THANKFUL FRIDAY

My coworker/friend who is in charge of our fitness facility gave birth to her first child this week. We all received photos of proof of life. One photo was a family group shot showing that all was well and the second photo was a solo shot of the newborn. All you can see are the two hands of a nurse holding up a red, angry faced baby. The look on her face is not one of fear. She’s not crying because she’s hurt. Her face is a perfect representation of rage.

And that is my favorite picture of the week.

Michael sent me a video this week of Kriya Yogi talking about how the financial web of constraints we have built for ourselves will be the thing that keeps us from following Jesus when he comes back to this planet. I argued that money would not entirely be the thing that makes people reject Jesus, but that it will be their mistrust and fear that will keep them from following. I also argued that Jesus currently already walks among us in various forms. It just doesn’t create the sensational click-bait style of headlines that the Nazis and Trump create. We are a society riled and united by our hate and fear of things that go against our ideas of societal normatives and there are people who have learned to manipulate this trait to their advantage. This hate that is fueled by those fears is the thing that keeps us blind from the true teachings of Jesus and the possibility that he’s walking around us right now.

So what does this have to do with pictures of red, angry babies?

It takes a very special adult human to remember their own birth, but I want you to imagine it for it moment. You’ve just spent the better part of a year (normally…I spent less time than most) cocooned inside a warm safe space. Actually, for the most part, it’s pretty great in there. Plenty of food and napping. It’s probably one of the few times in our lives when we are truly well rested. Then we are forced to leave this safe wonderful space in a traumatic and painful way. Suddenly we find ourselves in this space where the light is too bright for our little eyes and it is cold and terrifying. Now some babies take it all in mildly with a little suspicion. They might cry a little bit but nothing too loud and expressive. They cry more out of fear of the unknown than anything. Then you have those babies that tremble with rage over this new environment. These babies…these are babies that get it. They know they have just been forced into a world filled with trash both literally and figuratively. I don’t know what kind of baby I was when I entered this world other than in hurry to be here, but I like to think I was also boiling with rage at what I found when I did enter this world.

I see each and every rage filled baby as a potential ally because my secret fuel for a constant practice in kindness and fighting against the hate and racist people of this country is rage. Every story I hear about white privileged males harming and or killing a person of color and or a person of the LBGTQ+ community, my rage sends money to that person in need. My rage makes me get to the polls. My rage is the thing that forces me to stop and pick up the bit of garbage I just crossed paths with on the sidewalk. I know it sounds crazy, but being so angry at the way things are makes me want to just be better, and I see each rage filled newborn as a being that has the potential to learn to use their rage for good. I want to say to them that its okay to be angry about the way things are, but what do you want to do about it? Use that rage to for the greater good. Also, there is quite a bit of joy is showing these little angry babies that while yes they have entered a garbage society, there are so many beautiful things to be found in the garbage.

I am grateful for new allies.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

In April of 2018, Tammy Duckworth, a senator from Illinois, became the first use senator to cast a vote on the Senate floor with her newborn. Sen. Duckworth’s baby was just a week old and she wanted to be able to keep her baby close while still doing her job as a senator and previous rules of the Senate only allowed Senators and a few aids on the floor during votes. The Senate changed those rules to include children under the age of one. Sen. Duckworth thanked her colleagues for “recognizing that sometimes new parents also have responsibilities at work.” This was a huge step forward in recognizing the struggles of working parents, but that’s not the topic I want to discuss. The thing that I want to talk about is the reaction all of those Senators had towards that newborn when Sen. Duckworth rolled her into Chambers. Every single Senator in that room melted. They all wanted a chance to peak at the swaddled baby. Everyone was smiling. Joy filled up that space.

Now, I will always be an advocate for abortion rights. My body, my choice and it’s none of your business. I will also strongly stand by my decision to not have children. By no means does either of those two beliefs mean that I don’t like children. Quite the opposite. In particular, there is nothing more soothing than gently rocking side to side while holding a baby against your chest. Babies just have this beautiful ability to calm and bring joy. While I do believe that the world would change for the better if we all just took twenty minutes to lay down in final relaxation, I also believe that twenty minutes of gently rocking a baby would have the same effect. It seems that I am compiling a list of things that would make people calmer and happier: final relaxation, babies, puppies, kittens, roller skates and scooters. Maybe baby goats.

