A Mother's Love Transcends

Earlier this year, I heard a story on public radio about from every pregnancy, children's cells live on in their mother, protecting her. I think it is the best and most incredible science story that I've ever heard. Rarely does Science affirm Mothers' intuitive knowledge and solace her loss.

Yesterday at a child's birthday party, I met an elder who was admiring one of my memorial tattoos dedicated to my father who died when I was 12. This wisewoman shared with me her stories of loss and giving the incredible gift of Love which is to be with someone when they die. She then went on to share her experiences of babyloss; her two sons who died at birth. She still felt their presence with her as divine beings.

I told her about the science discovery of our children's continuing presence in mothers to give her solace. I related how a Viet shaman (who is also scientifically trained as a psychologist) once told me "Spirit is the ancestor of Science."  What the soul knows intuitively, science will spend decades studying and trying to "prove".  Now, through science we can take someone's voice, project into outer space to a satellite and relay it back again to earth to a recipient through a cell phone device. Shamans have been doing that for thousands of years to the disbelief of Science.

Science is not objective; it has an objective rooted in a Western way of knowing (Cartesian logic). There are many other ways of knowing which Science can only fumble at comprehending as a blind person feeling an elephant's trunk. Scientists can never get to the Truth of a Mother's Love;  a microscope will never reveal the spirit. 

This research only demonstrates what mothers have always known to be true: All of our children are with us always as we are with them.  We transcend.  Love is.

For Dafina, Uyen, myself, and all mothers who have been through joy and sorrow...

goddess of grief

[N.B. I originally wrote & posted this poem for a dear and lovely friend of mine many moons ago. After standing at the threshold of Life and Death and losing mine own, I (re)view it anew with raw eyes and a womb that weeps blood.  This poem has since been published in SQUAT! Birth Journal Spring 2013 http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/536994]



wind water earth fire
blood salt tears
hands cupped to receive
tasting of the bitter
salted with loss
sorrow for what was
and glimpsed could-have-been’s
of a vanished future
of a seed within
ageless from the beginning of Self
dandelion filament
borne off to the elements
wind water earth fire
blood salt tears
moon wanes in grief
womb betrayed
bereft and laid bare to the core
wind water earth fire
blood salt tears
a Mother’s wisdom borne
intuitive
a Mother’s power borne
betwixt Life and Death
a Mother’s Love borne
infinite
forgiving
wind water earth fire
blood salt tears
hands cupped to receive
cleansing breath
cleansing blood salt tears
hallowed for blessings to come

for 10

neow

yesterday I did something I haven't done voluntarily in over a decade. While VL napped, I went to the drugstore, got supplies, locked myself in the bathroom, and enacted the profession of my people--I painted my nails. And for the first time in my life, I like it. It's not the color per se (I wanted a dove gray but settled for gunmetal. and the violet on my toes is almost black, not plum) nor the nail polish (the smell still nauseates me) nor is it perfect having instantly ruined them trying to button up a jumper & onesie on a wiggly toddler. I still prefer my nails short and plain. And yet, I like them.

It is the ritual I spose, the ritual of carving out a space for myself that is completely selfish and indulges my vanity all for $7. And every time I see my busy hands doing busy things, my 'tips gladly remind me that I'm still me.

It is not quite a room of one's own, but it is enough. for now.

motherhood is the new irony

my baby, oh my baby,

she is the sun, the moon, the stars,
the universe, the ancestors, the future.
miss her, love her

and when i'm with her,
i wish for 15 goddamn minutes to myself.

Calloo callay, oh frabjous day! my favorite pre-pregnancy jeans fit.

ok, so there is some spandex involved but only like 3%.

the politics of milk

when i was a keiki, my ohana wen go to da Havai'i-kine State Fair. there we met LaniMoo. talk about your sacred cows. i can remember her standing outside the billowing white tent where the cows were being kept. an ambassador to her species adorned with her melia lei & haku lei, victorian blouson & muumuu, and her celestial name, LaniMoo was brown-skinned, two-breasted, two-legged, native & regal like the nubile Havai'i-kine ladies in the parades. only she was not really a holy cow, she was a haole cow. and dis heifer had a lockdown on immaculate conception. (they just re-launched a new mascot, her son by "surprise virgin birth" Kawika. given how they fertilize cows, weo the less said about that the better, though mike rowe has a lot of funny things to say.)

