we did it

not only am I of course thrilled that we made twleve hundred dollars for SOS, but I am so relieved for Jesse that it actually happened and worked. (Not to mention being glad to have not burned or otherwise wrecked all that donated food!) Everyone who played wants to do it again next year, the food was great, the beer was great, and everyone had a great time.
I have to admit that it freaked me out a litte to be down in Depot town with the streets closed down and the crazy ypsi crowd wandering around, and to hear these musicians whom I love, telling everyone how great this thing is that Jesse and Amy Morgan are doing and to hear Ypsi - tiki bar, restaraunt patios and loveable-freak-filled-street - roar back. It felt like dream. a good one.

for the love of god, lighten up woman!

ok,
I just read back at the long string of typical beginning of the school year angst and realized that

it's not that bad.

as much as I may not be thrilled about teaching, at least I seem to be doing an ok job and am appreciated (if mildly) by my colleagues and I can pay the house payment. I get to play guitar and jump around everyday, I am within 2 minutes of great pad thai (yep, just finished lunch) and the funfest is going to happen. We are healthy and safe and involved in what's going on around us, and in spite of global warming,the trees are turning colors.

confessions

bless me father for...

I am a tenured teacher.
(Mr. Gold says "you are the institution.")
I was telling everyone because I wanted it to mean more than that I have put off midwifery for five years out of college.
I wanted dinner or something.
Instead, on my way to grad school (see eponymous post)
I ate Wendys for dinner. Fries and a frosty.
And snickers for breakfast today.

I haven't seen S till eight o'clock once this week.
I'm not drinking enough water.
I don't know if I can handle having another kid.
The toilet is still leaking.
I have not vaccuumed under the bed in like 6 months.
I have no idea how much money is in my checking account, what food is in the fridge, which -if any- clothes are clean, what I'm going to do to my room for open-house tomorrow, how I am going to finish this lesson plan for the Michigan Department of Education, and whether I will look like an idiot if they decide to tape me.
Scratch that, I know I'll look like an idiot if I'm chosen to be on the video. My singing voice is not good. I don't look people in the eyes when I get tired. My car has cracker crumbs all over the seat, and there is lint in my big toenails. I don't practice enough piano, I talk too much, drink too much, think too much, and I definitely make stuff up on my homework.

My god I am heartily sorry for all my inadequacies.
May my gratitude for all the goodness in the world
cause me to be less of a whiny jerk,
and not shoot myself in the face.

costumes

As a pregnant person, I was so good about food and rest and water and exercise. I was pretty happy go-lucky even in the end of August huge and fat. I didn't binge on anything or treat my family poorly, but I did have a problem with wintergreen Altoids. I was like a smoker who knows where they're cheaper, and plans around getting them on the way to and from. I'd always have a box in reserve, hid the tins in the trunk, admitted the problem and just kept right on crunching (yes crunching) those curiously strong mints. My son seems fine, doesn't smell wierd or twitch, knows his letters etc... So I'd been feeling like I was home free on the birth defects from Altoids front.
Then,
I explained Halloween (kind of) to S last night. After telling him how he gets to wear a costume and be anyone he wants, I was expecting Buzz Light Year, or Ernie, or a toad. However, when asked what he wanted to dress up as this year, he said,
"An Altoid."
Yep.
Clear as day. "Like in mama's purse."

There you have it.
Call the APA.

How to be Born

BORN IN THE USA
How a Broken Maternity System Must Be
Fixed to Put Women and Childen First.
By Marsden Wagner M.D.. M.S.
295pp. University of Calfornia Press.



Scientists, in order for their research to have any kind of statistical validity, need to be dispassionate and totally unbiased. Doctors are not scientists. We hire them for their opinions.

Surgeons, in order to be able to make that cut and sew it up right, need to be cool and decisive, even detached. In fact, many hospitals will not allow surgeons to operate on close friends or relatives. Yet it is continuity of care and a trusting relationship with the care provider that most consistently increases positive outcomes and experiences for women in labor and birth. Obstetricians are surgeons

Obstetricians, like all doctors, are trained in pathology (disease.) Their experience and expectations of labor are that it is risky, painful and needs medical intervention to happen successfully. Healthy laboring women need, more than anything, to be trusted, monitored, protected, supported and left alone.

Who can blame doctors who only see what happens in the hospital; who are expected to manage every possible reproductive health issue, ward off litigation, keep clinic hours for prenatals, post partum visits and non-pregnant women, AND go to births; if they try to make their lives a little easier by scheduling more cesarean sections, speeding up or inducing labor with medication, and cutting routine episiotomies to help move things along?

