Favorite Parenting Quote

"The children they would have someday together. She told him, they're always there, towing along behind us, like balloons tied to our ankles. They aren't captives, just clouds. Only clouds."

-Noe Venable, "Aren't Captives" from Down Easy

...also one of my favorite albums of all time.


 

Finding a Gentle Trot

Halloween Penguins, in homemade costumes

 As most of you are probably aware, I live in Chicago.  It hosts the annual Chicago Marathon.  This marathon has been fraught with troubles these last few years.  Or rather, global warming has been wreaking havoc on the Chicago Marathon.  For the last three or four years, the organizers have been pushing the date of the Chicago Marathon later and later into the year.  What was once an early September event is now solidly in November, and that hasn't stopped the unseasonable heat from causing all sorts of damage.  Three years ago, many runners were hospitalized and several died.  Nobody could have foreseen the mid-90 degree heat, and as a result there wasn't enough water, or enough water stations, and the runners didn't have the common sense to throw their hands up and say, "This is ridiculous!"

At any rate, it was pushed back another week this year.  If it hadn't, the weather would have been gray and cool, but instead that extra week let the city warm up back to over 80 degrees.  Climate change has not been kind to mid-western marathoners.

And I have been half-heartedly training to run the half-marathon next year.  What that means is that I haven't run since my semester started.  The semester that's a few weeks from ending.  And it has been tormenting me.

DD the penguin

But I don't just want to talk about real marathons.  I want to talk about parenting.  You see, I have been burning out.  Hard.  I didn't realize that was what was happening until a few days ago, but I was losing my damned mind.  I didn't even know myself.  I was having outbursts of genuine rage- shrieking and throwing things at walls.  I was lashing out at M, snapping at my toddlers, and occasionally bursting into tears.  I spent an entire day in bed.  I was having migraines that might have turned lethal.  I couldn't eat.

That this was all happening around my period was enough for me.  I told myself I was having a crazy rush of hormones, and that once that settled down it would get better.

Well, it didn't.

I finally decided that M and I needed a night out.  The night that our sitter started her new weekend job, and none of our friends could cover for her.  We had no sitter, and canceled our dinner reservations and just ordered in some pasta.  It wasn't a particularly relaxing night.

And that was when it occurred to me- when was the last time we HAD a relaxing night?  When was the last time I went to bed wishing I was a little less exhausted so that I could take the time to rub my aching feet, or sweep the living room, or just have a glass of wine?  Since the girls were about two months old and suddenly sleeping through the night.  That was relaxing.  Until I got used to it.

I reflected on what I had wanted while I was going crazy.  The answer wasn't good.  I wanted to have half a bottle of wine before bed.  I wanted to take xanax in the afternoon.  I wanted to smoke a spliff and listen to show tunes in the studio.  I wanted to take a vicodan for my damned feet and let the afternoon disappear.  But I didn't do any of those things.  I have a very important job to do, three of them no less, that I can't do under the influence.

I read an article, Addicted Moms: Everybody Knows Somebody, by Lane DeGregory in Working Mother Magazine.  It seems that more and more working moms (and I do count being a student and an artist as 'working') are turning to drugs and alcohol to get them through the day.  The thing that I found most disturbing is how NOT NEW this is.  How it's essentially anti-news.  It seems that doctors have been prescribing mind altering drugs to housewives since the sixteenth century, when it was opium tinctures.  In the '20s it was cocaine laced Coca Cola, in the '60s it was valium, and now it's pain killers and alcohol.

Motherhood is fucking hard.  I'm not going to sugar coat it.  You've always got to look competent and in control for your kids, you have to take care of the house (because a dirty house becomes dangerous for small children fast), make sure everyone is fed, keep your marriage in working order (if you're married), and manage your work as well.  The working mother isn't new, it's just a different kind of work.  Before our modern ideal housewife existed, the mother was also a partner in the family business, be it farming, milling, shopkeeping...  There is always women's work.  Laundry, cooking, mending, fixing, childcare...

