‘motherhood’

All Articles tagged ‘motherhood’

Let Us Break The Silence on Stillbirth

Posted on February 1, 2013 in: Mama Doc Philosophies6 Comments

This is really beautiful. There’s little to say other than we can do a better job supporting parents in their loss and in the celebration of their children’s life and legacy.

Watch this and enjoy the amazing amount of love you will feel…

“I want the baby I didn’t have.”  ”I feel like a bad luck charm around other moms.”

“I couldn’t understand why that happened to me…”

“His life was a good thing.”   “People say really sad, crazy things.”

“We said don’t come and they came….that was what we needed.”

“I love to tell people about my son…I don’t get enough chances to talk about him.”

“His life was a good thing.”

“I’m not afraid to mention him.”  ”Why don’t they tell you about it?”

“You second guess everything you did, everything you didn’t do.”

“I don’t want another baby. I want the baby that I didn’t have.”

“I love to tell people about my son… I just don’t get enough chances to talk about him.”

Father’s Day: Two Wheels Of Their Own

Posted on June 18, 2012 in: Parenting, School Age, Toddler2 Comments

We had a marvelous Father’s Day weekend. On Saturday we started a Dad-coached soccer team with some friends which was surprisingly successful. And then on Sunday, we completed our first-ever family bike ride on the Burke-Gillman trail. Everyone had two wheels of their own, including Grandma. Although O ended up in the ditch at one point after steering off-course, it was an injury-free ride and we proclaimed it a success. I think we all felt really grown up. We gave my husband a mixture of homemade gifts (paintings) and then a trite, expected one (a necktie). We played ball in the yard, pulled weeds from the grass, and Jonathan got a bit of time to himself for a run. When we went out for Italian food and ordered Shirley Temples we formally celebrated the fortune of having a father parenting so actively in our lives. The boys began the day with exclamations and closed it with a final, “Happy Father’s Day” after the lights went out. It was then that I realized it’s prime time for this holiday in our home.

I get that Father’s Day isn’t this Hallmark in everyone’s home and I certainly understand it won’t always be like this. These manufactured holidays bring up thoughts of the tension and distance many of us feel from our own fathers. I also think about my friends and patients who have lost their fathers and those children who are separated from their fathers due to work, military commitments, or unique family circumstances. Last week one of my colleagues pointed out that children had eras in their lives where Father’s Day was on the map; young children adore and celebrate but then retreat as we’d expect during the late school-age years. “They tend to check back in during young adulthood,” he said.

And it got me thinking: is there a way to keep the intimacy of preschool-parenthood alive? Read full post »

TIME Magazine And The Mommy Middle Road

Posted on May 11, 2012 in: Mama Doc Philosophies, Parenting19 Comments

You saw the TIME magazine cover in the last 24 hours, right? Me, too. In the midst of 25 patients yesterday, moms and dads weren’t really talking about it in the office. It was in my inbox. But I hear and feel and witness the anxiety/angst we all swim around in every day as we compare parenting styles and essentially swap (pacifier) spit about how best to do this. The monogram of this parenting era is the quest for perfection. The epic win that’s constructed for us is built on prevailing over the rest. It’s not about juggling it all anymore, it’s about being tough enough to do it better than your peers. TIME magazine wants us to contemplate if we’re really “Mom Enough?”

Before you know it, you’ll be 13 decisions down the road wondering why you worried so much about what you did. You’ll care even less about what you called it. Of anything I hear over and over again from parents ahead of me on the road it’s this: “I simply wish I worried less about my choices.”

It’s a mom-eat-mom world right now and the media wants us perpetually navel-staring. Doubt sells magazines, pageviews, and books. I saw moms post opinions on Facebook this morning only to quickly take them down as they got too controversial. We’ll keep questioning ourselves and our decisions as TIME takes a supermodel, airbrushes her body and paints the cover the magazine with a provocative image for Mother’s Day. This article, this cover, this timing–this is the engineering of our age. The dinosaurs once ruled the planet—now it’s the voices online.

