In praise of magic

The world is pretty crazy these days. In the past two weeks, we had Brexit, the siege of the US Capitol, and the announcement of a six-week lockdown here in Britain. Whoa. 

Thankfully our ‘childcare bubble’ is still intact and we still have support for looking after our nine month old baby. I feel grateful for this every single day. There was a moment when the lockdown was announced when I thought that our nanny would not be able to come at all until mid-February. At this moment, I saw myself in a future with no work. How would I go back to work without any childcare? This lockdown landing right at the moment that I was meant to be preparing for full-time work again really rocked my reality. Not in a good way. While we waited for clarity, I stayed up at night chattering to my husband about my worries. “We can find creative solutions,” he reassured me. The promise of creative solutions sounded to me like a guarantee of disappointment. 

(Parenthetic note: The gender dynamics behind his optimism, and my skepticism, are well established. The pandemic has been a disaster for women economically, as we have taken on the majority of unpaid household labour and our careers have suffered disproportionately as a result. Industries that skew female have also suffered more — think retail and food and beverage, versus, e.g., construction. Public policy has not, generally, been assertive enough to make up for the gaps, although there are isolated examples of gender-sensitive programs like subsidised childcare or similar.

Another bit of damage that I don’t see a lot of reflection on is the reversion to heteronormative binary thinking in our discussion of these issues. The story of, women care for children and men excel in careers and there is no other family arrangement imaginable, is likely to set back our thinking about gender pretty dramatically. /end digression)

I rant about this in my head a fair amount, the injustice of gendered divisions of labour at home. In addition to that, though, I am trying to do something more constructive and self-improve my way out of this anxiety. I have decided to ‘explore’ my relationship with control. Maybe I will get into the weeds on that relationship at another time. For now, though, I want to sing the praises of the way I have chosen to do that, which is by cultivating a belief in magic.

 Magic is a bit of a new theme for this space, but a familiar one for me. I am an unapologetic believer in magic, and it is a key element of my worldview. I take justification for this position from my own work learning astrology, Tarot, and other ways of working with energy, especially through yoga. I’ve been aided and enabled by anthropological approaches to magic, which offer skeptics an on-ramp to respecting theories of reality that take magic seriously.  Here’s what I mean by magic.

First, magic is different to a lot of the negative, dismissive perspectives that skeptics bring to it. 

Magic is not one of what Miranda of Sex and the City called ‘convenient theories for you monthly’. Dipping into magical thinking some of the time, for example to make wishes by throwing coins in a fountain, can be fun and cute. There’s nothing wrong with this and it might work for you. But this ‘sprinkle the ordinary with fairy dust to get what I want’ approach to magic is not what I find compelling.

Magic is also not the opposite of a normal lifestyle. That is, you do not have to have dreadlocks and do hallucinogenic drugs or go into the Amazonian rainforest to experience magic. You can experience magic while working nine to five at a desk job and having a stable, normal existence. 

What is magic, then?

Magic is what happens in the margins and between the lines of all things. It is the animating forces at work beyond the explicit and the linear and the causal. It is the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It is what happens that could not have been predicted or planned. And it is an area of life that we can all tune into with a little bit of practice.

My preferred ways of accessing magic are:

Following my own impulses. If I feel like suggesting something outrageous in a meeting, then I suggest something outrageous in a meeting. If I feel like resting, I rest. If I feel like launching a new project, I launch that new project. The magic that results from this is the kind that is very simple: people respond to the impulse. They reflect it back in a way that can be beautiful. The key, for me, to embracing this way of accessing magic is to accept that the magic is in unifying my actions with my inner state and to let go of any desire for the outcome to satisfy my wishes.

Listening to my body. In my experience, the keenest wisdom and intelligence that we can access is in our bodies. Bodies are constantly telling us what our needs are, and they are mercifully insulated from the ‘shoulds’ that cloud our thinking about our own wellness. They communicate honestly. So, in my search for magic, I begin by responding to my own pain, cravings, discomforts, and leanings. I do this most often through yoga. But there are myriad ways to do it.

Learning about symbolic systems. Symbolic systems have been around for thousands of years and they allow us to see interconnections in ways that are very difficult to discern when we are fixated on the literal and the linear. My preferred way of tuning into the subtle world is through astrology, but any so-called ‘traditional’ system of knowledge is likely to open up avenues for seeing new connections. 

2020: Year of Care

There’s so much to say about this year. There’s so many things that have been absurd or difficult or a silver lining or a lesson or something that deserves remarking on. There’s so many people who deserve to be recognised (front line health care workers, home-schooling parents, people who lost their jobs, people who lost loved ones … the list goes on) and that’s without getting into the specifics of every single place that suffered through the blows of 2020 in its own unique ways. On the personal level, there are so many lessons I’ve learned and realisations that I’ve had and problematic things that I’ve witnessed. Where to even start? For me, though, there is one big thing that I want to comment on at the end of 2020. 

This year, more than any other, seemed to shout about the value of care. It provoked an obsessive fixation on home life, unsurprisingly since we spent the whole time stuck at home. It prompted a lot of hand-wringing about childcare, as parents were shoved into home-schooling roles and familiar gendered-divison-of-labour questions cropped up. And it generated a lot of poetic musings on the importance of family, as we became increasingly reliant on our co-inhabitants to keep us sane. There was also a tremendous amount of collective care fatigue. My Twitter feed all of a sudden started placing first-hand accounts of health care workers at the top, recounting how exhausted they were from fighting COVID-19. This fight was made particularly exhausting by a lack of support: in the UK, where I now live, that showed up most dramatically in the absence of funding and resources for the National Health Service (NHS). In the US, COVID skepticism hit the hardest. This kind of care fatigue did not reach me personally, but it was tragic to observe.

Other kinds of care fatigue were also commonplace. Everyone seemed to get a little tired of cooking and eating, as the effort of preparing, consuming, and tidying up multiple meals a day started to add up. Tending our own family or co-habiting relationships seemed like work, also: getting along with a partner or a roommate that you were sharing a small apartment with was a lot more difficult when 40+ hours of office time was shifted to home. And this is to say nothing of the endless social media content that flashed before my eyes about the fatigue of homeschooling, stay-at-home-mothering, or skyrocketing rates of postpartum depression and anxiety. There were also myriad other kinds of suffering and fatigue, of course. My selection here leans into the moodiness that characterised 2020 for people who had job security, reasonably good health, and safe homes. And today, as I say goodbye to the year, I feel deeply grateful to be in all those categories. I’m grateful to have commonplace care fatigue problems.