basically, milkcows were an invader species brought by the haole plantation owners in 1793 when they colonized the island of Havai'i. since everyone in the world are naturally lactose-intolerant in adulthood except for northern europeans, and hawaii-kine being no exception, i imagine profits were pretty limited. in the mid-50s introduced Lani Moo the bovine mascot so named by a haole kid. then in the mid-1970s they got smart, they started corporate-sponsoring the local youth soccer league and producing the propaganda about cowmilk's benefits. my dad being no stranger to propaganda (and no coincidence, like most brownskins, a lover of soccer) was militant about it. we all had to drink cowmilk. lots of it. my siblings being kids by then and over their (breast)milk drinking days by a decade maybe didnt catch on or get the brunt of this militancy. me being the baby, i was cowmilkboarded. and i came to have cowmilk all the time. gallons. and ice cream. and cheese oh i came to love cheese. i've been colonized by cowmilk.

i didn't stop drinking cowmilk until college sometime after my ex moved out. and then on a foster freeze & berkeley marina date with T. in 1999, i had the gut-wrenching realization that i am indeed lactose-intolerant, a "problem" i share with 95% of adult humanity, that i promptly & temporarily solved with lactase supplements. though there's not fixing anything with ice cream, lactase or no. nowadays its a moot problem since i've stopped consuming so much cowdairy products. and last year in an effort to treat my allergies & chemical sensitivities, i went on a strict dairy- & gluten-free diet. and indeed, my allergies & sensitivity cleared up. so i got lazy. then when i was in that last couple of months of pregnancy, i wanted ice cream and went on a bender. so i had haagen daz on a stick once a day. gotta love costco for bulk purchases.

and now i'm the dairymaid for our daughter. she is six months now and still exclusively breastfed. all 18lbs and 12.4oz of her. pure mother's love buttermilk.

breastfeeding. so not controversial. even our HMO sez mothers should breastfeed at least until 6 months. and i plan on breastfeeding to two years at least.

weo, we went to our 6 months check up yesterday. when our osteopathic-cum-medical pediatrician found out VL was still being exclusively breastfed, he said i should start giving her iron supplemented food right away because breastmilk has low iron after 6 months and no, i couldn't just take more iron supplements as the mommy. well, i took him at face value and was doing my own educational reading about starting solids, and i read in the evidence-based book Baby Matters and on kellymom.com that because cow's milk in formula commonly inhibits the development of intestinal villi ("leaky gut" syndrome) and as a result causes gastro-intestinal bleeding and malabsorption, because of that, formula & babyfood had to have extra iron to compensate for the loss of blood & iron. whereas breastmilk has lactoferrin an easier-to-digest form of iron and one that boosts baby's ability to resist bacteria like E. Coli. and breastfed babies at 6mos+ that are not given iron-fortified foods have a higher iron level in their blood than breastfed babies who are given iron-fortified food. the iron they use to fortify baby foods actually leaches the lactoferrin iron in breastmilk! so the standard for how much iron is "needed" is still based on babies who take formula and are therefore iron-deficient, and then applied to breastfed babies which in turns makes breastfed babies, iron-deficient! out-dated research based on formula companies' & dairy industry's profit-motivated "science". ridiculous.

we very quickly realized VL couldn't tolerate cowmilk. not because we gave her any, but because i consumed it. those last trimester haagen daz ice cream bars were still in the freezer after all... i'm piecing things together here, the puzzle of my digestive system. in thinking back to my dairy-full childhood and the cowmilk formula supplementation i was given the times i was hospitalized as an infant, which eventually overtook & ended the breastfeeding aft 6 months, i remember all the unexplained sometimes bloody gastro-intestinal problems & poor digestion i had as a kid and even now as an adult. i was always having to poo in a cup. and there was never a solution or explanation. a while back, when i was recounting my allergies and chemical sensitivities to my brother, he said it was prolly all the milk i drank as a kid. maybe there's something to that. maybe the cowmilk colonization that has degraded my digestion.

and cowmilk, cowmilk is so innocuous seeming. but as i teased my larger-than-your-average-vinamese-midwestern friend Linh, cowmilk is for cows; drink cowmilk, become a cow. and like a bad joke, her son was allergic to cowsmilk. and it seems there is something to that, even though there is a billion dollar dairy industry which tries to tell you otherwise; cowmilk is implicated in a over a dozen diseases. human milk is the perfect human baby food. it contains all the proteins, carbs, sugars, hormones, biotics, immune defense that a baby human needs to grow into a human adult. cows' milk contains all the proteins, carbs, sugars, hormones, biotics, immune defense that a baby bovine needs to grow into an adult bovine. wait, not just rancher-added rGBT growth hormones, we're talking grow-a-baby-hormones-intrinsic-in-lactation kinda of hormones. setting aside industrial propaganda-driven medicine, societal norms and dominant culture, on an intuitive level, what makes us think it's okay for a human baby or child to consume all the proteins, carbs, sugars, hormones, biotics, immune defense that cows' milk contains? app

with synchronistic irony enough, i came across this 1912 digitized book; Honolulu was the site for a major USDA experiment in standardizing and regulating dairy production because of high level of infant mortality resulting from milk consumption:
infant mortality and the connection to cows' milk (1912).