Your motherhood, your parenthood, your decisions. You know what? Of course, they’re Mom Enough…

The cover really isn’t really about breast feeding but I’ll bite. Read full post »

5 Things From My Online Sabbatical

Posted on September 19, 2011 in: Infant, Mama Doc Philosophies, Parenting, School Age, Teens, Toddler4 Comments

There are 5 things I took with me from my online sabbatical in August. Know, however, I didn’t do as stellar of a job staying offline as I’d hoped and the 5 things are harder to hold onto than those numbers you see me grasping right there. I’d envisioned an entire month like the family photos: unplugged, disconnected, liberated, and focused. It wasn’t entirely like that. Clinic got nuts a few times, there were minutes I was still staring at my phone and hours every day I’d sit at the computer responding to emails, there were upsetting mega-tantrums from the boys and there were a few phone calls I fielded with bad news from friends. There were moments I felt inexplicably tired despite the uptick in sleep. All was not peace on earth.

Yet, let me be very clear: the month away was worth it. I learned a bit more about my relationship with technology, who I am as a person amidst 2011 information flow, and how I want my life as a parent and person to change.

Clearly, part of the experience of being a parent is housed in the soul.

You know this. Something happens the day you become a parent. Like a huge shift in your footing, that unexpected large wave washing out the sand where you stand, or how it feels in your toes when you try to gain traction running downhill. It happens without our control. The transition is very loud yet somehow its inaudible. It’s huge, unquestionably bigger than any anticipation and warning about having a child. Being a parent is greater than our own capacity to explain it thereafter. And it’s tactile, although you can’t really feel the transition to parenthood like you feel a touch on your skin on a warm day or the cold air when you walk out into a mid-January night. Rather, you feel it shift inside. Somewhere in an unidentified part of who we are that isn’t detailed in the anatomy textbooks. Becoming a parent is becoming more aware. My time away helped me see this. So, here are the lessons:

Read full post »

Happy Mother’s Day

Posted on May 8, 2011 in: Doctoring & Healthcare, Mama Doc Philosophies, ParentingComments Off

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Mother’s Day. If anything, holidays like today place a stamp on this day amidst the irrevocable march of time. Photos, cards, gifts, mentions, and memories..a moment or day where we reflect, compare, and remember with those from the past. Last year on Mother’s Day it was sunny, my family had a picnic on a hill with fried chicken, and neither of my children were old enough/able to make a homemade card. We played airplanes (the kind where kids fly on your legs), drank sparkling water, and I celebrated my mom’s health amidst a cycle of chemotherapy. It was a good day; I felt love and loved, simultaneously. Sandwiched in the best way I know. Read full post »

Tina Fey’s Triannual Sob, The Mommy Wars, And A Truce

Posted on April 11, 2011 in: Mama Doc Philosophies, Parenting14 Comments

Tina Fey, I hear ya. As working moms, we’re asked an unfair question when we are asked about “juggling it all.” And I’m with you on the angst about working and parenting, except your triannual sob is my quarterly crisis.

Tina Fey, about-to-be-Momma-again-hilarious-comedian-”ridiculously-successful-and-famous”-deserving-it-girl, was showcased in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. It was in The Sunday Styles section, a portion of the paper I fondly refer to as the “Ladies’ sports section.” I can’t remember who coined the name, but the section is defined by wedding announcements, articles about junky TV, and snapshots of random strangers carrying coffee or poodle accessories in Manhattan. But I sincerely don’t mean to marginalize it. Often the section houses little storytelling gems that sit with me all week. Yesterday’s piece about Ms. Fey got my heart pounding. There she was, one of the funniest people on the planet, saying the same things that I do. Well kind of. Our only similarity really may be that I’m just another working mom. But it made me want to listen to her even more.

Tina, like the rest of us, is asked to defend her work, her “juggle,” her parenthood differently because she’s a mom. Curtis Sittenfeld writes that in Ms Fey’s new book Bossypants (dying to read it–can you find me 4-5 hours?) Ms Fey asserts, “‘The rudest question you can ask a woman’ is, ‘How do you juggle it all?”" Simply put, it’s archaic to think of life this way. Women are continually reminded to question their choices differently than male counterparts in the work place even when we share parenting responsibilities. The questions alone arguably bring the working-mom struggle back to our windshields. And it ultimately perpetuates gender inequality. Why is it any different for me than it is for my husband? He works just as many hours as I do. But no one asks him about balance. Or commitment. True, this struggle really doesn’t tug on him like it does on me. I believe cultural norms play a role in this. Read full post »