Eat Your Words

‘Oh you’re a good girl, eating yer fruit!’

How I hate that sentence, directed at my three year old daughter.

We hear it when she eats fruit. We hear it when she eats an avocado handroll. We hear it when she eats rice and veggies at the Chinese noodle shop.

I don’t like the whole ‘good boy / girl’ thing with its implication that a child might be bad if they behave in a way that we don’t like, but in this instance it is the implication that one would only eat real actual food if coerced into it, or in order to please a parent. It’s as though I’d spent the previous ten minutes berating her into performing such a feat of healthy eating, and her eventual capitulation must be praised to encourage future compliance.

I hate it because I don’t want her to absorb the idea that real food is something one must suffer through to gain the reward of adults’ approval.

Actually, Finna just likes fruit. If we take her shopping, and say, ‘get yourself a treat!’ she will trot straight off to the fruit and veggie section and load up on apples, grapes, cherries, mandarins, berries, carrots (current top of the pops is a bunch of baby carrots) and bananas. Yum-o! Her beaming little face and busy happy hands choose and organize, peel and arrange, sample and snack. “Mum!” she’ll call from the back of the car, “I want an apple.” She loves the green ones best.

There was a study released this week that was reported on across Australia. Published in the Medical Journal of Australia by Zhou et al, it reported that (extrapolated from a sample of 13,000 Adelaide children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds) Australian children eat way too much saturated fat, mainly from dairy products, milk, biscuits, cakes, and breakfast cereals, and far too little fibre. It also found that about one third of pre-schoolers are overweight or actually obese, but that this is probably from lack of physical activity rather than too many calories.

I have to say that I’m not exactly prone on the floor with shock at these revelations. I would go further and say that my experiences as a teacher have left me convinced that this study was pulling punches. I think the problem is worse.

The report said that the children tested did have adequate levels of iron, calcium and zinc, but I have to wonder whether these are from genuine food sources or from ‘fortified’ products. If so there are two concerns; one that artificial supplements don’t act the same way in the body that food derived ones do, and two that there are hundreds of other nutrients that are vital to a resilient thriving growing body and the best way to get these is by eating a diverse range of (mainly plant derived) real foods.

In my pre children life I was a teacher, and worked at one rural secondary school for five years. During that time, the Issue Of The Coke Machine popped up regularly at staff meetings, persistent as an unwanted suitor. The thing hulked in the 500 student strong school’s canteen, hogging a whole corner and dispensing an array of teeth – rotting beverages that appalled many of the teaching staff (no doubt partly because it made our job that much harder; taming coke – addled adolescents after their lunchtime caffeine and sugar bender was no joy). That wasn’t the only Issue, the canteen sold solid crap too, cakes and lollies, fatty fried foods and white bread rolls and bags of chips.

Why was it so? Clearly the voices of the teachers were ignored, and parents can’t have been complaining too loudly. The principal’s reason for the Coke vending machine’s continued presence among us was simple; the school needed the money. And that was why the food at the canteen remained enticingly crap also; apparently the sugar drugged little tykes in our care would rather starve than buy healthy food at school. The School Needed The Money.

The school’s attitude to its role in promoting healthy eating habits in kids wasn’t the only reason I make the claim that the situation may be even worse than reported. The contents of children’s lunchboxes, revealed to me over eight years of teaching in a variety of Victorian schools, were not uniformly but certainly generally appalling. The average kid was dragging along a white bread plastic cheese sandwich and a bag of chips, along with canteen money for lollies. Seriously. In fairness, some also had sweet biscuits with icing, a bottle of cordial, a little baggie of some junk food. Some certainly did have a piece of fruit, and the ‘brain food’ initiative in some schools (with a scheduled midmorning break for the consumption of fruit or nuts) helped. A minority of kids definitely had healthy, actual food in their lunchboxes.

Getting back to my beautiful daughter. How on earth did we get her to eat these things? Regular threats and beatings? No, actually, it was down to two basic things.

