The Price of Discretion

So I've fallen behind, and still need to catch up the latest chilling news -- a women kicked off an airplane for breast-feeding. The buzz on this is already fading; In the time it has taken me to assemble my own thoughts, the airline has already apologized and a number of “nurse-ins” across the country are proceeding with little controversy.

But the message to me, and to women everywhere, is still sinking in. It’s a message about discretion and exposure – our social obligation to protect other people from seeing too much of our bodies. The woman kicked off the airplane (seated by the window with her husband on the aisle) was first asked to cover her child (and breast) with a blanket. When she refused (or failed), her family was ask to leave -- no small request for a family who has spent hours hauling baggage, stroller, carseat and gear through an airport's gates and crowds. Removal from a flight is a serious measure. A group of Muslim scholars removed from a flight out of Minneapolis yesterday have called for an investigation because of the humiliation (and presumably they needed to get where they were going, too).

But even among dedicated lactivists, the outrage and disappointment at the news never sounded like shock and awe. Because we’re not really that surprised. Even if we agree that it was wrong to kick the woman off the plane, we understand why it happened -- or at least we have the vocabulary to discuss it: was she "discreet" enough? Does it matter? We can debate it, but we knew this kind of thing could happen. As much as we rail against it, for years we’ve been hearing that same message about our bodies and babies: Be careful. Your breasts are dangerous, and feeding your child is risky.

And so, in its first apology, the airline expressed its support for breast-feeding women – if they are discreet. I’ll assume that, in light of national news headlines and a complaint filed with the Vermont Civil Rights Commission, even the first apology (later revised) was vetted by at least one team of lawyers, publicists and managers. All that expertise, all that consideration, came to the decision that it’s necessary to draw the line when a breast-feeding woman exposes too much of her body. In essence, they reiterated that women have a duty to protect society from an inadvertent view of our breasts.

I won’t be the first to point out how ironic this is, in an age of breast-intensive advertising and entertainment. If breasts are offensive, why are they everywhere? It’s not enough to blame the media – if mostly-bared breasts weren’t appealing to most consumers, they wouldn’t be plastered across billboards and beer commercials. Boobs are good. So then, we assume, the threat lies the prospect of “too much” breast – along the lines of local strip club ordinances that define "nudity" as including "the breasts below and including the areola." Therein lies the difference between an episode of BayWatch (appropriate) and the moment when I quietly shift my drowsy son off my breast and reach for my sweater (not). Is it all about the areola? Too bad for babies that the business end for milk is the same part considered the most taboo for display -- because it is usually not displayed (a tautology?) -- and therefore takes on a more private and forbidden association. As the argument goes, because breasts are obviously sexual, and sex is private, breast-feeding must be private.

But it’s really not the slight slip of nipple that instantly repulses an otherwise breast-appreciative public. In fact, it’s not the “breast” in the “breast-feeding” that's offensive – it’s the feeding. I think of this as the "don't ruin them for us!" argument: It’s the lactating woman, not the sexualized one, that must protect the world from her body. As observed by the characters on Friends, while watching a nursing mother, "It's such a beautiful and natural thing. . . / Yes, but there is a baby sucking on it!" Or comments like those of Ken Schram, a local news commentator who compared public breast-feeding to "urinating in the middle of the mall.” Boobs are pretty and sexy; Lactation is an intimate, even disgusting, bodily function.

In practice, I can tell you that discretion is no small challenge. It’s hard to nurse a busy and curious baby while maintaining the crucial inch of coverage that could change a peaceful and cuddly feeding into an offense, a confrontation, even a ruined cross-country trip. A slip of blanket or bra, a little distraction, and there we are exposed. Even with laws protecting public breastfeeding, many women feel too vulnerable to ever nurse in public. This is not simply out of modesty (I'd argue that anyone has the right to protect their body from view) but out of fear. What if we're next? Why risk it?

