Milk: It does a body good

Being a parent is a worrisome business. Really, there’s no limit to the span and scope of things we will fret about, like what if social services comes to investigate us because wee Jasmine has developed a habit of biting her own arm, or how about that one martini I had before I found out I was pregnant, or what if little Johnny develops some bizarre hairy ears disease that only three other kids in the whole world have ever been diagnosed with and my insurance thinks hairy ears are a lifestyle issue and therefore not coverable (it could happen)? You get my point.

Then there are the more pedestrian concerns, and one of the biggies among first-time moms is wondering whether pregnancy and nursing will totally wreck your body (particularly your breasts). According to a UK plastic surgeon’s new study, the answer is no. Well, probably not, if you don’t smoke and have nice, elastic skin.

Look, I’m all for encouraging women to breastfeed, but I’m inclined to take this study with a grain of salt. I’m not saying they’re wrong—it may well be that breastfeeding has little to no effect on breast sagginess—but I have a few reservations about the study. For one thing, the sample was extremely small (132 women), so I question whether that’s enough to draw any sort of conclusion with confidence.

Moreover, a lot of the evidence was based on interviews. They did use standardized pre-operative photos of the breasts to measure the degree of sag at the time of the study, but that doesn’t tell me where the participants started out. I’d be more interested in a study that measured each woman before pregnancy, after the initial milk engorgement, and a few years down the road.

Finally, there seems to be a bit of a flaw in the design of the study: all of the participants are women who came in for cosmetic surgery on their breasts. The study found no significant difference in the degree of sagginess between women who had breastfed and those who had not, but how meaningful is that data when everyone in the sample thinks they have saggy breasts anyway? Their opinions on the subject are almost guaranteed to be variations on a theme of “I hate my breasts so much.” It would have been much more interesting if they had interviewed women who weren’t plastic surgery recipients.

Anyhow, the entire issue of whether breastfeeding is good for your figure is somewhat annoying anyway. Because first of all, breastfeeding burns massive amounts of calories, so it’s one of the best things you could do for your figure on that basis alone. And second, if you are so deeply concerned about your looks that you just don’t think you can breastfeed, perhaps you’re not quite ready to be a parent.

Don’t mistake me–there are many perfectly justifiable reasons women (including me) choose not to breastfeed. But pure vanity is maybe not the best one, in my opinion. It’ll get drilled out of you anyway after pregnancy—having a baby around the house generally means a season of mismatched clothes, under-eye dark circles, and somewhat ratty hair. And yes, maybe a bit of brand new breast sag.

But the bottom line is, whether breastfeeding causes a bit of sag or not, don’t let that stop you from doing it. Love your body, honor every stretch mark, every imperfect inch of it, because it has done something amazing: it nurtured and protected your baby from the day he or she was conceived. And now, even after the birth, your body knows just how to make the most perfect food in the world, custom-made for your baby. Now that’s a beautiful thing.

Are you gonna have twins, or what?

Due to recent inquiries, I felt it best to provide a few stock answers to Frequently Asked Questions section about my pregnancy:

Why yes, I am pregnant, thank you.

I am not having twins.

I am not going to “drop it” any day now.

I’m actually just five months along.

Stop touching my belly. Stop. It.

Thank you, I had noticed that I am enormous.

No, I don’t worry about getting too big for my maternity clothes. Should I?

No, seriously. Are you calling me fat? Huh?

* * * * *

So help me, people ask the rudest questions about pregnancy. But then, I consider it the height of rudeness to even ask if someone is pregnant in the first place.

An exception to that: if you have known someone for a while, and have noticed a significant change in appearance and wardrobe over the months (including a covert sighting of maternity panel on the pants) then it’s probably okay to ask–though in a roundabout way–if you have to do it at all.

If you have just met a woman? Not okay to ask. Not ever. Not even if you think she looks like she’s about to pop. Not even if you see the maternity panel on her pants. There’s a good reason for this. I once made a woman cry at the Little Lambs Closet sale down at Centenary UMC. The lady looked pregnant, had the maternity panel on her pants and no baby with her. I was pregnant as well, and so as we both stood there browsing through racks of infant clothing, I asked her in comradely fashion when she was due. She burst into tears. Turns out she’d had the baby several months before and just couldn’t get the weight off. I felt so bad I started crying. So beware, and learn where I have stumbled.

