June 30, 2010
Serious print overload
Honestly, today was an amazing In The Post day. I received the latest issue of Canadian Notes & Queries, whose cover is gorgeous (as you can see) and embossed (which maybe you can’t). It gets even better in-covers, with an interior re-design by Seth. It’s “The Short Story Issue”, which means I can’t wait to read it to pieces. I’m looking forward to everything, and a new story by Rebecca Rosenblum in particular.
In another envelope, I received some textual treats from my friend Alyssa (and I get to call her my friend, because I met her once in real life about ten years ago, and we didn’t become online friends until some years after that). Not only did she send a card with a photo of her beautiful son, but she sent me three little books from The Regional Assembly of Text in Vancouver: “Crust Test”, “Things They Loved” and “Encounters with Jesus”. Love it love it love it.
Seriously, this is print overload.
Further, I’ve been magazining it up like a madwoman lately. The day after my post on magazines a few weeks back, I received LRB, Chatelaine, and an subscription offer from The New Yorker in the mail, which I thought was sort of funny. The Chatelaine was even worse than the last one, incidentally. My biggest problem with it was the passages they’d highlighted so I didn’t have to go to the bother of reading the articles, and I was insulted by the idea that had I ten minutes to spare, I’d spend it spray-painting a hideous piece of crap. I don’t like how everything is so rigidly compartmentalized, and how the backyard depicted for relaxing in had a motor boat in the background.
But maybe it was because I was reading Wolf Hall, which really did call for diversions, that I began motoring through my backlog of periodicals. I read one LRB after another, and revelled in the fascinatingness. I can’t remember much of what got me so excited at the time, but the point was that it left me super-stimulated and inspired (and maybe I was just getting used to sleeping normally again). Perusing the archives, however, I remember that I loved this scathing review of the new translation of The Second Sex; Andrew O’Hagan on the moon; a review of a book called Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England; Will Self’s “On the Common”; review of Ian McEwen’s Solar; and then Andrew O’Hagan again.
I also read the latest issue of Room, which was the best one I’d read yet (even though I thought I wouldn’t like it, because I thought it was all about sports. It wasn’t. But even when it was, it was good).
The best thing about all this being that now my periodical backlog is not so backlogged. I’ve got three LRBS to be read, the Lists issue of The New Quarterly, and then the just-arrived CNQ. There is a distinct possibility that I might get caught up, for the first time in over a year.
And it is a bad thing that I reserve breastfeeding for reading magazines, which is part of the reason I haven’t really thought much about weaning?
June 29, 2010
Good news about bedtime reading
Though I’m not sure I qualify as a “busy parent”*, I am excited that Harriet and I appear (with a picture!) in this lovely piece by Andrea Gordon in The Toronto Star about bedtime reading. The article was written in response to a recent study showing that 88% of parents with kids under twelve read regularly to their children at bedtime. Which is good news, in addition to the news that all of us knew already– that bedtime reading is one of parenthood’s great pleasures.
*I am not being self-deprecating. Most of this morning has been spent either in a slanket or lying on the floor.
June 28, 2010
Big Brothers
“Inside the bus, he sat several rows ahead of me and I settled behind a girl singing a pop ballad into her collar. Kids around snapped bubble gum and yelled out jokes, but Joseph held himself still, like everything was pelting him. My big brother. What I could see of his profile was classic: straight nose, high cheekbones, black lashes, light-brown waves of hair. Mom once called him handsome, which had startled me, because he could not be handsome, and yet when I looked at his face I could see how each feature was nicely shaped.” — from Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
And it occurs to me that everything I know about big brothers I know from fiction, because I never had a big brother myself. But I want one, because of Rose’s brother Joseph, and Sally J. Freedman’s brother Douglas, and Elaine Risley’s brother Stephen in Cat’s Eye, and Madeleine’s brother Mike in The Way the Crow Flies. Gawky boys in ill-fitting sweaters who collect things and understand physics. Who are not quite of the world as their sisters are, always just out of reach, whose attention is coveted, elusive. Their protection a kind of talisman. These mysterious boys with pimples and secret girlfriends, twelve-years old and there’s nobody wiser in the world.
June 28, 2010
How a mother-centered approach to breastfeeding saved my breastfeeding life
The politics of motherhood are a bit like dealing with those people who live in really awful towns who like to tell you about how much they hate your city. That they could never live there, because it’s claustrophobic, soulless, and so expensive. And you just have to sit there and take it, because you’re not allowed to utter the truth you’re convinced that both of you know– that living in their awful town has turned that person’s mind to gelatin, and that if you had to live there, you’d probably blow your brains out.
Or rather, it is acceptable to write an editorial titled “I formula fed– so what?” attempting to liberate women from the “shame” of formula feeding by evoking saggy boobs and breastfeeding horror stories, but an similar editorial so unabashedly pro-breastfeeding would be considered impolite. Because it would make other mothers feel guilty. And apparently alleviating mothers’ guilt is the structure around which the modern discourse of motherhood is framed.