Marsden Wagner, for one. In his new book he offers a clear picture of how and why American obstetrics is basically out of control.

Throughout the world healthy pregnant women are attended primarily by midwives and give birth in out-of-hospital settings. Among industrialized nations, the rate of women reporting satisfaction with their birth experiences and positive outcomes increases with the rate of midwifery care. Although the US spends more per capita on obstetric technology and has a higher rate of medical interventions than any other industrialized nation, our rates of infant morbidity and mortality are among the highest and continue to rise. Many obstetric practices in the united states do not conform to world health organization (WHO) guidelines, or even the recommendations of the FDA. Womens' labors are often induced for no medical reason, putting mothers and children at unnecessary risk. This is often done using Cytotech, a drug that is known to cause uterine hyperstimulation, amniotic fluid embolism and uterine rupture. Not only is thie drug used "off-label" (for a different purpose than the one for which the FDA originally approved it) but it is actually contraindicated for use in pregnant women. The rate of cesarean section, which the WHO says should not exceed 15% is above 30% in the US (and higher than 50% in many hospitals) Many women are not informed that the drugs they are being given are being used experimentally, or educated about other, non-medical options in labor and birth.

Wagner describes the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) as a "tribe" with all the unspoken rules and hierarchy you'd expect. He tells many stories of doctors refusing to make official statements that would lead to negative consequences for another obstetrician; of midwives losing their practices because they couldn't get physician back-up, of oversight committees and peer review boards who take turns justifying one anothers' actions rather than forthrightly grieving loss, learning a lesson and moving toward evidence based practice.

This book would be a heavy handed condemnation, were it not for the vision of what could be. In Dr. Wagner's perfect world, healthy women are attended by midwives at home or in free-standing birth centers. Obsetricians attend high risk births in hospital settings.
Perinatologists (scientists) get the funding they need to do substantive research that begins to shape the scope and direction of maternity care.
Women form neighborhood self-education groups and care for eachother during pregnancy with the supervision of a local midwife. They become educated about and intimiately involved with their own health care while forging the invaluable relationships that will aid them throughout parenthood.
Midwives and doctors are equals. They collaborate and value eachother's insight and experience.
A singlepayer, or socialized medical system provides quality care for all pregnant and laboring women; making it possible for midwives to make a reasonable living, while reducing patient cost.
All health care practitioners are accountable to their clients and to oversight within the system.
All kinds of people all over the country know about, have experience with, and trust the process of labor and birth.
Women becoming pregant have a clear idea of what their care will look like. They go into labor for the first time having seen their mothers, aunts, cousins and friends do the same thing; sensing their connection to the millions of mothers who have made thier lives possible, and with the determination to instill in their daughters the same trust and strength that will sustain them through one of the most profound experiences of their lives.

I find it truly inspiring that, for all his familiarity with very frightening statistics, the author really seems to believe that profound change is not only possible, but that it's coming. And that women - that's us, ladies -
will be the ones to bring it.

frenzy plunges into conflict

1.develop composition inservice for monday morning
2.put cds in raffle baskets and design tickets to be printed
3.create signage for concert, henna tattoos and raffles
4.pick up food donations and
5.cook food for 60 hungry musicians and their signifs
6.finish book review for the birthproject
7.pick up nostril ring from pangea (more on that later)
8.find and fix bathroom leak
9.prune the tops of spirea and forsythia
10.put up fence
11.move impossibly large pile of stinking compost
12.do grad school homework (see #11)
13. get, wrap, and make card for step-dad-in-law birthday present
14. deliver to Tecumseh
15. eat gross food from bad restaurant
16.lose five pounds
17.become a nicer person
18. practice cello everyday
woops.... little carried away

ok, #7. - I actually got a message from the piercing place (the silver nose hoop that I made for myself is starting to turn me green, so I ordered one in surgical steel) saying "Come to Pangea and pick up your fucking nosering." click.
WHAT?!?!?!
Seriously, I get the hard-core routine, but come on! Pardon my inconveniencing you by ordering something from your store; thanks a shitload for taking 4 weeks to get it in, and leaving-once it's finally arrived- an obscene message on my phone, with no store hours, price or contact info. To top it off, apparently they accidentally sold my nose ring to someone else, so now they want me to order it again.