That doesn’t stop me from being sort of amazed at the way the weight of care has landed. We’ve all been a little shocked at how much work is involved in just keeping ourselves and our families balanced and well when we don’t have entire infrastructures of other people to help us do it. It tells us something that we’ve all been so blindsided by this. That we’re overwhelmed by providing care. That we find it exhausting and depressing and demoralising. (And occasionally life-changing and profound and beautiful, of course, but mostly the other stuff). And, most simply, that we are not doing most of it. That we are distributing most of it across structures that benefit us. 

This does NOT mean I think those structures are beyond critique! Childcare, schools, domestic labor … all these things fail people/families/parents in loads of ways and can be improved. I am not telling people to stop complaining, no matter how privileged they are or how much excellent support they have to meet the caring needs of their households. Keep complaining and agitating for better support, from peers, partners, communities, governments, whoever you can think of to implicate. BUT. When we agitate, let’s make sure everyone knows how much work it is to keep it all together. Care takes a lot out of us, a lot of intelligence and planning as well as a lot of physical effort and energy and a lot of experience and wisdom. Care is not easy! It is not a thing for people to do if they aren’t smart/privileged/motivated/whatever enough to do ‘hard’ things like have managerial-level or intellectually stimulating jobs. Care is hard! And my wish for 2021 is that everyone who felt exhausted by keeping their household running this year remembers that. Care deserves respect. A lot more respect than it has been getting.

Webinar addiction, or research-based parenting, part one

The moment I even began considering having a child, I took on a second job. Monitoring my monthly hormone cycles, modifying my exercise routine, and generally thinking about what I needed to do to bring a healthy baby into the world gradually became a significant part of how I spent my time. Since that life stage began some two years ago, I have read countless articles on the internet, tens of books written by former RNs and ‘sleep consultants’, and become the kind of person who actually reads Internet forums. (What to Expect When You’re Expecting’s forums were my favourite pregnancy guilty pleasure). An entirely new energy outlet entered my life post-COVID and post-parenthood, though, and that is the educational webinar. 

Since Khalil was born, I have attended webinars on breastfeeding, breastfeeding in a pandemic, breastfeeding a baby less than twelve weeks old, and on breastfeeding a baby more than twelve weeks old. I have attended a webinar on how to play with a newborn (which, I will tell you, is definitely something you need to attend a webinar on, because newborns can barely focus  their eyes on objects). I have attended a webinar on swaddling (we swaddled my son for about a week). I have attended a webinar on how to introduce a bottle. (My son has never successfully drank milk from a bottle). I have attended a webinar on how to let a six month old feed themselves. This list does not include any of the webinars I attended on sleep. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think that I spent more time in the infant stage learning about sleep than I spent sleeping. Thankfully, this is hyperbole.

 I would say that I deserve a prize for webinar attendance, but, judging from the wealth of webinars that are advertised on my Instagram feed, there are women out there whose webinar attendance would put me to shame. The only prize I would get for webinar attendance is a participation trophy.

Somewhere in my mind, I believed that this was a phase. I believed that after my maternity leave I would have figured it out and that I would just have undergone the necessary mom-compatibility upgrade that takes place during a baby’s first few months of life. As my son’s nine month birthday approached, I mentally prepared to graduate from my webinar-attendee status. My devices must have sensed a decline in activity, because they were activated.

‘Did you take Feeding Littles’ Toddler Course?’ A new mom friend asked in a text message. I had not. Wasn’t toddler-hood light years in the future? ‘They recommend you take it between ten and twelve months.’ (Translation for people who do not intuitively use their child’s age as a unit for measuring the passage of time: they recommend you take this course when your child is between ten and twelve months old). Ah. Toddler-hood was around the corner, and I had not taken a single webinar yet to prepare.

Within minutes, an email arrived in my inbox reminding me to renew my subscription to a learning platform. They would be with me through toddler-hood, they promised. I worried. Was I behind on toddler-hood? My not-yet-nine month old was getting close to toddling. I fretted. How was I going to find time for all these webinars? I chafed. How much money did I need to spend on correcting my seemingly bottomless ignorance about parenting? And yet. When I went to write this blog entry, I renewed my subscription. And while I wrote, I took short breaks to watch a video on developmental milestones for nine month olds.

Let me be clear: these webinars have been life-saving for me. Feeding Littles taught me how to do baby-led weaning, which has been one of the most enjoyable experiences of parenting so far. There are few things in the world that bring me as much happiness as watching my son stuff a baked potato into his face with both hands, and I would not know how to back off and let him do that without the guidance of the delightful Megan and Judy. Taking Cara Babies is my starting point for sleep questions, and sleep questions are easily my most urgent questions. And I honestly credit Emily and Jamie of Boston NAPS with making me into a confident mother. Without these women and their library of common-sense, real-talk webinars, I would have spent a lot more of the past year lost and in tears. Before everything went online, lactation consultant extraordinaire Nadiya Dragan, hypnobirthing instructor Duna Abu Jaoude, and Joanna Nawfal of Sophia Maternity in Beirut, as well as the midwives at Rizk Hospital, helped me get ready for my delivery and everything new-mom-stage. It shouldn’t be surprising that someone who elected into as much education as I did sought out education as a way to be ready for this life transition! What was pleasantly surprising is how wonderful and caring the women (it was all women, without exceptions) who did this educational work were and how much they addressed my explicit and unspoken needs.

Parenting webinars have been a godsend for me. They soothed my anxiety, armed me with tools to use when I saw basic parenting challenges looming scarily large and complicated, and made me feel connected to a universe of other mothers who were going through the same things. 

Now that I am going back to work soon, though, and considering how much of my life I spent watching these sorts of videos, I am … well, I am amazed. I am amazed at how little other support I had, first. My friends who are moms were wonderful and supportive, and shared their experience and feelings in deeply helpful ways. But when there was something serious to be addressed, their pro tip was to refer me to a book or a webinar. Now, when I see someone who really needs a fix, I do the same! I just don’t know as much as these pros do. 

