EC Milestones

Today BabyG and I went to a nearby coffee shop, where I wanted to read John Winthrop's Modell of Christian Charity for an hour or so. BabyG slept soundly, and we lucked into a nice table outside, and escaping house was so restful that we ended up staying a few hours. Since she was dozing in her stroller or in my Sweet Pea sling it was easy to keep track of her little potty signs.

The first time she started squirming I ran her to the bathroom. It didn't have a counter, so it took finagling to get her diaper off & discover it wasn't yet soiled or wet. I figured if I went back to the table she would go in a minute or so...so for the first time since we started this EC adventure I held her over a real, big person's toiletbowl (instead of her plastic Bjorn buckets) and said "Psssst" -- and she smiled and peed. About an hour later she peed and pooed in the toilet -- and if you think you're embarrased for me now for all the gushing I've already done about my baby going potty at Brazil's, you would be absolutely mortified to know how proud and excited I was this afternoon when I heard poo shoot into the toilet. I'm guessing BabyG's either the only, or one of the few six weeks olds who has eliminated in the potty at Brazil (the restaurant). To top off the experience: we went to dinner at a restaurant and she continued her foray into the world of eliminating into public toilets with both me and her daddy.

For the record, a year ago I never could have imagined that I'd be holding my baby over a toilet; or that I'd be delighted when she pooed; or that I'd be convinced she waits for me to take her to pee and poo if she can, even at one and a half months old.

But here I am.

Perspective

I remember when I was a youngster, and I would catch some sort of glimpse of the world that I knew I couldn't capture in just the way I saw it. My eye would be an inch from a blade of grass, maybe, and in the background I might see a man walking, and I would hear a motor revving, and somehow the man in relation to the grass and the motor were perfect. And I despaired because it was perfect and so small, something so full of mood and unsignificant life, this tiny scene slipping into my brain and nowhere else. I understood there was no way for me to preserve and to hand that vision to the world. You couldn't take photos of these moments, there isn't the right shaped lens, there is, in the end, no lens like the eye sees.

I had forgotten all about this sort of despair until BabyG was born. I spend so much time breastfeeding, watching her face and expressions. Nobody sees them but me, and even though I try to convince GreenDaddy he should stare at our daughter nursing, since he doesn't have to be there with her and isn't actually attatched, he doesn't have -- or need -- the patience/desire it takes to just watch her.

There are so many little movements of hers I want her to know about, to see, and again I'm despairing that they can't really be caught. I don't think even filming it -- even if I was Fellini -- would catch what I want her to have. I don't feel like the world needs to see these moments, I just despair that BabyG won't ever see how she was born into the world filled with desire, and with the lungs to protest when her needs went unmet.

I read that babies are vulnerable, adorable, cute, sweet, or maybe even fussy, but BabyG is confident and intent, especially in relation to eating. She looks like an expert just as soon as my breast appears: she's calm, she assesses it, she waits to take it. If anything gets in the way, even her own hand, it makes her so angry she can't calm down enough to suckle, which makes her angrier. She has a high pitched, girly scream of frustration she uses in this moment. She makes a little grunting/humming noise and shakes her head as she attatches. With all obstacles are out of the way, and she's calmed and suckling, she looks resolute & peaceful and purposeful.

At first she gulps so much that a tiny stream of milk escapes from the side of her mouth and soaks my shirt, or sometimes hers, if I forget to put a towel below her chin. Then she screams because she's eaten so much she can't eat more, and I burp her. Then she gulps a little more, and then takes five tiny, quick sips in a row, then none for five or ten seconds; then five or six more tiny sips. When she's done, sometimes she suckles herself to sleep and I have to decide whether I want to wake and burp her, or leave her to her dreams and risk a spit-up. Other times, as GreenDaddy has written, she throws her head back all at once, her neck is extended backwards, and she focusses on some point in the distance or closes her eyes to contemplate some unknowable vision.

All this describing gets me nowhere near the vision I wish I could give to BabyG. She is already a strong little being who knows what she wants and needs. I want her to know that the secret to her own contentment and desire lies in the very core of who she is, though time and experience might confuse and bury her ability to recognize it.

Must Green Parents Be Poor Parents?

When I was twenty-one, much to the dismay of my family and friends, I quit medical school. I had just come back from working on a public health project in the poorest region of Peru. After two months among Quechua-speaking people in little Andean towns like Huascahura and Huayopuqyo, I made the break from medicine, a decision I had long considered but never built up the courage to do. Rather than spend my life focused on a particular disease or set of diseases, I wanted to devote myself to considering, encountering, and changing the way we think about justice, wealth, and living meaningful lives. Instead of studying a protein in a tapeworm, I wanted to ask why the native peoples of Peru didn’t have the kind sewage systems that would eradicate tapeworms? Why are they poor? What is poverty? Why did my life seem less meaningful than the life of a guy who makes less than $2 a day? I thought the writing life would be the best way for me to explore those questions.

The most common response to my decision from family and friends was, “How are you going to pay for your children’s college education?”

