While more studies are warranted, consuming “the fruit of kings” is a small addition to your daily routine with great potential.  The women in the study consumed six dates per day starting for weeks prior to their due dates.  We already know the importance of eating fruits while pregnant, so go out and buy your dates and plan your date night too!

Register now to watch the live webcast this Monday, Labor Day, or watch it when it is re-aired every five hours on September 17th and 24th.  When you register, you will be entered to win one of many great prizes a grand prize give away of full tuition to Karen Brody’ Birth Facilitator Training Program, FEAR to FREEDOM. The prize is valued at $697 and they are giving away 2, as well as a bunch of other great prizes like books, tshirts, mugs and more. You do not want to miss this raffle!

This is really exciting!  Please join us!

Perhaps many of the women who share stories of woe need validation or closure. It could be that they are still trying to understand what actually happened during their births. It is also possible that they are all about the spectacle. In a culture that doesn’t value women and their powerful role as mothers, a good sob story can be a source of pride.

I sadly admit that I told my negative birth story, too. I tearfully offer my public apology to the dark-haired woman at the Hale and Hearty soup shop. Honestly, I think I was jealous. I think I needed to convince myself that I hadn’t missed out. I regretted it almost immediately but it was too late. She, with her big belly, sat next to the table I shared with my baby girl and told me that she was having a homebirth.

“I wanted a homebirth,” I said, “but my husband and my mother weren’t comfortable with it. It’s good thing, too, because I think I would have died if I had been at home. I hemorrhaged right after she was born and again the next day.”

The words flowed effortlessly. At the time, I believed everything I had said, but why did I need to say it? Before the woman started eating, she put her hands together and prayed. I can guess what she was likely praying for. After, she gazed dreamily out the window while she ate. I hope she tells a beautiful birth story, and maybe includes a bit about the horrible woman she met one day at lunch.

For a long time after my daughter was born, I mourned the loss of the birth I had envisioned. There were so many things I didn’t know when I was pregnant, and only discovered after giving birth. That is why I became a doula, to help give other women in our society the chance to know.

Last year, I was saddened to receive an e-mail from a client who, at 39 weeks, perfectly comfortable in her strong, robustly pregnant, yet delicate, petite body, wrote:

Lately I have been bombarded by women who want to share with me all their negative stories, how much pain I will feel, how I  will want to give up, how I don’t know what pain is until I try to labor without an epidural. All of it really disturbs me. Why  would they want to transmit such images into my mind right before I birth? It seems like they think they are being helpful.  Yesterday I was meditating and thought of all the thousands of women who’ve been passed these images of pain and who pass them on to others in kind. I felt so sorry that it goes like that for most of us. I want to see this as having potential to be  anything, and like that woman in the video you showed us, view it like a celebration.

I apologize on behalf of this culture for the way pregnant women are being treated. I don’t know why so many women choose to share such stories. Maybe they feel a need to justify for themselves why they chose to labor as they did. Do not doubt your decisions or your body. For all the women who can tell you their horror stories, so many more have tales of victory and empowerment.

That particular client’s birth turned out to be one of the most beautiful I have ever experienced. It seems to me that, as much as we need to help spread the good birth stories, we also need to listen to the bad ones with a helping spirit. Maybe we can listen with compassion and offer to explain why so many of these births are typical, but far from normal. Mostly, though, we need to continue to help make the positive birth story the only one there is to tell.

This is a preprint of Why the Negative Birth Story?, an article published in Midwifery Today Issue #99, p. 19 Copyright © 2011 Midwifery Today, Inc.  http://www.midwiferytoday.com/

I still feel this way.  I try to give people the knowledge they need to make informed decisions without my biases.  I’ve supported families in a variety of settings and scenarios that I would not choose myself.  I’ve attended many births that were far from my ideal happily, knowing that the women had their own choices to make.

I’d like to think that I even still wish a little that people get to have the birth they want, especially my clients.  It would be great if, after their births, everyone said, “Thanks, doula, that’s just what I wanted.”   It might be great on some level, but what I really wish for people is that they have the birth that they need.  Unfortunately, we don’t usually know what that might look like until afterwards, sometimes for a long time.

After all, I wouldn’t even be a doula if I had gotten the birth I had wanted.  I got a very different birth, the one I needed to bring me to this beautiful place in my life.  Every decision I made during those three days of birthing brought me further away from what I wanted and closer to what I needed.  In the weeks that followed I had to release my misguided ideals and face the realities of the birthing world, eventually finding that I had a place in it.

Many women wish for fast labors.  I’ve seen a couple of fast labors that left the women needing to catch up emotionally.  These women often wish things had gone more slowly and need much more time to process.  I wouldn’t wish a fast labor on anyone, even if it means overtime for me.

Some women have the coveted “easy” labors.  They often overwork their bodies in the postpartum period and pass blood clots or faint in the middle of the street.  Worse though, they aren’t connected with their power as women.  It’s easy to feel that you can do anything after experiencing the amazing things your body can do in labor.

As a doula, I too have attended births that were, not so much what I wanted, but what I needed.  I’ve learned things from every birth, some more than others, and I always need that, to learn and to grow.

It is an honor to be with families as they go through their journeys and grow.  It isn’t always easy and it often involves some unexpected things, but it is truly a gift of life in more ways than one.

It took me a few weeks to buy it because, when no one is poking me with a sharp metal stick, my teeth aren’t actually sensitive at all. Anyway, I did by the stuff and started using it at night, before bed- half of the recommended time. Within days, I noticed a funny taste in my mouth and thought little of it, but a couple of days later, I looked at my tongue and noticed it was white. The Listerine had offset my perfect bacterial balance and caused an overgrowth of the fungus candida albicans. Now I had a yeast infection in my mouth. It didn’t hurt or bother me, but it wasn’t normal and my husband was basically disgusted by it.

