Sunday Morning ~ Risks of Staying Quiet

Mu mphasa yongoima mubisala zoluma zambiri. ~ In a mat that just stands there many biting insects hide.

~ Chewa proverb

May 31, 2020

Hi Everyone,

This is the weekend of my annual national midwifery meeting. It’s a conference I always look forward to as a booster shot of midwifery energy. It gets me through the year. The midwives inspire me and sometimes make me feel like I do nothing at all. There are some great women out there working hard in ways that have me staring in awe. We shouldn’t compare ourselves, I know, but it’s a fine line between inspiration and deflation. 

We were supposed to be in Austin Texas this year. The meeting moves around the country, every four years swinging back to D.C. so we can storm the hill and lobby congress. That was last year. Two months ago they canceled the meeting in Austin and decided to make it virtual. I was curious how this was going to work for 2,000 midwives. I could see the educational sessions on line, but the business meetings and regional meetings? Not sure how that would work. I figured they’d just forget about the exhibit hall and sponsors, but no, they included everything including the final party. Amazing. In just eight weeks.

Friday evening started with a three hour strategic planning session for the national organization. That was impressive, complete with breakout rooms. I was in marketing, an area of interest for me since after thirty-five years of being a nurse-midwife some still think all I do is home birth. It takes some time to explain that while some of us do home births, I have solely attend births in a hospital and obstetrics is only a part of what I do. I practice women’s health care. All of it. Why are we unable to get this message out? It’s the same struggle we’ve been talking about since I joined the organization in 1987. I think we need a Netflix series. There seems to be one of those for everything now. 

Anyway, yesterday was the big kickoff with our opening session, induction of fellows, and keynote speaker. That was all done live and pulled off rather well. I was impressed as I sat in my comfortable greenhouse with a cup of tea and my knitting. I thought about sitting in the over air-conditioned rooms with terrible lighting––trademarks of huge convention halls, and considered this a reasonable alternative. This year’s keynote speaker was a man named Charles Johnson  whose wife, Kira, bled to death in a LA hospital several hours after having her second child. Charles described sitting with her in the recovery room, recognizing something wrong but unable to get anyone to take action until hours later when she was finally taken to surgery. She died on the table. She’d been a healthy woman in the prime of life. She was a marathon runner. She was black. His presentation was powerful and he has started a non-profit aimed at working toward preventing this happening to other families.

It’s not only black women who are dying needlessly in childbirth in our country, but they do so at three times the rate of white women. Native American women die at four times the rate of white women. I’ve been screaming about this for years (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v5A3BxU4Uc&sns=fb) but it goes on and on. George Floyd’s murder has brought the persistent racism in our country back to the glaring light. It reveals yet again how lethal racism is to our communities and country. If we could only view it as the whole suffers when racism is allowed to persist, might things change?  

No one was videotaping Charles Johnson plead for someone to do something when he could see blood filling his wife’s catheter bag. He has the medical records as proof, but it’s not as immediate an image for public outrage. It took him ten hours to get someone to help her, whereas George Floyd was killed in only eight minutes. Black men are killed more brutally, while black women are murdered more subtly, more by neglect, more by systematically eradicating services for them in healthcare. 

All women, not only minority or poor, have procedures they do not need for profit and convenience of the medical system. But black and Native American women are dying from these disproportionally. Unnecessary c-sections kill women but they go on and on and on. I get so sick of making the same argument over and over. I left my job over this. I could not work in a system anymore that abuses women only to be told I’m “too angry” when I yell about it. I will ask again, what is it about women dying unnecessarily that should not make YOU ANGRY??? 

And here we are, blaming the victims again. What is it about police killing innocent black men that should not make YOU ANGRY? 

If you want to protest but can’t do so in person, consider contributing to either Charles Johnson’s organization 4Kira4moms http://4kira4moms.com/home/#press or The Equal Justice Initiative  https://eji.org  

Both these organizations keep me from giving up.

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ Forty Years From Malawi to Maine

Caona mwana tola; ukulu nkuona kako. ~ What the child has seen, pick it up. Being mature is to find your own.