In my life, more ‘traditional’ sources of support simply were not that knowledgeable. My mother and my mother-in-law were far enough away from their parenting experiences to be unreliable, even by their own assessments. They have also been ocean-and-continent distances away for most of my son’s little life. Of my three sisters-in-law and one sister, three did not have children when I delivered, and the one who did have a kid made the essential contribution of referring me to Boston NAPS! Arguably that sister-in-law was my guardian angel. And, since I delivered at the height of COVID19, I had limited access to in-person help.

The truth, though, is that I craved (and crave) expert, correct, reliable opinions about parenting. I do not feel reassured by grandparents’ saying, we did this, and you all turned out fine. I wanted (and want) guidance that has some kind of facts behind it. Research-based methods gave me confidence. Which is both predictable (I am a researcher, after all) and surprising, since I previously fancied myself so liberated from these discourses. A critical perspective on the medicalisation of birth, for example, or on the professionalisation of literally everything, made me think that I was going into parenthood armed with neutrality and objectivity. This was not my experience at all.

There’s so much more to say on this — it will be continued in another post.

Paris, Where American Writers Go to Escape their Puritan Legacy

Pamela Druckerman’s book-length story of parenting in France has been, by any book-author standards, a wild success. It spent ten weeks on NPR’s Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list. It was reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes. The reviewers did not love it, but it sold well nonetheless.

If you’re looking to criticise the book, you don’t need to dig very deep. It’s got all the problems of amateur social science. First, Druckerman treats her own observations of French moms at the playground as representative of a ‘French’ culture—she enviously sees moms having conversations while their children play and concludes that French mothers have a talent for keeping their children under control at the playground that Anglophone mothers lack. (The ‘Anglophone’ category is as suspect as the ‘French’, of course—I think Americans and Brits would be amused to know that they are the same ‘culture’ in Paris). 

Second, Druckerman lumps everything happening in France (media, policy, and anecdotal experiences) under the heading of ‘culture’. One can imagine the reasons for this: French culture is cool and desirable and American readers will buy a book that tells them how to be more like French people. (See: French Women Do Not Get Fat [https://frenchwomendontgetfat.com/ ]). If I were a publisher I would do nothing to undermine the idea that French culture can be emulated by you, dear reader, in your own home. This decision to emphasise American fetishism of French culture over intellectual rigor means that policy victories in France, like the crèche system providing high-quality care to children between three months and three years of age, get treated as something that the French just do because they have good taste. Of course, it also means that the book is a charming read rather than a treatise on policy, which you don’t see very often on NPR’s bestseller lists.

These critiques are really beside the point, though. The book nowhere claims profound knowledge of France, and I doubt its readers care very much about the nuances of French society in all its diversity. Instead, Druckerman’s journalistic memoir offers a fantasy. In this fantasy, children are gourmet eaters who sleep through the night and quietly entertain themselves while you sip coffee with friends. Women lose all pregnancy weight after three months and resume wearing fine fabrics and high heels without missing a beat. In short, the fantasy is of a motherhood that is sexy, attractive, and above all easy.

Druckerman’s rendering of the French fantasy is all the more attractive because, in her account, it’s easy to achieve all of it with a few simple tricks. Druckerman has a list of these tricks at the end of the book, pithily summarised with headings like  ‘Baby Formula Isn’t Poison’ and ‘Stay Sexual’. (Again, the significant structures in place behind the simple solutions are backgrounded). The solutions are essentially attitude tweaks meant to shift a neurotic, overwrought Anglophone mother into a self-assured, relaxed French one. They range from reasonable (‘Eat for One, and a Bit’) to aspirational (‘It’s Me Who Decides’), and all share a lack of interest in nuance that is probably liberating for anxious people in search of guidance and infuriating for people reading a book with an eye toward critique.

The most interesting part of the fantasy, though, is its total dispensation with the dream of gender equality. The entire project relies on a leaning in to femininity. Under her tip that, ’50/50 Isn’t the Gold Standard’, Druckerman advises women ‘try tempering (their) feminist theory with some old-fashioned French pragmatism’. (Of course, much excellent and influential feminist theory is French … but again, not the point at all). French pragmatism, she explains, involves women trading off their desire for help from their husbands with their desire for their husbands to be in a good mood (which housework doesn’t put them in). If women let go of this obsession with equality and followed the tip to ‘Treat Men Like a Separate Species’, then things would be easier.

Again, it’s easy to criticise this framing of gender relations. But what’s so appealing about it? Why did this advice speak to so many American women?

I have my own experience of reading the book to help answer this question. I picked it up not because I wanted to analyse its advantages and faults but because I, as a new mom growing in to what felt like a lot of responsibility, I wanted a bit of guidance. Enough of my mom-friends had gleaned helpful insights from the book that I figured it was worth picking up. And the constant reminder voice in my head saying, YOU COULD BE FUCKING THIS UP, made me amenable (vulnerable?) to outside influences. Reading Druckerman’s trajectory from an anxious woman convinced that she’d be a bad mother if she was anything less than slavishly devoted to her child, to cool, collected Parisian fashion plate made me think, it’s possible to make this feel, and look, easy.

What’s easy about this approach is that it eschews moral righteousness. Everything about it suggests pragmatism and normalcy come first: keep families constructed the way we like them, with men and women conjugally happy and children benignly subordinated. Just eat what’s in front of you, the way that everyone else does. Stop thinking you are going to catch food borne illnesses all the time, because you probably won’t.  The ease comes from not having to do anything in a Puritan way, and just being able to muddle along doing more or less what everyone else is doing and feeling fine about that. Which sounds appealing, doesn’t it? And is why it’s a bit troubling to look at the principles it is built on up close: on an acquiescence to conceptions of gender roles and women’s sexuality that’s hardly progressive. 

Clearly I am in the anxious Anglophone category, reading so much in to such a mild text. But it really speaks to how influential popular literature can be, in ways expected and unexpected.

