Livingston, I Presume

Here comes the judge

I'm pro-choice. In theory, that means I don't give a rat's ass what you choose to do with your uterus, as long as you're choosing it. In practice, I'm having a harder time being neutral about all choices. Of course I'm referring to reports that the woman who gave birth to octuplets already had six children and did fertility treatments to achieve this most recent spectacular (and not in a good way) pregnancy. I'm having a helluva time with the judginess I'm feeling.

Specifically, what in the hell is a woman who already has SIX CHILDREN doing having fertility treatments?!?!?! I mean, I'm just not sure I can understand the decision of a woman to implant that many embryos when she already has six children. It's batshit crazy and unbelievably selfish besides. I mean, doesn't it seem unlikely that adding eight babies to an existing childset of six is in the best interests of all involved? Especially when your husband is a goddamn private contracter in a warzone?!?! I mean, what would happen to her if she had to handle this blessing as a single mother?

Of course, many of these reports have yet to be verified. The mother's identity is still a closely guarded secret, so there's no way to know whether it's true that the family declared bankruptcy two years ago. Or that they're receiving government assistance. Or that the oldest of the other six children is only seven years old.

Sweet Baby Corn.

I just can't hold off on the judgment anymore.

This fetishization of families with huge numbers of children is driving me up the wall. I don't care if it's Jon and Kate and their eight or that wackadoo family in Arkansas with 18 kids or even Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopting or having kids every time you turn around. I'm not prepared to say that people shouldn't have large families--because, again, I'm pro-choice--but the wisdom of going beyond a certain number or without having sufficient spacing seems, well, questionable in this day and age.

It was one thing back in my great-grandmother's day. She had 17 pregnancies and 11 kids who made it to adulthood (my mom will correct me on those numbers if I've goofed)--in other words, a huge number of offspring. Such families were not uncommon then, given the woeful odds that faced babies and children in that era. And if my great-grandmother had stopped at a smaller number, I wouldn't even be here, given that my mom's dad was one of the last of the kids to arrive.

But today, I just can't get behind a woman being pregnant every 10 to 15 months--or having eight kids at a time. Women's bodies need time to heal, and babies need time to be the focal point, for at least a while. My grandfather always contended that in his family, the only kids who got parented were the first few--the rest were raised by their siblings. That, to me, is inexcusable. Kids should have responsibilities, but they should not be junior parents. It's not fair to anyone involved.

Not that I can foresee that happening with the octuplets. At seven, the eldest can't even be left on his or her own, much less look after anyone else. But you can't tell me that he or she--and the five other kids this family already had--are going to be adequately parented after those octuplets come home. I have seen some amazing moms and dads with relatively large families, but I don't think even they could cope with those odds.

My own personal bias has always been not to allow Chip and me to be outnumbered by our kids. Seems dangerous somehow. That said, twins (and triplets) sometimes happen, and I'd usually see that as a blessing. But even as pro-choice as I am, I can't see how bringing octuplets into an existing family of six can be anything but a nightmare. For everyone.

Um, yeah

So I totally went back on my word and joined Facebook. I couldn't help it. You see, my college friend Shannon began to post pictures from our study abroad term in 1992 and I just had to see for myself (and she was stubborn enough to only post them on Facebook so that I would have to join. She's sneaky that way.) Well, predictably, I'm enjoying all of the re-connections and spending entirely too much time hanging out there. I'm so weak.

But be my friend anyway! Because I'm sure you're already on Facebook.

Edited to add: Farhad Manjoo justified my cave-in with a funny Slate article last week. Apparently I was right to succumb. Best line, though, is a quotation from The Onion:

I was reminded of a quote from an Onion story, "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a Television": "I'm not an elitist. It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."

To hell with Proust. I'm totally going to go update my status now.

Dreams from my president

Barack Obama read to me for six hours this weekend. We were all alone in my car, except for the sometimes-sleeping, sometimes-crying baby in the back, and he was telling me the story of his life. It has been quite a life, even before the events still to come today.

