tv [untitled] CSPAN June 14, 2009 9:00am-9:30am EDT
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lactation consultant nor i had noticed the baby was getting no milk when he nursed. he had probably not managed to extract more than a few ounces of milk a day since he was born. he was, in short, starving to death. i had been worrying about the baby's weight from the day after he was born. for the first few days after he nursed, my breasts would leak clos strum. i can't say that, and i just don't know if i can say breasts, breasts, breasts on c-span. can you say breasts? okay. breasts. my breasts would leak coloss strum. loathe to waste the precious liquid, i'd asked for a breast pump. my plan had been to pump immediately after he nursed and mix with a bottle of sugar water
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which i would then encourage him to drink. the hospital lactation consultant had walked in on me. why are you doing that, she said, you've got plenty of milk. instead of wondering why my breasts were so full after the baby had supposedly nursed, she confiscated the pump. i fretted. whenever anyone came to see him, i would ask, do you think he looks too skinny? i would measure the circumference of his thigh with my thumb and middle finger. when i couldn't get an appointment with the pediatrician, i asked the local public health nurse to come by and weigh him. unfortunately, she was far more interested in screening me for domestic violence than in evaluating the baby. he's fine, she said absently ticking off an item from her
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checklist. has your husband physically assaulted you in the past 30 days? [laughter] i was worried, but i accepted everyone's reassurances that abe was doing fine, that my concern was a reflection of my own neuroses. i went forward with abe's bris who also missed the fact the baby was still suffering from starvation. i was, however, sufficiently concerned not to be altogether surprised at our pediatrician's response when she finally put him on a scale. give this to him, she said, no. abe drank four ounces of formula in 5 minutes, astonishing for a baby his aim. i sat there weeping, sick at the
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thought that he'd been in pain. he'd cried a lot doing what he could to let us know he was hungry. after a while, however, he had stopped. he was a good baby, we told people. we hadn't realized he had simply grown too weak to utter more than the smallest whimper. the pediatrician said she would allow us to take him home for one night, but 24 hours later when she put him on the scale, he had gained almost a full pound. i held him in the palms of my hands all night long watched his chest rise and fall. during those hours the membrane between life and death seemed so very thin. he was tiny, a weightless bundle of sticks wrapped in translucent skin. i felt his heart beating and the blood flowing through his veins. as soon as he opened his mouth, i or michael popped into a
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bottle. we kept feeding him long after he wanted to go back to sleep. we unwrapped him from his blankets, tickled the soles of his feet, anything to keep him awake. i gave myself no more than an hour and a quarter between pumping sessions. all of this i told the woman behind me at the bakery. [laughter] i showed her that the milk was colored a faint shade of purple from the ointment i'd been applying to treat thrush. i told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was. i live in berkeley. she gave me absolution. i was doing great, she said,
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keep it up because you know, breast is best. over the course of the next six months, i continued my punishing pumping schedule. i gave over the actual feeding of the baby to my husband, who managed to keep him steadily gaining weight. i enlisted the assistance of a team of lactation consultants. every few hours i settled into the glider rocker in a darkened room, a nursing pillow circling my waist called my breast friend -- yep -- and tried to cajole abe into doing something more with my nipple that moving it around with his tongue. i took him to l.a. to consult with the lactation institute, a place that promised me it could solve the problems of any nursing pair, that is mother and baby. i had imagined a medical clinic
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with consulting rooms with experts spouting the latest in breast-feeding research. what i got looked more like the headquarters of a marxist student newspaper 1971. there were the usual posters on the wall, the usual pile of magazines with names like the vegan quarterly, the lesbians guide to yoga -- [laughter] and the usual assortment of herbal teas and mugs. the consultants mothered me. best of all, they were confident that they could help showing me an oversized syringe attach today a long needle, they said you fill the syringe with breast milk, then you put your finger in the mouth and slide the needle in alongside it. while he sucks on your finger,
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slowly, slowly depress the 34ru7bger. make sure you go no faster than he can swallow. easy as pie except it took a full 20 minutes to give him a single ounce. at that time abe was consuming about 36 ounces of breast milk a day. at that rate, 12 hours of my day would be devoted just to feeding him. it took two hands and full concentration, and add to that the six hours a day i spent pumping. by have three other children, i wailed when i did the math, when do i sleep? well, the lactation consultant said giving my shoulders a squeeze, it's really just a question of how committed you are. in a few months, i'm sure he'll have learned to do it on his own. i packed up the baby and took him to the airport, i pumped on the plane the baby precariously
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balanced against the armrest. i resolutely ignored the people around me who stared transfixed and horrified as i struggled to produce a replacement for the bottle of breast milk i spilled all over my baby when the full syringe went flying because of turbulence. if he stops sucking your finger, you back off the plunger, i said. that way he only gets milk when he sucks. michael had by now stopped looking at the baby. instead, he was staring at me, his mouth gaping. are you kidding me, he said finally. i know it's really time consuming, i said. yeah, you could say that. but it's really just a question of how committed we are. you know what, michael said, turns out we're not that committed. [laughter] he threw the syringe and the pack of needles into the trash.
