mother's milk

my 3 year old is a poetess-in-the-making

sữa mẹ dúng:

mother's milk is like

dúng trái cam

like oranges

dúng trái dâu

like strawberries

dúng sà lách

like lettuce

dúng cà rêm

like ice cream

war on germs

I think the reason that the debate on vaccines is so heated on this is because it's an intensely personal parenting decision that is also intensely political. My take on all this is philosophical. The dominant metaphor and paradigm for larger Western society is warfare. The medical industrial complex is steeped in that framework, treating disease and bacteria as enemy combatants, and valuing profit over evidence-based protocols. So that's the context in which the billion dollar vaccination industry was developed.

When we look at the mortality rate associated with any given disease, let's say polio, we'll see that the mortality rate was dropping with the advent of industrialization and better sanitation--prior to the introduction of a polio vaccine. The early polio vaccines were "live" and many people who were vaccinated contracted polio from the vaccine itself before they recalled it. Most pro-vaccine lit only looks at the period immediately after vaccines were introduced as "proof" that they work. Without that larger historical context, yes, it's easy to attribute the salvation of the human race to vaccines.

Even with the recent pertussis outbreak, if you look at the population dying, it's typically very poor children, and in Cali, undocumented Latino immigrant children, who are more likely to have poor nutrition and poor health. Yet rather than address the underlying factors of poverty and anti-immigrant health policies, the DPH is telling the general population to vaccinate.

Let's look at Gardasil as another example--this vaccine for females which supposedly prevents genital warts, an STD, which can lead to cervical cancer. This was fasttracked onto the market and is the controversial subject of mandatory vaccination laws. It's been around a few years now and the deaths or sterilization or other vaccine injury of young girls is only beginning to make the FDA take a second look. What is manifestly clear to me, is that vaccines are a massive human guinea pig experiment funded and fueled by the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyways, I recommend Aviva Jill Romm's Vaccinations book over Dr. Sears. She is a midwife, herbalist and now MD. She actually explains the fine print of what are the benefits, risks & adverse reactions to vaccinations (i.e. what your doctor is supposed to tell you) AND how the disease manifests and it's risks so that one can make a truly informed decision. It's the only book I found to discuss the disease itself.

Final tangent (sorry there's no returns in here): It's only very recently that it's become profitable to understand the immune system and commodify non-invasive healing modalities (i.e. indigenous or traditional healing systems). Hence the sudden commercialization of probiotics as the "friendly" bacteria after decades of vilifying bacteria and creating the self-perpetuated problem of "super-bacteria" which are immune to antibiotics. From a holistic standpoint, the human body exists because of bacteria; we live in symbiosis with bacteria and it's not until our body is out of balance that the bacteria become harmful. In that context, we need to re-evaluate the supremacy of Western medicine and its paradigm over all other traditional modalities.

And as parents, we have to weigh and balance all those personal, political, social, financial factors and make the best decisions for our families. (As a side note, in true service of humanity, India patented their traditional system of healing under Creative Commons license to prevent the continued theft of "intellectual property/patent" by pharmeceutical corporations.)

growing pains

Babies are very smart and every thing they do has developmental purpose.

Having an experienced family chiropractor who worked with pregnant women and babies was my maternal salvation from the first time parent anxiety. My chiro mentioned to me how much the cranial plates shift in the first few years as babies' heads make fantastical growth. Sometimes, the cranial plates get a little stuck.

Ever notice how one eye seems smaller than the other at times? It's because the cranial plates near the ear of the smaller eye are a little stuck. Creating pressure in the cranium helps to alleviate the pressure and move the plates--so breastfeeding/nursing/sucking is physiologically and developmentally critical for babies in their cranial development. Sometimes when cranial plates get stuck and sucking doesn't help, the pressure of those cranial "growing pains" causes them to bang their heads or suck on random things or other "odd" repetitive behavior that the medical profession dismisses as phases or meaningless. So headbanging can sometimes help get the cranial plates get unstuck as a last (frustrated) resort.

Teething can also cause similar behavior. If you have access to a craniosacral therapy (chiropractor or massage therapist) it is very gentle and can really help babies to transition through all those growing pains without banging their heads in frustration. I highly recommend going at least once with your infant and asking them to show you how to do some of the techniques if you can't afford to go alot.