I'd just like to say, to every disorganized, demanding, well-meaning or malicious, rude, needy, or just plain curious person who sees my busy-ness as a beacon or some kind of responsibility magnet; drawing them inexorably toward me with the intent to unload, delegate, or ask for a favor; as I pick up my "one more cup" of coffee, take a deep ragged breath, settle into my desk chair, and turn my back on the soft, warm, wonderful call of my too-long empty bed...

I'll get right on that.

morning in detroit

instead of breakfast today, we made the trek to eastern market. I love the city this time of year. I guess anything looks good against a September sky, but Downtown was so beautiful, and there is no place like Detroit for some quality people watching.
umm......
I can't believe how tired I am.

scans

from a series of kids' songs lyrics. old style illuminations they are not. but one of the woodcuts is going to be the cover art for the next birthproject. www.thebirthproject.com

grad school

My mother (a nurse) and her sister (a dental hygenist) are the only two people in either of my parents families to graduate from college. My Dad, although he's now a liscensed builder and engineer, was in a religious studies program, but dropped out for trade school, like many of my uncles; one or two mechanics, a foreman in a sheetmetal shop, a glazer. One aunt works for the city of Detroit, one at a daycare, a few clean houses and one is a stylist. Their parents worked at similar trades. This said, every single one of my generation is either graduated, in school, or planning on college. Our parents insisted and made it possible for us to pursue higher learning. However, not having a whole lot of experience or background in the system, most of us ended up at state schools, doing fine, but with an eye for getting out and getting on with "real life."

In undergrad I - the bookiest, most school oriented of the bunch - was shocked and apalled by my experiences in class. Having been homeschooled, in high school I had wasted no time in getting what seemed to be essential out of whatever I was assigned and moving on to whatever I was currently obsessed with (soapmaking, sewing, backpacking, piano, goat cheese, writing, reading philosophy) or whatever needed done around the farm (roofing, gardening, mucking, riding, milking, haying). I was so excited for college; to just focus on learning a lot and having the uber-wise professors on hand to answer my pressing questions. I finished my first semester with extra credit beyond a 4. in every single class. My mind totally blown by how easy everything was, I kept thinking I must be missing something. I went up to the UP camping after Christmas and stayed two weeks into the next semester. Back at Eastern, I quickly figured out how to navigate the system, got a few jobs, moved out and prioritzed so that I could work full time, be in a band, and graduate with honors without really studying much beyond completeing the requisite papers and theory assignments. Dissillusioned as I was, I couldn't wait to get out of school and never go back. I will never understand why, just before graduation and blessed escape, I decided to choose the one profession that not only requires continual addional schooling, but also refuses to pay for it. Fucking teaching. This is why - after a long and desperate period of avoidance - I find myself in.........

grad school.

Even Eastern's music program offered more than this sick bullshit. I sit in a class with some very lovely people who apparently have nothing better to do than to hang out in a middle school media center talking about what we already know. I have a few very lovely professors -good people! - who are sent to tell us the startling truth that, although people are different in many ways, really - at our core - we are all valuable, and no culture or ethnicity should be seen as superior, no individual as more important than another. I know, it's a shocker. Take a minute and try to digest it. I'm sure it's going to take years for me to bring this one to bear on my classroom policies. AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I feel like I am paying the university (or Sallie Mae is paying the University) to allow me to sit in a room twice a week and explain what I already do and currently think, get approval from a credentialed official, document my thoughts and lessonplans, get a stamp on a paper at the end so that I can pay the state some more money for another paper that says I can continue to do what I already am. If this is confusing and obfuscated, blame it on the influence of the stupid system that I am trapped in and valiantly trying to inhabit without absorbing its inadequacies.
(all statements in my homework to the contrary notwithstanding)

type therapy

Today I'm remembering when S was three months old and my massive identity crisis had me seeing a therapist for the first time in my life. The thing about it that really helped the most was just knowing that there was sometime in the week when I would be able to, in fact have to, talk about myself - without feeling like I was putting anybody out - for forty five straight minutes. She (the psychologist) was not all that helpfull really. Although, when she said that if I didn't dust anything and we ate off of paper plates for the next year, I would still be a good person and my family most likely would not crumble around me, I could've kissed her. Of course, I did dust. And sweep and garden. We ate on the fiestaware, and the food was usually healthy and or tasty, but saying what I felt and getting that kind of permission was so great. Later, not long before I quit going, I would get annoyed with just about everything she said (which, incidentally, wasn't much) and she seemed sort of passive agressive. I guess that's a common feeling at the end of a stint of counselling in people who don't usually ask for emotional help, but all I really wanted was a chance to lay out my thoughts and get some pespective.
Blogging is so much cheaper!

nigella, that brittish tart, and my saturday breakfast fiends

Our little neighborhood breakfasty saturdays are getting to be sick.
Seriously sick.