Maybe I wouldn’t be able to pay for my child to attend a private school, I thought. Maybe my future child would not want me to sublimate my ideals and desires in order to save up a three hundred thousand dollar college fund. Maybe my child would want a dad who was actualized, took risks, and lived fully. If I made my career choices based on the college-fund concept of parenting, I was worried that I would become too busy and well-paid to be physically and emotionally present. I asked myself, is a childhood good only if it culminates in attending a US top twenty college like Northwestern or Duke?

After quitting medical school, I worked for a year in publishing. Then I went to graduate school for writing and literature. I made about a thousand dollars a month teaching freshman at the University of Houston. My classes were about analyzing the language of advertising, war, colonialism, and trade agreements. I met my wife at that time and she did the same kind of work. I took a semester off to work for a feminist NGO in India. When I got back, MaGreen and I organized anti-war protests. I felt that I was doing my part in the struggle for global justice. I had to teach myself to live on an extremely tight budget. I bought clothes secondhand, scavenged for used furniture, and cook my own lentils, rice, and vegetables.

As soon as MaGreen and I started to think about having a baby, my mindset started to change. It’s all fine and good to subject yourself to poverty, but doing so to your children is another matter. Accumulating wealth is essential to weathering the big shocks that life inevitably throws at a family like illness, natural disasters, losing your livelihood, or whatever other unspeakable things. We don’t live in a country with a decent safety net. I absolutely don’t want anyone in my family to go through the humiliation and forced poverty of Medicaid, disability, or what’s left of welfare. Forget an Ivy League education without debt, what if we can’t even afford to help our child obtain a decent education at all? Also, I don’t want our child to be burdened with fiscally caring for us when we are elderly.

MaGreen and I, as parents, feel an obligation to build wealth, but at the same time we do not want to abandon our ideals. We will not buy mutual funds that include weapons manufacturers like GE, companies that attempt to patent seeds like Monsanto, or multinationals that rely on sweat-shop labor like Nike and Walmart. Investing in those types of companies will not help create the kind of world I hope our child inherits. We don’t want to hinge our family’s fiscal security on global inequality. Ever since I learned that the East India Tea Company was the first multinational company traded on a stock market, I have refrained from buying any stocks or mutual funds. The East India Tea Company impoverished India, reducing it from one of the wealthiest places on earth to one of the poorest. How can I willingly take part in that system?

We do have one strategy in place. My parents helped us buy a duplex with two apartments in the back. We live in one of the units and rent out the other three. We are providing decent housing to people who make steady, but limited salaries – an electrician, a caterer, a newspaper reporter, and a webmaster at a pipe company. The rental income goes towards our mortgage payments and helps us live in the center of the city. I can bicycle to work and build equity. But our entire financial security cannot depend on one piece of real estate.

My job at Rice University working for the journal Feminist Economics has allowed me to build some savings, but I’m not sure what to do with it. They’re sitting in a savings account that earns less interest than the inflation rate! MaGreen and I are reading Co-Op America’s Guide to Green Investing, which came with our membership to Co-Op America. It lists mutual funds like Domini and Calvert that have social justice and environmental criteria.

Green parents do not have to be poor parents. Some of the people I lived among in Peru were demoralized and resigned to their pitiful lot. Most of them, however, were striving for dignified lives. They tilled rocky desert soil, spun wool, wove rugs, and built their homes from mud. They organized as communities along political and religious lines. MaGreen and I are striving for the same dignity for our family and communities, but we refuse to get a leg up by stepping on those below.

But For Lack of a Boob

MaGreen went to work today, only four weeks after giving birth to BabyG. She teaches writing to children at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Normally, MaGreen works three hours twice a week. For now, she has agreed to go just once a week. My employer does not provide paid leave for paternity, but I am taking all my vacation days and I have not yet run out. So I stayed at home with BabyG and took care of her while MaGreen went back to work.

BabyG slept soundly – that is soundlessly – for the first hour and a half. I read twenty pages of a book, put the soiled cloth diapers in the laundry, and picked up around the house. Then BabyG started to fuss, which she usually does before peeing or pooing. I decided to catch her elimination. When my parents and my brother’s family came to visit last week, we stopped practicing elimination communication (EC). I couldn’t focus on BabyG’s signals and it felt awkward holding a bowl under her for several minutes at a time. Everyone vied for time to hold BabyG and EC just wasn’t going to happen. Today though, without any distractions, not even from MaGreen, I was able to catch everything – multiple pees and a two-squirt poo – and I did not have to wait long. I used our new bowl bought from the EC store that allows BabyG to rest her thighs on the curved top.



When BabyG cried for food, I popped a pacifier in her mouth. Then I warmed up breastmilk MaGreen had pumped that morning. When I gave the bottle to BabyG, she drank eagerly and with focus. I had to warm up a second bottle after BabyG drained the first one. I felt quite confident. I can care for BabyG just as well as MaGreen but for my lacking lactating breasts. I feel lucky that we can afford an electric, double breast pump.