Pelvic floor shield, or why I cry all the time postpartum

Since becoming a mother, I have become a crier. This is not new, it’s just more dramatic. I was a crier before — during my pregnancy I would have weekly sobbing sessions for no reason at all, just to clear out whatever I was feeling. But after the baby arrived I reached a new level. In our first days home from the hospital, I would spontaneously burst into tears every night at around 9 pm. It was a vulnerable moment: I had survived the day with the tiny human still intact, but the night was still ahead. Nothing helped but crying. 

I felt so shaky and weak. As a yoga-obsessive I had become extremely reliant on my pelvic floor for embodied safety and security, in part through control. Years of involved vinyasa transitions had made me hyper-attuned to it. I spent astonishing amounts of effort trying to lift myself up from a cross-legged position without engaging the strength of my arms. In moments of tension, I consciously sucked the bottom of my pelvis up toward my navel as a way of reconnecting with my body. This discipline and control reassured me and I followed other yogis in considering it a virtue.

During pregnancy, I relied on that virtue, and on that muscle (is it even one muscle?), to protect me against a constant fear of miscarriage. If I felt for a moment that the baby was unsafe, I visualised a closed cervix, a strong base to my body, a secure container for him to safely spend forty weeks in. I convinced myself that my carefully cultivated muscle tone would prevent anything bad from happening. At the same time, I let other muscles slacken, slowing down my practice to fifteen minutes of gentle stretching. I cultivated receptivity everywhere except my pelvic floor. 

When I went into labour after more than forty-one weeks of pregnancy, I thought that my close relationship with this region of my body would make it easy. I spent a week contentedly observing mild contractions pulse through my body, quietly praising my own preparedness as I shut out outside influences. It’s not an exaggeration to say I took up residence in my lower abdomen. (You will not be surprised to hear that this did not make me pleasant company). The day before the birth, I woke up to strong contractions early. They were painful in a slightly pleasurable way.

I went to the hospital at ten o’clock in the evening with my husband and our mothers. We laughed on the short drive to the hospital. Predictably, I was sent home to let my labour advance a little more. I was not about to experience the pleasurable labour I had read about. My attempt to sleep devolved into a profound encounter with my pelvic floor. Contractions came at me one after another and I could feel the baby pressing down at the hammock of muscle that I had worked so hard to keep taut. No, my body said. No way.

We went to the hospital again at three o’clock in the morning. I asked for an epidural. I knew numbness was the only way to override my pelvic floor resistance. I dismissed my natural-birth fantasy and let an unskilled resident stuck a series of needles into my spine. After six attempts (or more, or less, I was not counting) I got the trickle of drugs that put me to sleep. I woke up at eight o’clock in active labour. I dozed in between interventions until one o’clock, when my doctor told me the only way to progress was to push.

As I screamed and whimpered and grabbed at supportive hands, my doctor pressed down on my perineum. “See?” She told the resident. “I’m pushing down on it but it isn’t going down.” She complimented me on my strength. “You yoga people, you have so much strength here! My last yogi patient pushed for two hours.” I laboured to get the baby out, visualising his ears stuck just above my vaginal opening. After ninety minutes I pushed his ears out and the rest of him spilled out instantly. “You didn’t have any tearing,” my doctor said, complimenting my pelvic floor again.

Afterward I expected to find that space floppy, vacant, ineffective. It was not. Instead it was bruised, stretched, frightened. Instead of releasing it had fought a tough battle and lost. When I reflexively returned to that inner strength, I found it battered. This made the crying uncontrollable. There was nothing to stop the flow of tears, no internal wall to provide a secure container. There was no baby there to protect anymore, but I still needed it. After all, the baby was never the one frightened of miscarriage. I felt my own raw bottomlessness, and wept and wept and wept.

I had one notion of maternal sentimentality from watching my own mother get weepy about nothing. Something entirely unlike that notion emerged from my body. You could have called me sentimental after the birth of my son, but this was quite beside the point: I was simply beaten up. The muscle I had trained to protect me had been beaten, by me. There was nothing there to stop the tears. So I cried, about sad movie plots and my intense hunger and the baby’s screams during the bath. My tears left wet patches on my sleeves multiple times a day.

My pelvic floor is back. I did every imaginable exercise to rebuild it and now it holds me in place again. It’s skittish, though, or maybe I am, and anything tender or tragic can reactivate the feeling of being bruised, defeated. So news headlines bring on sobs, war movies need a box of Kleenex, the baby smiling leaves my cheeks wet. Since I became a mother I realised how quixotic my body-armour was. I also saw how my everyday normalcy relied on it. I cry differently because I have less power to stop my feelings. I also have less will. 

Protecting patterns

The worst thing about quarantine for me is the fear of other people. With the baby, it’s so acute, it’s sometimes physically painful. I was walking down the street alone with the baby on a rainy day once, carrying an umbrella, and a beggar approached me trying to sell me something. I actually spun the umbrella out in front of me, between my body and his, and said please, stay away from me. I was a little surprised to see this reaction emerge from my body, but it didn’t feel bad, it felt like the right thing. I was not about to let this stranger near my child. 

This has been the thing about being a new mom in a pandemic: it has brought me in touch with this feral protective impulse. The only thing uglier than following this impulse (as demonstrated above, when I put a physical barrier between my baby and a person in poverty) is what happens when I suppress it. That’s really unpleasant, the feeling of being impotent in the face of a threat to the little one in my arms.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I wanted my delivery to go, how I wanted my space to feel when I came home from the hospital with a newborn, when I embarked on this new life stage, the thing I kept coming up with was a bear. I wanted to be like a mama bear in her cave, deep underground, fed for the winter, and safe in the darkness. I spoke about this with a friend, and she said, well, you know what to do about boundaries. Everyone knows what happens if you piss off a bear. She was right about bears. Bears have courage, and I wanted to summon courage.

Sleep, sleep, sleep

In the daytime, baby usually sleeps on me, or on my husband. He sometimes sleeps in the baby wrap (Solly Baby, I love you), or while we take our evening walk with him. Other times of the day he sleeps on my chest or while one of us holds him. He sleeps in his bed at night, but during daylight hours he is usually attached to another body while he sleeps.

I think I am meant to be concerned about this and anxious about my child developing bad habits. But I am not! I am not one tiny bit concerned. I love cuddling my baby while he sleeps.