we must know that there is something species-specific about mother's milk because we don't consume the milk of any carnivores for example (in addition to it being very hard to milk a tiger). And indeed, we do know there are differences among mammalian milk:

A comparison of mammalian milk from a 1912 USDA Honolulu experimental research on reducing the infant mortality resulting from cows' milk.



differences between human and cow milk

the term breastfeeding itself is a "sacred cow", reserved only for humans, but truly all mammals breastfeed. isn't it wrong that we humans, we living in a Euro-American cultural context try to breastfeed a bovine? and i guess other people are questioning why we as a society would rather feed a baby another species of milk than milk from another mother.
common sense in 1912

i recollect that when VL was in the womb she would kick and stretch out her legs so hard, that you could see the bump on the top of my abdomen. we were amazed. when she was born her legs were stretched out straight unlike any newborn the midwife had ever seen and she even had to rate VL's leg reflex apgar a little lower for it. a few days later, when our chiropractor Dr. Aaron did a homevisit (his partner Dr. Eileen came for a couple of hours during labor), he noted that VL was having digestive issues and the tension in her back and legs was her way of trying to resolve it. he did an adjustment and her legs instantly relaxed. we thought oh maybe its her newborn immature digestive system, but i immediately harked back to her straight leg propensity in utero and then, like many things, the thought passed. when i had a postpartum ice cream bar, she cried and cried all night. it's not colic. like Linh' son, my baby is allergic to cowmilk protein. and we're still trying to figure out if by extension, she is allergic to beef protein which by some cosmic coincidence i had stopped eating in '03 due to boils and other things, and had only resumed eating last year. even now, some days her digestion (and mine own) is really off. and it seems that i will have to go back on a strict allergen-free diet--no beef, no pork, no dairy, no soy, no corn. we'll see about the wheat.

so despite the pediatrician's recommendation, i will wait until VL is developmentally ready to eat solids (not quite there yet) and i will not feed her processed, dehydrated, reconstitute simulacra of food fortified with artificially derived chemicals aka baby cereal.


more 1912 common sense about the connection of nutrition to health

i'm getting so tired of having to be our own educator & advocate when it comes to our family's health. i wish the western allopathic modality of medicine as its practiced in the US which pays lip service to "breast is best" and which has become the modern standard worldwide, i wish that it was evidence-based, instead of this janky presumptive "truthiness" paid for by the blood money from profiteering industries. and yes, babies die from this. i mean i know that is my job as her mother to make the best choices for her and do the educational prep that requires, and at the same time, with everything we have to do, it would be nice to have an ally in her medical care...

postscript... i just read the last few chapters of Baby Matters including "the Dangers of Cow's Milk" and "Allergy Matters". three things i learned: 1) "early exposure [under the age of 1] to cow's milk protein a risk factor for childhood diabetes, but 3 or more glasses of milk per day during childhood leads to a quadrupled risk of diabetes" [the author goes on to cite other scientific studies which show correlations between cowmilk and a full spectrum of diseases common in developed countries like cancer]. 2) Colic, ear infections, eczema, cradle cap, among others "normal phases" for American babies all have a direct correlation with food allergies. 3) if the mother has allergies, she is likely to pass on that immunological response to her child though not the specific trigger (mom could be allergic to onions and baby may be allergic to cows milk) and should avoid all potentially allergenic foods in the third trimester. no one ever told me that!

i'm lookin over my life, my health, VL's birth and being, and my postpartum recovery (i had hives! and mastitis!) and understanding it and the human immune system in a whole new way. i'm a little stunned at the breadth & depth of it actually.

the connection with food is so fundamental, ingrained, cultural and giving up something (like flan) feels like a sacrifice and yet, the eating of it has caused me a lifetime of gastro-intestinal damage & hemorrhage and i've been unknowingly embarking on the same path for my daughter. i gotta decolonize my mind, decolonize my diet, decolonize my colon.