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that night when the lactation consultant called to check up on our progress, michael took the phone away from me. we're finished, he told her, enough is enough. i pumped for a month or two after that until i'd stockpiled enough milk in the freezer, then i returned the pump and called it quits. for the next year, however, whenever i mixed up a bottle of formula for abraham, i felt shame that i still feel to this day. the good mothers would cast a glance at abe's bottle and loose their pendulous breasts from their cow-spotted nursing bras as they cuddled their expert nursing babies i would blush. i was a bad mother. the reaction i had to having failed to nurse a baby whose malformed pal at made it
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impossible was the same one i'd experienced after attempting a vaginal birth after cesarean. that effort had resulted in 44 hours of unmedicated labor followed by another c-section. when pregnant with his older brother zeke, i spent most of my time online chatting and reading about how to avoid a medically-unnecessary cesarean. and all she sair yarns were, according to experts, unnecessary. women around me were having babies in birthing tubs and had birth plans. granted, i live in berkeley. perhaps in other parts of the country a woman who ends up under the knife is not derided as too posh to push.
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[laughter] posh or not, i never got to push. after 44 hours, a doctor shoved my midwife aside and ordered a c-section. when zeke was a fussy newborn who loathed all systems of transportation, especially his stroller, i was once walking home from running errands. i had been holding him all day, and my back felt like it had been worked over by a pack of foul-tempered ninjas. hoping to distract him from the fact that he was separated from my body by a full foot and a half, i kept up a constant patter. on the final uphill leg of the trip i said something like, yes, yes, the world is a terrible place, and you are the saddest baby in it. a woman spun around, her hand clutching her mouth in horror, how dare you, she said, lips white with range. how dare you impose your
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negative view of the universe on that child! [laughter] now, i'm sure there are women who circumcise their sons, who use dispose nl diapers who are smug, snarky and unpleasant. i may be one of them. but there seems to be a particular brand of sarnt moanny practiced by those who choose to exclusively breast-feed, use a family bed and wear their babies in slings. proponents of attachment parenting wean their babies as late as possible. that baby is so disgusted with me. i know, it's terrible. you're so lucky. think of it that way. [laughter] there are eight principles of attachment parenting developed by dr. william serious, but they
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are, frankly, too dull to enumerate. i have been informed by at least one attachment parenting adherent and not as the punch line of a joke that a baby's body should be in constant contact with one of her parents for her entire first year of life. anything less is child abuse. now, look, i know of course the majority of devotees are marvelous, generous people whose sole interest lies in doing the best they can to raise contented, secure children. don't you dare go, that baby is providing that right sound effects. but why are there so many others who are so very self-righteous? there's something called the berkeley parents network, and it was founded by this lovely woman named ginger ogle. hundreds of people post every
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month seeking -- i think thousands at this point -- every month seeking guidance on everything from potty training to how to deal with philandering spouses. moderators are warned that spanking, stay at home moms, circumdecision and television have a history of generating emotional responses. one issue in particular seems to draw out people's ire. in september 2003 in response to a desperate mother's plea for advice on how to sleep train her wakeful baby, anonymous poster referred to all nonnon-sanked styles as abandonment parenting. her attempt to seek support was greeted with an accusation of child neglect. in a letter to subscribers,
