Toddled Dredge

Yesterday I went in for my weekly check-up.  I have been using the same OBGYN practice for the last three pregnancies, and by now the doctors are very familiar to me.  There are four of them, and I see all four during the course of a pregnancy.  My baby will be delivered by whichever of them happens to be on call at the time.

It is a good practice with knowledgeable and reliable doctors, but each has his or her quirks.  This one talks too much and must be interrupted if I want to make sure she understands a problem.  That one almost never blinks.  This one has a great bedside manner but is uncomfortable discussing weight issues.  And the doctor I saw yesterday is the most likely to have the facts at his fingertips if I want to discuss the latest pregnancy study, but he is very rigid about rules.

So yesterday I was examined by Dr. Rules and I made the mistake of saying that the baby does not move very much.  He immediately started saying DECREASED MOVEMENT in big capital letters and insisted that I have the baby monitored.  I explained that it was not “decreased movement,” that this baby had never moved very much, and he asked about my kick counts.  I do not do kick counts with this baby because if I actually called the doctor every time I could not get 10 kicks in an hour, I would be calling the doctor every single day. This is a docile, sleepy baby, at least in the womb.

The two doctors at this practice who have actually carried babies in their own wombs are completely unbothered by the sedentary nature of this baby and comfortably tell me to call only if she begins moving less than customary.  But Dr. Rules was having none of it, so he ordered me to be hooked up to the monitor so they could measure the baby’s movement and heart rate for twenty minutes.

Of course, the nurse could not get a reading from the baby if I lay in a remotely comfortable position, so she made me lie on my back.  Lying on my back during pregnancy hurts and it makes breathing difficult.  But HEY! I’m just the gestating mother! Why should I need to breathe?

After fifteen minutes of back-lying torture which revved up my heartburn, made my stomach muscles cramp, raised my blood pressure and gave me sciatic twinges, I was growling phrases like “know-it-all doctors” and “over-medicalized births” and “stupid waste of my time.”  They concluded that OH! the baby hardly moves at all, so they brought out the buzzer to wake her up enough to kick to their satisfaction.  Then they finally released me.

I was grumpy about the whole thing, and I will remember next time to fake it when Dr. Rules asks me about kick counts.  I will also fortify myself with lots of Hathor the Cow Goddess before my next appointment.

In the meantime, you can also read my thoughts on pregnancy at my latest 5MFP post, where I growl considerably less about it.

I spent a lousy day in the hospital being tested for preeclampsia.  I don’t have it (yet), but my blood pressure is high and I am helplessly pukey a couple of nights a week.  I wrote a post for 5 Minutes for Parenting about my thoughts on the matter.

The Toddled Dredge blog is getting a little dusty.  At this stage of pregnancy, I’m afraid survival is about all I can manage.  Even the usual insistence it takes to get computer time for myself seems currently beyond my stamina.  There are only a few weeks of pregnancy left (please, God), and then things should get a little better.  It’s not easy to blog with a newborn either, but the inviolate house rule around here is that, since nursing is the world’s most boring activity, the Breastfeeding Woman gets the computer.  Every time.  No exceptions.  Deal.  The whining of a four-year-old who loves PBSkids.org a little too much will NOT be tolerated.

In the meantime, I just finished re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (wonderful!), I watched all of the episodes of Burn Notice on hulu.com, and I have a decent man crush on Dangerous Davies from the BBC series The Last Detective.  If only he would ditch his annoying friend Mod, we could be very happy together.

As long as he doesn’t mind an enormous pregnant woman who can’t keep her food down.  Because really, what’s more attractive than that?

Today at the park I removed a tiny, tiny spider from PoppySeed’s eyelashes.

When I thought about passing on family traditions, I never thought this woud be one.

(Dear readers who do not use American spelling reform - I confess that the American spelling of judgment has always pained me, but I am what I am, and cannot do differently.  Kindly imagine an e between the g and the m if you are feeling queasy.)