If you don't have access to craniosacral therapy, try giving her/him a light scalp/cranial massage. Feel for the grooves between the cranial plates above the ears, around the fontanelle (soft spot in back of head) and with your two thumbs gently gently move them apart. It won't feel like anything is happening or actually moving, but can help get it unstuck. Letting baby suck on something while you do this helps baby to move those cranial plates. I would do this while breastfeeding. There are other specialized techniques as well (like the ear tugging thing which I've been shown how to do but don't really know how to do so I leave it to the trained expert).

parenting equity

We live in a patriarchal society, so in a hetero family even a progressive family, gender is still going to be a struggle. I think white feminism (Stanton, Cody) did a huge disservice to women by demanding equality with white men (legal, political, biological) rather than equity. Historically, white women were emancipated based on the Stanton argument that white women could counteract the freed black male slave vote. Also, those white suffragettes and subsequent white feminists distanced themselves from motherhood as a form of unremunerated bondage and not coincidentally, the wage work of freed black women.

While that is all centuries ago, its legacy is this--Mothers are not valued in the mainstream power structure; the US is the ONLY 1st world nation that does not provide mandatory paid maternity leave. FMLA is a watered down approximation of a well meaning thought. If you are on welfare, you can only take of other people's children for pay, you cannot be paid to raise your own children. So the rallying cry that a "women can do anything men can do" is mostly true, but more importantly, men CANNOT do everything women can--give life and sustenance--and that is exactly what remains unacknowledged, unvalued, and unremunerated.
(ASIDE: the New Yorker had an interesting article a while back about the "liberating" American invention of breast pumps and how it forced mothers to go back to work sooner because now biology wasn't a barrier for women to be like men in the workplace.)

SAHM label is an effort to reclaim the degraded "homemaker."

All that to say that I don't take the gender dynamics as solely an individual couple's relationship problem, but a social problem. I struggle with it too, not because my husband is a patriarchal narcissist (far be it from true!), but because we live these socially imposed power dynamics and norms. And this all without bringing in other dynamics like race and culture.

Motherhood is still unpaid work.

The patriarchal nuclear family structure and the ruptures in extended family networks from immigration and American nomadic existence makes it so much harder; no grandmothers and elders live with us to raise our babies.

Dennis Brutus once gave met Tstsi Dengaremba's novel Nervous Conditions. And I think it gets exactly at the tension between Western feminism/norms and cultural roles.

Having exclusively breastfed and coslept until 1yo meant that my daughter was squarely attached to me which created its own cycle of emotional dependence. It wasn't until ~2.5yo that VL would ask for her Ba when she needed comfort or nurturing. Now this wasn't my husband's refusal or irresponsibility; he picked up the slack on all the household chores and other non-BF parenting so that I could nurture our child. When he was back at work FT, I voluntarily did all the diaper changes at night while I was on maternity leave in equitable appreciation of him working outside the home. For SAHMs, the household chores do fall on their shoulders more, because that is what is equitable. For families where both parents work outside the home, chores and parenting may be more negotiated in the 3 hours we have with the offspring before they go to sleep.

Until males start lactating (physiologicaly possible, if socially/cultural taboo. google it), the first few years fall squarely on the mother's breasts. I still struggle with what mainstream feminism enculturated in me and traditional/cultural roles.

January 7 at 10:12am

Act of Love

I used to joke that the Learning Annex has classes on things only rich people know like how to hide your money in overseas accounts.


Knowing about how to protect your family in the event of death, catastrophe, is one of those cultural capital that so many immigrant/low income families don't know and so get screwed over and remain in poverty. We went to a parents' workshop about it at Bananas Inc (Oakland).

My biggest take away is "A Will is an act of Love; it shows your children you love them enough to take care of them even after you die."

A Will is for when you die; a Living Will is for when you are incapacitated, establishes power of attorney; an Advance Health Directive is re: your medical care if you are incapacitated.

Other things we learned--if you write your own will it must be entirely HANDWRITTEN so that your identity can be verified through handwriting; if it is typed, probate court will disregard it even if you have notarized witnesses. Everything you own is your Estate including property, cars, life insurance, etc. Unless your Estate is in a Trust (a fictional company that your family are the "tenants/employees of"), it will go through probate court to ultimately decide even if there is a Will and your heirs will have to pay heavy taxes (something like 40%). If your Estate is in a Trust and you die, it does not go through probate court, your personal debt will be forgiven. If you don't have a Trust and die, your debtors have first right to claim everything in your Estate before your heirs see a dime and they will still have to pay probate tax on your entire estate, not just the remainder.

Guardianship of minors always goes through Probate court, but your Will can influence placement. No Will means the Court decides what is best for your children. We bought the Nolo book on DIY Wills until we can save up for a lawyer but each state also have different probate laws (it costs something like $500 to do a Will and $2500 to set up a Trust).

wretched of the earth

My ong ngoai passed away very early this morning. He had a heart attack at home, called all his daughters, and accompanied by my youngest uncle and my mother, he died without prolonged suffering. One of his last wishes because he had already a lifetime of suffering. His heart was broken after my ba ngoai died two years ago. The had been married over 60 years.