Firstly, we offered her a range of real actual food (things that grew somewhere, not long ago, some of them in our garden) from when she became interested in eating (at about eight and a half months old).

Secondly, we never forced, cajoled, tricked, bargained, berated or bribed her to eat anything, and we never stopped her from eating any time she felt like it. No sitting down to ‘finish your tea’ if she’s not hungry. No smothering veggies in tomato sauce, no eating races, no bargaining about eating dinner so you can have desert. Just, here’s some food, eat what and when you want. Nowadays, (she’s 3) we sit down to eat meals together at the table, but she still eats as much or as little as she wants. We occasionally have treats (too many hot chips when we’re out due to gluten and dairy allergies, dammit, but Finna will just as often choose an avocado sandwich given her druthers), but the vast majority of the food we have in the house grew somewhere recently, and even through several moves of house we always chuck a few veggies in the garden. This morning she lit up with excitement, ‘Yes! Let’s pick some broccoli!’ We grew it, and that makes it that much more magical.

Finna is completely self regulating, she stops eating when she’s full, and many times we’ve observed that she consumes exactly what her body needs. I’m guessing that our exact way of going about things may not be for everyone, but certainly children learn most powerfully by example and immersion; they learn what to do and how to be by observing what’s normal in the folk around them. Reason number five hundred to be really careful how you go about schooling your children; if they are in a school environment where the norm is eating rubbish, then you can bet your lunch that will become your child’s preferred norm too.

So what do I reply the next time someone says, ‘Ooh, you’re a good girl eating that!’? Suggestions welcome ;-)

My son's simple birth

My son’s birth was so simple.

He was conceived in late summer, some months after another little soul decided not to stay, six weeks into its pregnancy.

This loss, of a pregnancy that felt tentative and out of time from the beginning, nevertheless floored me, mired me in unexpectedly powerful grief, left me wading through thick purple sadness. I fumed at the four decades old body that had, in fairness produced and nurtured my perfect little daughter (one out of two ain’t bad, surely). Several months dragged on while my poor old body healed and re-calibrated itself, and I became dark with the hopeless tangled certainty that it wouldn’t give me another baby.

Then came January. Midsummer month, bright and yellow, and I just opened clenched hands and let it all go.

I enjoyed January.

Early February, hothot time. Sandcastle season.

A day spent digging in the warmwet sand with Finna. Her little paws piled the stuff high as rhythmical water licked at it, building lumpy sodden sandcastles that the ceaselessly hungry tide ate. And I knew. There was another there with us, watching us build, feeling that tide, those slipping waves that ate sand. That other made me nauseated, turned the usually enticing odour of an Indian restaurant into a repellent fume, and flipped breastfeeding my girl into a strangely prickly thing.

I knew he was there. Just not that he was he (although a dear friend, nearest I have to family, somehow knew this all along).

Two thick lines.

The next few months were hard going and beautiful, miraculous, jubilant, scary exhausting and hopeful. By gods I was sick. We moved to a house on a remote 400 acre farm, a move that was belly scrapingly slow, and my daughter and I ate tree apples, most of which I threw up again. My partner did the hard yakka of moving mostly on his own because I couldn’t stand the feel of anything and those long car journeys might as well have been on heaving oceans. Recently my daughter watched a video about a fluffy golden retriever puppy, one I used to keep her happy on those awful moving trips, and the sound of the title music knocked a wave of powerful nauseous revulsion though me, even now, so many months after my son’s birth.

My belly grew, (and grew and GREW like something out of a children’s story book, the kind that has the child wondering how big this can get and what could possibly be in there!) and the nausea slowly receded to a tolerable background nag at about 19 weeks. It never left completely. I lived again.

I slept with my Finna in a corner bedroom of our new house, all yellowlight in summer and dankly cold in winter, and listened to my inside baby. He was envisioning coming into the world under a tree in the yard, apparently. Some work to do, then, on making that happen!

I dreamed of a big strong baby boy, spread out asleep in the bed with his sister and I.