Atoning for a Sin

We have fallen from the grace of the Goddesses of Green. Please hear me witness now. My parents flew in to see their granddaughter for the first time. They rented a little beach house on Galveston island for the week so that we could all stay together by the Gulf shore. MaGreen and I did our best to prepare, packing all of our gear into the car. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fit the wooden co-sleeper in the car. Even though we sleep with the baby in the bed, in our judgment we needed somewhere safe to keep BabyG. So we bought a huge portable, plastic, combo crib/changing table/play pen called the Graco Pack N Play…and we bought it at Walmart.

I knew it was a sin when we committed the act. We must atone for purchasing goods from Walmart, because it is an anti-union monster. By making the purchase from Walmart, we contributed to the erosion of workers’ rights here in the US and globally. It’s just that the local, non-corporate baby shops don’t sell Pack N Plays and the consignment baby store didn’t have one. The Pack N Plays at the other big box stores like Babies R Us and Target were an additional twenty dollars and on top of that price difference, their models did not have the features we wanted. In seeking atonement, MaGreen and I have decided that we will donate $40 to Walmartwatch.com which is helping coordinate efforts to defeat Walmart’s abusive practices. And we will redouble our efforts as consumers to support fair, ecologically sustainable trade.

I May Be Ten Days Old, But I Wasn’t Born Yesterday

We’ve been parents for ten days, but I feel like we have existed outside of clock time since BabyG was born. I have to look at the calendar to figure out if it is a weekday or weekend. Time has largely become the interval between breastfeeding, poos, pees, and naps. We barely noticed New Years.

We have been fortunate to sleep for hours at a time at night. MaGreen has managed to breastfeed lying down in bed and fall asleep while BabyG suckles. We are not overwhelmed or exhausted. On the contrary, we have enjoyed ourselves. But we are consumed by caring for BabyG. It is all we do.

Each day, we try to learn some new parenting skill. Two days ago, we made the switch to cloth diapers. Yesterday, MaGreen set up her Ameda breastpump. Today we have been trying to use Elimination Communication (EC). So far, we have “caught” the majority her poos and pees in a little bowl (and she’s had a cloth diaper on the rest of the time). I have been amazed by the experience. The claims made by EC proponents about bonding between parent and child that I thought were outlandish have been true for me. Since I don’t have a breast and BabyG’s two activities are eating and eliminating, the EC bonding is what I've got to work with.



Switching to cloth diapers helped us study BabyG’s elimination patterns because we could actually tell if she urinated. That helped us prepare for EC. She pees about seven minutes after ever breastfeeding. She poos after breastfeeding around 10 pm, 4 am, and 7 am plus some other times. I have learned tell the difference between her rooting for MaGreen’s milk, general digestive distress, and straining to eliminate. When I hold over a little bowl and she needs to eliminate, she is quite calm in my arms. It is a tender moment. When BabyG kicks around and whines that means she is done and I know to put her down. I’m shocked that the communication part of Elimination Communication is real. My baby may be ten days old, but she wasn't born yesterday.

On Watching My Wife Give Birth

Miah’s water broke while we were eating at a restaurant on December 21 around 8 pm. We went home after that and timed her contractions while cleaning the house. By 11:30 though, Miah contractions were about five minutes apart and lasted a full minute. So we headed to the hospital. By about 1 am, we were settled into the labor and delivery room, but then the contractions weren’t so regular. We felt a little guilty when the midwife came in and Miah wasn’t in active labor yet. The midwife told us to try to rest. I took a nap and woke up around 4 am to Miah’s moaning.



Then the midwife stayed with us and guided Miah through the labor. It was difficult for me to watch Miah go through so much pain. Miah had made the decision early on to avoid using anesthesia. I wrote the following poem about a moment when Miah was in active labor:

Natural Labor

A white rag drops from my wife’s clenched mouth.
Good, the midwife says, face the pain,
make a straight line through the pain.
Then my wife starts to moan
a high-pitched moan
with an even higher tone ringing above the main note.
like a lone fire truck hurdling through the night
sounding its sirens not to clear traffic
but to align all the elements in the universe
to focus all the forces from above and below
calling them to the cause.
As I stand there regarding her pain,
the city marches on,
the jets howl,
the buried pipes and cables whir,
lawnmowers, compressors, and heaters
groan, whine, and growl.
The highway is one long wail.
My wife outmoans it all, the whole city.
Her moan emanates from the walls and floor,
as if her moan never wasn’t there.
Her moan is not accidental
like a leafblower’s whistle and drone.
It is not the sound of a city driven by profit
concrete spilling over steel.
She moans with singular purpose.
She moans as if she is a planet
whose tectonic plates are unbuckling
bearing forth a glowing molten core.
Can she bear this?
She is not a planet, she is a body,
a human and not a celestial rock.
She’s crying for air
because she moaned it all out of her.
All I have to offer is an assurance,
one I do not entirely believe,
that our baby will be out soon.

Happy Birthday!!!!

Raj and Miah decided to celebrate Raj's birthday by having a baby! What else do you do on a birthday, but give birth?

BabyG was born 11.46AM, December 22, 2005.
She is 7lb 7oz, 20in.
And she and MaGreen are doing just fine.