~ Chewa proverb

May 24, 2020

Hi Everyone,

My oldest turned forty this week. Yikes. I have a child who is forty years old. Remember when being forty seemed really old? I’m having a hard time getting my head around this. I remember turning thirty thinking, yikes, in ten years I’ll be forty. And now I have a kid who’s forty. When that decade turned for me I still felt twenty. Except for the fact that I had a SEVENTEEN year old child plus four others. Holy smokes.

I was always a big planner and mapped out all my milestones when I was a kid. Looking at a National Geographic magazine made me decide turning forty was to be done in Venice. Oh the romance! The markets, the canals, the art! When I made that plan it seemed I might as well be tuning one hundred. Turning forty was eons away. A lifetime away! More than a lifetime away. The next ice age or something. But there it was, coming at me and I had to make good on my plan. Yes, I always felt once the plan was made it must be executed. I spent many hours as a visiting nurse sitting with those at the end of their life. They often said, “I wish I’d (fill in the blank) when I had the chance.” I vowed over and over not to die like that. I did not want to be an old woman filled with regrets and unfulfilled longing which seemed to me a cancer in itself. So off to Venice to fulfill the scripture! My mother, bless her to the stars and back, came to stay with our five teenagers so we could board a flight to Italy, leaving her with a hundred miles a day to drive the kids to all their activities. Our paltry contribution to her good deed was bringing in a television to preserve her sanity. God. I hope I made that up to her.

The attempt to retrieve romance, fall in love with each other again, shake off the stress of having five teenagers, and forget about work, was all secondary to turing forty in Venice. The swarms of tourists didn’t bother me. The polluted canals didn’t bother me. It was all an ecstasy of art, engineering, and history. We meandered, got lost a lot (something that drove Joe mad), argued about that, (“What is the problem? You have a meeting to get to or something?”), and walked a million miles sucking up all the mind boggling architecture. We ate gorgeous lunches and snacked on olives for suppers. Joe gave me diamond earrings which, kind as it was, was a bit of a disappointment since I had asked for a ring. Not having gotten an engagement ring, I asked for one for my birthday but for some reason, getting me what I wanted was not in my husband’s scope of practice. That would have shown weakness or something. So he got me diamond earrings and I pretended (not very well) that I liked them. I was in Venice. That was the important thing. I vowed to make each decade better than the last and buy my own birthday presents.

Now I have a child who is forty and it makes me feel like I’m moving to a new stage of life; like he’s moving into middle age so I must be moving into senescence. My mother seemed old when I was forty. Well, she was a lot older than me when she had kids, so I guess I shouldn’t compare, but I have been walking around this week thinking more about my joints.

He was born at 6:12 a.m. after a long labor. This week, forty years after that day, I woke early and wrote to him, sending it at the exact minute he was born. Amazing how we can do that, isn’t it? We talked and he told me I was very brave and slightly crazy to have had a child so young so far away from home. What was I thinking? he asked rather accusingly. I said, “Women do have babies all over the world, you know.” but his tone did echo several other family members’ at the time.

I never worried about having a baby in Malawi; I felt safer there than I did in our medical system. I worried about the world we were bringing him into. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, Reagan was about to be elected, Mount Saint Helen just blew it’s top off, and John Lennon had been shot. I was terrified the world was ending. I thought not only would we be raising a child but we’d have to fix the world too! Came up a little short on that last one.

He was ten months old when we left Malawi. We weepingly said goodbye to our village and dog, got into a rickety boat that rowed us out to the Ilala, the lake steamer that would take us south. In 1981 the road south was still a dirt trail up an escarpment and was impassable in the rainy season. There was no dock in Karonga where we lived, so we had to pile into a small boat that took us out to the steamer. There we handed up the cargo and children to the deckhands and climbed aboard. It took three days to get to Lilongwe where we ended our Peace Corps service, a process much simpler then than now.  Now it’s like a week long process. Then, they handed you your passport and some money and said goodbye.