SI the penguin

It's endless.  And while most of it isn't exactly hard, it's CONSTANT.  You reach a point where your idea of a nice night is one where you have the energy and peace of mind to actually clean the whole house now that the kids are in bed.  Maybe cook a few meals in advance.  Do some baking.  And that's your time OFF.

Add to that the fact that, when small children are involved, every task takes three times as long.  It's much harder to put away clean laundry when very small people empty every drawer you leave open, throw the clean laundry onto the floor from the basket, and demand that you play games with them half way through the now very onerous task.

Then there's the guilt.  You see, right now I'm typing and deleting all sorts of excuses about how much I love being a mom, how it's all really worth it, etc.  Which is true.  But you see, as a mom you have a hard time allowing yourself to acknowledge that being a mom is HARD.  That it kind of makes you miserable sometimes.  See?  There's a giant load of guilt right there.

So I've burnt out a bit.  I'm coming up on my finals/final projects, my coursework has picked up, and of course M's coursework is picking up as he nears finals as well.  He can only really do his homework on campus, so this means more and more time without M.  He's looking at a situation for the next few weeks where he won't get to see his children from Sunday night until Friday afternoon.  And while that's very, VERY hard on him, it essentially puts me in the position of a single mom most of the time.  Taking care of all bedtimes, wake-ups, baths, and meals unless I'm at class, feeling miserable about all the money I'm tossing into childcare.

I called my parents for a little sympathy.  After all, who knows how hard it is to be a parent better than your parents?  And my parents had a really rough run of it.  So I figured they'd sympathize.  My father said two things to me, which miraculously made me feel a little better.  The first was that it took me an awful long time to burn out.  That was nice.  The second is that I've been running a sprint, and parenting is a marathon.  The longest marathon there is.

True.  But what to do about it?  I don't know how to run a marathon.  And this brings me back to my goal of the Chicago Half-Marathon and my abysmal training.

Playful Halloween Penguins!

I can't not sprint.  I can jog gently in place, for a long time!  But as soon as I start moving forward, my legs just take off.  I RUN until I can't do it anymore.  I know, this is not good training.  But I can't stop!  I just plain do not know how to jog.  Silly, isn't it?  But that's also what's going on with my kids.

I don't know how to parent any other way.  I can only go full tilt.  If I try to force myself not to do things that must be done, I simply freak out.  Imagine sitting in a chair, staring at the Cheerio strewn dining room and telling yourself, "DO NOT SWEEP THE FLOOR.  DO NOT SWEEP THE FLOOR."  It puts me so on edge that all I can think of is to go grab the Bailey's off the shelf and have one on the rocks.  Or just take some pain killers and pick up the damn broom.  And instead I leave the room to do laundry, thinking all the while about how I'm going to get to the library to work on my final projects.  How I'm going to pack up the girls and get to the DMV to get new plates for the minivan.  How I'm going to get to the toy store before Channukah, or what I'm getting my in-laws for Christmas, or what holiday cookies I'm going to make and if I should plan on letting the girls help.

Why do I worry about these things?  Because they need to happen.  Why do they need to happen?  Because I said so.  Vicious cycle, no?

Being a penguin is exhausting!

So I need to learn to run a marathon.  To find a calm, slow pace, and just keep it up.  Just keep keeping it up.  I need our rhythm to beat a little more slowly.  I need to figure out how to parent differently.

It's sort of like learning how to breathe differently.  But I know, as a singer, that it can be done.

I think that parenting theory is one of those things that can't actually be taught.  I remember as a kid, being lectured about head voice and chest voice, singing from the top of your mouth, not through your nose.  Nobody could point to what I was doing wrong and help me fix it.  All they could do was point out how I sounded, and make vague gestures at different parts of my head and chest.

So much of parenting theory is like that.  There aren't instructions, just... vague gesturing.

I keep coming up with impossible plans.  I don't think that's the answer.  I think I just need to find out what makes us all happy, and do THAT.

And I am part of "us all."  A very important part.