So we suffer a chilling affect. We hide ourselves in a safe “quiet” corner, cover up with a blanket, and spend hundreds of dollars on pumps, bottles and formula – all because we feel vulnerable. And what is our vulnerability? A nursing mother doesn’t shield her breasts out of fear that a sexual predator will notice and direct his violent attentions upon them. We’re really protecting our babies, out of fear that someone will disrupt the feeding. We protect the fragile eyes of the public from the uncomfortable truth of lactation. And in doing so, we complicitly agree that our bodies should be protected -- for someone else's prurient fantasy.

50-State Summary of Breastfeeding Laws
Militant Breastfeeding Cult

Waning Crescent: Birth Stories

I went into labor two years ago today. I've written tons about my labor and delivery -- in email, in a Baby Book, and all the journal entries, messages and posts in between. And now, looking back on it all, I can see how I've changed by the stories I've told. When my son was 8 days old, I wrote out a long timeline, hour by hour. Here's a quote:

Hour 22: Still at 6 cm. The doctor (new one on rotation!) came in and said we could deliver now by c-section, or we could wait and see if things changed. I had never thought about a c/s, no one in my family has ever had one, and my pregnancy had been so healthy and easy. The doctor said the baby wasn't in distress, but didn't say "get the c/s or wait for a vaginal birth." It was more like, do it now or do it later because all the pitocin hadn't worked and my water had been broken all day. They couldn't figure out why I wasn't dilated despite good hard contractions, whether it was the magnesium sulfate or what.

We talked about the c/s. They answered all our questions about breastfeeding, time together right away after the birth etc., and it sounded manageable. The doctor and nurses and my mom left the room so D and I could talk it over. We understood the risks and benefits of situation pretty well, it was just overwhelming to be faced with such a huge decision about our baby in such an exhausted state. We decided to go ahead with the c/s.

This is accurate, but I notice the tone. I was so careful not to place blame. The surgery was inevitable. At the time, I thought I was confident and competent. Now, I hear defensiveness and denial. When I wrote this, my son was so young he still had the stump of his umbilical cord. I had only felt a fraction of the pain the cesarean would eventually involve. But I insisted that I had "understood the risks." I had heard about women who were ignorant and manipulated into cesareans -- I was not one of them. I was better prepared. I chose. In these stories, I am savvy and empowered.

If anything, I told myself, I was unlucky -- I had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia in labor, and was treated with magnesium sulfate. This made my labor both unpleasant (vomiting, sweats and chills, double vision) and slow (an effect of the drug). I'm the one who "failed to progress," but the deck was stacked against me. If I was sad, it was because it had been so bad. My writing began to emphasize all the difficulties, as if I need to justify my pain. I had never been hung up on childbirth (I wasn't some granola-cruncher who wore hemp maxi-pads.) I thought it was healthier to be flexible and not set my heart on natural birth. If my heart felt broken, it wasn't because I had set myself up for disapopintment -- I had low expectations in the first place. It must be because my labor was so very hard. I was one of those women talked about at baby showers with sadly shaking heads. In these stories, I am a victim.

But I knew women with “worse” trauma who weren’t as upset as I was, and I hate to feel competitive. I tried to move on -– but without much "blame" or "regret" to hang my hurt on, I became listless and conflicted. Whose fault was this? I had chosen a cesarean, but the memory haunted me -- the pounding, slamming anonymity that violated me, despite my consent and my numbness -– like a teenager who thinks she's "ready for sex," realizes too late that she's not, but tells herself she's okay and that she can't complain. So many, many other women had been through identical experiences and they were fine. I wondered why I couldn't get over it: Was I hypersensitive? Melodramatic? I read, wrote and argued with women who had cesareans and women who hadn't. In these stories, I am confused.

I began to doubt and wonder. What had I really done to prepare for childbirth? What if I had been more patient -- even let the epidural wear off, and sit or stand enough to let my son's head dilate my cervix? On the day I finally Googled "mild pre-eclampsia," I found a reputable medical source say that magnesium isn't standard treatment. Had my cesarean been avoidable? And if so, who was responsible? I ordered my 147 pages of medical records, sat down to read them, and wrote about what I found. In these stories, I am searching.