Really, it’s treacherous ground, asking a woman if she’s pregnant. Or even, if you know her to be pregnant, guessing how far along she is. Because some of us didn’t start out slender as young birch saplings. Some of us have a little junk in the trunk. Some of us, in fact, have junk all over the metaphorical car, sitting right on top of the preggo bump and making it look perhaps larger than it really is.

What that means is, when you tell a six-months-pregnant woman that she looks like she’s ready to have that baby any day, she hears, “Boy, you sure are a fat little dumpling, aren’t you? Moooooo!” This perhaps explains why I did not buy bedroom furniture last week from the insensitive baboon who was making jokes about how my water was going to break right there in his showroom. Twerp.

And hey, you can’t even assume anything if you think her water is breaking. Because it could be that a psychotic beagle has simply peed on her while she was napping. And yes, that did happen to me the day before I gave birth to the Sprog. We no longer have said psychotic beagle, but that is another story for another time. My point is that not all is as it seems. And even if it’s exactly as it seems? A little tact would be appreciated. Your need to satisfy your curiosity is not crucial enough to risk seriously offending someone.

Besides, we’re talking about a volatile cocktail of pregnancy hormones and self-consciousness. You mess with the bull, you get the horns, baby.

Good grief, I can’t even type that with a straight face.

Discuss: Under what circumstances do you consider it appropriate to ask a woman if she’s pregnant/how far along she is? And what’s the rudest thing someone has said to you/your partner during pregnancy?

One mammogram please, extra lipstick on the side

Note to readers: I wrote this a few months ago, just before I got pregnant, but now seemed like a good time to publish it. Breast cancer has been on my mind a lot lately, what with Elizabeth Edwards’ sad news and Barbara Isaacs’ excellent article about cancer recurrence. Also, it was my mom’s birthday last week, and she totally pwned breast cancer. Chuck Norris? Has nothing on my mother.

* * * * *

The dressing room is cold, and you don’t want to take your shirt off. But you do it anyway, and you stare at yourself in the mirror, wondering what’s going on in your breasts. They look the same as ever — not so hot since they’ve been mauled by a baby — but you can’t stand not knowing anymore. You cram your shirt, bra, and jewelry into the plastic bag they’ve provided, feeling like an idiot for even wearing jewelry, feeling gross because they told you not to wear deodorant. Feeling a terror so profound you don’t even know how to describe it.

You awkwardly wrap the kimono around yourself with the opening in front and hold it closed as you bungle your way into the inner waiting room. All the other women are older, reading Woman’s Day magazine and Modern Maturity. They’re bored, jiggling their feet. They’ve done this before. One smiling woman in her 50s waits in her dressing room, instead of the main waiting room, and you suddenly realize she already has breast cancer and must stay away from other people’s germs. You wonder how many women have left here and cried, foreheads on their steering wheels, in the parking lot.

You pick up a People magazine and leaf through endless pages of celebrity gossip. All the women have nice breasts. You really hate Ellen Pompeo’s dress. You jiggle your foot, and think maybe the other women are nervous, too, not bored. You wonder if it ever gets easier.

You think of the book review you just did, about the journalist in her late 20s who found out she had breast cancer, and how she wore bright red lipstick for her mastectomy surgery so the surgeons and nurses would look at her as a woman, not just a patient. How the book terrified you, made you finally schedule a mammogram. And though you’d been reaching for Chapstick, you grab instead the sassiest lipstick in your purse and, tongue firmly in cheek, apply a bold layer. It feels like a battle flag.

Then it’s your turn, and you’re following the radiology tech down a long hallway to the mammography room. There are a lot of pink decorative accents. The tech notices you struggling with your kimono and grins as she shows you that there’s a tie on the side, so you don’t have to keep holding it shut with your hand. Oh.

The mammography room is dimly lit, and you feel as if you are participating in something slightly illicit. The tech smiles and asks you to remove the kimono. You do it quickly, before you lose your nerve. She scotch-tapes tiny metal balls to your nipples and says they’re to provide a point of reference on the mammogram. You secretly think she’s just screwing with you now.

Then she coaches you through the strange rituals of the mammogram: left breast on the shelf, left hand holding the handle, turn your head to the left. Don’t breathe. She arranges your breast on the tiny shelf, prodding it, pushing it over a bit, until it’s positioned just so, and you think of the pork roast you pounded flat this afternoon, how you flopped it around on the cutting board with the serving fork.