The problem with this structure, however, is that is devalues some really thoughtful choices. Breastfeeding is only one example of this kind of discourse, but it’s the most pervasive one. The problem with this structure is that it makes everybody defensive, then we all decamp to our various corners to argue about just who can scream the loudest. You either breastfeed, or you are selfish. You’re either free of the shackles of motherhood, or you’re a doormat whose nipples knock against her knees.
The point of all this being that I’ve come to understand why some women become so evangelical about breastfeeding, because I’ve seen how they’re driven to it by a society that supports breastfeeding mothers in name only. A society that seeks to undermine the value of breastfeeding or at least fails to celebrate it, because we don’t want people to feel bad. But I’ve also come to understand that breastfeeding evangelists are really irritating, unless they’re preaching to the choir. And I can’t help but think that there has to be a middle ground.
Actually, I know there is a middle-ground, because I found it once, and it’s the only reason I managed to breastfeed at all. One of the many things I didn’t know before I had a baby (though I was warned; I just didn’t listen) was that breastfeeding is really hard. On the second night of my daughter’s life, I fed her all night long. Watching that clock tick through hours until the sun came up was one of the most agonizing experiences of my life, and in spite of all my effort, she lost 11% of her body weight in her first four days. We didn’t receive terrific support while we were in the hospital– we had a “good latch”, which apparently implied that all was well, and so no one took any notice of the problems we were having. (Most problems with breastfeeding are blamed on bad latches. If a bad latch can’t be diagnosed, then nothing can.)
Eventually, we had to supplement with formula, which I didn’t care about because it meant that I could go to sleep. I was just waiting for someone to tell me to quit breastfeeding, because then I’d have permission to do so (and I’m a textbook case, here, by the way, which is why no one should give a woman permission to quit breastfeeding, in my opinion, but then this is troubling too, no?). The baby was finally gaining weight, but her hunger was insatiable. I would feed her for two hours and she would still be sucking and crying when she was done. It was a growth spurt, I was told, or she was cluster feeding, but neither of these things were supposed to last as long as they did. By two weeks, I was out of my mind and couldn’t take it anymore.
We went to a breastfeeding consultant at a different hospital, one picked by chance from a list of resources, and this woman saved my breastfeeding life. The thing about her, however, is that she did everything wrong from a “lactivist” perspective. The first thing she did was promise me that we’d try to get the baby to feed less at night. I remember her saying to me, “You can go all day, but not all night”, and so much of my agony melted away with that acknowledgement that the awfulness was not to be simply withstood. The second thing she did was weigh the baby, then have me feed the baby (with that excellent latch), and then weigh the baby again to see how much milk she’d taken. In fifteen minutes, the consultant determined, the baby was getting plenty of milk. The baby doesn’t need to be feeding for two hours at a time, she told me. She wasn’t feeding, but simply soothing. These marathon sessions were not only driving me out of my mind, but they weren’t even necessary (which, having a baby who’d lost 11% body weight, I’d be loathe to determine on my own).
I also found out that the baby was constantly sucking and fussing not because she was hungry, but because she had terrible tummy cramps which my constant feedings (and formula supplements) were doing nothing to help. Equipped with the knowledge that she was eating just fine, I started cutting her feedings off and finding other ways to soothe her. We were able to quit formula supplements altogether. Breastfeeding finally became manageable, and I could imagine doing it for some period of time. 13 months later, we’re not even ready to quit.
My problems are nothing compared to what other women go through. I’ve had friends who’ve suffered through unbelievable pain while breastfeeding, receiving no support from breastfeeding consultants because to acknowledge the pain would be to acknowledge that breastfeeding really sucks, undermining the cause. But breastfeeding does suck, in the early days. The early days can extend to about six endless weeks though, and beyond, and it’s no wonder that so many women opt out altogether, and that the women who don’t become so fierce about what they’ve struggled through and what they’ve accomplished. Deservedly so.
I can’t help but wonder though if a more mother-centric approach to breastfeeding would ease the hostilities. If it would put everybody on the same side if we acknowledged that breastfeeding was truly awful, so that those of us who made it could have sympathy for those who didn’t. (And maybe those who never found it awful could just thank their lucky stars.) If those who were tempted to pack it in could receive the kind of support I did, the lately-unfashionable support that dares to take the mother’s well-being into consideration, sometimes even before the baby’s (as long as baby is thriving, of course. And maybe sometimes if baby isn’t. What baby is going to thrive if a lunatic is its mother?). If breastfeeding got a little more flexible, more mothers could keep on with it, and maybe we could ease up on the whole all or nothing “nipple confusion!” “formula is deadly!” etc. paranoia that makes things even less easy.