I face my son’s second birthday tomorrow. In the past, when anyone has asked me "what date he was born," I've had trouble answering. I had labored through the night and day of November 9; The nurses in the operating recorded his delivery as "00:50" on November 10th. But I didn't like that date – what kind of time is "00:50?” The middle of the night, or the early morning? The end of one day, or the beginning of another?

And this is how I felt about it all: A gap surrounding my son’s entry into the world. When I saw “State of Washington” on his birth certificate, I thought no, not my Washington. The "place" was a sterile operating room, forbidden to anyone not trained and scrubbed (or being cut open). When I hear “November 10,” I think no, it was not that day. It doesn't have a date. It’s taken me two years and thousands of words to help me articulate what the gap is. Maybe it wasn’t a birth.

So how can we commemorate that? Yes, we'll buy balloons and cupcakes, he'll open presents, and we'll all sing "Happy Birthday." But for me, it doesn't feel quite right. So I think of this: I recently told someone how my son loves the moon (he calls the outline of a naked pregnant woman on my "Birthkeeper" shirt a "moon and stars.") She asked if he'd been born at night. I flinched but said yes. Then I thought about it, did a little research, and here's what I learned:

When my son entered the world, the sky was dark. That morning at 4:45, the sliver of a waning crescent moon rose for its short journey across the wintry southern sky. Imagining this, I can imagine those moments. I can remember that what happened did happen, and even if it will never be "okay," it will always be part of something bigger. Maybe that is what we will observe this year. Tonight I’ll take him outside and we'll look at the moon. He will say "Oh LOOK! The MOON!" like he does every time. I will think about the eternity and rhythm of its phases. We can live in the blackness, and we can live by a sliver of light. We can rage against loss, and love all of life with the same heart.

Happy Life-on-Earth-day, Malcolm.

International Cesarean Awareness Network
Birth Truth
Phases of the Moon

What's Hempenin' Mama Cloth

Hearts without Names

All over Seattle, there are billboards and buses showing bodies -- the insides of dead human bodies. This is not a metaphor; it is advertising for a science/entertainment exhibit of preserved cadavers called "Bodies: The Exhibition." It is hard for me to get past the "I see dead people" aspect of this, but on reflection it's pretty amazing.

The exhibition website describes it as an educational exhibit that tells the story of ourselves "with reverence and understanding." I would hope so. These are the real remains of real human lives: The muscles, bones and skin that grew with these people from childhood. Legs and backs that worked for a living. Lungs that breathed and brains that dreamed. Arms that held lovers and cared for babies. These bodies aren't just artificacts of life -- they were life itself.

In every culture, human remains are treated with some kind of ritual and reverence. Even when they are destroyed through cremation or funeral pyres, it is not because they are so much waste -- it is because they have so much relevance. For the people who became the "Bodies" exhibition (all former Citizens of China), their funerals consist of a transportation across the United States for public education and viewing. The exhibition is their final rest.

I love science -- in fact, I love anatomy -- and find myself staring in wonder at the complex interplay of tendons and muscles on display I see on the side of the Metro Route 15X bus. Perhaps the exhibit itself (like others, such as the display of ancient Egyptian mummies in Chicago's Field Museum) lists the dead by name and respectfully asks for prayers in their memory. But the advertising (which is everywhere) doesn't. I see a skull without a face; I see a heart without a name. I know science and education are public and social goods. But is this?

I'm happy to find, on doing some quick research, that it's not just me: The Seattle P-I has written a cogent editorial about consent; unlike human cadavers used in medical study (which I have seen, in educational settings), there is no evidence that the people exhibited intended to donate their remains to public display. The Exhibition has affirmed that it has a "contract with a Chinese university" which, while it apparently guarantees the bodies are not from political or religious prisoners, doesn't say much else about the source or intention of the remains. The Stranger's article, "Unrest in Pieces," includes an article written by an employee there who describes the moral and political ambiguities of law and death in China.