If Your Mama's Belly Were the Globe

Today is Miah's due date, but still no signs of real labor. We're waiting eagerly. Mehul says that Miah should eat spicy food and the baby will want to come out. Well, while we're all waiting enjoy this silly poem I wrote for our baby.

If Your Mama’s Belly Were the Globe

You would be the deep inner core
the hidden center of all the world.
You would be the force of gravity
you would be the source of magma flow.
Your kicks would be earthquakes
crushing whole city states.
You would cause a sky-high geyser
each time you kick your mama’s bladder.
You would make a great big mountain
by pushing out her belly button.
You the goddess Mahabhumi to whom we pray
with the soles of our feet each and every day.
You the yearning burning fearsome churning
six billion trembling waiting for your coming.
Om bhur bhuvah swah: come now at this twilight hour
earth air fire water may this planet turn inside out .

We Hauled out a Holly: Our Native Christmas Tree

Tree dilemmas are all over!  The two shrubby evergreens in front of
our house are wiping their brows for having survived this holiday season.  I found a merry holly at a store called Buchanan's (psst...here's a list my friend Julie gave me of native plant stores in Houston.).  I was looking for an oak, like GreenDaddy wanted,but unfortunately they're all basically branchless sticks at this time of year.  Only Ziggy or Charlie Brown would buy one and decorate it.  Luckily I saw the holly, perfect because it’s full of all these little red berries.

What I learned while decorating our Ilex Vomitoria, or Pride of Houston
Yaupon Holly:

1. Putting lights on holly is not the same as putting them on an evergreen.  You can’t just wrap them around the whole thing, you have to follow each of the main branches…our has about seven.  
2. Important to find symmetrically balanced tree. Otherwise you'll have to stick your heaviest knicknacks in the pot so it won't tip.
3. It’s hard to put lights on.  My dad always did it for us.
4. It’s a relief not to have pine needles, but squashing the red berries that fell all over the floor while I put up the lights might be its own kind of meditiation on the word Vomitoria.
5. When the lights are on, berries seem to glow of their own accord and are gorgeous.
6. According to GreenDaddy:  whereas only a real square would not have appreciated our unusual wedding cake, many people will be upset by our strange little tree.  

I think its lovely.  It looks prairie-like and sweet.  It is true that we can't get a good photo of it, though.  I’ll put one up, but be   
assured it looks much nicer in person than it does in photograph. (I almost decided not to share an image since the image doesn't do it any real kind of justice.)

What I learned after decorating the Ilex Vomitoria:

1. I thought I was buying the Ilex Opaca, which is a tree that grows 20 to 25 feet as is supposed to be a fabulous tree
2. Ilex Vomitoria is a bush that grows about 15 feet, but it draws lots of birds and butterflies.
3. Vomitoria does signify that the leaves, when boiled, makes a person vomit.  According to a website I read but can’t find again, Native Americans (which natives, I don’t know) used to eat its leaves in order to vomit as a means of cleansing themselves before hunting.

You would think either GreenDaddy or I would have noticed the difference between a tree and a shrub, and the truth is that we did.   GreenDaddy kept saying things like, “I just don’t see how these branches are going to turn into a trunk.”    Since I saw the picture of the tree in my book and it had a trunk and red berries, and since I saw the label at the store calling it American Holly Tree, I just figured this particular type of tree would look more like a shrub than a tree until it was older.  I think the man who put the tree in the car for me just picked up the wrong tree.  

Though you might pay more going to a local native plant store, their service is superb.  When I called to tell Buchanan’s about my sad tree mix-up, Donna (not the owner but “the other Donna” she said) told me I could bring my tree back in three weeks, so I wouldn’t have to undecorate it and redecorate it.   So I can still have a big tree to plant, like I had planned on.  

But also, I’ve just seen lots of pictures of the ‘Pride of Houston’ which can be trained into a tree-shape.  I think I like it better than the American Holly, which has the sharp leaves and grows in a conical shape.  So maybe I won’t even exchange the tree…though we’ll probably not use this tree to plant BabyG’s placenta.

Green Tree

I love Christmas Trees. My dad used to go cut one down from the Uintah Mountains when I was growing up, they smelled fabulous. They leaked pine sap all over the living room floor and oftentimes they were way too tall for the house. I guess it’s hard to gauge how high a tree ought to be when you’re out with a lot of drunken friends in the middle of a snowy Utah night, in early December. We’d have to cut off the bottom of the tree with regularity.

My mother Helen collects an eccentric and dazzling number of ornaments. She has hundreds that people have given her over the years, and even on an enormous tree, there’s not room for all she has. After spending a day putting on lights and decorating tree we had this lovely, lovely visual spectacle to greet us throughout December and January. The tree was always one of the important personalities of Christmas – its antics mirrored the woozy nog-filled ones that took place during my parents’ numerous holiday celebrations. On the years the tree didn’t tip over because in no way does a real pine tree’s base fit into a commercial tree-holder’s stand, one of the cats would invariably decide to climb it, or somebody would stagger into it. Always one of Helen’s favorite ornaments was broken, which was okay in the end. It was a sort of survival of the fittest sort of tree we hailed.