At that time, British Airways let you stop anywhere along your route for free as long as you didn’t venture more than five hundred miles off the course, so we looked at the flight route from Malawi to Boston and picked all the places we wanted to stop along the way. We decided to spend two months traveling, arriving home just before Matt’s first birthday. It seems astounding to me now that British Airways allowed you to treat it like a hop on hop off bus but that’s how it was. I laugh now just to think of it. So we stopped in Kenya for a week just to see Nairobi and it’s environs, admitting to ourselves that climbing Kilimanjaro with a baby was probably not a good idea. From there we went to Sudan for a few days seeing Juba then staying in Khartoum to see where the Blue and White Niles meet. There was no war in Sudan back then. Imagine. Then it was to Egypt for a fascinating week in and around Cairo, then to Athens to see the major sights. Rome for Easter seemed a good idea, and we’d met a seminarian in Malawi who set us up with a place to stay and Easter dinner at the seminary near the Vatican. It was before the Pieta was smashed by a crazy person, so on Good Friday we stood in the front of a huge crowd, feeding Matt oreos to keep him quiet, waiting for Pope John Paul II’s Friday audience. Being so close to this holy man as he processed past Michelangelo’s Pieta is still one of the most spiritually moving moments of my life. He was so close to us. Joe held Matt out toward the procession and the pope looked straight at my child, smiled, and made a graceful sweeping sign of the cross. Call it wishful thinking, but deep in my bones I believed that blessing would protect my child forever. Maybe it has. 

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ If We Only Knew

Ciipira acaje, amace ndi mwana. ~ The one who is nasty for others keeps being a child to his own mother.

~ Chewa proverb

May, 17, 2020

Hi Everyone,

So last Sunday I told myself, “Do not look at Facebook, do not look at Facebook, do not look at Facebook…” a tool I appreciate in many ways but one that makes Mother’s Day like scab picking for me. When my kids were growing up their father made a splash out of Mother’s Day. This was long before I could share these images with the world. He’d buy me presents and put the kids names on them, give me many funny cards, breakfast in bed, and meals he prepared in a loving manner. I was appreciative of the intent but him cooking meant that: a) I had to eat it, and b) he spent most of the day making a huge mess in the kitchen and part of the evening cleaning part of it up. Monday, the roasting pans and piles of grunge in the sink corners were somehow neutral territory now that Mother’s Day was over. Erma Bombeck wrote: “Later, when you decide it would be easier to move to a new house rather than clean the kitchen…” a line that always came to mind the Monday after Mother’s Day. Those were quaint times, simple really, and I miss them, messy kitchen and all. My mother cooked and cleaned on Mother’s Day, but I’d make her cards and some crap gift she oohed and ahhed over, stifling a laugh now that I think of it. When I got older and had no money, I gave her a list of promises as a gift, written in floury loopy handwriting with hearts dotting the i’s. When we went through her papers when she was dying I found that list, so it must have meant something to her. I miss her, too.  

After my husband left, so did any celebration of Mother’s Day. It was harsh. For many years afterward the kids all felt it was a Hallmark holiday and weren’t going to buy into it, a notion I agree with, but still. The every-day-is-mother’s-day is a nice nod but they weren’t calling to acknowledge me any other day either. I told myself to get over it. And don’t look at Facebook!  The lockdown and isolation seems to have softened them a bit. Or maybe it is adulthood, but this year I went up a full 60% and heard from all my children. A message or call is what I wanted and got and I am glad. And believe me, I was keeping track. By nine a.m. I’d received a text from one and a call from another. 40%. I thought that was pretty good and went through my day not expecting anything more. I repeated my mantra, “Stay away from Facebook” and pretended I didn’t care. I went for a long walk, missed a turn, took a longer walk, and pretended I was fine! Evening brought another call, then another and I went to bed thinking four out of five was pretty good. When I got up on Monday there was a text sent at 11 p.m., just under the wire and I thought all day how happy I was that I finally was batting a thousand! Then I went on-line and bought myself a present and tried to remember the poem about buying yourself flowers or something like that, but was more practical and settled on nice new sheets. I find I either sleep really well these nights or don’t sleep at all. Sheets have become a more important part of my daily existence. I thought I deserved something special to spend so many hours wrapped in. I bought bamboo and love them. Thank you.

