through his school years, but we are following a drawn out vaccination schedule to limit the number of shots he is getting during his early childhood.

Now, these are my choices, they are not anyone else's choices and in doing the things they way I have wanted I am not, in any way, making a statement about this person's choices or that person's. There are numerous cases in which it is not feasible or desirable to make the kinds of choices I have made. Sometimes the labor goes awry, or the milk doesn't come in, etcetera, etcetera. You do not need to defend your choices to me; I am not judging you. The flip side of this is when my choices are judged and I am the one playing defense. I am endangering my child for putting him in my bed, for not getting him the Hep B vaccine after he was born.

Judge, judge, judge. Why do we mothers feel so profoundly judged and judge so harshly and at the same time? I'm asking this rhetorically, of course, because I like to think I have an inkling why this is. I think we feel judged because our instincts and authority that we ought to have as the mothers of our children have been undermined by the massive industry surrounding pregnancy and babycare. Have you checked out the relevant section in Barnes and Noble? There are an infinite number of purported experts with lots of letters after their names who have their ideas about what we should do as mothers: the kinds foods we should eat while pregnant, the kinds of foods our kids should eat at 6, 8, 12 months of age, how we should discipline our kids, how we should put them to sleep... so many shoulds. If anyone was to say, "Hey, mama, trust yourself, listen to and watch your child," a lot of people would lose a lot of money. (This is not to say that there aren't times we need help or advice from an elder or a professional!)

We are made to feel that we do not know how to take care of our children, that we must rely on outside sources. And I think there is a certain insecurity in that because it isn't born out of our knowledge of ourselves or our own children. Confronted with a different way of doing something, we are made to question our choices and rather than feel confident and open we feel unsure and we close up. Who wants to be caught at feeling unsure about her mothering skills, right? So we make ourselves feel better by judging negatively someone else's choice. Not breast-feeding? Down comes the gavel!

This is unnecessary and damaging, both personally and politically (if you want to separate the two). Mothering is hard, often isolating, work and we ought to be there for each other, not estranging ourselves from one another. I have struggled personally over the last 20 months with loneliness and depression and I didn't feel so afraid to share my own feelings and questions with other mothers, I might not have felt this so acutely. Defensiveness, judgment, and fear of judgment are not conducive to open discussion. Moreover, there are a lot of big-picture issues that we could resolve if we just banded together, like improving workplace policies that aren't family-friendly. However, if my concern over the cesarean rate in the US elicits angry responses about how many lives are saved by C-section and how dare I question its use, then someone isn't listening to what I'm saying. (PS- My great-grandmother died in childbirth, leaving my grandfather and his brothers to be sent to an orphanage until his father re-married a mean, mean lady.)

So hear me now: I am not against C-sections or bottle-feeding or vaccines. I am FOR women making their own, informed and confident decisions about how they give birth and nurture their children. If we don't listen to each other because our ears are filled with scared, defensive judgy-ness, we will never improve the environment in which they can do that.