I’d had no medical anythings this time. After what happened to my first birth it seemed fairer to this baby. I didn’t want Inside baby hearing the scream of ultrasound, or being kicked out of me by Syntocinon, pulled at the last from my utterly empty unfueled, cut pulled and tethered self by a doctor who Meant Well.

My partner and I drove by the local hospital. ”Oh you can’t have it there.” Excellent, my thoughts exactly. No independent birth centres in our entire state either.

I was 22 weeks pregnant when we met the woman who would support me to have a powerful, simple, life changing birth. At home. We chatted on the wide long slatted porch of our home, with its tangled vast garden and cows in the background pacing and eating and birthing their own children. When she left my partner and I agreed. She was perfect. We just trusted her, and Finna, all two and a half years of her, thought she was the bees darn knees, although the blood pressure cuff sent my sensitive child running to daddy in fear of what was being done to me.

Our lovely midwife confirmed it. ‘Yep, there’s a baby in there!. Good, the other option was really large tapeworm. Not as nice.

Weeks wore on, I ground them slowly out, walking and stretching until stabbing pelvic pain and swollen legs, the skin stretched and creased with pressure, stopped me well into my eighth month. I looked forward to birth, feared it, worried about how my sensitive and very connected little daughter would cope with seeing her mum in pain, hear her ‘vocalising’ (which in my first birth translated to keening high screams, something I felt might disturb her!).

So we prepared.

We watched videos of gentle water births, and Finna said. ‘Want to watch babies –come-out!”

We talked about the baby in mum’s tummy, and she watched the little limb bits wave across my belly more than anyone else.

She made friends with our midwife Mary but never could stand that blood pressure cuff or the belly checking. ‘Baby’s fine…’ a tiny worried voice.

We found, at 36 weeks, a perfect doula, the wonderful Kate who came armed with paints and bubbles and a willingness to look for frogs and pick green plums. Our dear friend and her daughters were on standby too. Finna’s Distraction Team.

We did turns of the sodden warming garden with me on hands and knees, swiggling my pelvis for Inside Baby’s benefit, although the little guy’s head had been firmly engaged since 33 weeks, making elephant noises for Fin as she rode around in childjoy on my swaying back.

And at 38 weeks we had a blessingway, a warm beautiful thing that painted my belly with stunning swirls of inspiration and love, and my soul with hope and joy and footprints beside mine. I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, the most stunningly positive and sensible thing I could possibly have imbibed at the time.

The birth pool arrived, its room, the yellow corner one, draped with Blessingway candles and beads and wordflags.

A darknight peaceful birth filled the eye in my mind.

We waited. And I got on with things, so the waiting wouldn’t swallow me whole.

At 40 weeks Finna mouse nibbled a mushroom from the garden, then threw up fiercely in the kitchen, a torrent of reddish lumpen stuff that left her cowering and sobbing. Terror for my girl jolted at me, and Inside Baby jumped up to lie under my ribs. The illness passed and finally Finna slept beside me, cleaned and tired. Inside Baby descended again the next day, head jammed firmly back in place, his sister safe, and this time the pressing feet scrimbled my right side rather than the traditionally favoured left.

At 41 weeks I took my Finna to a playgroup, batting off the ‘Oh, you’re overdue’s (with much dramatic widening of eyes) and the ‘you poor thing’s and the ‘where are you having it’s and the ‘do you know what you’re having’s.

Why offer sympathy? Bizarre, I felt, in my waiting space.

The fears that dogged me were these; that I would not be able to go into labour myself, that my body would fail me and I would feel the strangeness of another blankly painful birth that belonged to others, that somewhere in all this I might lose my precious baby.

So I read Ina May again, walked some more in that tangly sunny stormy green past our back door, held the blessingway beads, heavy with love and the colours of birth.

The next day, the day before the third anniversary of Finna’s birth, my partner went off on a trip to a town several hours drive away. The day was warm, and a young local girl came to babysit in our home for a few hours. Finna played, showed her trees and seeds and things, and I found a red flag of impending birth on one of my frequent toilet visits.

