May 26th, 2010

Behave on My Blog As You’d Behave In My House

In never ceases to amaze me that, despite my very clear (and slightly silly) comment policy, some people have no problem acting like giant buttheads in the comment section on my blog.  I understand that not everything I say is going to resonate with everyone.  I also get that some things I say are polarizing, and will be met with fierce opposition.  That’s fine.

The subjects I tackle are often emotionally charged, outside the mainstream, and steeped in passionate conviction based on my own experience, research, and ideology.  There is no way that I could say something that everyone in the world will agree with.  It’s just not possible.  For example, I could say “You know, it’s not nice to kick puppies” and undoubtedly someone will show up to leave a comment yelling “You are a stupid asshole, kicking puppies is awesome!!!”

I just can’t win.

Thankfully, most people who read my blog are either A.) on the same page with me, or B.) know how to politely disagree without attacking me or calling names.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case 100% of the time.  Having a comment box means the inevitable rogue commentor with too much time on their hands and no ability to edit themselves.  Many bloggers have experienced this at some point, especially if they attract a lot of comments.

However, in the words of Eddie Murphy’s drunk father, “I pay the rent… this is MY house!”

Because my blog is a space on the internet that I own and manage, allowing others to leave comments on my blog is like inviting them into my home, both literally and figuratively.  Each time a comment is left, I get an email that which I open in my office, my TV room, my bedroom, or sometimes in my car.  When people say “Your post sucks” or “You are stupid,” that message hits me in my real life, and it hurts. It pulls a nice dark cloud over wherever it is I’m sitting at the time.  The more viscous comments can often feel like a kick in the gut.

It feels exactly the way it would if I invited someone over as a guest in my home, and he or she turned to me and said, “You know what? This dinner you made is total horseshit.”

How many of us would do that to a hostess?  I’m guessing not too many.  Sure, we’ve been at somebody’s house, politics have come to the table, and we have disagreed.  I don’t mind disagreement.  Disagreement is healthy.  It moves a discussion along and expands our minds.

But it’s no longer a simple disagreement when you turn to your host and call her a bitch, or tell her that her house sucks.  That’s just an outburst.  A mean, uncalled for, outburst. And she doesn’t have to put up with it.  In her home, she decides what goes, and if that means kicking you out, then I don’t blame her one bit.

And that’s exactly how I feel about comments on a private blog.  As a commentor, act the same way you would if this person invited you over for tea. If she said something you didn’t like, you have two real choices.

A. Ignore it and go on with your life (what a novel concept!)
B.  Tell her you feel differently and start a dialogue

BUT – under no circumstances should you call her a name, tell her that she “sucks,” or otherwise personally attack her.

If someone is allowing you to comment on their blog, take this as a personal invitation into their home and treat it as such.  Otherwise, she might just revoke that invitation and send you packing.  I have no problem hitting the ol’ delete button – I just wish people wouldn’t make me use it.

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What’s your experience with rogue commentors?  Do you delete them or keep them?  Have you been one?  Fess up.

May 14th, 2010

Reasons I’m Not Getting Pregnant

Well, my plans for a 2010 baby are clearly shot to shit.  I really could have used the extra tax deduction this year too.  At this point, I’m worried that we won’t even have the baby before the Hyphenated Husband leaves his job next year to start his very unpaid teaching hours.  There goes the insurance that woulda covered my homebirth midwife.

But when I sit and think about the reasons this probably isn’t happening for us right now, a number of non-biological factors start to emerge.  I’m a pretty big believer that the universe (not god, the universe) leaves me subtle clues to help me navigate this crazy life.  No matter how badly I want something, or how much it sucks when it doesn’t work out, I always discover that there was some reason things went down the way they did.  Everything happens for a reason.

So what is the reason I’m not getting pregnant?  We’ve been trying since January, and so far, nada.  Now, I know that the truly infertile people are probably throwing rotten tomatoes at their monitor right now, and trust me, I know we’re not considered “infertile” yet.  However, getting pregnant has never exactly been a problem for us before.