Imagine if we all decamped from our camps to discover we’re in the same boat? Or imagine if the whole breastfeeding thing became so de-polemicized that I didn’t need to mix my metaphors anymore?
June 28, 2010
Hers is still the second sex
‘It may be that today’s woman writer doesn’t have much to do with the concept of “women’s writing”. Feminism as a cultural and political crisis is seen to have passed. Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain. If a woman feels suffocated and grounded and bewildered by her womanhood, she feels these things alone, as an individual: there is currently no public unity among women, because since the peak of feminism the task of woman has been to assimilate herself with man. She is, therefore, occluded, scattered, disguised. Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing. Superficially this situation resembles equality, except that it occurs within the domination of “masculine values”. What today’s woman has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex, but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it.’ –Rachel Cusk, “Shakespeare’s Daughters”
June 28, 2010
I love pruning
“I love pruning. If gardening is unsuccessful, I’m going to be a hairdresser.” –overheard through my open window, from one of the two wonderful women working in the garden down below
June 27, 2010
Unsad Lemon Cake
This is a slice of the lemon chocolate cake I baked after reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake last week. I think I may have a new compulsion to bake every fictional cake that I encounter, or maybe it’s just any fictional cake I encounter as written by Aimee Bender, who writes about food and eating in such a concrete, tangible way, rendering the ordinary extraordinary. Whose description simultaneously blows your mind and has you going, “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean…” Anyway, the cake was good, and devoid of sadness. I wonder what kind of fictional cake I’ll encounter next?
June 25, 2010
A Spotlight on Atlantic Canada Reads
So yes, I’m rereading Lisa Moore’s February, and loving it as much as I loved it the first time, even though I was delirious back then. All of this very timely, because February is currently in the running for Atlantic Canada Reads, a brilliant initiative by Chad Pelley of (another brilliant initiative) Salty Ink (“a spotlight on Atlantic Canada writers”). Check out the other books up for Atlantic Canada Reads, and read their defenses, and vote for the book you think should take the prize.
June 24, 2010
Goodness turnips!
I have a vivid memory of the day my mother bought me a copy of Pollyanna on a visit to The World’s Biggest Bookstore when I was about eight years old. (This was back when TWBB was my favourite place in the universe.) I must have read the book a few times because many parts of it have stayed with me, but what I remember the most is the afterword to my edition, which was written by the great Lois Lowry. What I remember is one phrase in particular, one that applies to most of the books I like best; I think of it today because I’m currently rereading February by Lisa Moore.
The phrase is, “Goodness triumphs; I like that.” Except that I didn’t know the word “triumphs” when I was eight years old, and I read it as “turnips”. I read the whole phrase as a kind of exclaimation similar to “Goodness gracious” or “Merciful heavens”, but with a root vegetable twist.
“Goodness turnips; I like that.”
And all these years later, I still do.
June 24, 2010
Pssst… today is my birthday
Pssst…. today is my birthday. Which has made clear how far a body can come in a year. Because last year was my thirtieth birthday, and it was terrible. I had a four week old baby who had screamed all night the night before, my husband was so busy picking up the pieces of me that he didn’t have much time to orchestrate birthday celebrations, and my computer had just crashed taking with it five years of everything on that precious hard-drive.
The evening was better– Stuart went shopping on his lunch break and came home with some wonderful presents, including a beautiful sundress to cloak the postpartum frump. My sister and best friend were here for a bbq dinner, and Harriet bestowed me with two wonderful gifts– about twenty minutes during which she was awake and not crying (and this was so exciting! We all just gathered around to watch her be), and then she fell asleep and we ate our dinner without Harriet-juggling for the first time since her birth. I also drank beer. But still, it wasn’t the best day.
Today however, my thirty-first, in spite of earthquakes and tornadoes the day before, has been so far without calamity. I got croissants and jam in bed, and wonderful presents (including the beautiful Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, and Sarah Harmer’s new CD which is a wonderful birthday morning soundtrack). Opened a lovely stack of cards for me this morning, a few of which were delightfully bookish. I’m going to drop over to my friend Bronwyn’s for a cup of tea this afternoon, and we’re having Thai take-out and a Dairy Queen Treatza Pizza for dinner tonight (and did you know they’ve been discontinued in the US? I never realized before just how fortunate I am to be Canadian).
Anyway, Harriet been occupied unpacking my new Body Shop satsuma gift pack, but I’ve just noticed teethmarks in the soapbar. I will turn my attention back to her then (and note that she’s now crying because I won’t give it back to her for another bite). So we will go and play, and she’ll get up to all her new tricks– showing me her belly button, pretending to talk on the phone, offering a cup of tea to Miffy, showing me my bellybutton, sucking on my nose, and a good old game of plush-ball catch.