He was a good man who lived through a lot of hardship. Born a Catholic peasant in 1925 in a tiny hamlet called Lien Thuy under French colonization, though he was chau dich ton--the patrilineal heir, the firstborn son beget of the firstborn son beget of the village chief and so on and so forth, he tilled the catholic-ceded land land under peonage to his own grandparents for his disowned father's gambling debts; his mother left him at age 7 and a baby brother behind to become a wet nurse in the big city Ha Noi. He minded the water buffalo, ploughed & harvested the rice paddies and fished in Ha Long Bay and learned to be self-sufficient though unloved. He never gave up the hope and faith that his father's family would love him and perhaps even restore him to his rightful place.

As he grew of age, he was conscripted as coolie labor to the colonial Army and learned to build bridges and to hate the French. He had an customary arranged marriage with my ba ngoai. In his teens, he survived the Japanese invasion and their torching of the granaries and their deliberate famine that took 2 million lives. When armistice was declared, he joined the Viet Minh to prevent the French from regaining colonial power. And when it became clear that religion and Communism would never reconcile, he left behind his what ought o have been his ancestral lands, uprooted his family--ba co|his mother, ba ngoai, my eldest aunty and mother--to enter the South where he tried to find a small piece of earth to call his own. Roaming through the Mekong for many years, they finally settled in Quy Nhon in the Central region where my parents grew up.

My ong ba ngoai, my parents & siblings (& me in the womb), 4 aunties, 3 uncles, all left Viet Nam to join my oldest aunty in Honolulu where land was scarce to be had and jobs even scarcer. My grandparents, 3 of my aunties and 3 uncles tried to make a go of it in Missouri but the winters and the chicken factory were misery.

We were all reunited in San Diego; we all lived together until I was 12. I still mark time not by years but what street we lived on--Reynard then Ohio (ong ba, aunties, & uncles on Whitmen) then Auburn (then ong ba and 2 youngest uncles on Alta Dena), then mom & us separately Oro Vista, and finally Jason; for peasant stock, we were awfully nomadic.

I learned so many things from my ong ba ngoai. My ba ngoai of unconditional maternal love, spoke the love language of food. My ong ngoai though had only his stories of loss and perseverance to give to us grandkids, and at Tet, his handmade banh chung and his sesame candy gooey and almost scalding. I am one of the only grandkids who is fluent enough and was around enough to have listened to his stories. Ong ngoai secretly loved my siblings and I best he once told me years ago because he said, my mother suffered the most from my father's heroism and fate; and perhaps too, because we were his only full Viet grandkids and he had not the prospect of a chau dich ton|patrilineal heir to carry on the Phamily name and to remember his legacy. He taught me to be proud of being Viet; that was my first day of kindergarten when we lived on Reynard Way, when I came home proclaiming I was American, he took me by the hand, squatted down beside me, and told me that to Americans, I would always have yellow skin, black hair and eyes. I would always be Viet.

I learned to love tools and making things from watching him make banh chung|pork sticky rice cake every Tet, building non-permitted additions to our rented houses (Ohio & Auburn and later their house on 54th), and making flapping wooden angel harnesses from scraps of wood and cloth for the Christmas pageant (Auburn Dr).

I don't grieve very well. I tattoo.

I lost my father when I was too young to understand and taboo to speak of it. And so, I write. I feel so bereft to have lost my roots in this world. There were so many more things I wanted to learn from them, about them. And with the narcissism of youth and American-ness, I marked not the time until too late.

My grandfather wore 3 piece suits, fedoras and pocket watches, loved cognac and good food, made the best banh chung and keo me every Tet up until very recently, and lived to play with his great-grandchildren. In his elder years, he learned to forgive (not the French nor Japanese) but certainly his paternal family, and to love. He still dreamed I think of water buffaloes and rice paddies (and thit cay on occasion) but he and my grandmother had their garden, family, and Church. And now he has peace and rejoined my ba ngoai in the either.

An era has passed. I am disconsolate, desiring what is in the past, a byproduct perhaps of being partly raised by my grandparents. I feel in this modern society we lose our rituals and I feel it the most with death. We've lost our rituals of death and honoring our loved ones by being with them as they die and our hands that loved them so well, preparing them for their final resting place. I am bracing myself for the artifice of mortuary preparation and the dullness of performance.

mangalitsa