I had checked out Dreams from my Father on CD from the library a couple of weeks ago. I expected to enjoy listening to it, but I didn't expect to be totally engrossed. I was. The drive between Livingston and Great Falls is three hours each way, and my interest never flagged. I think that's one reason that I started to cry on Sunday night when he and Michelle Obama came across the stage at the beginning of the pre-Inauguration concert on HBO. Here was the same man whose calm but passionate voice had told me about his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, his struggle to find his place, his ideas about the world. His thoughtfulness and intelligence and care was apparent in every word.

It's just such a damn relief, isn't it?

I know he'll make mistakes. Hell, he already has in my book (Rick Warren?!?). But I can't imagine feeling--as I have for the last eight years--that I don''t even have a president. (Or that I had a president, but that he was a fictional character and therefore somewhat less effective than I might have liked.) In November 2000, I remember vividly sitting in our tiny first apartment in Prague, waiting up until the wee hours to find out whether Gore or Bush would be our next president. When I went to bed, I had just talked with my brother back in the States, and it was looking good for Gore. I thought it was safe to go to sleep. Like everyone else, I was dismayed to wake up and find out what had happened (and extra dismayed to know that I would be trying to explain the intricacies of the Electoral College, which I daresay I scarcely understand myself, to a bunch of Czech trade school students and business people over the next month in the English classes I was teaching then). When Bush was given the presidency, I was as dumbfounded as anyone.

But I didn't know how bad it would get. I didn't know that by the next election night, we would be back in the United States--driven back, in part, by the collapse of the value of the dollar under Bush's watch. I didn't know that I would witness the outpouring of love and grief after September 11th from friends and total strangers alike in Italy, where we happened to be vacationing at the time--only to see all of those sentiments dissapate in the wake of an unjustified war and the revelations that my country was involved in torture, warrantless wiretapping, rendition... I didn't know that by November 2008, I would begin to have serious doubts about whether I could raise my children in my own country. If the election had gone differently, I might be blogging about our preparations for another international move.

But it didn't. I cried that night, and I expect to cry many times today. In less than an hour, I'm going to have a president again.

Troll-y goodness!

I'm just not a big enough fish to get a lot of trolls (mixed metaphors, anyone?), but I did get a great one the other day on my post about Mike Huckabee's robocalls. The anonymous (surprise!) commenter left me this little gem:

Nope said...

Your quite a hateful one aren't you. Not going to take the time to read your blog, but your either spoiled or a lesbian. both angry for no reason at all.

If someone knows the connection between being spoiled and being a lesbian, I'd be interested to know it. Besides the obvious "being angry" thing, I mean. Still, I'm apparently less angry than some, given that I've never left a grammatically disastrous drive-by on a total stranger's blog. Must be the lesbian side.

Tempest in a D-Cup

Missoula is known to Montanans to be full of hippies and other licentious types, but that hasn't stopped yet another breast-related controversy from breaking out. The kerfuffle that erupted when a Hooters restaurant opened there several months back received statewide coverage. (And really, of all the cities in Montana, doesn’t Missoula seem the least likely destination for that particular “theme” restaurant? But I digress.) The latest debate, however, finds not Hooters but another national restaurant chain in the headlights—er, spotlight.

According to an article posted at Missoulian.com in early January, two sisters and their children were having lunch at Red Robin—a franchised burger restaurant—when Sonnie Atwood’s three-week-old son got hungry, too. Luckily, she had plenty of food with her. On her, even.

Atwood chose to breastfeed her son, openly, at her table in the restaurant, and some of the other patrons—apparently having missed the memo about Missoula being a bastion of tolerance—complained to the management. Atwood told the Missoula daily that the Red Robin manager then directed her to cover herself because “several customers had complained that they were losing their appetites.”

What Atwood and the manager did not know—and what most business owners don’t know, I would daresay—is that nursing mothers are actually protected under Montana law. Montana’s “Nursing mother and infant protection” statute (MCA 50-19-501) states that a mother “has a right to breastfeed (her) child in any location, public or private, where the mother and child are otherwise authorized to be present.” Montana’s law is in fact one of the strongest in the country: Montana is one of only nine states that protect a mother’s right to nurse “irrespective of whether or not the mother's breast is covered during or incidental to the breastfeeding.”

Red Robin has apologized to Atwood for the incident, but the battle rages on in the comments that accompany the article at the Missoulian’s website. A surprising (to me) number of commenters have been quite hostile to the idea of anyone nursing outside of the confines of their own home.