There are downsides, of course. He is getting big (5.6 kilos at his last pediatrician’s appointment) and carrying him all day makes my arms hurt a little. And, while I am grateful for baby carriers in all their variety, they don’t free up my hands as much as NOT carrying a small person would. It’s a handicap in the getting-stuff-done race to carry a baby. 

I don’t care, though. I feel happy that my son is spending a lot of his first weeks on the planet being cuddled within kissing distance of his parents. Coming out of the womb into the cold harsh world where he will spend the rest of his life is difficult enough. I can offer him a few short weeks of warmth and affection before he starts cultivating the skills of self-sufficiency. I don’t mind being less productive during that time, don’t mind spending a lot of my time looking for a place to sit down or being stuck in place with a baby immobilizing one or both of my arms. The new-baby smell alone makes me forget about other stuff.

Minutiae

Today I am deeply preoccupied with my son’s nose. It seems to be full of boogers. Every morning I put a bit of physiomer, a saline solution, into his nose to clear out anything blocking his airways. My pediatrician recommended it. He also warned against overuse of the NoseFrida, on grounds that it probably didn’t feel good. It was hard to argue with this logic.

This morning in the nursery, I put in the solution, like normal, and he sneezed out a big booger. Success.

I carried him into the sitting room and handed him to my husband. ‘Wow,’ he said, peering up the baby’s nose. ‘He’s got a very big booger in his nose. How are we going to get that out?’ 

I peered up his nostrils. It was big. ‘Give me a Kleenex,’ I said. I wiped his little nose from the side and out came a substantial chunk of snot. ‘Look at that,’ I said to my husband.

‘Bravo, Mama,’ he said. I considered it a win, keeping my baby’s nose clean.

 But as the day went on, little specks of dried snot continued to accumulate on the rim of his nostrils. Determined not to stick my fingers into his nose, I resorted to blowing on them, pinching his nostrils together, or rubbing my fingertip over his top lip over and over. I annoyed him profoundly and the specks would not go away. Clearly they were doing nothing to the baby, he could breathe fine despite his nose looking a little dirty. But the look of it bothered me. He looked so unkempt with snot in his nose. People who visited would think I did not keep my child clean.

Of course, no one is visiting these days, except my mother-in-law. 

My fight against the boogers continued. Eventually they disappeared on their own.

Mom guilt ... I see you.

One thing that has been terrifying about parenting — now, almost exactly eight weeks in — is how much it has amplified my screen time. I’m not even retreating to the safety of my phone, as I have done during other stressful times. I don’t feel I need a retreat. I love hanging out with my baby. But having him in my life has made me paradoxically closer to my phone as well as to him and to my husband. 

Part of it is breastfeeding. A new baby breastfeeds basically all the time. In our first few days at home, my brain was a sieve, so tracking things like how long it had been since the baby had last eaten was impossible without my phone. This meant I had my phone with me constantly. I couldn’t nurse or change the baby without it, since I needed to record how often he ate and filled his diaper to know if he was getting adequately nourished. My phone, specifically the BabyFeedingLog app, was a lifeline. Once he regained his birthweight and the urgency was gone, there was a new urgency, that of staying awake during night feedings. Again, the bright light of my iPhone was my support system while my husband snored beside me. In the early days of motherhood, I have relied heavily on my phone.

All this makes me feel guilty. Why am I not engaging more with my child while he nurses? Why am I not spending more time admiring the soft fuzzy hair on his head or counting his precious fingers, one through ten, over and over again? 

 Although I do plenty of this stuff, sometimes I want to browse what is on the Zara app or Google ‘baby heat rash’ or read about what Boris Johnson’s government is up to. And now, part of my emerging mom identity is feeling a bit guilty about looking at my phone to do that instead of looking at my baby. The guilt sneaks up on me. I think I am just having a break and before I know it I am thinking, shit, my baby is not being stimulated enough, he is going to be feeling bored or neglected or disconnected from me. It’s funny, because the baby looks content, or at least vacant. But I see the specter of the guilt, how he lurks everywhere, waiting to chime in. 

On not having gestational diabetes, continued

This post follows on from yesterday’s, in which I share the details of my own stressful reaction to failing a glucose challenge test for gestational diabetes in my second trimester of pregnancy. (I took this test twice, in week 24 and in week 28, and I did not pass either time).

After scouring the internet for information, I began scouring for testimony. It seemed the medical establishment was quite in agreement that gestational diabetes is real, affects mothers and babies, and can befall women of all backgrounds and body types. While there are risk factors for gestational diabetes, like high BMI and a family history of diabetes, many women without any of these risk factors were still diagnosed.

I began finding these women on the internet, and I was immediately gratified that they were as anxious and as pissed off as I was. They were runners, nutrition counselors, people who follow the paleo diet … many of whom failed the glucose challenge test and some of whom subsequently were diagnosed with gestational diabetes. What were these women upset about? Well, everything about this test and its aftermath. Here are the common themes:

1. How could this happen to me when I am so healthy?

2. Why should a body’s fitness to process food during pregnancy be assessed on the basis of its ability to process something that is nothing like a food? Writers and commenters who carefully watched their diets were horrified at their reactions to the drink (some vomited, some felt like vomiting, some were grossed out) and peeved that they were expected to consume something so sugary, in the name of health, that they avoided so scrupulously in all its forms.

3. Why should they be forced to carry out such intensive monitoring when their real diets were completely fine? Some writers and commenters received a gestational diabetes diagnosis and were instructed to monitor their blood sugar using a glucose monitor four times a day (fasted in the morning before breakfast, and either 1 or 2 hours after meals). These women often found they processed their actual diets completely fine, and never had alarming results. Alternatively, they found that they processed their normal diets fine and had alarming results when they did eat carbs—which in some cases they claimed not to eat for exactly this reason.

4. Had they somehow failed their children by having gestational diabetes, and was it their fault? This was not the same righteous anger as the other two, animated by convictions about what was and was not healthy. These women felt terrible and worried about their babies. One blogger, a nutritionist specialising in gestational diabetes, chronicles her thought process on failing the test and openly admits to equating failing this test with actual, upsetting failure, her extensive knowledge on gestational diabetes notwithstanding. Her language? 'How could I not feel that way? The official medical terminology was passing or failing.’