A text to midwife, a text to doula; it could still be days or weeks. I got on with my quiet lumbering day, feeling regular tummy grumblings of anxiety, or excitement. Baz called, we chatted, I suggested perhaps labour might be not far off but also perhaps not for weeks yet.

We smiled, Finna and I, we played, we went out to that long porch and she sifted horsefood and the anxious digestive pangs continued and it stormed, mightily. Long rolling strokes of grey thunder drove us inside, squealing. We hid together in the corner under the window.

I was overcome with hunger, ate, packed in food, a huge grainy sandwich, fruit, honey. I was starting to have my suspicions about these tummy grumblings, timed them. Every two or three minutes. Couldn’t be labour. Too mild, too kind with only minutes between them.

Gentle whisperings.

We were weary, my girl and I, so we lay down for a rest. She had some boobs, and the pains changed; grew, took on more of the tugging quality of a period. I got up, we got up, Finna played, a growing need for movement pushed at me.

I paced.

These tugs at my belly were about a minute apart.

A text to Kate, wondering if she might pop by as she lived locally, and just ‘tell me what she thought’. A limp feeling of not wanting to be alone crept in, I followed Finna to the porch, the waves of pulling grew and I walked through them.

Phone, Kate. Please come, thanks, ten minutes, have you called Mary?

Mary, sorry to bother you, probably a false alarm, pacing the long green feathered porch, do you think it’s a false alarm?

NO.

Pacing. Driven, pushed, up and down, there and back, tromping the porch. Waves now of tightening, pain, pulling.

Kate arrives just as I can no longer focus on taking care of my tomorrowthree birthday girl. She shows Kate the horse food, she’s safe, I pace, I breathe. I’m swimming now, floating smiling in the clear water between the tugs, swaying and humming across the tops of the increasingly powerful waves.

Mary is here, smiling strong gentle. I’ll talk to you once that one’s past. Oh, is that another one already? They’re pretty close together aren’t they?

Smile, ride another one, humming hip circling now, I have a favourite place on this porch, a safe corner of doorframe that hangs me from it by my strong hands, feels the centre of me as these waves crash in growing and heaving.

Now all of me must be there to ride each one.

So they don’t swamp me.

I am singing, hhooooaaahhhhhe-e-e-eyyyy…… and the breath keeps me surfing, not drowning.

This bub might be born on Finna’s birthday! Oh, Idon’t think she’s going to make it to midnight.

A fistclench of excitement. This is happening?

More waves, another and another, more and more powerful, but each one is only one. Each one I can do.

Then the timbre changes. There are still those crashing tightening pains, but I’m transported. Smiling, lolling, shaking. I’m in a loose place, a steaming jubilant ecstatic place. Are you ok? Oh yes. Where do you think you’re at? Oh, I’m in transition, but not that hellish burn of terror and agony of last time. This is intense, it holds me tight, but it’s blissful too, a rush of soft bliss, and I’m somewhere else.

I cruise there for a while, then the thing I’m riding changes again, hot drawing up pain. It’s a pain I don’t like now, it’s not so friendly now I’m feeling it now it’s here.

I want the pool now, cool wet holding. Too late.

Huffing grunting pushpain and a swollen gush of lifeliquid, the sea my baby has grown in, leaves me in a shocking tidal wave.

NOW I know what the urge to push, so empty and absent from my first birth, feels like!

I’m down, a huffing dog still in my friendly doorpost corner.

Stretching burning pains, reaching down the insides of my legs, red hard pain. B comes home, somewhere behind me.

His face, felt, you’re doing so well, hun!

Mary spreads towels under me, do you want to go inside?

Go?

Inside?

Foolish talk!

The unkind pains shear me, push me apart, splay me, and as each crescendos (slow it down a bit Tine) there are harsher sounds pulled from me, fearful sweeps. Mary checks that strong pulsing heartbeat again, and it’s all I can do to let her.

 Kind hand on my back, relax your bottom. I do.

Hot! Towels! My. Back!

Mary brings them, they are joy on me, and Finna, my littlebig nearlythree girl, finds a little facewasher and places it gently over my back too.