As a currently nursing mother who has sometimes needed to nurse in public in Bozeman, I’ve been following the conversation with interest. I’ve never been challenged here, in supposedly more conservative Bozeman. Granted, much of the breastfeeding I do takes place in my car—I really prefer to use my Boppy nursing pillow but don’t particularly want to haul it around with me—but I certainly have had occasions when I’ve been, ahem, exposed.

I did a lot more public nursing when I was living in Prague. What everyone says about nudity being less of a big deal in Europe is true, and beyond that, I always felt more at ease with the anonymity of a big city. I was unlikely to run into a colleague or business acquaintance while I was out and about there—in Bozeman and especially Livingston, it’s a virtual certainty.

Wherever I’ve been though, it has never been my intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable. I would imagine that Ms. Atwood feels the same. Still, when it comes right down to it, my first priority is going to be my baby. An adult, seeing the situation, may feel uncomfortable but should have the intellectual capacity to understand the situation: A baby is hungry, and mom’s got the goods. Good luck explaining social norms and the overwrought eroticization of the female anatomy to an infant.

NB: A version of this column was published in today's Business to Business, a publication of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

This is for you, Sher

You've been accusing me of lying about Emerson's diabolical nature after dark. Doubt me no more:

Look at that crazed expression! Believe me now?

Once more, with groaning

It's 2009 and already I'm annoyed.

It seems one of Livingston's two gyms is under new management, and the new and old owners took out a full-page ad in the local paper to announce it. The ad includes a letter from the former owners-- naturopathic physicians who were quite good, in my opinion, about focusing on whole-person health--as well as one from the new owner. As I don't have the ad beside me, I can't quote it directly, but I can say with confidence that one of the new owner's final sentences is something like, "Your health is one of the few things in life that you can control." Turns out the reality is worse than my memory, and not just grammatically. The sentence is, "Things have been tough all over the past year, the only one thing you have control over is your health."

Really?

That was some news to me. Probably to a lot of other folks, too.

I guess I can blame Connery's asthma on those three packs a day I didn't smoke while I was pregnant with him. Or on the smoky bars I never took him to. Or the 15 months of breastfeeding. And clearly my dad was negligent in not doing those special exercises that prevent ulcerative colitis. (Oh, wait, there aren't any.) Not to mention all those lazy bastards out there who go and get themselves cancer.

I've said it before and I'll groaningly say it again: Health. Does. Not. Equal. Morality. Health does not equal morality. Healthdoesnotequalmorality.

Are there behaviors that one can undertake to improve one's general wellbeing? Of course. Does undertaking those behaviors constitute some kind of ironclad guarantee of good health? No f'ing way. More importantly, does undertaking those behaviors make you a virtuous and moral person? Uh-uh. (Do you know which of our recent presidents has had the very best "healthy lifestyle" among his rarefied peer group? That's right--the one who legalized torture, blew up the economy, and generally left the country in the shitter. He can't control Wall Street, but he can damn well control how many times a week he works out.)

It may be that I'm extra sensitive about this at the moment, having spent much of the Christmas and New Year's holidays fretting about my father, who underwent another major surgery in early December as a result of the ulcertive colitis that perforated his colon almost three years ago and necessitated the removal of large sections of his insides, then and now. This latest surgery was grueling--how could it not be?--but he came through it like a champ, right up until he contracted MRSA. (Clearly because he was eating too much, um, MRSA fruit?) Two additional hospital stays later, he is recouping at home and trying to get back to his regular slate of healthy behaviors, habits that have included--for as long as I can remember--regular exercise, a wide variety of nutritious food, and plenty of good friends and cherished family. He controls what he can and understands better than most that some things just aren't within our sphere of influence.

Like "health" writ large. Until we can choose our parents and their parents and so on down the line, and until we can know what kind of effects the chemicals and other toxins in our air, soil, and water have on our health, and until we can ascertain what really causes complex conditions like cancer and diabetes and asthma, we can't control our health. No one can. And to imply--hell, to flat out say, like this guy did in his ad--that a gym membership is going to be the ticket to immortality is more than just annoying. It's wrong.