Since moving to Texas, I’ve never had a tree, but now that we’re having a baby, I feel like I need to start making some conscious efforts to incorporate holidays – both Indian and “culturally American” holidays. So I want a tree. But in keeping w/Green Parenting spirit, not a Christmas Tree lot tree. That seems wasteful of a perfectly good tree to me, especially in Houston where I figure any tree they have planted ought to stay that way. But I also don’t want a fake tree because that feels like lying. So we will:

a) Cut down the ugly little deciduous, pokey, evergreen-like trees in front of the house and decorate them. We were going to tear them out, anyway.

OR

b) Research trees in my Texas Gardening book, buy two, decorate them and use them through Christmas, then plant them, along w/BabyG’s placenta, after Christmas. As I said in my ordinary blog, if BabyG is born already speaking Gujurati, English, or Spanish, she can tell us which tree she’d like her placenta buried beneath.

Probably unless BabyG comes out today, we are a choice “b” family. The downside to it is that I really love the evergreens I grew up with, and we’re going to buy some sort of oak or fruit or magnolia tree or a bush with red berries. Not to mention that we both secretly love the idea of using the two trees we don’t like and that we already own.

Though maybe we could freecycle those. All the time people have other people come over and dig up whatever plants they don’t want, and take them for themselves. Maybe the two scrappy trees I will never understand would make somebody else’s Winter Solstice.

I’ll have to consult Mr. GreenDaddy.

Who’d Want to Be Gandhi’s Child?

Last weekend, anti-war activists in Houston were abuzz with activity. Dick Cheney was to speak at a fundraiser for Tom Delay at a luxury hotel in town on the coming Tuesday. The opportunity to create media coverage of the terrifying mélange of corruption, scandal, lies, and policies of war, economic exploitation, and torture that Cheney and Delay represent was very enticing to the activist community. Local groups that often refuse to work together converged. Moveon.org spurred its Houston area members to action. By most accounts, the protest was a huge success.

Miah and I, however, did not go to the protest. She could go into labor anytime and I’d had bronchitis for two weeks that was beginning to abate. It was not the time for us to stand in the cold with a sign as the police circled us on their horses. I still made a little contribution to the organizing effort by writing and designing a feature about the coming protest on a local news website.

Our parents were in town that weekend and they were a bit upset with my participation. “It’s not inconceivable that you could be locked away for this type of activity,” they said, “and now you have to think about your child.”

My response was that repression grows strongest when people are silent and that it is our duty to our child to speak out so that she does not grow up in a society that locks people up for voicing dissent. Still, I took my parents’ concern to heart. At what point does the parents’ obligation to keep their family safe outweigh everything else? I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m not sure there is a single answer. Clearly, parents in 1938 Germany faced a different set of choices than parents in 2005 Texas.

I actually don’t think safety is my biggest concern when it comes to activism and parenting. I’m more worried that the rigidity and inflexibility of belief that is required for activism – how else can people be sure enough of themselves to stand up to authority – is contrary to what is called for to parent well. Unqualified commitment to a set of ideals, whether its Evangelical Christianity or Green Anarcho-Feminism, is sure to create distance in families and rear children who are more perceptive of their family’s hypocrisies than their family’s love.

Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal (pictured above), had an estranged relationship with his father for, what seems to me, legitimate reasons. For example, Gandhi opposed his son’s remarriage after his son’s first wife died on the grounds that he opposed marriage for the sake of sexual gratification. Though I admire Gandhi and read his writing closely, I would not have wanted him as a father. Not because I would have missed my father if he was in jail, but because I would not have wanted my childhood to be defined by my father’s uncompromising experiments with truth.

Diaper Free: Potty Training Indian Style

Last October, the New York Times published an article called “Dare to Bare” about the growing number of American and European families raising babies without diapers. It was written by an anthropologist named Meredith F. Small. She wrote, “I am ashamed to admit that, even though I've studied how babies are cared for all over the world, it never occurred to me to focus on how children in other cultures use the potty, or not.” Though she’d adopted parenting techniques from Kenya and India like co-sleeping, she kept using diapers and chides herself for it.

When MaGreen read the piece she became interested. If you have been a regular reader of this blog you know that when MaGreen becomes interested in something, she researches it exhaustively. She bought a book by Laurie Boucke called Infant Potty Training. It explains elimination communication (EC) in great detail. The main message is that potty training can be a continuum of communicating and working with the child as she gets older. Infants can communicate the need to eliminate by squirming, grunting, straining, or making sounds. Initially, parents hold the child over a bowl, sink, or toilet. Eventually kids can get to the receptacle but need help disrobing. Ultimately, the child can walk to the potty, disrobe, and eliminate, often much earlier than kids raised on diapers.

I was hesitant. But, you know, my older brother was raised without diapers. And for that matter, I was potty trained in India during a family vacation.

Like Meridith Small, it hadn’t occurred to me that a child could be raised without diapers in America. Despite having Indian parents, living in India, and seeing my own cousins’ kids raised without diapers, I never considered going without diapers for our expected baby girl. When I read the book, I was pleased to find out that Laurie Boucke learned the diaper-free method from an Indian woman. A strange form of pride welled up inside me.