I mean the joereillybreakfast was a thing of beauty:

Crepes filled with
Mango Mousse
Kiwi, cocunut, and Valrhona, or
(local) rhubarb, strawberry compote with cardamom and cloves

and little rose-bud potatoes in halves with a bit of bacon, sour cream and a scallion on each.
The later ones got messy (we decided they were the easier version; from Martha's little sister Tina's cookbook)

Always coffee, and usually danishes

After that, S's birthday breakfast with the Blueberries and granola with vanilla yougurt parfaits in champagne flutes and roasted potato/egg/bacon/cheddar bake was not so shabby either, but of course, this Saturday
Tom had to go and quiche his way into breakfast history (such a competitive guy) and send us all over the edge with some crazy nut and pumpkin bundt (yes, bundt) - the insanely georgeous weather helped, but it was breakfast of the gods

Next week we'll just have to blow it all up and start over at the bottom, like um...well...
See, that's the thing with breakfast. there is no bottom. (GrapeNuts, maybe)
But bacon and eggs and toast? Happy food. Real oatmeal with dried fruit? Yes! Pancakes? Pick me! Hash, uuunh hunh.
Toast and tea, leftover pie, cold pizza and warm beer...

Breakfast is beautiful
and a joy forever.

have a baby already

As long as I have been conscious of birth, I have been irked by the waiting of it. I rember waiting for the birth of my now 18 year old sister; my young brain unable to comprehend why it should take an entire school year to cook a baby who would be born unable to talk, read, chew, move independantly, or even sleep longer than two hours at a time.

As a doula the waiting was narrowed down to the 2-6 weeks of sleeping with my phone by the bed, and then 24-65 hours at the hospital.

As a mama, I cherished the pregnant time, awkward as it was, I learned so many things and, for probably the first time in my life, felt at home in the pace of something beyond me, and truly comfortable with slow. The hard waiting was really the last three or four days before S was born, and especially the last 2 hours!

Now, assisting at homebirths, the waiting is big again. I have the on-call periods, and add to that the desire (now that I've finally decided that I am really going to be a homebirth midwife) to get the fuck on with it! I want the birth of each individual child, and I want them to start adding up into the great pile I need to complete the portfolio process and, more than anything else, to give my intuitions the weight of experience and my hopes the reassurance that I am suited to this and will be able to be of competent service, rather than a menace to society.

There was a time when I could have dropped everything, and made faster inroads into the massive heap of work that's facing me, but full-time teaching, financial obligations, and a family (aside from their making life worth living etc...) are a serious logistical issue.

I get it that time and patience are important teachers, and it's not about just getting info and experience, but I need to grow into the person that I want to be and I'll be ready when I'm ready and no sooner no matter how I try to push it, but this primip is 1 or 2 or 4 weeks out and 0 station and all squishy and efface-y and the summer's over and the weekend's almost and still not a single contraction; I am just now really tired of waiting!

Proof, of course, that it's a good thing for everyone that I still am.

first full day

It always suprises me when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window, or the glass of the stereo cabinet as I'm passionately explaining the concept of Home Tone or running to grab xylophone mallets, hot it the center of an emerging orff arrangement of such classics as, "Senor Don Gato was a Cat," or showing Tariq the underhand turn in a Circassian Circle mixer. It's all I can do to not stop dead in my tracks.

Of all things, how on earth did I become an elementary school music teacher?

I feel like I muse endlessly about teaching and the effect it's had on my life. How I've learned so many things about myself, how the kids are like a mirror - their innocent faces relecting back my deepest insecurities, blahblahblah. Over the summer, or at meetings I always seem to have such great perspective on how to relate to/ understand kids in order to love them. To love them by teaching them the right stuff. And, somehow, as I'm talking/writing about this I am creating for myself the subconscious assurance that when I go back there, I'll get them, and they'll love me, and they'll be interested in what's going on, and I'll pay close attention to what their actions are saying and
we will make beautiful music together.