As she presses the hard plastic plane down onto your breast, she reminds you, “Don’t breathe, okay?” The pain is immense, continents wide. You couldn’t have breathed if you’d wanted to. Then the other side. Second verse, same as the first. Much, much worse. You watch her arrange your other breast on the tray, and wonder how your mother felt when she had this done 11 years ago. How scared she must have been.

The tech scans your right breast, and you remember giving your mother a long hug the day of your uncle’s wedding, remember feeling the steady thump of her heart underneath the hideous green taffeta bridesmaid dress, how you had no idea then that it was the ticking of a bomb. You remember that day a few months afterward, the exact street you were on, the exact intersection she had just driven past, the exact seat in the minivan you were sitting in, when she told you and your little brother that she’d found a lump.

The tech tells you to put your kimono back on, and you tie it shut this time before you go and sit in the waiting room again. Minutes later, she comes back, smiling, and tells you everything’s okay, but the doctor would like to do an ultrasound on your breasts just to make sure. You panic, just a little, but you follow her. You wonder how you will tell your husband, what words you will use to tell your small son that Mommy’s sick, if they find something. You remember how your son always fell asleep on your breasts when he was an infant, his milky breath fanning your skin. You want to run out the door. You lie down on the padded table instead and pull off the kimono again.

The same friendly tech squirts gel all over one of your breasts, and because you talk when you’re nervous, you ask her how long she’s been doing mammograms.

“Thirty years in mammography,” she says. “Three years in ultrasound.”

“Is it ever difficult, when you do a mammogram and you know something’s wrong?” you say.

“Only when it’s my sister,” she says, her mouth tight. You ask her if everything’s okay, and the story spills out, that she performed an ultrasound on her own sister a few days ago, and found a tumor in one breast.

“I’m kind of having a bad day,” she confesses. Her eyes are dry and she keeps her eyes on the monitor as she talks, pass after pass over your breasts.

You don’t know quite what to say, but you tell her, “Well, your sister’s lucky to have you in the family, since you caught it so early.” She nods, and then you’re absolutely out of things to say, so you stare at the ceiling. You think about your mother again, how you sat on her bed one evening in the first month of her chemo, when she was feeling so sick. You remember running your fingers through her hair to soothe her, as she always used to do to you when you were small, and your shock when a long hank of bushy brown hair came away with your hand. You remember how you picked hair out of your dinner for the next few months until she gave in and had her head shaved.

The tech smiles and tells you to stay put while she reviews your ultrasound with the doctor. So you lie there in the dim room, and as nervous as you are, you begin to doze off.

And then, just like that, it’s over. She comes back, noticeably more cheerful, and says everything looks great. She gives you a piece of paper that says the same thing: everything’s normal. You wonder what to do with it. Frame it? Toss it? You put it in your purse, where it will sit in limbo until the ink rubs off.

You get dressed in the ultrasound room, but when you try to put your necklace on you can’t quite work the clasp. Your hands are shaking and your eyes are burning, and you realize you’re crying anyway. In relief, partially. But also for your mother, who’s alive but with a mastectomy that looks like a radioactive wasteland. For your friend Elaine, who’s so brave and cheerful in the face of her illness. For your hairdresser Lana, who’s in remission but can’t get health insurance ever again. Even for the tech’s sister, who had canceled her ultrasound three times for fear of what the scan would show. For your husband and for your son, because you hope they’ll never have to go through what your family went through when your mother was sick.

You sag against the wall in the elevator and tip your face up to the mirrored ceiling. Your eyes are puffy and red, but the lipstick is still looking pretty good.

Fight for your right to give birth the way you want

Did you all know that there’s only one certified nurse midwife in Lexington who’s allowed to deliver babies at a hospital? One. Frankly, that’s absurd, especially given the rising popularity of the midwifery model of pregnancy care. According to awesome mommy blogger Guinever, midwives have applied for positions at local OB/GYN offices, but they’re being told that women in Lexington don’t want midwives.