The first baby was a “my-period-is-late-so-stop-and-get-a-test-OHMYGODHOLYSHIT-PLEASE-TeLL-ME-THOSE-TWO-LINES-MEAN-NEGATIVE!!!” sort of situation.  Our second boy was well planned.  Planned so perfectly, in fact, that we said we wanted to get pregnant in August and have him in May, and that is exactly what happened.  We got knocked up on the very first try.  Yep – we were those assholes.

But now, oh, the tables have turned.  And I figure there could be several non-biological reasons that we’re not seeing the two pink lines.

One of them could be my Outlook Calendar saying,

“Uhhhh, Gina?  Hi, yeah. What are you, fucking stupid?  Do you NOT see that you have NO time to complete all the crap you’ve obligated yourself to do as it is?!?!  Where exactly do you plan on fitting morning sickness and sleep deprivation and childbirth and all-night nursing sessions into this mess?  Snap out of it, lady!  We’ll never make it out of law school this way!”

Or, perhaps, it’s the memory of my second degree perineal tear, along with my cesarean scar, looking up at me saying,

“Uhh, Gina?  Hi… remember us?  Yes, darling, well, we wanted to remind you that if you put a baby in here, it’s gonna have to come out of here, and have you totally forgotten how that worked out the last two times!?!?  In case you need a reminder, just glance down at your lady regions and we’ll wave to you.  Hi!!  There we are!  The violent exits of those children!  Now snap out of it, girl.”

And then, of course Murphy’s Law chimes in with,

“Come on Gina, you knew this would happen.  Why did you go ahead and buy a new bassinett and $90 ring sling before you even got the positive test?  Tsk, Tsk.  Also?  I know you desperately need some new clothes, and you know that I’m obligated, by the laws of irony, to save your positive pregnancy test for the day after you buy the new clothes and throw away all the tags.  Go ahead – go shopping.  I dare you.”

And of course, my waistline throws in her two bitchy cents with:

“Darling – we just got re-aquainted for the first time in nearly 5 years!  We are finally back to a place where your prepregnancy pants will button, and you want to throw it all away?!  How dare you even consider it!  I will not stand for it.  The answer is NO.”

As you can see, all these mother-effers are conspiring against me.  Every month, they take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to my two pink lines, and turn on the dreaded menses hose.  All I know is that no matter what the universe is trying to tell me, I still want another baby.  Call me crazy. I’m sure I am.  But I also figure if I want it this bad, that must be the universe telling me something too.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking…

April 14th, 2010

Forget Everything I Said About Breastfeeding…

…Because she said it so, so much better.

Melissa Bartick from A Peaceful Revolution has gone on The Huffington Post and illustrated the breastfeeding pitfalls in a way more poignant and beautiful than I ever could have.  All it takes is two very simple stories that so many too many of us can relate to.

She lengthily describes two birth scenarios; one being the typical American hospital birth, and the other being the kind of birth most Americans never get to experience (though women in most other countries do).  I’ll give you one guess which one supports the breastfeeding relationship, and which one undermines it from the moment the baby’s head pops out.

Yep , you probably guessed it. The one undermining our efforts and sabotaging our best intentions is the typical American hospital birth.  This is exactly why birth and breastfeeding issues go hand-in-hand in the mind of the birth activists and Lactivists.  Trying to change breastfeeding culture is damn near impossible when babies are coming out drugged, swaddled, and too discombobulated to know a nipple from a knee cap.  It’s even more impossible when women can’t claim any lactation support services through their insurance, and they have to go back to work before the New Baby smell even wears off.  Oh, the list of tiny little obstacles which build into one giant, daunting wall goes on and on and on…  So please, go read her article because it’s just too insightful to attempt to recap here.

And just in case you’re wondering what Bartick’s qualifications are for even addressing this study, she concludes with this:

“Yes, I’m a researcher and a physician, but I’m also a mother. Since I live in the United States, you can probably guess what my birth experience was like. Maybe you’ve heard me on the news saying that moms shouldn’t feel guilty. I’ve been there. So take that guilt and turn it inside out, and do something positive so that other moms don’t have to go through what you did. We all deserve better.”