So at least it's a "controversy," in the headline-grabbing sense. Yet I'm still kind of surprised that this is this where our standards are: It's socially acceptable to display tastefully flayed dead bodies on billboards, as long as they weren't executed for political reasons by a totalitarian government. Apparently, under our American values system, the victims would be much more sympathetic if they were killed for exercising their civil rights. Perhaps it would be okay if they were criminals, executed for morally reprehensible crimes like rape or muder. Or best of all if they'd simply died "naturally" from malnutrition, disease, poverty or unsafe work conditions.

I wonder whether the cause of death even matters. Or is it that, in contemplating the specifics of individual human deaths, we must see these as individual human lives. And maybe the issue of "consent" distracts us from the real moral question of whether there are some things just too intimate to buy and sell, no matter who consents. Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, has apparently sold the video of her cesarean section to Entertainment Tonight (sorry, not linking to that one). Like the Bodies Exhibition, it speaks its own truth (yes, that is a "section" cut out of a real woman, knifed in half and bleeding, crying through drugs for her baby). It is indeed educational. But the fact that we can view it so casually (even unwittingly -- be careful clicking on links that read "Anna ET Video, TMI") raises questions of exploitation, profit, and dignity.

When it comes to prostitution and pornography, our culture draws the line -- too much potential for abuse, too much exploitation, and at some point, just "too much" -- consent or not. Yet when it comes to death, we tend to deny its intimacy. I remember being so disturbed by the decaying flesh of the Pirates of the Carribean Zombie-Ghosts. Why is it cinematically appropriate to represent the inner structure of a human arm as it loses its rotting skin, but a healthy woman breast feeding a child is quickly criticized as "too much?" Death, violence, injury, surgery -- these involve our vulnerability, privacy and humanity, as surely as sex does. But we're supposed to act tough -- to turn away -- to shake it off -- to see it as tecnical, academic, and scientific. What have we lost?

Tricks, Treats and Tantrums

I was going to start by saying, "Our child has never had a temper tantrum." But that would be obnoxious, if not dishonest. This morning, for instance, went something like this:

Me: It's time to go! Here is your coat!

Child: No coat. NO no no no no nooooo cooooooooaaaat!

Me: Here is your coat [forces coat on child]. Now it's time to go. Let's get in the car. Here we go! [uses fun voice]!

Child: No car nocar nocarnocarnocarnooooooo!!!!!!!! [lays down, hits head on the floor, screams]

Me: Time to get in the car. [carries to car, buckles carseat]

Child: No carseat no buckle no no nooooooo [Kicks. Screams. Defies consolation. Cries for ten solid minutes].

And so he proceeded with "an irrational fit of crying, screaming, defiance, and a resistance to every attempt at pacification in which even physical control is lost," which is Wikipedia's definition of a "tantrum." I'm pretty sure he wanted to bring his Halloween Candy in the car with him, and is angry that I stashed it on top of the refrigerator (he may even suspect, correctly, that I'm eating most of it myself). But since I recently came across the suggestion to avoid using the word "tantrum" at all, I can say he didn't have one. And though this may sound pedantic, or semantic, or even absurd, I’m amazed to find myself really feeling better about the whole morning.

No, I haven’t lost my mind from getting hit over the head with sections of toy railroad track. I’m serious: Letting go of the "tantrum" label has separated my child’s irrational, screaming behavior from my own desperate need to snap him out of it. I've read about all different ways to prevent, control and react to the dreaded Big T, and so far this one little trick has helped me the most.

Labels matter: They're little bits of linguistic shorthand that reduce entire categories of behavior, expectations and perspective to a few short syllables. Since the moment I became pregnant, I've had labels to define all my parenting fears and achievements: When is my "due date?" Will my son hit the "terrible twos?" Is he "potty trained?" When we use labels enough, we take them for granted -- and forget, for instance, that a pregnancy "due date" represents an entire body of research, tradition and cultural expectations about what should happen, when it should happen and how we'll react if it doesn't.