When MaGreen and I started to talk to acquantances about our diaper-free plans, we got lots of comments. “You could hurt the child,” one mother told us at a party. “You know you have to support their heads.” There were rants against the diaper-free method on the feminist listserv I subscribe to on the grounds that it keeps women out of the workforce.

When my parents visited last weekend, I thought they would get upset when we explained our plans, but they were excited. I gave my mom a copy of Laurie Boucke’s book. After a few minutes she laughed and said that she didn’t need to read it. “This is just how it is done in India,” she said.

Eco Green Natural Gift Ideas for Baby Showers and Holidays

MaGreen and I both try to avoid obsessive and arguably immoral consumerism. We know we will not become ideal parents by buying expensive, new things. We frequent a local second-hand baby shop and are grateful for hand-me-downs. However, expecting parents and newborns do receive many gifts. Gifts are an expression of the givers’ love (or at least their sense of duty and obligation). And new parents do need lots of equipment and clothing. I hope this list is useful to new parents, friends, and family. In making our choices, we sought out organic and fair trade items when possible and reasonable. In some instances, however, we believe plastic makes sense or is unavoidable. Unfortunately it can be difficult to create a baby registry for these types of gifts. We’ve had some success with felicity.com. Please feel free to make suggested additions or critiques through the comments option. Note the prices are approximations in US dollars and we don’t receive any advertising money.


Baby Clothing, Receiving Blankets, and Sheets
mamasbaby.com
www.ecobaby.com
www.sckoon.com
store.naturalchildren.com

Baggie/Gown Organic -- $21.99
Bummis Sleeveless Bib -- $9.25
Organic Kimono, snap wrap style -- $14.99
Zutano Complete Outfit (cotton and colorful, but not organic) -- $29.95
Sckoon Organic Cotton Baby Underwear -- $13
Sckoon Organic Cotton Wrap-me Body -- $24
Organic Cotton Cap (many options available) -- $9
Organic Sheets -- $150

Cloth Diapering, Diaper Services, and “Diaper Free” Supplies
www.theecstore.com
www.babynaturale.com
www.diaperpin.com/home.asp
Google Diaper Services Directory

Infant Potty Training by Laurie Boucke -- $19.50
Daytime Diaper Cover: Bummis Prints -- $10
Nighttime Diaper Cover: Stacinator Deluxe Fleece Prints -- $17.50
Snap Pants -- $14.03
Fuzzi Bunz Micro Terry Inserts -- $5.50
Fuzzi Bunz Stay-Dry Changing Pad -- $14.95
FUZZI BUNZ system (see fuzzibunz.com/care.htm) -- $14.95
Happy Pants, Small 8 – 14 lbs. -- $12.00
Hemp/Cotton Fleece Doublers -- $2.33
Imse Vimse Swim Diaper -- $11.95
Infant 4x6x4 Chinese Prefold - $1.50


Technology
www.tvbgone.com

TV-B-Gone (keychain remote that can turn off televisions) -- $19.99

Other
store.gxonlinestore.org
www.aubrey-organics.com
store.naturalchildren.com

Organic, Fair Trade Teddy Bear -- $29
Aubrey Organics Baby Shampoo -- $7.95
Case of 10 Fair Trade Green & Black's Chocolate Bars -- $35
Receiving Blanket Organic -- $22

Green Parenting Starts in Bed

Beds in the United States are soaked in flame retardant chemicals called PBDE's, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Studies have shown that these chemicals build up in people’s bodies and are found in breastmilk. Baby mice that are exposed to PBDE’s suffer from disrupted brain activity, memory, hearing, and learning ability. Even low doses cause higher rates of hyperactivity in the mice. The European Union has banned some PBDE’s, but the United States has not. Here are a couple of articles on the subject: mindfully.org and LA Times repost.

After MaGreen found out how toxic regular beds in the US are, she started looking for alternatives. Our mattress was already old – I bought it when I was in college – and giving us back aches so it needed to be replaced anyway. You can find all kinds of alternatives if you do an internet search under “natural beds” or “eco beds”. However, we didn’t have a huge budget. Some of these natural beds go for over $2000. Initially, we decided to go with the nicest foam bed from IKEA, which at least meets the European standards on chemicals, but when we got to the store we found out Hurricane Katrina destroyed their bed warehouse.

Then MaGreen found a deal on eBay for a natural latex foam North Star mattress that was used for a few months as a display by The Savvy Sleeper. It was made by Amish people in Ohio. Here are the links about the process: treehugger.com and northstarbed.com. Basically, someone who lives near the equator collects sap from rubber trees. The Amish people froth it up and pour it over a mould. We bought a frame with wooden slats from IKEA to support the mattress.

Sorry this information isn’t as sexy as the title and picture suggest, but I think it’s a good example of complementarity. The bed is not toxic, less devastating to the environment than a regular bed, not made by anonymous workers in sweatshop conditions, and…hopefully a place where we will enjoy love and passion.