Oh, really? Because I think it’s pretty presumptuous for doctors to say women won’t hire midwives when women hardly have the opportunity. And midwives, just like obstetricians, differ somewhat in their personal philosophies and methods, so it seems only fair that women should be able to choose from a wider field of CNMs to find the one who best fits their needs. Perhaps, too, if women were more informed about the midwife model of care, CNMs would be a more popular option. You can find more information about midwives at this site and this site, but here’s a brief overview (which is by no means exhaustive, mind you):

CNMs are highly trained professionals who are more than qualified to guide women through pregnancy, birth, and other feminine health issues such as PAP smears, breast exams, and birth control advice. They believe that pregnancy and birth are normal, healthy events in a woman’s life until proven otherwise, and they try not to interfere more than necessary in the body’s natural processes. That said, CNMs are trained to recognize red flags, and they refer a woman with a high-risk pregnancy to an OB/GYN. They are not qualified to do cesarean sections, and their abilities to do certain medical procedures (such as giving episiotomies or prescribing medication) are limited in many states. All CNMs are required to have a bachelor’s degree, and 70% have a master’s degree. About 96% of CNMs deliver babies in hospitals.

Now, I admit that this issue hits close to home for me: When I gave birth to the Sprog, my labor was induced, and I was hooked up to about 14 different straps and monitors at all times. I could hardly move, and I felt like a lab rat. The nurse refused to allow me to drink any fluids, saying I would throw up after I gave birth (which I did anyway). I felt as though I had very little say in what happened to me, and the whole time, my instincts were screaming at me that this was supposed to be a very different experience.

This time around, I was interested in a home birth with a midwife, but my nervous husband asked me to consider a hospital birth. That’s probably for the better anyway, since every surface in my house is covered in dog hair. But anyway. I figured that a good compromise would be a hospital birth with a CNM. However, when I went looking for a CNM with hospital privileges, I only found one, and she’s crazy busy. I ended up finding a wonderful obstetrician who used to work with midwives and is very into that whole vibe. I’m very happy with my OB, but still, it would have been nice to be able to find a CNM with a more open schedule, as I had originally wanted.

If you want Lexington doctors to know that you want more options for the birth of your baby, I encourage you to sign this petition, which will be distributed at local hospitals, OB/GYN practices, and family practices that provide maternity care. The doctors around here seem to be misinformed about what Lexington moms want, and if we don’t speak up and make our voices heard, how can that ever change?

A great new store for Lexington moms

I don’t generally use this blogspace to promote local businesses (at least not to the shameless, drooling depths to which I’m about to plunge), but I’ll make an exception here.

I’ve been hearing about the Mother Nurture store for weeks — from friends, acquaintances I bumped into at Kroger, blogs, message boards, you name it. So last week I decided to go and see what all the fuss was about. I knew I had arrived when I saw a car parked outside with bumper stickers that said, “Midwifery is Catching!” and “I (heart) my doula!”

Mother Nurture is one store in a phalanx of mother- and birth-related establishments that are slowly taking over the space-age building behind the Sunshine Grow Shop on Richmond Road (right next to Lowe’s). The other two are Baby Moon, which offers parenting support, resources and classes, and Family Works Massage which offers therapeutic massage for mamas and babies.

I will be quite honest: I didn’t know quite what to expect from a store whose chief claim to fame is “natural” baby care items. So I was flying blind, but I had the vague hope that they stocked cloth diapers, since my husband and I are debating whether or not we will use them with the next baby. I’d read about the merits of cloth diapering online, but I wanted to see how they worked for myself.

And that is the best thing about Mother Nurture, right there: you can read online reviews of baby products until you go cross-eyed, but nothing beats being able to go into a store and check out the merchandise in person. And, let’s face it, the kind of stuff they sell there would make the average Wal-Mart executive hyperventilate (all that high-quality, mostly American-made merchandise, and none of it disposable, dontcha know), so you’re not likely to find it elsewhere in Lexington.

Moreover, there are several products they stock at Mother Nurture as a direct result of mothers’ requests to the owner, Cerise Bouchard. Go ahead and try that at a chain store.

But the selection doesn’t suffer, for all it’s such a tiny little store. They had a staggering variety in their merchandise: cloth diapers and accessories, baby slings, organic cotton toys and clothing, funky nursing cover-ups, breast pumps and nursing bras, plus plenty of little hand-made items made by work-at-home moms.

It was a very kid-friendly place, too (of course). There are inviting chairs for breast-feeding, and there’s a well-stocked toy area in the back. The Sprog made a beeline for the toys the second we arrived and played with another little boy the whole time I was there; I never had to worry about entertaining him or keeping him away from the merchandise, which is such a nice change from our usual shopping experience.