Tomorrow marks the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks. For some of us, it’s really hard to image that it has been twenty years since such a horrific event occurred. Those events have morphed and changed this country in truly awful ways, but there were some good changes to remember. There were about a hundred babies born in the weeks that followed 9/11 whose fathers had died in the attacks. Jenna Jacobs, interviewed by People Magazine in 2016 in regards to her son who was born six days after the death of his father said “These children are what comes after 9/11. They are the joy, the salve, the ointment. They’re the love.”

One of the men that was in J’s unit recently had a baby and they named the new baby after J. In fact they call him Jaybird, which is a nickname we used for J. This week, my brother, Randy and sister-in-law, Katrina got to spend the evening with this little family. Katrina got to hold and snuggle this baby and they all had such a wonderful evening together. I could tell by the brief texts that I had with Katrina afterward that both she and Randy left that visit with fuller hearts. What a beautiful gift this man has given to my family by naming his newborn after J. I hope that meeting Jaybird was a healing salve for Katrina.

If you get a chance to cuddle a baby (or a puppy) today, do it. You won’t regret it.

THE BIG SQUEEZE

I wonder if Josephine would wear these clothes

5 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "I wonder if Josephine would wear these clothes"

Last week, a coworker sent out a group email announcing the birth of their second child. I had no idea him and his wife were expecting another baby, but was glad to hear that all was well with mom and baby. He attached a photo of their new little girl and when I opened the picture, I fell over. She's perfection. Sometimes when I'm feeling stressed or anxious, I find myself opening that picture to stare at her sweet, sleeping face and feel my ovaries cramp up. Not long after his announcement, another couple I work with who recently had twins had their babies up in the office. They are about sixish months old now and rolly polly and drooling and adorable. The mom handed one of them over to me so I could smell her head and then we all marveled at the evolutionary design of babies. 

At birth, babies secrete a hormone that makes everybody in the room love them. They also look like their fathers. This ensures their survival or at least it keeps the dad from eating the young. The father sees this delicate tiny version of himself and is hit with that love hormone, thus sealing the bond between baby and Father. Even the helplessness of babies is part of evolutionary design. In a paper released in Proceeding of National Academy of Science in 2016, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd present an evolutionary model of a positive feedback loop where humans are born early to accommodate larger brains. This in turn gives rise to helpless newborns and caring for these children requires more intelligence and thus larger brains. This is how we evolved to our current level of human intelligence. Large brains means helpless babies who need parents with large brains to care for them. I think, in this case, the word 'intelligence' refers to a relative intelligence. Like knowing that fire is hot or that stepping on the sharp end of something is going to hurt. Because we all know that person who flunked out of high school and now has seven children.

You know, I thought all these years that the main reason I didn't want children was because I didn't have what it takes to raise a good human being. Now I'm wondering if it's really because I didn't think I was smart enough to have a child. I've always lacked confidence in my intelligence. 

In the past few years, the sight of babies has stirred feelings in me that were not normally present when I was younger and in childbearing years. I have uncontrollable urges just to hold a baby and talk in a ridiculous baby babble with them. I think about finding ways to bottle that new baby smell so that I can spritz the room with it. I see baby clothes in shop windows and want to buy them, thinking that maybe I could get Josephine to wear them. My body twinges at the sight of their gummy infectious smiles. I try to distract myself by looking at puppies but this inevitably leads to me looking at the adoptable dogs on Petfinder. There may be room in my heart for another dog, but there is not room in our house for another dog. There might be room in both places for a goat. We do have a big backyard. 

I was talking about all of these new babies to Michael and he looked at me sideways and asked "Do you want a baby?!?" I did not hesitate in my answer. I said "Of course I don't want a baby. I'm FORTY TWO YEARS OLD!" I mean, even if I managed to give birth to a healthy baby without genetic abnormalities, what on Earth would I do with it? That new baby smell transforms from something lovely to something very funky in no time. Every time I smell soured milk, I think of my nephew Thomas who was a terribly cute but stinky baby. Also, I am going to retire at a normal retirement age. I cannot afford to retire and put a kid through college all at the same time. So, at least I am smart enough to know that the baby ship has left the docks and is probably sinking somewhere in the Atlantic. And I am really truly okay with that. 