Right ON, Melissa.  Can I friend you on Facebook and send you love letters?  Can I at least follow you on Twitter?  How about LinkedIn?  Do you still MySpace?  Okay, okay, I’ll just keep reading you at A Peaceful Revolution (but I can’t promise I won’t leave love letters in the comments section.)

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And Dear Readers: I PROMISE I will not write another post about these “$13 billion dollar” breastfeeding studies (Okay, for at least a week or two.)  There was just too much great stuff to talk about in the last 7 days!  But, I pinky-swear, after tomorrow, we’re back to our regular scheduled programming.

April 13th, 2010

I Swear Officer, Those Were Not My Drugs

This is the kind of thing that can only happen to me.  All my life, I’ve found myself in situations where I’m accused of something I had absolutely nothing to do with just by being in the worst place at the worst time.  I told my husband years ago there may come a day when I stand trial for something I didn’t do because I have the worst luck in the history of the world.

The other day, the Hyphenated Husband is vacuuming the bedroom while I’m cleaning the office.  I hear him shut off the vacuum, then he heads into the office saying,

“Uhhh, Gina?  Okay, I’m not accusing you of this, but, ummm… what the hell is this?”

Then he walks into the office holding a marijuana pipe, and sporting a look of shock.  Now, nobody in this house smokes pot.  I haven’t smoked pot since I was a teenager, and neither has he.  So where the HELL did this thing come from?  We start searching our minds for who may have been in our house with this thing.  Was it his mom??? She’s the only person ever in our bedroom.  No, it’s not his mother, the retired police officer, for crying out loud.

Then who?  How did a piece of drug paraphernalia make it into our bedroom?

Oh wait!  The chair! It must have fallen out of the chair that was given to us by his uncle!  Ohmygod, his uncle gave us a chair with a pot pipe in it!  And now we’re thinking, “Okay, was it our uncle, or our aunt, or one of their two kids that left the pipe in there???”

It doesn’t matter now, because even more pressing is: how the hell do we get rid of this thing? John starts to throw it in the garbage and I’m all freaked out like,

“Wait!!! You can’t throw it in the regular garbage!!! What if the cops go through our garbage and think the pot pipe is ours and ohmyeffinggodwe’dgotojailandthey’dtakeourkidsawayohmygod!!!“

See – pot DOES make you paranoid, even when you haven’t smoked it.

So, I make John wrap it up really tightly and take it all the way out to the garbage on the curb.  Today is Tuesday, garbage day in my town, and I’m patiently waiting for the knock on the door by the good ‘ol village police.

Let me just state, for the record, those were not my drugs. You all are my witnesses.

February 10th, 2010

I’ve Been Annoyed with Feminists This Week

Perhaps you don’t follow a million feminists* on Twitter like I do, so you may not be aware that they/we are all pissed about the Tebow Super Bowl ad.  If you’re like me and you weren’t watching Super Bowl 44 either, then you really have no idea what I’m talking about.

Let me set the stage:

The notoriously anti-choice organization calling themselves “Focus on the Family” paid umpteen millions of dollars to run an ad during the Super Bowl that depicted Pam Tebow (the football player’s mom) being faced with the choice to either abort Tim, or keep the pregnancy.  Um, you can guess which she chose.

Now, the reason this is pissing feminists off is that CBS has never allowed this kind of controversial ad during the Super Bowl before, and we believe that a sporting event is no place for abortion politics.  But CBS decided to scrap their previous anti-advocacy ad policy and took the paycheck from Focus on the Family – a paycheck, as so many feminists have already noted, that could have gone to HELP women faced with unwanted pregnancies.  You don’t see Planned Parenthood generating Super Bowl ads because they use the money they get to help women.  What a novel concept.