Ultimately many women made peace with their experience, either of failing the first test and passing the second or weathering a third trimester full of screening. They dispensed advice on how to move on, how to make the best of a gestational diabetes diagnosis and learn more about health and nutrition, how to put oneself aside and put the baby first. They waxed philosophical. The fact remained, though, that they were uncomfortable with the conditions under which they were tested, stressed about the results, and unhappy with the monitoring regime that followed. One nutritionist blogger, Lily Nichols, applied her training as a certified diabetes educator to understanding her own experience in a way that could help others; hers was the only voice I found on the internet that was relatable AND knowledgeable. Most of what I read was one or the other.

I noticed a lot of things in this internet deep-dive. Many women were struggling or had struggled with this process just as I was doing, and they didn’t seem crazy or ill-informed. This was a painful process. Noting their pain, though, didn’t resolve much for me. I still had to answer the question of (1) how did I want to take care of myself and my baby given the fact that I had failed the glucose challenge test and (2) how did I want to work with my doctor on this?

Having tried, and failed, to prove to myself that gestational diabetes was a fabricated disease, I arrived at the conclusion that I did need more information about my body and that I did need outside input to get that information. I talked it over with my husband and decided to buy a glucose monitor to track my blood sugar levels; I could use this information to decide how I wanted to proceed. I began the four-times-daily process of puncturing a finger, squeezing a drop of blood onto a test strip, and writing down the number that resulted. I kept a log of what I ate alongside the number, to see if anything in particular spiked my blood sugar. After five days I was ready to cry every time I had to prick myself. (You may notice a theme here of me crying). The routine was not easy, pricking one’s own finger is a bit painful and even more painful when you are not very accustomed to taking these readings yourself and make frequent mistakes! I averaged 2 to 3 pricks per successful reading.

Monitoring myself so closely is also deeply uncomfortable for me. The constant feedback from the monitor about whether I was in desired ranges or outside them made me stressed about everything. I spent a lot of time mulling over whether I was allowed to have a snack or whether I was allowed to have a drink outside the mealtimes after which I would test my blood sugar. This was despite all my levels being normal, every time I used the glucose meter, whether or not I ate carbohydrates. This kind of monitoring drove me crazy; the fact that it involved deliberately making myself bleed did not make it more charming. Despite promising myself that I would eat normally during the test period (which I left up to my own discretion about when to stop) I felt frightened of sugar. I also drank water and took walks with more commitment than I had at any point in my pregnancy.

On day 5, I sent the results to my doctor, apologising for taking on board her suggestion without consulting her first. She laughed and confirmed that she had recommended this route, and then confirmed my levels were normal. The hospital protocols in this case were fasting levels below 90 and 2 hour postprandial (post-meal) levels below 120; my levels had been well within this range and usually quite a bit below. ‘Eat normally,’ she said. ‘And you can stop monitoring.’

I did stop monitoring, and I did continue eating normally, plus the freedom that I felt from knowing I would not be punished for what I ate. Despite the number of exhortations I read to look at the glucose monitor as simply a feedback mechanism on my diet, I was not able to be so appreciative of its insights; all I could think about was being forced to have an early induction. I had avoided a gestational diabetes diagnosis, but my new knowledge of gestational diabetes actually had shown me that this was not necessarily the good news I had been hoping for. My research empowered me to make choices about how I wanted to go through the testing process, but it made me careful of the dangers of sugar to the point of being slightly paranoid.

Knowledge, in this case, was the only thing that I could draw on and it felt like the thing to trust, but ultimately it was less decisive and less reassuring than I wanted it to be. Intuition, as well, had been slightly off: my ‘feeling’ that gestational diabetes was a fake disease was not entirely reliable. It was a humbling experience, to be sure.

On not having gestational diabetes

Subtitle: what I learned from overreacting to a routine test.

Like many women who have given birth in the US or in a medical system that follows US protocols, I took a glucose challenge test in week 24 of my pregnancy. The glucose challenge test is a test of how fast your body can metabolise 50 grams of sugar, which you drink in a small bottle of the world’s least appealing juice. How much sugar is this? Well, for reference, two Double Stuf Oreos, or one serving of Double Stuf Oreos, has 13 grams of sugar. If you wanted to approximate this amount of sugar using an Oreo cookie, you would need some 9 to 10 cookies. Your blood is tested before you drink the glucose solution and one hour after to determine your blood sugar levels. And, importantly, you are not meant to consume much water or do much moving around during this one hour.

Like everything with gestational diabetes, protocols vary. Some people are told to fast before the test for 12 hours, told they cannot drink water, and told they need to be still during the test. My doctor advised against fasting, and the staff in the lab where I took the test said it was fine to drink water but not too much. Everyone told me not to walk around during that one-hour period.

Protocols also vary for how you read the test: at the hospital where I go, in Beirut, if you have a pre-drink level of 95 or higher, or a post-drink level of 140 or higher, you are in the category of people who might have gestational diabetes. Some hospitals use lower thresholds, 130 or 135 for the post-drink levels.

My results were 88 and 142. I foolishly did not follow my doctor’s advice to eat breakfast before the test, although I did drink some water and move around the hospital a bit while I was supposed to be waiting in the lab. When I got these results, my doctor looked at me very sheepishly.

‘It’s supposed to be 140,’ she said. ‘We will have to test again. You can do the three hour test, or you can monitor your blood sugar levels with a glucose monitor.’

I tried not to outright glare at her. My doctor is a genuinely nice person, so I don’t always tell her the not nice things that I am thinking. FAKE DISEASE, was the thing I was thinking at this moment. Anything with ‘gestational’ as a modifier that went away after pregnancy immediately made me think it was a fabrication of an out-of-control medicalisation machine.

[I learned in my subsequent research about gestational diabetes that this is not really a fair characterisation. Gestational diabetes was accidentally discovered in 19th century doctors’ efforts* to find a way to support women with diabetes during their pregnancies. They initially tested women’s urine for evidence of sugar to make a diabetes diagnosis. It seems gestational diabetes predates the era of big pharma-driven hospital policies—the manufacturers of this horrid drink did not invent it, as I maintained for at least a week. They might have contributed to new testing regimes, but those red flags did not come up in my research].