Those stirred up feelings are my body's last ditch effort to remind me of the choices I have made. They are coming at a time when I am also experiencing other symptoms related to perimenopause. My body is taunting me in a way that makes me doubt my decisions even while I mentally stand by those choices. I still come from a generation of women who were taught that having babies defines us as women. Ovaries and eggs. These are the things that make us female. At least, biologically speaking. What are we then when our ovaries are no longer working? There was a time when the older a woman became, the more invisible she became. I don't want to be in the limelight, but I certainly do not want to become invisible because of my age.

I am lucky enough to be moving into this transition during a time in history where there has been a shift in how we view older women. Or that we view older women at all. The forty and over woman is represented in fashion ads and media, not as homely grandmothers baking cookies, but as strong, beautiful and running the business. I'm not saying that cookie baking grandmothers is a bad thing. It's just an unrealistic image for someone like me. The women I know who are my age and older are running businesses. They are strong and beautiful. I was just in a yoga workshop filled with women my age and older who were doing the most intense and demanding yoga poses without blinking an eye or breaking a sweat. We have finally, FINALLY, reached a point in time where ovaries and eggs are not our most defining feature. 

I still might buy that baby sweater I saw the other day and convert it into a dog sweater for Josephine. 

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Grey

5 Likes, 2 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Grey"

I heard my mother telling the story of my birth to some poor soul at our party on Saturday. It is a story I have heard a number of times and I have heard multiple variations on the story. In this particular telling, Mom said that I would only sleep for five minutes at a time and I broke out into a rash every time the sun hit my delicate preemie baby skin. I think my parents liked telling people the story of my birth because of the three of us, mine was the most dramatic. There's alway lots of oohs and ahhhs when they disclose how much I weighed at birth. I can still see Dad holding out his hand, palm facing up, as he would tell about how my tiny body fit right there and point to his hand. Mom always mentions the beautiful bouquet of flowers that she received from a close friend who also happened to be our milkman. This time though, my mom said something I had never heard her say before. She said "They told us she probably wouldn't live."

In all the tellings of that story, it never once dawned on me that I was in any kind of danger other than just being born tiny. I did not suffer with lung issues or heart problems. I do have allergies, but not more so than any normal birth person would have. I am healthy and despite some broken bones and a tonsillectomy, I have always been healthy. So I never really thought much about my birth as more than a regular birth but just a little early. Like a month and half early. A study of 148 premature infants from 1966-75 that weighed 1000g or less found that 48 of those babies survived. That's less than a 50% survival rate. More like 32%. Not bad, but I can't imagine that hearing your doctor tell you that your baby has a 32% chance of living is all that reassuring. I've heard people say that your birth story plays a big role in defining the person you become. Je suis forte. I guess I just never really saw myself as that strong. Survivor strong. 

Did the Fates see my future and say to themselves "This girl better be strong or die now."? Probably not, but it makes a nice cartoon in my head. I can see Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos each holding my life thread, tugging it between them to see how far they can stretch it before it feels like it might snap. Maybe Clotho and Lachesis kept Atropos from snipping it with her scissors or they found the thread to be too strong to be snipped. It makes a nice visual and I am thankful that I ended up as one of the 32%. I am thankful to have a mother who is strong enough to survive a child like me. I am also thankful for the other women in my life who were part of the tribe who raised me. All of them played a hand in shaping the woman I am today.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend and a truly Thankful Friday.

AT WAR WITH MY OVARIES

Oh good lord this face

elephant_soap's photo on Instagram

Remember when I said that everyone was pregnant? Well, we've reached the point were those babies are actually being born. Charlotte came months ago and she's this lovely drooly round squishy goodness of a baby. She makes the most wonderful faces and she's going to be so mad at us when she turns into a teenager for some of those faces we captured on (digital) film. Too bad Charlotte. You've been born into a framily of jokers and hilarity and dang if you don't make the perfect faces for meming. You can thank us all now for helping you develop the greatest sense of humor. After Charlotte, one of my coworkers had her baby. We had a month to ooh and awe over the picture she emailed to everyone before it was finally Jeff and his wife's turn. I was standing in line at IKEA Saturday when Jeff sent me a text with a picture of their newest member of the family, a perfect little girl born at 11:03 that morning. I promptly burst into tears.