But children operate without language – a gestating baby can’t count to 280, and an overwhelmed toddler doesn’t self-identify as an autonomous person who’s exhibiting a specific behavior pattern called a "tantrum." When my child loses it, he is so saturated with fear and anger that he’s hardly capable of protecting his own body from harm. He might be raging for a variety of reasons – exhaustion, confusion or experimentation, to name a few. It’s only when I choose to label these behaviors that they coalesce into a recurring "event" called a tantrum.

As soon as I let go of the label, I'm free to focus on the bigger picture -- in a way, the conscientious use of language is part of a powerful paradigm shift away from adversarial parenting and toward a mindset of helping my child. So when he goes into an irrational rage, my priorities are something like this: 1. Keep him safe. 2. Keep myself calm. 3. Keep our lives on track. 4. Help him calm down. And, in the long run, I will 5. Teach him the skill of behaving appropriately under stress. For instance, if I’m carrying him through a doorway, I’ll 1. Protect his head (or try to, oops, bonk.) If I’m about to lose it, I’ll 2. Leave him alone and go take a few deep breaths, for my own peace of mind. After that, 3. What we do depends on what needs to be done: If it’s time to go, we’re going out the door, even if he’s got big feelings about it. If it’s time to relax and get in the bath, I’ll devote more time to calming him down. 4. Depending on the child and the situation, this could include rocking, nursing, a bear hug, or leaving them to unwind alone.

Of course, I’ve tried tons of things that don’t work, too. Sometimes it’s easy enough to leave the TV on for five more minutes instead of dealing with the screaming because he can’t watch the end of Little Einsteins. I’ve been known to regret this, but I don’t worry too much about spoiling my child by occasionally accommodating him – I think it’s fair to say, "I didn’t realize this was so important to you," give him a spoon instead of a fork, and quietly move on. On the other hand, I won’t agree to "no diaper" just because he wants to keep playing with his pee-pee (okay I confess I stole that one, but I love it because it is SO TRUE). Some things aren’t optional around here, no matter how upsetting this might be for someone who loves being naked but is too young to clean up his own undiaperedly mess.

And this is where Number 5. comes in -- that we're in the process of teaching him how to behave appropriately even when we're overwhelmed by big feelings. I’m not interested in instigating good behavior by making my child feel bad when he fails. And I'm not all that concerned about "rewarding" his meltdown with some calm attention and help where it's needed. And looking at the big picture, there are lots of things I can control (our routine, meals, rest and exercise) to avoid us getting so burnt out that we become utterly unable to cope.

On the other hand, I don’t go out of my way to be sure he never has bad feelings at all. In fact, when we step back and realize that big, loud feelings aren’t a failure – that they are, in the end, "just feelings" – it’s much easier not to take it personally when a child is overwhelmed with emotion. In fact, simply labeling the emotion (instead of the tantrum), in a calm voice, can be powerful: "You are angry. You want to stay home. So angry." Sometimes, as silly as it sounds out loud, wrapping my calm words around his raging feelings helps me believe that it really might not be that bad.

And I know that as he gets older, my child might start to "tantrum" more strategically. Kids do tend to experiment with the power of their big feelings over the adults around them. It's my hope that, by modulating our own reactions to his outbursts -- and by accepting our own frustration, without using anger to threaten or manipulate our child -- we can set a tone in this family that honestly helps each other through the hard times without being scared of our emotions.

I'm sure it will be an adventure. I have bad days, where I forget all this and we both end up crying on the floor anyway. But on a good day, it’s almost as if I can look down on the whole scene: A screaming and confused little boy soaking wet on the bathroom floor, and an exhausted but calm Mama who's finding her authority and managing to be in control. Who knows she’s strong enough to dry off a thrashing toddler, clean the tub, and find pajamas -- while making a mental note to herself that next year, Halloween candy won't go in the bath in the first place.

I owe my perspective on tantrums, as I do many things, to the work of Crystal Lutton.