I negotiated with my doctor to take the glucose challenge test again, thinking that I would just pass a second time. She also thought this, since I told her I had fasted the first time, and advised me to eat toast with labneh before I went in to take the test. Full of bitterness, I took the test, and the next morning I got on a plane to the United States for Christmas.

My doctor had reassured me it was not a big deal to fail the glucose challenge test. ‘I had 140,’ she said. ‘I took the three hour and it was fine. And, I don’t think you have gestational diabetes.’

At 28 weeks, when we had this conversation, I had gained 7 kilos and my baby was measuring about 1 kilo, slightly small for gestational age. Gestational diabetes can cause macrosomia (big babies, who are hard to deliver) and often shows up in women who either have a BMI of 29 or over (mine was 20 when I got pregnant). I did not fit the gestational diabetes risk-factor profile. As a first course of action, though, my doctor advised we go by the book and follow the standard protocols for gestational diabetes. ‘Don’t hate me,’ she said.

It was unfortunate for both of us that I did, at that moment, hate her.

I took the test again, channelling all my concentration to violent visualisations of bonfires in my veins burning up glucose. My husband and I canceled our plans to go look at discounted designer furniture. When the test was over, I didn’t want to eat, I felt nauseous and icky, like I had binged on sweet treats (which, essentially, I had). Instead of last-minute Christmas shopping I lounged on my couch and Googled gestational diabetes.

The Mayo Clinic told me that gestational diabetes increased the risk of C-section and fetal death, as well as my and my baby’s risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in future. What to Expect warned that a gestational diabetes diagnosis might make early induction necessary. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said that 50 to 70 percent of pregnant people diagnosed with gestational diabetes develop type 2 diabetes later in their lives. Even the NHS, my pregnancy go-to for levelheaded advice, said the first thing pregnant people with gestational diabetes should do is regularly monitor their blood sugar with a glucose monitor. I was horrified.

We flew to the US. I literally brought up gestational diabetes at every opportunity. My husband was disciplined in his neutral responses to all my commentary. By Monday, I had turned down enough muffins and scones that I think everyone around me was worried, and had spent three days calculating whether to ask my doctor about my test results or ignore them until she brought them up. My worrying was predictably useless. At lunchtime she sent me a text message with a screenshot of my test results. 87 fasting, 144 at one hour. ‘I thought I told you not to fast,’ she said.

‘I didn’t fast,’ I told her.

‘Ok, then it’s high. I’m still not worried. Just limit bread, rice, pasta and we’ll do the three hour test when you are back.’

For the first time in my pregnancy I did not thank her. Instead I began panicking. I looked at the bowl of rice I had just ordered. Fuck. I spent the rest of my day in a broody cloud that would impress any adolescent girl. At night, I sobbed into my husband’s neck, lamenting my diagnosis. That night, the first night, I focused on rejecting it, using my preferred argument that the manufacturers of Glucola (the dreaded drink) had invented gestational diabetes to sell more of their product. He held me and encouraged me to respond however I was comfortable. Refuse the three hour test if you want, he said. Don’t restrict your diet. Tell your doctor what you are concerned about.

The next day, I decided I had to move on from these advice websites. They had not clarified anything else in pregnancy, I reasoned, they only communicated standard advice that came without any explanation or evidence. These were written for a general audience. As an academic, I had two weapons at my disposal: a high tolerance for jargon and access to a university library’s vast electronic resources. I could do better than this, I told myself. I could blow the cover off gestational diabetes and find out just what a fake disease it was.

I began with Evidence Based Birth, a website that furnishes readers with the scientific evidence they need to discern whether common medical interventions into pregnancy are ones they actually need or want. My most earth mother friend had recommended it to me (she rejected plenty of common medical protocols in her three births) so I thought for sure it would share my views on gestational diabetes. Dr Rebecca Dekker’s conclusion? ‘We have strong evidence that treating gestational diabetes improves outcomes for both mothers and babies.’

I cried some more. In between sobs, I consulted her bibliography. I plucked out the meta-analyses and systematic reviews and pasted them into the Cambridge University library search function. I consumed abstracts frantically, skimming over anything that got too detailed for me to immediately apply the information to my own ongoing argument with my doctor in my head. I learned that the diagnostic criteria for gestational diabetes were controversial: the US model, which uses two tests, usually leads to fewer gestational diabetes diagnoses than the European standard of one test. I saw the word ‘controversial’ appear in abstract after abstract. I also saw the recurrent appearance of references to worldwide increases in diabetes and obesity, and the acknowledgement that increases in gestational diabetes diagnoses could mean more gestational diabetes specifically but it also might just mean more people were developing diabetes, and this screening was picking that up.

I narrated my new learning to my husband, through a new intellectual lens: gestational diabetes was part of a worldwide initiative to discipline fat people’s bodies and shame them into conforming to a norm through the threat of medicalisation. None of these risk factors apply to me, I told him. I don’t need to go through this test, and I do not have this disease. He dutifully agreed with me, and refrained from telling me to get out of my pajamas, it was 10 am.

At night, in bed, I cried more. ‘What if I have gestational diabetes?’ I told him. ‘They will make me keep a food journal and test my blood sugar levels every day and then force me to have an elective C-section before my due date.’ Except I didn’t say it like that, in a sentence, but in hiccups while I wailed through the distress of failing a test, of submitting to a system that found me inadequate, of knowing that my conviction of my own rightness was not as strong as the fear that something bad would happen to my baby, that I would overestimate my own cleverness and gamble with his life and I would lose. I was suffering. All of my knowledge about the anti-feminism of the medical establishment, about the corrupt ways that expert rule was consolidated and imposed, did not free me from this fear that something bad was going to happen to me if I did not follow instructions exactly right.

I gave up sugar, I bought high-protein and low glycemic index bread, I walked after meals. Instead of crying on my husband before I slept, I cried after he went to bed. I woke him up and then gave monosyllabic answers to his questions. I had gone beyond the point of seeing this issue as potentially humorous or a chance to learn; I could see my mental health deteriorating. After maybe the third night of this, he confronted me in the morning. ‘Susan, you have been crying about this for six days. What is wrong?’