And then I see them. After all the smiles and hugs I realize that they have not a clue what it does to me when I've been offering a brilliant first-class-of-the-year treatise at the second grade level about empathy and respect and being peaceful and I ask who's got a question or a suggestion about how we can make this happen in our room and thirteen hands shoot up and I call on them each by the names I've worked so hard to remember only to realize that all they've been thinking about the entire time was who's going to be first to try out the bathroom.

I see each child (there are almost 800 of them) for 45 minues a week(including set-up and clean-up and tuning etc..), 42 weeks a year That is, if they're not on a field trip or at an assembly (gag) or off on vacation, or absent, or I'm not at a meeting talking about reaching them - you get the idea. In this time am supposed to instill in EVERY CHILD not only the ability to play on the beat and sing in tune, and read notation, and listen critically, and respond creatively, experience the music of other cultures and their own, and integrate the arts into their other academic subjects, and improvise and compose and hear functional tertian harmony; but ALSO to love music.

I can't. No one could. The only kids who really get the music part, are kids who have it outside of class. But- and here's the real issue - everyone who is in my classroom (including myself) gets the experience. This is why I think I've had it backward. I can't love them by teaching them the right stuff if teaching them the right stuff means turning them all into skilled and creative musicians. I just can't do that. But if I just love them. Right away. Not via a plan or curricular delivery, but in the flawed yet powerful way that I love my family, or music itself, then maybe our experience of my pathetic attempts to instill social conscience and just intonation will have the desired effect, and maybe they won't. Whatever happens, I'll actually be doing what I'm trying to teach them about. Trusting in the idea that if you really let go of control, really listen, really love the people around you it makes the world a better place.

I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow after 4 first grades in a row!

my bathroom renovation as feminist battleground

I sort of hate bad linoleum. A lot. That, combined with the fact that the closet flange was leaking and rotting the sub floor around my toilet, was enough to cause an (admittedly ill-timed) emergency overhaul of the downstairs bathroom, the last bastion of 70's tacky in our otherwise pretty ok little ypsibungalow. Feeling the crunch of the approaching school year, I usually turn a critical eye on my summer self and embark on a mid-August quick-have-to-do-something-to-feel-poductive-about project that takes over our lives for a few days and nights and leaves me dusty and swearing and covered in adhesive compound; and J shaking his head and escaping to the Corner or his office at the first opportunity.

This brings me to my point. Kind of. In the process of attacking my bathroom, I removed the castiron tub, the sink, and the toilet; tore out aformentioned nasty linoleum; replced some subfloor; put down underlayment and new ceramic tile; replaced my closet flange (shit tube); installed a new sink and resized the door. And, though I do say so myself, it looks good.

J, my husband, is a great guy. The best. Compassionate, insightful, musical genius, generous to a fault, thoughtful, supportive, etc... But I swear to God as long as we've been together I can not remember once, NOT ONCE, seeing him pick up a hammer, except maybe to move it off a pile of books I left it lying on. I, on the other hand, while perhaps not so highly evolved, am pretty damn handy. So why does my Dad - for example - a self proclaimed "woodbutcher" who taught me most of what I know about fixing (and wrecking) just about anything, insist on suggesting that J get the powertools for Christmas? Why does my two year old call it "papa's hammer?" Most importantly: Why do I care?

Ever since I was a kid on a co-op farm being told to get off the roof and into the garden, I have had this burning need to assert that I can do whatever the hell I want. (And WELL, gdmmit!) As a teenager I saw it as a quest for gender equality, but as I get older I wonder.

I am deeply satisfied as a wife, mother, musician, teacher (all things I didn't like -or didn't get- as a kid ) and so honored to assist women at birth (not much is more female that that, folks!) So why is it that when I'm feeling frustrated or inadequate I jump into something like plumbing to get me out of my funk? Could be just the sense of accomplishment that comes from completeing a finite task (something I don't get a lot of these days). Could be subtle gender-role rebellion. Could be Martha-style "pride in my home" :-) Could be seeking approval from my Dad/men. Could be my unrefined response to the creative impulse. Maybe addiction to adhesive compound.
Maybe I am trying, through amatuer plumbing and masonry, to assert that the balance of yin and yang (or whatever the hell you want to call it) that makes us who we are, is a fluid continuum. Maybe I am trying to remind myself and the people in my life to look at each other without the usual expectations/ projections, but as ever-changing miraculous interconnections of desire, hope, experience and determination. Reminding myself to allow for free improv (J's favorite) and open-endedness in my definition of myself and my understanding of the world.

Maybe I just sort of hate bad linoleum.