So M and I are going to start taking bi-weekly date nights.  For a start.  I'm going to try to jog, with or without the girls.  I'm going to try to get the girls more involved in meal preparations.   I'm going to try to find the time to clean slowly, as the day progresses, instead of all at once.  Or maybe just let some more things go.  I don't know.

Because I don't know how to run a marathon.

 

Marijuana and Motherhood

Women and Cannabis: Medicine, Science, and Sociology (Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics)

I recently finished reading what was, to the best of my knowledge, the only modern book published on the scientific findings of studies on women's health issues and the use of marijuana.

You're probably wondering, why on earth would I do such a thing?

There's a very simple answer.  There are questions I've had regarding the use of marijuana since well before I became pregnant.  I had a friend who was an avid smoker, and continued to smoke while pregnant and breast feeding.  She attributed her daughter's intelligence, friendliness, and general laid-back attitude to this exposure.  Mind you, this was about six years ago.  You will recall that my children are just now nearing their first birthday.

When I was a teenager, I was arrested for the possession of marijuana.  It being my first offense, and me being both young and obviously scared out my wits, I was sentenced to twenty hours of community service and the writing of an essay about the dangers of marijuana.  I did my research, and concluded that the only danger of marijuana was that it was illegal.  The court thanked me for my essay, and that was the end of my career as an outlaw.

Back pain, insomnia, nausea... all of these are treated in some diseases with marijuana.  But the big question... will it hurt my babies?  There seemed to be no answer.

I never forgot, however, that all of the scientific evidence I could find described marijuana as being essentially harmless.  Even then there was already a growing movement of using marijuana as medicine for treating cancer and AIDS patients, and a well known subset of other conditions that might also benefit from treatment with marijuana.

During my pregnancy, I found myself repeatedly thinking about the use of marijuana to treat my symptoms.  Back pain, insomnia, nausea... all of these are treated in some diseases with marijuana.  But the big question... will it hurt my babies?  There seemed to be no answer.

The information I could find was varied and suspect.  Each article, despite its findings, ended with a warning that because of the illicit nature of the drug, the subject sampling was also probably smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, eating poorly, and had little access to medical care.  There was no control.

My queries continued into my months of breastfeeding.  Would marijuana help my symptoms, would it hurt my children if excreted in the breast milk?  I asked my doctor, and she told me that the only information available was that THC did enter breast milk.

Finally, I found this book.  You can imagine my shock that this publication, from New York, was essentially blacklisted in the United States.  To buy it here was going to cost me nearly a thousand dollars!  For a book of less than 200 pages, less than ten years old.  The challenge of procuring it alone was incentive for me to read the entire thing.

Queen Victoria was known to use a hashish tincture to treat her dysmenorrhea.

What I learned was absolutely fascinating.  It's a collection of twelve articles, primary research, personal anecdotes, and historical reviews from institutions of learning in the United States, Canada, England, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands.  They cover a wide range of subjects from pre-menstrual syndrome, to hyperemesis gravidarum, to multiple sclerosis, to the effects of pre-natal marijuana use.  The major findings in the book that interested me the most were in regards to the use of marijuana while pregnant and nursing, the treatment of hyperemesis gravidarum, and the THC receptors in the brains of infant mice.  Also amazing to me was the information that marijuana, or more commonly hashish, was produced in the United States by pharmaceutical companies until Prohibition.  In fact, these companies continued to stand by this medicine, fighting to continue its use, until the Nixon administration.

Marijuana has been used as medicine for thousands of years, across the entire planet.  Queen Victoria was known to use a hashish tincture to treat her dysmenorrhea.  It was one of the most common drugs in the kits of doctors for delivering babies, used to accelerate and ease labor, particularly in first pregnancies.

A Canadian researcher did a review of studies of children of marijuana smoking mothers, going up to their teenage years.  The only finding that was consistent throughout these research projects was that children of mothers who smoked between five and ten joints a day throughout their pregnancy were more likely to have difficulty multi-tasking between the ages of three and twelve years old.  To cause this sort of effect, that's a daily consumption of up to ten grams of marijuana a day.