It really is critical to survival of the species that we do not know what we are getting into when we have kids. No matter how many books we read, stories we hear, lived experiences we’ve had, we still think we are going to do it right and better and have kids that fulfill the missing parts of ourselves. What a terrible burden to lay on them. I wanted a family so badly from the time I can remember. My dolls were real to me and I cared for them like real babies, irate if anyone treated them otherwise. I came of age when women finally had choices about procreation. I chose a big family, it wasn’t an accident. And there have been many times during the raising of my children I wondered what I was doing wrong.  All my good intentions weren’t enough and things were not turning out how I expected. And, yup. That’s how motherhood is. 

During this time which, I think we can all agree, is historic, I think people should be writing about their experiences. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I keep a daily journal and write this blog every week, but this is just me. I wish I had access to mothers’ daily experiences across time, not just the noble women who could write, but every woman. I want to know what she felt and thought about raising kids. Honest feelings and honest reflections. History is clearly and obviously skewed by male writing and perspective. What was it like for women in 1918, day to day? How did her heart break when she lost a child? I imagine it based on how I feel when I’m sad if a child of mine is suffering, but I want to know about the grief she felt; the fatigue of just getting through a day trying to keep everyone alive. I want to know her story and I want her to tell it. We can’t go back and get those stories but we can get women’s stories now. So write girls! As if no one will read it. And make it from the gut and heart. I want to believe the world will survive this and your stories will help shape the remake. 

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ Mothers With Sons Who Run

Cikumbutsa nkhwangwa mdi cisanu. ~ It is the cold that reminds us of the axe.

~ Chewa proverb

May 10, 2020

Hi Everyone,

My five children all arrived into a changing family dynamic with unique reactions to our family events. Child rearing often blindsided us while their accomplishments delighted us. They quickly taught me the vision I had for them had nothing to do with the one they had for themselves. Some hard times were easier to roll with than others, I guess stemming from my own experiences as a child. I never wanted my offspring to experience the painful parts of my childhood and naively thought I was more enlightened and therefore more capable of protecting them than my parents were. I thought I’d be more on top of things. It didn’t take long for that comeuppance to hit home. 

It was my mother who noticed one of my children spent an inordinate amount of time running in circles. I hadn’t noticed it as there were always kids running around in the house. I ignored the activity until someone fell or broke something. My mother asked, “What’s the matter with this kid he keeps running in circles?” as if he were poking needles in his own eye. I snapped back at her, “Why do you care? Is he hurting you?” always sensitive to her criticism.  But after that comment I did start watching more closely and he did run in circles. Huh. It started looking strange to me and I started thinking it did sorta look like something was wrong. I pointed it out to my husband and asked, “Do you think this is a sign of some problem?”  He brushed it off as if I were overreacting. I focused on other issues. But then I’d watch his little red jacket going by in the woods when I looked out the kitchen window. I thought it was great he was playing in the woods but one day I went out there and could see a deep track he had made by running in the same circle over and over. He was a loner and had more trouble socially than any of my other kids. He ran in circles in the woods, he ran circles in the house, rerouting if something blocked his way. He seemed to meditate and self soothe that way. It seemed a good coping mechanism for him. I tried not to make an issue of it.

In elementary school he was bullied and it left scars. He was getting in fights and I worried constantly about him. He ran cross country and did well and I’d hoped that would boost his self-esteem. It was a positive thing but he still struggled. High school was different. Track, specifically running the mile, became an event that would alter his life. He’d been training for this since he could walk. He was good. His coach, who to this day I credit for the positive pivot my son’s life took, cared about him. I’d stand at the chain link fence and watch him giving my son feedback. I watched my son listen and nod his head. I was grateful this coach knew how to connect with this running son of mine. It was crazy exciting to watch him run the mile. I’d barely breathe for the four minutes and thirty-eight seconds it took. By the end I was screaming and flailing my arms to the point I had to warn people sitting near me. He’d start out at the back of the pack and slowly move up lap after lap, his ponytail flying out behind him. He reminded me of a pony set free, graceful and fluid. Awkward in many other aspects of life, he would glide over the track with some combination of God given talent, dedicated coaching, and pent up angry energy at how his world treated him. He often won the race in the final few feet. I loved being his mom. I loved sitting in the stands hearing parents from other towns say, “Watch this kid, he’s amazing.” I’d think, “Yes, that’s my son. He’s amazing.” 