Many of the people I’ve told about it have been disgusted, but I’m sure most of them would happily gobble up any of my delicious mushroom dishes. That’s another issue, though.  A few people offered helpful suggestions, but one, offered by two different doulas caused me to write this blog post.  Gentian violet. Gentian violet is commonly recommended for thrush in infant’s mouths and on women’s breasts. The recommendation usually comes with the warning that this remedy is very messy and nothing else. The name suggests that this is a natural remedy that perhaps comes from a lovely flower. It is not. Gentian violet works for oral thrush because it is a powerful antifungal chemical. In other words, the living fungi are killed. Sound poisonous? It is.  You’re not gong to use nearly enough for it to be a real threat, but I don’t even use toxins to clean, much less to put in my mouth (except for the week of Listerine).

You may still choose to use gentian violet for your baby’s thrush, but do the research first and use it properly. Consider using chamomile, yogurt or bayberry instead. Adults should increase their consumption of good sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir and yogurt. You can even empty the contents of an acidophilus capsule onto your tongue everyday.

I’m glad that my thrush has caused me no pain or discomfort and that it got me back to my blog after so long. I hope that it gets a few people to discover and opt for natural remedies for oral thrush.

For years I have noticed that my children start adjusting their waking time all on their own and usually, when Daylight Saving Time begins or ends, they are largely unaffected. My children are unusually well-rested, however, and are early to bed, early to rise. I imagine that many children probably have a harder time with the sudden time change, so here I offer my suggestions for an easier transition for the whole family and anyone else who might spend time with your children. Afterall, studies have shown that a great number of “behavior problems” are actually due to a lack of sleep.
First you need to know when you need to change your clocks. Even if all of your electronic devices will automatically be updated and you don’t own a watch or analog clock, you should be prepared this year to “lose” an hour on March 13th.  The magic shift is supposed to happen at 2am, but I always cheat the system by changing my clocks at about 9pm the night before.  I always make up for it by cheating myself by a few hours at the end of DST.

Especially if your child needs to go to school on Monday morning, you should try to gradually ease him or her into the time change.  Start about four days in advance by making bedtime fifteen minutes earlier on Thursday, thirty minutes earlier on Friday and  forty-five minutes earlier on Saturday.  On Sunday night, bedtime can be at the regular time which is now one hour later, but only fifteen minute later than the night before.

Whether you take this advice or not, you should at least be mindful of the fact that the time change will likely affect us all. Remember that children aren’t the only ones who misbehave when they’re tired!

We have taken our technology and advancements all around the globe, bringing people further and further away from normal birth.  When we go outside of our culture to “help” we should always pause and scrutinize our actions for the effects they will have in the long run.

So much work can be done internationally, but it’s important to remember all the work that’s yet to be done here.

Anyway, this acquaintance, who I now count as a friend, works for a government agency that is charged with spreading the good news about good health in the Bronx. I’m sure their mission statement isn’t worded quite that way, but that really does suffice for my purpose right now. So, my friend asked me if I knew of anyone who might be interested in teaching one-hour breastfeeding classes. Her office needed to get a certain number of classes taught in a short amount of time and they were looking for help. Well, not only did I know someone, I was that one. She told me to go to the office so we could talk about it.

When I showed up, I was surprised to find I was on a job interview. The application even asked for references- and they were called! We talked about my experience as a doula and an educator and then I was asked if I had ever actually breastfed. I could have been hired solely because I had breastfed my son only an hour before the interview.  Before I left, they asked, quite incidentally, if I might also be available to give talks on SIDS.  They were providing all the curricula and a very generous stipend, so I said yes without knowing that I was stepping into a pit of self-betrayal from which I could only emerge by complaining to my dear husband and you, of course.  Thanks for reading.

The class is actually on SIDS and Safe Sleep Practices, which are actually unrelated because, as I have been trained to say, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is the unexplained death of a baby, furthermore and to the point, it is not preventable.  I suppose, though, that someone felt that a class for telling people to put their babies to sleep in a crib, on their backs, with no blankets, pillows or other suffocation hazards might be too short.  Well, that’s not the only problem.

My big concern is with the recommendation that families make their babies sleep alone.  The recommendation is based on a flawed study which was funded by the Consumer Products Safety Commission and the Juvenile Product Manufacturers Association, i.e., the crib manufacturer’s lobbyists.   The study concluded that babies sleep best alone, in a crib.  Once again, we in the United States, have decided that what the rest of the world is doing,  what humankind has been doing all along, is wrong and we should go out and buy something, along with its hundred accessories to make it right.

Our public education campaigns have been dumbed down because it is widely recognized that some people may not follow the safety guidelines for bed sharing.  I wish I could share that, if they want to experience the ultimate in bonding and hormonal regulation, better sleep and milk production and even better family relations, they should keep their newborns with them around the clock and find out how to safely share their beds.  Maybe I could slip each of them a note instruction them to meet me outside for a private class.  I know, however, that many of these women have always planned to separate themselves from their newborns with at least a wall.  That even in the hospital they will welcome the rest offered to them by the nursery option.  This is typical in our society and it’s very difficult for me to explain that it just isn’t normal.

Next week I will be speaking to four different groups, spelling out for them the guidelines that our government has established for them on safe sleep.  It is unlikely that anyone will ask me what I personally did with my children, but if someone does, should I admit that for four months my son slept on top of me as I sat in a recliner?  Probably not, as that is discouraged by all sides, but I will tell them that I made the decision that was right for my family and I’ll encourage them to do the research and make the decisions that are right for theirs.

I won’t stray from my curriculum for now, but I look forward to seeing our leaders take us in a new direction in the near future. Perhaps they should focus on breastfeeding, the missing factor in bed-sharing infant deaths.