20 weeks

i feel pregnant.

um, no duh, right? somewhere in the last few weeks the whole enterprise became real to me. maybe it was the baby quickening or the way my belly doubled in size between week 16 and now (i've gained 3 inches on my bust & hips and 7 inches on my waist since B.P. hubba hubba) or the lack of any of the "typical" signs of pregnancy (no vomiting, nausea, or bizarre midnite cravings). somewhere along the way, it became real. the baby became real.

did i mention the sleep deprivation? oh yes, prolly cuz i have back issues to begin with, i have increasingly gotten less and less restful sleep as the nighttime peeing has not abated and as the pressure on my spine made it impossible to sleep on my back (my favored position since slipping down some stairs years ago. twice.) nor on my side. the sense of my center of gravity being pulled forward and the tendency to swayback & slouch has me all off kilter. let me not underplay this, my spine hurts. my leftside nerves are literally fried. if you have ever had spinal/nerve injuries you understand the agony. i spent all of sunday on the couch just to recuperate from the lack of sleep the rest of the week (in addition to recovering from working overtime).

formerly pregnant women (aka mothers) talk about pillows. so many pillows your partner is exiled to sleep on the couch. mythical pillows. i tried every position, arrangement and pillow in the house--the bradley method (yes, there's a bradley method of sleeping. bradley is a husband coached natural childbirth method. not the same thing as Lamaze which is designed to facilitate the hospital staff's process of birth and has a 80-90% incidence of medicated birth.), pillows under my side & head and between the legs; i tried a pregnancy wedge, sofa throw pilllows. to no avail. i understand now why some pregnant women drop some serious cash on these ginormous pregnancy pillows (what do they do in VN where the wood "dining" table is the bed?). it steadily got worse over the last couple of weeks til i was reduced to tears of exhaustion. and even pregnant, i still don't cry easily. in that state if any mother said boo to me about pillows i prolly would have snarled and gone for the jugular. so it was a good thing i wasnt around any that particular meltdown day. though i won't vouchsafe for T. or my co-workers' post-L. stress disorder.

and then, oh joy! i discovered the magical pillow configuration (cue the paradise music). since i found the squashy couch immanently more comfortable (and 10's pillowtop guest bed in Sac) it stood to reason i needed more give (we have an extra firm organic rubber mattress with a wool mattress pad primarily so we can avoid the toxic off-gassing of most american beds. euro beds for reasons established elsewhere do not contain toxic chemicals.) so we doubled up a thick comforter and last night a down comforter as well on my side of the bed which is now raised above T.'s side six inches and that--plus a folded towel under my side and the pregnancy wedge pillow jammed in the small of my back for anti-tipping (any comments about cow-tipping will earn you stinkeye, a knuckle sandwich and The Finger)--did it. i'm still test-sleeping the diameter of the leg pillow also called gối ôm|hugging pillow in vinamese though for obvious reasons i call them phallic pillows.

so why am i up at 4am? the other pregnancy thing. i'm hungry. waiting for my hardboiled egg to cook. (my genius tip for peeling hardboiled eggs: using a teaspoon crack the wide end of the egg where the air pocket is. peel off just the air pocket. dip the spoon in the water and then slip in between the egg & membrane. circle the egg as you work your way towards the small end. the shell should peel off whole or in a long strip. this doesn't work as well with soft-boiled eggs because the membrane clings a little harder to the egg but still is easier than manual peeling.)

btw we heard bé's heartbeat at our prenatal on saturday. we gave in to the doppler. T. was more assured by hearing it than me, but then i have bé to keep me acrobatic company all day & night. still haven't conclusively ruled twins out. belly growth in next few weeks will really be diagnostic.

my grandmother whups đít

you ever feel like scientists/researchers lack common sense? and maybe some home-training by their grandmothers? as my bà ngoại likes to say "đá cho mày mà đá bây giờ!|i'm gonna kick your ass!"

anthropologist researchers "discover" that grandmothers are productive members of society and have a social-evolutionary role that prolongs longevity & survival in non-industrialized societies. whether its childrearing or economic production, grandmothers the world over hold their own and keep families alive. grandmothers are powerful.

it's a sad commentary on the patriarchal nuclearization of the modern american household in the industrial capitalist era that somehow that piece of info should be revelatory. elders are denied dignity and a social role in this society. i have only to visit the nursing home where my bà ngoại is staying until she's well enough to have the feeding tube taken out to get depressed & indignant about how this society treats its elders. or as i learned in high school with the few non-immigrant schoolmates (and in that area of town, they were white trash and/or military brats), the kids would get kicked out or forced to pay rent at 18 and then they in turn would stick their parents in nursing homes as soon as they got the chance. karmic payback.

we need a council of grandmothers in government. maybe they could make sense of the billions of dollars spent on the war machine, profiteers, and cutthroat mercenaries and straighten out our nonsensical health care system, public education and social security/elder care.