I was never a runner but he made me want to be. I asked him to help me train to run a half marathon for my fiftieth birthday. He agreed. He’d say things like, “Remember, there is never a day when you don’t run.” and I’d absorb that like a sponge. I have no idea where he got this or if he made it up, but every time I didn’t want to run I would think of him saying that sentence and would force myself to run. I wanted to honor him. Running saved him and I wanted it to save me, too. I became stronger and started liking it more. I realized I don’t like the first two miles but after that I felt good. I stuck with it because it was running that changed my kid’s life and I wanted to understand the experience. We’ve run a marathon together. (Well, it was the same marathon but I was no where near him after the first two seconds. We didn’t actually run it together.) I think often that my child’s life was saved by running. But today I can’t stop thinking of  another mother’s son, taken by running because of the color of his skin. I can’t stop thinking about her. I wonder if she cheered him on during races? Was he a high school star?  I wonder if she felt that running changed or saved his life? I wonder if she were grateful to his coaches for helping him? It’s her first Mother’s Day without him and I don’t know how she can she bear it. I want to reach inside her and help carry her grief. I want her to know I am sorry for the burden she carries. I worried about my kids for all sorts of reasons but never worried they’d be shot while running. I always felt that if my son were running he’d be ok. I wonder if she felt that way? As long as he was running, everything would be ok. 

Mother’s Day is hard for so many. For every mother who has lost a child, I am sorry. None of it is fair.  

Love to all,

Linda

Sunday Morning ~ Shining, Gleaming, Steaming, Flaxen, Waxen

Ukapanda tsitsi, usamabise lumo. ~ If you have no hair, do not hide the razor blade.

~Chewa proverb

May 3, 2020

Hi Everyone,

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about their hair this week. I get it. I’ve had short hair for a long time and one day you wake in the morning and it’s too long. It happens overnight. You have to get your haircut that day. It can’t wait another minute. Little wings sprouted over your ears while you slept; your bangs, grazing your eyes for a few days now, are suddenly IN your eyes. They are too short to put behind your ears and too long to make vision involuntary. It’s an emergency. You can’t think of anything else. You cringe every time you walk by a mirror, unable to glance away from the horror. Of course, there aren’t many hairdressers who can give you an appointment on that exact day at the exact hour you are free, even though when you call you make it sound like you’ve got appendicitis. You (I) are (am) not the type of person to book your (my) haircuts six weeks ahead, because who knows what the world will be like then? There might be a pandemic and you’d have to cancel anyway. Then you (I) find out there isn’t an opening for two weeks! What? How can that be? This dire situation can’t wait two weeks! Even if it is the result of my own poor planning. I’m sure every hairstylist has thought that to herself or maybe even said it out loud to the lucky customer sitting in the chair at that very moment.

I used to have hair long enough to sit on. I started growing it long in junior high, either because everyone else had long hair or one of my friends told me to. I had to get my father’s permission to grow it long and had to agree to keep it out of my face. It was the late 60’s and the contempt my father had for “women libbers” was only outdone by the contempt he had for hippies. I could put it in braids and french twists. I agreed to the terms and let it grow. It was easy enough to brush, wavy, and not too thick, and the damage done by hot curlers and sun exposure was remedied by baby oil, which, also fried my skin. Lucky for me I had mediterranean genes. When I got to college I found myself still wearing my long hair pulled tightly away from my face even though I was free from the parental restrictions. It was required in labs and certainly in clinical rotations. One day, riding my bike from campus to my apartment in Brookline I looked over my right shoulder to cross traffic. I had my hair pulled back and secured with one of those trendy leather patches with a stick going through it. When I turned my head, the stick came out and the leather patch fell off. My hair came down and when I turned to look forward the wind blew it across my face. I was riding my bike down the yellow line of Brookline Ave in rush hour traffic, cars going both ways, blinded by my hair. I didn’t panic (well, I did panic, I didn’t lose control) shook my head slightly while keeping the bike steady going as straight as I could until some of the hair blew back and I could see again. I so could have been killed by my hair. I was attached to my long hair and didn’t consider cutting it despite the risks it posed. Not long after that incident I spent my last summer at home. I couldn’t find a summer job, had no car, and was bored. I had way too much free time and hardly any money. I took a bike ride one day up through Stow with my hair secured in a ponytail never to repeat the hair/traffic incident. On my way home I passed the shopping center where I saw a new hair salon had opened. I coasted into the parking lot, locked my bike to a stop sign, and went in. The place was empty. I asked if I could get my haircut and they took me immediately to an empty seat. This may have set off alarm bells for some people but I was happy with the accommodating atmosphere. She asked how short? I said, “All of it. Short. Cut it off.” This was the most impulsive thing I had ever done. She asked several times if I wanted to do that all at once? Go shoulder-length maybe first? Nope. All off. Short. 