It’s a good thing the Sprog was kept so busy, because I was immersed in a crash course on cloth diapering with the clerk, a knowledgeable, friendly doula and nursing student named Kendra who was filling in for Cerise.

We left 45 minutes later, armed with new knowledge, a fistful of pamphlets about cloth diapering, and a burning desire for a Hawaiian-print Hooter Hider.

All in all, I was highly impressed with the store: the staff, the atmosphere, the governing philosophy, and above all, the fabulous merchandise. I admit, some of the stuff is kind of high-end, but I’m willing to splurge on well-made baby necessities — that’s one area you do not want to skimp on. Besides, they have gift registry there, so you can spread some of the cottage industry love among your friends, come shower-time. W00t!

UPDATED: Breastfeeding is not sexy

All right. I’ve been mad about this issue for a while, but this article just put me over the edge. What is it, exactly, that is so filthy and freaky about feeding your baby the way your body was designed to do?

Apparently, MySpace is endeavoring to enforce certain standards of public decency and good taste, specifically by militantly deleting photos of Melissa Rock’s breastfeeding baby. All this while leaving up untold scads of pics by Girls Gone Wild wannabes. One of these things is not like the other.

In the E-mail of Infinite Irony, a MySpace moderator told Rock that MySpace can’t allow “nude/sexually suggestive” photos on the site, since it’s an all-ages site. Now, let your eyes travel to the left of that screen capture, and observe the MySpace-approved advertisement of Scarlet Johansson with her cleavage jacked halfway up to her collarbone. The pictures of the breastfeeding baby (which are mostly behind a cut anyway) hardly expose any more chest acreage, so there’s no real nudity. And they certainly aren’t intended to be sexually exciting.

Even Kentucky state law says that breastfeeding is not “an act of public indecency and shall not be considered indecent exposure, sexual conduct, lewd touching, or obscenity.” Most other states have laws with similar wording. So…what gives? How is it that it’s legal to do it, but it’s not okay to take a picture of it?

I’m not trying to be naive; I get it that breasts have a sexual function, and that some people are unable to see beyond that, but looking sexy in a halter top is not the primary biological function of a breast. They’re for feeding babies, plain and simple. So how did we get to a place in our culture where it’s okay for a woman to parade around in an extremely low-cut top, but it’s wrong for that same woman to replace the coverage of, say, a bikini top for a baby’s head?

And it doesn’t even have to be that overt. Most women use a nursing cover-up or a receiving blanket to nurse discreetly, but even then there are some who are incensed at the thought that someone might have an exposed breast underneath the fabric. To which I say: if you have a problem with women walking around — in broad daylight, the hussies! — with breasts under their clothes, then you need to get out of the house more often.

Which is all new mothers are trying to do, at that. They can either stay holed up at home until they start talking to the yellow wallpaper, or they can toss a receiving blanket into the diaper bag and get out into the fresh air with the baby. The kid has to eat, and a mother shouldn’t have to waste precious hours and energy pumping milk, then lugging cooler packs and bottles all over town just to appease a squeamish few, if she’d rather nurse.

And though most women would rather find a private place to nurse, there are very few places available when you’re out on the town. Far too often, the choices are: nurse in public, sit in a changing stall, or balance on the toilet seat in the women’s bathroom. None are comfortable or particularly convenient (though Fayette Mall and Babies R Us both get a gold star for their spacious, appealing nursing areas furnished with easy chairs and changing tables.)

So, again: what is it that’s so dirty and indecent about feeding your baby in public? I’d love to hear about your experiences with this, both positive and negative. And if you know of a place in town that’s particularly accommodating to nursing mothers, I’m sure many of us mothers would love to hear about that, too.

 UPDATE: 

In response to this comment and a few others like it:

I have no issues with moms that WANT to use nursing covers, but in my mind, most people that imply that they NEED to in order to be discreet are implying that there is something that needs to be hidden.

I just wanted to say that I absolutely agree with this. A nursing cover is not necessarily, um, necessary for discretion (and can, in fact, scream “Feeding time!”), but it can be a very useful tool for new moms who don’t have the hang of it yet, or those with really wiggly babies who like to yank shirts up (mine did), or klutzes (again, me) who are certain to bungle around and give everyone a eye-full without the aid of a cover-up.

I got better at it later on, but in the first few months when my milk-fu was not yet strong, a nursing cover-up was a real blessing. For those who have the confidence and skills to nurse without one, I salute you.