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ginger responded we seem to have an on going problem with some of our attachment parenting subscribers making the assumption that the rest of us need to be instructed on the proper techniques of parenting. it was not a problem we have with the newsletters, just the attachment participanting people. things were quieter for a bit, but soon enough the scolding resumed. i have seen women on the sites, and it is always women, accusing one another of practicing detachment parnght, by allowing their babies to cry. i've read posts that inform mothers who don't sleep with a copy of the baby book tucked under their pillows that they will never have children as independent as those lucky enough to be born in non-western
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cultures. the first nine months of life should be considered the second stage of gestation. don't put that baby down. when i asked ginger ogle while she thinks it can be so strident, she says it's because this kind of parenting is a belief system, nearly a religion. some of these parents believe in cloth diapers, breast-feeding baby, etc., in exactly the same way southern babb p bah baptists believe as the bible is the word of god. it is inarguable that certitude does not tolerate dissent. it responds to it with fury. those of us whose parenting style can be described as a series of reflexes, instincts and minute by minute adjustments rather than a philosophy are
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less invested in our own practices. what we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. what we need to remember is there is no need to apologize for that even when confronted with the most red-faced outrage. it's also important to acknowledge that the impulse to tsk has probably been indulged at one time or another by all of us. i remember grocery shopping once not long after my oldest child had been diagnosed with mercury poisoning when i saw a pregnant woman tossing a few cans of tuna into her cart. the words, you really shouldn't, were repeated more than once. only when i finally noticed she was side lg away down the aisle did it dawn on me i had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
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what is it about parenting that allows us to indulge our inner scold? normally, most of us don't feel particularly threatened about the choices other people make. you live in a split-level ranch, i live in a craftsman bungalow. i might like my house better than yours, but i'd never stop you on the street and tell you to do something about your aluminum siegd. sure, each issue -- even architecture -- has its fa gnat ticks, but parenting seems to have more, and they're more vocal. another parent's different approach raises the possibility that you've made a mistake with your child. we simply can't tolerate that because we fear any mistake, no matter how minor, could have devastating consequences. so we proclaim the superiority of our own choices. we've lost sight of the fact that people have preferences. as a parent i am absolutely certain of only one thing, my
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own fallibility. i use disposable diapers because it's easier. i circumcised my sons because we're jewish, though i cried the whole time. i sleep trained my children, i feed my kids organic food and milk, but abe consumes only two food groups, meat and candy. [laughter] i wouldn't be surprised if the kid eats a pound of chocolate a week. on weekends even the little ones veg out to the simpsons. my kid pontificates about the most incredible things, you know, he knows about modernist music, he learned it all on the simpsons. [laughter] i have tried to learn to accept these failures to inure myself to those who are so confident that they do it all better than i do.
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but still, nearly six years after abe's adventures in breast-feeding, there is a defensiveness about the way i tell these stories. i tried really hard, i seem to be saying. it's not my fault, forgive me. parenting is incredibly hard work ian without having to look over your shoulder to make sure you're doing the way the neighbors, actual and cyber, think you should. let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. failing that, let's just go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental but only behind one another's backs. [laughter] [applause] thanks. all right. now, mom, untie that bag. there's a knot in it, so you might have to tear it open. who is my first questioner? come on, there are prizes, people. even if you don't have a question, invent one.