I wonder now what led me to that impulsive act? Boredom? Bad hair day? Frustration with my life? I had a boyfriend at the time but couldn’t see him much in the summer. He lived in Wellesley, had a convertible, and a summer job. We had no cell phones. I couldn’t text him and ask if he thought I should chop all my hair off. Texts were science fiction in that day and age. I only remember him coming into my thoughts on the matter insofar as the fun of seeing his reaction. Long hair was a huge deal at the time. Guys dated women for their hair. It could have been the end of that relationship for all I knew but I never gave that a thought. Maybe I was secure in the idea that he like me for me. She started cutting and I was happy. I felt freer by the snip. The waves turned into curls and the color seemed a darker brown. I loved it. I must have had cash shoved into the pocket of my cut offs because I pulled out the six dollars it cost. I don’t think I knew enough to leave a tip. It was 1975 and I hadn’t learned all the unwritten social rules of hair salons. I got on my bike, helmet-less and smiling, happy, anticipating the shock value of returning home. I often felt like a wallflower and was looking forward to a little attention. First my mother: Scream! Then an admiring approach to run her fingers through the short curls. That made me happy. I tossed my head around to see how it felt. I loved it. I went upstairs to her bedroom, the only one with a mirror. My sister could, and still can, make me laugh harder than anyone else. That choking unable to breathe laugh. The pain in my stomach laugh. She bounced down from her attic bedroom, the one I’d vacated to go to college. She peered into my mother’s bedroom when she saw me, then screamed. She yelled “Why didn’t you warn me?” and flopped onto the bed as if the shock was just too much to bear. She did have a flair for drama and her hair was much more important to her than mine was to me. I laughed. When she recovered herself she came over to rub my head and toss the curls and examine the damage more closely. She liked it. I remember being happy she did.

The boyfriend liked it too. He picked me up on a street corner in his convertible on a day I’d planned a trip into Boston. I hadn’t told him about the haircut. It was a big change. He did a double take and smiled. He was a man of few words and didn’t say a thing. I hopped into the car and he turned onto the road looking straight ahead. At the first stoplight he reached over and rubbed my head like a poodle. He smiled and said, “I like it.”

I’ve had short hair ever since and realized there is a price to pay. Haircuts, for instance every four to six weeks. Where I live there are no chain haircutters that take walk-ins and most of the places I’ve lived the situation has been similar. I don’t care who cuts my hair so never had an attachment to a particular stylist. I have been to hairdressers all over the world and my hair always looks the same. For that reason I hate paying a lot of money to have my hair cut. Well, I hate paying a lot of money for anything, but especially that. I’m not fussy, always want it the same way, don’t require a blow dry or even a shampoo. Years ago when I couldn’t get an appointment before my hair drove me mad I took matters into my own hands. I thought I’d just cut off the little wings that look so cute on a two year old. I did that and it didn’t look too bad. So I kept going. I trimmed the bangs and… there, that was better, then started on the top and before I knew it, I had a haircut that looked pretty much the same as when I paid for it. I left the back alone since I couldn’t see it. Years of this self-grooming has left me well prepared for this very pandemic moment. My bathroom, a pair of scissors, and apathy for my appearance are all I need to make the zoom close-ups tolerable.

Stay safe everyone. Hang in there. Cut it yourself. It’ll grow back.

Love to all,

Linda