Beck just wrote a post at 5 Minutes for Parenting about that great bugbear of mommyblogging: judging others.  In the parenting blogosphere there is a general insistence on sunny optimism and bonhomie about each other’s parenting skills and choices.  We are a community, you see, and we are not supposed to judge.  At least, we are not supposed to judge each other about parenting.  There is plenty of judgment passed out about politics, religion, money, fashion, writing and perceived slights.  A democrat blogger might write about evil republican scum (or vice versa), but when it comes to actual parenting, we are supposed to join hands and sing “Kum Ba Yah, every mother is doing her best and let’s support each other.”

It’s time you knew: I am not doing my best.

I have never done my best.  I am a paralyzed perfectionist, and just about the worst advice anyone could ever give me is “Just do your best.”  This is about as helpful to me as suggesting that if I just tried a little harder, I could painlessly levitate my baby from my womb instead of dealing with all that messy labor.  “Best” is a standard impossible to me, utterly out of reach of my nature.  I will always find a flaw in my efforts somwehere.  Part of my growth as an adult has been to learn to accept a standard of “good enough” instead.

Or as my brother once told me when I freaked out about a college test: “Veronica, if the minimum wasn’t good enough, there wouldn’t be a minimum.”

There is actually a minimum to parenting, and we do not all agree on what that is.  Sure, we agree on a few basics: you must love your children, you must feed and shelter them, you must not beat them.  But there is a world  of standards beyond that, and we will not agree on all of those standards.

I cannot get all worked up, say, about which method of discipline parents choose for their kids, but I damn sure get worked up if they DON”T discipline their kids.  Discipline is not optional.  Nor is teaching your kids some measure of respect for authority.  We all have to live with your kids, and if you raise them to only disrespect rules laid down by authorities, then I do not want to drive on the same road with them.  If your son has learned from you that people will always say yes if he just keeps asking long enough, then I do not want your son dating my daughter.  If you teach your kids by example that stealing from big organizations doesn’t count as stealing, then I do not want your child as my employee or coworker.

In short, if you do those things, then I am judging your parental decisions.  It’s not a harsh or final judgment - as noted above, I know I’m flawed too, and I have plenty of boneheaded mistakes of my own.  But judgment as condemnation is one thing; judgment as discernment is something else.  Community and kindness do not require us to pretend that bad decisions are good ones.  We have all made bad decisions sometime; we cannot form a truly helpful community if we forbid ourselves from saying so.

So perhaps we could pause a little from the “we’re all doing our best” mantra.  We’re not.  I let my kids watch more movies and eat more junk food than they should.  It’s okay to tell me that, as long as you tell me like a friend who has made her own mistakes.  Recognizing that we don’t all make the best decisions all the time should not be the death knell of community; it should be part of building community.  The friend who lovingly tells me I don’t ___________ enough and then comes over to my house to help me out so I can - that friend will always be a more essential part of my community than the Pollyanna who tells me I’m doing my best, and just leaves me to it.

The girls slept a little late today (7:40AM!), and when they woke, I gathered them all into my bed.  They love to snuggle me in the morning.  Sweetpea is my most dedicated snuggler, flopping into position somewhere on my body and sticking that thumb in her mouth.  Ah, contentment.  PoppySeed is fifteen months old and has no interest in cuddling, preferring instead to use me a stepladder to whatever she finds interesting above the bed.

We lie there like a mother dog with a heap of puppies and I enjoy it in brief moments.  The moments are only brief because morning snuggles hurt.  This morning I had one bony four-year-old elbow ground into my arm, several three-year-old kicks to my stomach, and a nineteen-pound toddler tried to stand on my neck.

Parenting is dangerous.

I know it’s worth it.  I know there will come a day when they will not want to snuggle Mama in the morning, and a few bruises will seem a small price to pay for all that missed closeness.  I try to enjoy the snuggles now, knowing that they are in limited supply.

That’s what I tell myself anyway.  It’s hard to feel entirely appreciative with a black eye.

My new post is up at 5 Minutes for Parenting.  I wrote about a parenting issue I do well.  Take a minute to stop by and brag on yourself by telling me about a parenting thing you know you do right.