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[laughter] think of one. the prizes are so good. this is -- ah. madam, who i don't know at all, never met you before. [laughter] what is your question, dear strange lady? >> i was wondering -- >> sit down, sit down. >> if your children have read your book. >> my children refuse to read anything i or their father have ever written. like, the oldest -- you know, my husband wrote a book for children, the oldest struggled through it and the second one was like, forget it, it's too long, i'm boring. but i forced them to listen to every single thing that had their name in it in this book, so there was scene of scene of me reading aloud to zeke who's 11, almost 12, and he was like, oh, shut up, i don't care, i don't care. but i wanted to be able to say when he accuses me in five years
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of abusing him i want to be able to say, dude, you totally said it was okay. [laughter] so i needed his approval. so no is the answer, but not because i haven't tried. and now, oh, my god, it's so exciting. wait, hold on. come, come forward, oh strange woman, to receive your prize. [laughter] it's a lunchable. get it? they're all bad mother prizes. [applause] and i would just like to point out that finding a lunchable in trie beck ca is, i don't know, trying to find a jew at the vatican. it's impossible. [laughter] okay. now you know the prizes are good. >> i don't know what a lunchable is. so first of all i just want to confess that as much as i love you and your book that i will not be buying it because i live
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in park slope and my wife lives in rim which means this is a documentary to us. >> excellent. but you still have to buy it, come on, dude, and don't say it on c-span. >> so look, the question is to what degree do you think that sort of the intensity, the professionalization, i would say of parenting and particularly motherhood is about all these chicks like you and me, we're middle class, upper middle class, we went to good schools, we got degrees, and at some point a lot of women decided they would rather stay home and raise children, and i feel like the intensity that people are bringing that is sort of the intensity of what you didn't do with your harvard degree, that you just have to be the best and most competitive at it. it's the newest form of misogyny among women. >> that's interesting. i just want to point out, mom, it's totally your fault. she wants to know how this is all my mother's fault, and i am
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about to explain. [laughter] this is all my mother's fault because my mother raised you like i'm sure your mother raised you in the '70s and '80st. she raised me to believe that i could have everything and i should have everything, and she prepared me very well to have a career. so i did well in school because those were the expectations and i, you know, got a great job that i love. i went to the institutions that gave sticker rights on the back of the car, that aspen station wagon was like a a chariot unto the gods, and i did all the things i was supposed to, and i had incredible ambitions generated in me by my mother except the world didn't change as fast as we did, or if you're a conspiracy theorist, you would say that the world changed in
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this nefarious way. suddenly, the workplace became this place you had to be in all the time. so when i was a kid, the train that showed up in new jersey at, say, 6:00, all the dads got off the train and went home. well, now that 6:00 train, there isn't a living sole on that train -- soul on that train. it was just at that moment that suddenly being a good professional meant you had to be at work all the time, nonstop. 8:00 face time, you know? so i think i don't know any women who have children who have not made some kind of professional sacrifice. they may be working as hard as they did, but somewhere they made sacrifices for their kids, and i think particularly women who chose to stay home with their kids, you know, when you've strived your whole life to achieve this goal and you abandon it, well, then the cause for your abandonment had really
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better be worth it. so, like, the nursery school committee that's run by the former cfo of a dot.com is the best damn nursery school committee you've ever seen, and this is an actual i ware to got thing, the brownie troop run by the former pediatric encolings so, you know, when they do their badge for first aid, they're basically giving people tracheotomies. [laughter] and god bless all those women, right? because that means you and i don't have to be on the nursery school committee, but at the same time it kind of ratchets up this anxiety for all of us. and now your prize. >> i actually have a follow up. lucky charms. >> my daughter will be happy about this. >> proves my point. >> but dope you think it is --
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don't you think this is just the hate red that especially straight women -- >> isn't this the latest form hate red women have always felt for one another? oh, that's depressing. you don't see a lot of, like, with some exceptions on some issues, you don't see a lot of men out there screaming, you suck, you're doing this wrong. i don't get hate mail from men. i mean, i've gotten some hate -- not hate but respectful disagreement from men who are pro-life, but i've never gotten an, oh, my god, you're a bad mother. i get can you help me make my wife more like you? well, you can imagine what they're saying. aren't you excited? the prizes are getting better and better. quick, someone. god.
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come on. yes. thank you. >> i'm not asking you to be judgmental, but i'm just curious what these attachment children turn out to be like. >> yeah. she's curious what the attachment children turn out to be like. >> well, you know, i don't know yet. i'm sure some of them are wonderful people, but then you sort of wonder what a child who's been raised on the altar of his mother's ambition, how he feels about himself and his place in the world. and i think that we may be creating these outsized egos. there was all that talk a year or so ago about young people entering the workplace and how they need constant positive reinformts like awesome, dude, you tried so hard, you know? and how they're used to getting this kind of stroking, stroking, stroking, and there are all these seminars for managers on how to stroke your -- you know, because they need this constant
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positive reinforcement. i'm like, oh, my god, whatever. just do your damn job. okay, prize. [laughter] cheese whiz. >> it's getting dangerous. >> i know, exactly. next, next, we'll take another question. yes, madame. >> i was just wondering if you could say more about the issue of fatherhood. i've taught feminist theory courses, and we theorize mothering as a practice, and there's almost nothing on fatherhood, and there's not a lot of men in the class thinking how am i going to juggle -- >> so the question is about fatherhood and how incredibly low the bar is, basically. [laughter] so my husband, same cafe, my husband's standing there and he's getting like
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