Principles of Green Parenting – Complementarity

Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote in his book Development as Freedom about how capabilities often reinforce each other. When he uses the word capabilities, he’s talking about what a person can be or do, like have bodily health, earn a decent income, and be able to participate effectively in politics. Sen gives a number of excellent examples of capabilities complementing each other. For example, if a person has a decent income, she will be better able to make healthy choices and buy medicines. If a person has bodily health, she will better able to earn a decent income.

I’m trying to think about Green Parenting in terms of complementarity too. Green Parenting, for MaGreen and I, has been and will be the intersection of several efforts: detoxifying our home; creating a family life that is environmentally friendly; working towards gender equity through pregnancy, birth, and childcare; making socially responsible choices as consumers; and living playfully and joyfully. An example of complementarity in Green Parenting would be that cooking fresh organic food cuts toxic pesticides out of our diets; helps the environment; improves working conditions for farm workers; and tastes good. If we have a healthy, well-adjusted daughter, there's a whole host of other capabilities that will be enhanced for her, MaGreen, and me.

My Unborn Daughter's Desire

I have a friend who, when he found out from the ultrasound technician that his wife was carrying a girl, immediately began to worry about boys asking his daughter out to the high school prom. Even now when he talks about it, he runs his hands through his hair and rubs his forehead.

When MaGreen and I found out we are having a girl, I didn’t quite have that reaction. But I am worried. If I try to raise a daughter who doesn’t want a Barbie doll, I know the first birthday gift she’ll ask for will be a Barbie. I don’t want to try to control my daughter’s desire. But I don’t think it’s wise for me to ignore desire either, fooling myself that I don’t play any role. I don’t want to leave the formation of her desires to the shallow and commodified notion of sexuality that permeates our culture.

I have this other friend who tried to convince me that walking around the house naked and taking showers with my daughter is the key to life without shame. I just don’t think it is that simple. Pretending to live without any boundaries could be as bad as erecting big, puritanical walls. Something has to be mysterious and out of bounds. Doesn’t desire begin with transgression? with curiosity? She should feel safe at home, aware of all the violence in the world, and in charge of her body.

Here is a poem I wrote in which I try to imagine what I should do as a father, at least metaphorically…

My Unborn Daughter’s Desire

The top dresser drawer
will be hard for her to reach
and I will stuff it with objects
she should not see.
I will fill the drawer with stones
from the beds of great rivers,
postcards from Khajuraho,
bangles and payal made of 22 karat gold,
verses of Sappho embroidered on satin,
a biography of Phoolan Devi,
and a book on Mayan astronomy

Never a Net Loss in Love

I was at a conference in Oxford where a woman presented a true-cost accounting model for the global trade in caring labor. Let’s say a poor woman from India leaves her children with their grandmother and moves to Dubai to help a rich woman there take care of her kids. She sends money back to India, the grandmother does the unpaid labor of raising her grandkids, and maybe the mother in Dubai works for a real estate agency. Lots of clear economic questions to consider. When the presenter got to the question of love – the love and affection the children in India did not receive – she said, “I didn’t need to include love in the model because there was no net loss in love.” The children in India, she argued, were loved by their grandmother like they would have been by their mother.

Many people at the conference were outraged. The No Net Loss in Love theory was widely discussed at the cafeteria tables in the lunch hall. How dare she! Love isn’t a commodity like shoes or oranges that you can model with supply and demand curves. Love is the stuff of poetry. Unmeasurable.

I think the presenter was brave enough to at least try to talk about the global trade in caring labor. The LA Times ran a story November 3, 2005 about an Salvadoran woman who leaves her kids with a neighbor everyday so that she can help a rich Anglo woman take care of her kids on the other side of town. She’s one of an estimated 62,000 Latina nannies in LA County alone. These stories of poor mothers having to leave their children behind, like Nuris who we met when we staid with the Navas family in Panama, are heartbreaking. I know I don’t want to be at the demand end of this trade in love. It’s immoral. Like buying baby shoes made by children in sweat shops. I talked to my friend Ruben and he said, “when we have a baby, it’s going to be raised by family.” But you know, my mom hired daytime nannies -- white women in Mobile -- to help take care of me so that she could work. Dorothy was so nurturing to me and having a career was good for my mom, my family, and for me as a child. So I'm already a benficiary in the unequal trade of caring labor and I experienced a net gain in love.

I just want there to be another way where we think differently about how we live in our communities, where extended families are reimagined, where poor women don't have to leave their kids behind to take care of rich kids, where the state helps, and where men and women have more flexibility to leave and enter the world of paid work.

Mr. Feminist

When we found out that our baby was going to be a girl, one of my colleagues at work said, “Oh good, you can raise a little feminist.” Then she looked at me, paused, and added, “not that you couldn’t raise a boy to be a feminist as well.”

I work for an academic journal called Feminist Economics. People are often surprised that I can, as a male, even work for a feminist publication. They imagine that feminists always want women-only spaces. Then people ask what feminist economics is. A feminist stance on reproductive rights or domestic abuse, a feminist reading of a novel, or a feminist critique of magazine advertisements – people are accustomed to these sorts of feminism. But feminist economics, why would feminism matter in a world of graphs, charts, and statistical models?