So, the feminists and the Women’s Media Center were all over this one – even sending in the President of WMC, Jehmu Greene, to make an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor.  Unfortunately, as much as I think O’Reilly is a jackass who never lets anyone talk, I also think Jehmu lost the argument.  By the end of his stupid rant, he even had me thinking “Yeah, what’s the big fucking deal?  It was her choice.”

Now wait, I still know what the big-fucking-deal is – I am a pro-choice feminist after all – but it got me thinking that we had a whole lot of other feminist fish to fry this week that the mainstream feminists, and the Women’s Media Center, seemed to flatly ignore.

Yeah, I get it.  We’re pissed that some organization shelled out millions of dollars (making them poorer, btw) to put out some vague ad on the Super Bowl that probably didn’t influence anybody to do anything except go,

“Hey look – it’s Tebow.  And his mom.  That’s sweet.  But I’d rather see Danica Patrick’s tits in another Go Daddy commercial.  Now pass me the nachos.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the influential media last week…

There’s a woman strapped to an operating table, live on the Today Show, undergoing a cesarean delivery with no medical indication to warrant this major abdominal surgery, which the Today Show Talking Heads falsely touted as “medically necessary” for reasons that the ACOG do not even support.

And the feminists uneducated about cesarean awareness issues will say,

“Who cares if she had a cesarean!  It’s her choice!”

To which those of us educated on cesarean awareness issues would respond,

“It’s not an informed choice when someone tricks you into it. Talking a woman into major abdominal surgery for your own convenience and without any true medical indication is deplorable.  And selling your viewers that same snake oil is even worse.  That surgery just compromised that woman’s uterine health and patient autonomy forever, and probably for no good reason. THAT is why we care.”

And then the woman’s doctor told her on national television that she was free to birth vaginally next time, and what he must have meant by that is that she’s “free” to have a VBAC as long as she can find one of the few doctors or hospitals left that will truly support her decision to birth vaginally after a cesarean.  And if you’ve ever been a mother looking for a supportive VBAC provider, you know what an impossible task this can be.  My OB also told me I could have a VBAC when I was strapped to that OR table.  What he meant by that was,

“as long as you don’t try to birth vaginally during my daughter’s birthday party, because if that happens, I’m going to try to force you to have a cesarean, which you will spend 38 hours fighting off, and eventually you will birth vaginally, but I will have ruined your birth experience in the process – so yeah… birth vaginally on my terms, and on my schedule, or suffer the consequences, lady, because now that you have a nice uterine scar, all I have to do is say the words ‘uterine rupture’ and I can get you to do pretty much whatever I want.”

Oh, and then on Good Morning America, Giselle Bündche’s graceful, natural home birth in a tub has some talking heads over there spouting off all the “risks” associated with water birth – you know… the “risks” being that if you’re birthing comfortably in the water, then you might have a less painful childbirth, and the hospital then will not get to poke you with all their pharmaceuticals and non-evidence based, non-woman-friendly policies.  Water birth is very bad for hospital business, you know.

So all the while that women’s reproductive choices are being trampled on in mainstream media outlets last week – where are all the feminists? Where’s the Women’s Media Center?  Where, Where, Where?!?!

I’ll tell you where – they’re busy paying more lip service to a Super Bowl commercial than it deserved.  They’re busy pretending that most women would elect a major abdominal surgery even if they truly knew the risks involved, and that abortion is the only reproductive justice battle we have to fight.

Well, I’m one feminist who will spend my fight on the women who are being cut into without informed consent, and on the women who want to give birth where ever they need to even if it won’t make the local hospital a nickle.

I just wish the Women’s Media Center would report on these crimes against reproductive rights.  They can start by sending a letter to NBC.

Tell me, if you’re a feminist, what have you done to help birthing women retain their legal rights to patient choice and informed consent?  If all you’re fighting for is abortion access, think about moving a step beyond that every once in awhile, and helping the women who choose to continue the pregnancy.  They need justice too.

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*oh, and don’t get all nit-picky with me, I know there are some wonderful feminists fighting for birth choice – you know who you are, and so do I, so I didn’t mean you.