And then my ovaries and my brain had the big baby debate. My ovaries would say that women my age have babies all the time. It's true. The CDC has a report on pregnancy rates for 2009 showing a decrease in pregnancies for woman under thirty while pregnancies increased significantly for women thirty and over. All the report is saying is that women are waiting until later in life to have kids. This isn't news. Women and their partners are just making a decision to wait a little bit on the whole kid thing until the woman is established comfortably in her career and they are financially stable enough to support another human being. Except my brain knows that even though pregnancies are up for this age group, fertility is down. The ideal age for pregnancy is really in the late teens, early twenties. Your eggs have the least possible genetic mutations and chromosome realign correctly during cell division. Your body can carry and deliver a baby easier at this age too. Your joints are more elastic for expanding and you have a faster recovery time. Except most women I know usually don't hear their biological clock ticking until they're at least thirty. Our bodies are a Catch 22. 

My ovaries can at times violently tell my brain that yes we can totally do this at our age. "At our age". (Like I'm really all that old. I am not old in the grand scheme of life.) Those ovaries will say "Hey! you eat your leafy greens and do yoga. Your body can totally do this without blinking an eye." Thank God my brain is so much smarter than this because my brain knows that my body has to make it through more than the act of carrying a baby inside me and delivering that baby. This body then has to care for that baby. There's five years or more of picking up, carting around, opening doors with feet, being used as a personal jungle gym, being used as a personal trampoline, chasing after (which requires running) and you get the idea. Maybe the load gets a little lighter after the five years, but then comes the carpool lanes and the running to soccer games and the rushing to scouts and the trotting to dance classes. Things might slow down once the kid is driving, but that only brings along the damage of stress caused by worrying about that kid driving and being where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there.

So yeah, my ovaries may kick me heard enough to make me cry at times, but my brain is wise enough to brush those tears away and move forward in that check out line. 

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The healing waters

elephant_soap's photo on Instagram

Hey, remember when I said something about still not being sure that this whole domain and hosting crap would not fall apart? It fell apart. The original elephantsoap.com no longer works or re-directs to this site. Here are my options: 1. Pay the current hosting place 2. Move to a different cheaper hosting place or 3. Own the domain name, but forget about using it any more. I'm really leaning to number three mainly because I don't want to pay for more hosting. Also, I kind of don't really care any more. But Michael was all "NO WAY! You are not dropping that domain!". It was in an email, so I'm only assuming that he was pointing his finger at me while saying that. There's also that whole thing about everyone knows the dot com address. There's search history to that address. It's the first house I ever lived in (I still remember my childhood home address as a route number). I'm sure when I discuss these options with Michael he'll convince me to pay for the extra hosting. Any way, I am aware that there is a problem and I'm working on it. I promise. 

The weird thing is that I kind of feel like I have an inkling of what I'm doing. I still haven't emailed Todd in a panic. Todd's probably all "Thank God!". Not that he has been anything but wonderful when it comes to my panic about the blog emails. But come on. Todd has his own gig to deal with. I'm super thankful for all his help, but I'm also thankful that I can take that burden from him. It feels nice to be able to say "Hey Todd? You don't need to worry about this. I've got it". It feels nice to say it and almost even believe it. I've got this. No really. I've got this. I'm grateful for that confidence.

What else? Sometimes Thankful Friday turns into a just a wrap up of the week. Not a bad thing at all. I am so thankful for the time I spent with friends last weekend. There's nothing better than letting a friend's baby chew on your finger or making that baby laugh. Oh! The joy of making a baby laugh. I'm thankful for the afternoon and evening spent in Robin's backyard talking about everything. I am thankful for slumber parties at the Jens' and puppies that sneak into the bed to cuddle with you.  I am thankful for some pretty stellar moments on my yoga mat. And....get this....I'm thankful that construction on the bathroom is finally going to start next week. Really, I'm thankful that Michael called the company so I didn't have to. I'm thankful for you guys too.

Here's to a blissful weekend and a super Thankful Friday!