I consulted a friend. She advised me to listen to my anger, to use visualisation to learn about meeting my own needs, to consider whether I felt alright about my plans for how I intended to give birth. I knew she was right, that my husband was right, that other things than gestational diabetes were wrong. I continued to fixate. Where were the moms who went through this testing? I wondered. What mommy bloggers chronicled this whole hellish ordeal? I will continue this saga in the next post, out of consideration for readers’ eyes.

The paradoxes of a #GIRLBOSS

Sophia Amoruso's memoir-cum-advice text for ambitious young women draws on the unlikely story of its author to offer guidance for women who hope to follow in her footsteps. It stays true to her sassy, irreverent narrative voice, but seems confused on the principles it offers for young women to follow. Rather, it continually undermines its own message in favour of attachment to the brand of Amoruso. The meta-message, that one's strength of character and magnetism is everything, drowns out the stated message, of 'work hard and believe in yourself and you will find that anything is possible'.

GIRLBOSS is the story of Sophia Amoruso's trajectory from teenage ne'er do well to inspiring female entrepreneur. Her story begins with her as a troubled youth -- diagnosed with ADHD and constantly switching schools -- and travels through her rebellious phase of hitchhiking, shoplifting, and dumpster diving. It takes a turn toward the redemptive when she locates her passion in selling vintage clothing on Ebay and then follows a rather steep uphill path to glory when her clothing business reaches its stride and simply won't stop expanding. She takes us quickly through her growth, jumping from one employee to an office to a bigger office to going to Menlo Park to meet VCs. Based on her meteoric rise, she concludes that being a #GIRLBOSS involves hard work, luck, and a measure of self-respect that has some parallels with self-worship. In her words, 'be your own idol'.

There are three key confusions that are perhaps the most interesting elements of the book. First, there is the profound confusion about capitalism and whether it is good or bad. Second, there is the simultaneously conviction that magic is not in your control and that all magic emanates from the self. Third, there is the conviction that hard work is the most direct route to success paired with the obvious implication that there is something more than JUST hard work at play in a meteoric rise like Amoruso's.

Confusion 1: Is capitalism a problem? Is it my problem?

'As a teenager, I thought that life sucked and that my life—"oppressed" as I was by school and the suburbs—especially sucked. ... I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evils ways (which is true, but a girl's gotta put gas in her car).'

Amoruso goes back and forth on whether she would like to embrace capitalism. On the one hand, she spent her youth experiencing it as oppressive. This seems to be less a political stance of hers and more of an emotional reaction to not fitting in to the suburban community where she was raised. She presents Nasty Gal as an aesthetic response to the oppressive nature of capitalism in her childhood. Since she never wanted to fit in, she was attracted to the unique look of vintage, its one-of-a-kind imprint and its inherent opposition to what was in the mall. But as she encounters success and begins to think like a CEO, the principles of capitalism and especially the inherent intelligence of the market in the form of the individual consumer, take over her resistance to being controlled by structures and her distaste for looking like other people. As it turns out, Amoruso's critique sputters out when her feeling of being an outsider dissipates.

Confusion 2: Who makes magic? Do I make magic?

"Chaos magic is the idea that a particular set of beliefs serves as an active force in the world. In other words, we choose what and how we believe, and our beliefs are tools that we then use to make things happen ... or not. Though this comes from a school of magical thought, it actually seems really practical and 'no duh' to me. It all goes back to the red string of my imaginary kite—if you believe something, other people will believe it, too."

In this passage, Amoruso refers to the time she, as a child, dragged around a red string saying that this was a kite. The other children on the playground with her immediately caught on to her idea, and began dragging imaginary kites behind them as well.

The magic, in her case, arises from a conviction that is entirely at odds with reality. It can become some version of reality through the distributed power of that conviction. For her, it is linked to self-confidence of an authentic kind, which persists even during periods of discouragement or opposition. Amoruso is at pains to distinguish her kind of chaos magic from more impotent manifestations of the same notion. 'You can't just type "abajilliondollars" whenever you log in to Facebook and all of a sudden become Warren Buffet,' she clarifies. But you can get everyone to pretend to have a kite simply by believing your own pretend kite is real. She gets bound up in this paradox, simultaneously offering techniques for incorporating these intentions into your own everyday life (she is herself a fan of making her intentions internet passwords, hence the Facebook reference) while spurning less authentic versions of this practice.

This is a similar confusion to the one about capitalism: her deeply held conviction is true for her but not necessarily transferable; it is possible to do JUST AS SHE DID but to somehow mess it up by being impractical, self-deluding, not hardworking enough.

Confusion number 3: When is hard work the path to true success?

Amoruso is a devoted believer in the power of hard work, and she makes this clear. Nasty Gal grew to what it is because of her hard work. Without her late nights, obsessive accounting, and perfectionist tendencies (she mentions her obsession with getting the labels straight on the packages she sent to clients with their new vintage purchases) the business would not have grown the way that it had.

Hard work, she shows us, is synonymous with her approach. She was a perfectionist when she made tuna sandwiches at Subway and when she sat at the information desk at Borders bookstore. She has worked hard at every job she had, even though the jobs she did all appear to be dead ends (in her narrative as well as in popular imagination). The capacity to work hard on its own enabled her to become a successful businesswoman.

This fanatical capacity to work is something she also values in her employees. She warns would-be #GIRLBOSSes that thinking themselves above a task, any task, will not win them affection from their employers nor endear them to their colleagues. But hard work is clearly a necessary but not sufficient condition for her rapid climb upward. While she tells the story of her many 'shitty' jobs as if it prepared her to run Nasty Gal, the only evidence for that is in the fact that she eventually did run Nasty Gal. There's no sense in which her tour of minimum wage employment opened doors for her or taught her essential skills (other than working hard, that is). You need the theory of magic to make sense of her path, which otherwise seems to lead only to other minimum wage jobs.

These three paradoxes make Amoruso's career advice a bit difficult to follow. Embrace capitalism, but with a critical eye toward its destructive properties. Believe in magic, but don't be a hippy-dippy person who overdoes it. And work hard, blindly, at whatever you are doing. It's tempting to dismiss these inconsistencies as a failure of the writer, or of the editor, who should have thought these things through better. But they seem commonplace enough that blaming her seems a bit simplistic. Are these maxims simply the received wisdom of 'making it' for young women in the 2010s? I am curious how widespread they really are.