Feminist economists look at all kinds of issues like women’s participation in the labor force, pay gaps, wealth gaps, marriage law, inheritance law, unpaid work, childcare, eldercare, and informal labor that are often ignored by mainstream economics. They question mainstream assumptions which are collectively termed homo economicus or the economic man. They contribute to groundbreaking models for understanding poverty, globalization, diseases, and trade. And they try to use this understanding to improve the lives of men, women, and children through public policy efforts like gender mainstreaming.

I’m not a feminist economist myself, I work on the publishing side in the editorial office. The first issue of the journal that I helped edit was a special issue on lone mothers. The cross-country comparisons were the most eye-opening. Once you see how much state support can help parents and children, the situation in the US seems immoral. The numbers are really compelling. Access to childcare, paid maternity and paternity leave, and welfare can mean the difference between well-being and poverty. Yet generous state-mandated maternity leave, like in Scandinavia, can lead to really low rates of working women and discriminatory hiring practices. That issue taught me how profoundly parenting is shaped by social norms and laws.

What I have noticed in many of the parenting magazines and parenting books is that they focus exclusively on how to raise a healthy baby. The parents’ well-being is usually in terms of the baby. You need to take care of yourself to take good care of the baby. Yeah, MaGreen and I are consumed by the desire to raise our baby well in a nontoxic environment. But I want to be vigilant about falling into patriarchal traps. Being stuck at home without the engagement and financial security of work can be bad for mothers. Working all the time and becoming emotionally distant isn’t great for partners either. I don’t want to be trapped into the male-breadwinner, female-caregiver model. And I don't want to be trapped in the relentless life of the two-income, baby-raised-by-a-nanny-from-Panama-whose-own-children-are-growing-up-without-a-mother model either. I have hope, but I'm not sure what we will do.

The Cervix and the Heart

MaGreen and I attended the first evening of a birthing class. When we walked into the teacher’s home, I suddenly felt nervous, vulnerable in this room full of strangers. The other couples had already settled into chairs. Our teacher, a woman named Lu, is also a midwife in the hospital-based group we’re going to for pre-natal visits and the delivery.

“This class isn’t outcome oriented,” she said with a New York accent, “it’s not if you do this, you get this. No, see, I’m going to help you build up resources that you can call on depending for whatever challenges that come up.” This sounded right to me.

Lu continued with some basics about delivery. She waved her arms around as she talked. She grabbed a brown doll and thrust it through her favorite prop – a fake pelvis. At one point, she rolled her index finger around the tip of her nose, “Normally the cervix is kind of like cartilage.” Then she opened her mouth and pulled at her cheek from both sides, “But when it’s dilated, it’s like aahhh, yeah nice and soft and flexible, aahh.”

Despite Lu’s unabashed use of her own face to explain the cervix, I couldn’t help but let my attention drift. Part of me wonders if I wasn’t able to focus because at some level, even though we have chosen to go with midwives and natural birth, I’m uncomfortable with the rhetoric of natural motherhood and whole mothers.

Lu asked us to talk about our fears. One man, whose wife looked like she might give birth any second, said, "My employers have better give me leave or I'm going to quit."

An expecting father who looks like a lawyer started explaining the Family Medical Leave Act when another expecting father, a guy with a crew cut and a drawl, said with astonishment, "You have to work and make money."

Then this man's wife, a rather shy woman, said, "I'm afraid that I won't be able to breastfeed."

After talking about breastfeeding and lactation consultants, Lu moved on. She asked each person to draw a picture that represented pregnancy. After about ten minutes, we shared our pictures with the group. Four of the first eight people drew big hearts.

The father with the crew cut had drawn his own big heart with his wife and child inside. He said, “Even though I haven’t seen the baby, I feel more love than I could have imagined.” I liked this guy. He was so earnest. But in light of his astonishment at paternal leave, his drawing bothered me. I could just see his wife stuck at home breastfeeding and the second-wave feminist inside of me started shouting, “See! All this talk about natural birth and motherhood is about keeping women out of the workplace!” It’s like the husband’s drawing of his heart, even though it symbolizes love, defined the strict and debilitating gender divisions in our society with the man as breadwinner and woman as caregiver. Heart as prison.

When my turn came, I blabbered as I held up my picture of a multi-headed, multi-armed version of MaGreen. Our baby is floating outside MaGreen and there are lots of miniature people clamoring around. One of MaGreen’s faces has a sardonic expression, another has its tongue sticking out like Kali, and the third one is looking up with a smile. One hand holds a book, another signals “no fear”, another “I give what you need”, and another holds a spinning, serrated discus that can chop off people’s heads. I’m a burning spirit blending into the background. I said that despite seeing the ultrasound, hearing the heartbeat, and feeling the strong kicks, the baby was like a possibility to me and not quite real.



Lu thanked me for describing how many men feel pregnancy is more of an idea than a physical reality. But I felt disappointed in myself. I couldn’t explain how pregnancy feels fraught with tensions; how it forces all my values, relationships, commitments, hopes, and limitations on the table; how it makes the gender inequities in our society personal; and how there are too many hang-ups, fears, and histories for me to think of pregnancy as a big heart.