The study in the book found that two to four puffs of marijuana, not grams, were sufficient each day to allow the women to eat and drink, to essentially sustain their pregnancies.

Compared to the study of marijuana use to treat hyperemesis gravidarum, that is an extremely excessive quantity.  The women in this study used up to one gram each week.  Hyperemesis gravidarum is particularly cruel condition.  A pregnant woman with hyperemesis gravidarum experiences constant and debilitating nausea for an average of 16 weeks, although occasionally it lasts the entire duration of the pregnancy.  They waste away, unable to consume any food or water, and frequently spend much of their pregnancies being fed via IV and taking a variety of prescription drugs, none of which are considered entirely safe for the fetus.  Many women with hyperemesis gravidarum are advised to terminate their pregnancies, and many more miscarry while attempting to persevere.  The study in the book found that two to four puffs of marijuana, not grams, were sufficient each day to allow the women to eat and drink, to essentially sustain their pregnancies.

A similar quantity of marijuana was used by multiple sclerosis patients in another study to ease their symptoms.  The amount of marijuana then, found to be efficacious in treating these diseases is exponentially less than the amount needed to cause any sort of measurable harm to a baby in-utero.  Also interesting was this it was cannabis sativa that was more helpful as a medicine, while it is  cannabis indica that is gives recreational users a more potent high.


The information that I found the most fascinating, without a doubt, was what pertained to breast feeding.  As an Israeli study in lab mice found, the THC in marijuana stimulates what is essentially the eating reflex.  THC expressed in breast milk stimulates appetite, which encourages babies to nurse, and therefore survive.  This is one of the reasons attributed to the high infant survival rate in impoverished areas of Kingstown, Jamaica.  What's more, the researchers preformed a very interesting experiment.  The research team blocked the THC receptors in day old lab mice.  100% of these mice died.  With no urge to eat, the infant mice could not survive.

The research team blocked the THC receptors in day old lab mice.  100% of these mice died.  With no urge to eat, the infant mice could not survive.

This is not to say that marijuana is harmless, or that I am advising pregnant and nursing mothers to go out and get some.  Most of the researchers agree that using marijuana is generally unsafe because it is unregulated, you never know if your marijuana is diseased, or otherwise tainted.  There is a small chance any time smoke is inhaled for a myocardial infarction.  The concerns regarding lung cancer are poorly understood.  Marijuana has been found to exacerbate some existing psychological disorders.    Artificial THC pills, like Marinol, have been shown to have even more side effects and risks.  What's more, and unfortunately most relevant, is that marijuana is illegal.  This means that the act of procuring marijuana can put a person in danger, both from drug dealers and from the law.  However, as every article agrees, the evidence supporting the medical use of cannabis, particularly for conditions suffered by women, definitely warrants further study.

What I believe this means to mothers is that there might be some other answers out there.  There is apparently a wealth of research about women's health concerns and marijuana that we, the women who might want to use marijuana, do not generally have access to.   We as mothers, as feminists, and as individuals need to take the time to control our own health and lifestyles.  Self education is so important, and more and more we are made to feel helpless by our own health professionals.

One of the authors of the book, Mary Lynn Mathre, RN, MSN, CARN, wrote of the study of marijuana as a harm-reduction tool, "Cannabis as medicine is not a magic bullet that will work for everyone, and is not without potential risks.  Cannabis as a recreational drug is not enjoyable for everyone and is not harmless, but when put in the broader perspective and compared to standard medicines or common recreational drugs, cannabis offers greater benefit with fewer relative risks."

The anecdotes of women in Jamaica and Thailand who routinely use marijuana during pregnancy coincide perfectly with what my friend told me about her marijuana use and her daughter.  The folk-logic regarding marijuana use in these cultures is that it creates calmer, happier children.  The findings of the Canadian study show the opposite, that what we might call excessive use during pregnancy causes attention deficit problems.  Perhaps then, what is truly warranted is moderation.  I have said before, whatever makes you a happier, saner person is good parenting.  If what makes you happier and saner is the occasional marijuana use, you will get no judgment from me.  But please, be careful, and always be informed.