I am swamped with love, nuzzle her, lean my head on her little body for a few suspended warm moments.

The lulls in between the pains, those shrieks as the solid head pushes its way down me, are even now calm, painless.

The peaks push me to the very very top, the lowest highest furthest bits of me, stretch every part of my being, pull sounds from me; shitfuckshitfuck!! Those are good shit fucks! Laughter brings me back in, gratitude for this warm sensible woman just letting me be what I am, do what I can do.

That head is shoving at me, pushing my body apart, coyly advancing, slidingback.

Only a few more pushes now.

It’s a little blondie!

A few more? Of those?!

I’m on knees, body snaked up along that doorframe, my stronghands holding it holding me.

Another tidal wave and I grab that pain, push that head, hold it and gruntshove again HUNH! I hold the painforce, use it’s ripping power, push and it slips from me, the whole long body warmfalls from me and Mary catches my child lays him on the towels and I laughcry out in a surge of the hugest mountain of triumph and relief.

‘I’ve had a baby!!’ I’ve had it!

Me. It’s done and I did it!

Stunned for a suspended moment.

Pick up your baby Tine, we need to go inside it’s getting cold out here, and my hands are on the warm slippery body, the little thing held firmly to me, towels wrapping us, I’m shaking and high and in love already and I hold the person to my chest, the tiny wetwhite new person, mewing quietly, bluish under the white, and sitdown on something, a chair that someone puts under me, and Mary passes me some oxygen to wave in the tiny face.

I love you, we all love you and want you here with us SO much.

My first words to him.

And the life comes in, the limbs move firmly, definitely, he has made his decision to stay. He breathes, and Mary says ‘him’ and I look.

And Baz and I, Finna beside him, look.

We have a son.

The rest is all warm and jumbly, and really there is no ‘the rest’ because birth is not the beginning or end of a living person’s story, it’s a profound transition. He lived before that, inside me and right now he snuggles warm on my lap, breathing in sleep and warming my breast with his strong joyful little warmhands.

Even deep in sleep he’s always checking that I’m there.

My dear friend and her three precious daughters arrived as we sat in that chair, just inside the door where our son was born. I shakystood to birth a huge placenta with the longest cord that Mary had ever seen (the cord that was wrapped several times around his neck when he slid out of me), and our son’s father cut the strong rubbery lifeline a while after that. We made our way, my son and I supported on each side by one dad arm and one Mary arm into the living room where I sank onto the couch to smile and smile, warm in the support of Baz and a curious Finna, our friends and Mary and Kate, and where our newborn son found that source of safety and warmth and nutrition that newborns are so completely primed to find. Breasts that filled with milk the second day after his birth, and fed him so well that he gained half a kilo in his first ten days.

He was born at 7.05pm (24 hours almost to the minute before his sister’s third birthday), and that first red flag show had happened at 10.30 am, with real labour that I could recognize as such from about 3 – 4 pm.

He was born amid rolling latespring thunderstorms, on the porch of our home, and Baz, newly the father of a son as well as of our perfect daughter, described the scene he came home to, with me in the 20 minute or so long second stage, as ‘Wagnerian’. Our son is named for the Norse god of thunder, and that was to be his name if he was a boy, from before he was conceived.

The photos from that night show tumbles of people on the couch; me and our son at the centre with Baz and Finna, our amazing doula Kate and fabulous midwife Mary, and our dear friends, who had driven three hours to arrive to see our son for the first time, ten minutes old.

The team, and our ordinary miracle.

Baz describes our little boy as ‘a joyful presence’, and so he is.

The next day we all celebrated Finna’s third birthday with messy chocolate cake, little presents and the presence of my brilliant friend and her family, the first people to see my boy after his magnificent birth.

Tor’s birth was simple, inexorable, awe inspiring, and left me stronger, bigger, more. It gave me back some of what that stolen first hospital birth drained away. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to the fabulous warm people who made it possible for me to do it, to be and do what my body, and nature, always knew I could do.

That four decades old body did, does, pretty well after all.