Ask Moxie

Baby carriers and back pain

Baby carriers do not need to hurt your back. If you're wearing them correctly, you'll feel the weight of the baby, but it shouldn't be so painful that you need to take pain meds. If you are feeling that much pain, you can Google the name of the carrier you have and the word "instructions" and someone somewhere will have posted photos of the correct way to wear that carrier. Or else try a different kind of carrier, because there is no perfect one, and maybe there's a better one for your body.

In general, the closer to you and higher up you can put your baby, the less pain and movement you'll have. If you're using a Bjorn or Bjorn-style carrier (which I don't actually recommend because I think other styles are far less painful, notably the Ergo if you like a constructed carrier or a wrap carrier if you like less construction), make sure the cross in the back crosses below your shoulder blades. It should be where your bra strap goes. Here's a really old post on different kinds of carriers.

Also, wearing your baby should be something you do because you want to. Not because it's "in fashion" or because Dr. Sears tells you to. Do it because babies who are worn tend to cry less, or because you like having your little one snuggled against you, or because your baby won't stop !@#$%-ing screaming if you put her down, or because your best friend walked all the baby weight off by wearing her baby, or because you can't deal with your stroller, or whatever. But let it be because you want to. Not because the lady at the grocery store or the women on the message board or the misogynist ad-writers at Motrin tell you you have to and then make fun of you for it.

You are the parent. You get to decide.

Also, seriously--Lucky Magazine? I read you because I want to get away from the "moms should do this and that" crap that bombards me every effing day in this country. All I want from you is to know whether ruching is in this fall and how to wear suede booties with a sweater dress and why shea butter is the miracle that's going to solve all my hair problems. I do not want misogynistic mommy drive-by ads in your pages. If you want to take ads from the hacks at Motrin (who apparently have never heard of a focus group), force them to give you ads about pain and *actual* fashion. They could have done a heck of an ad about stilettos and other painful shoes, but they chose the easy, inaccurate, bottom-feeding low-hanging fruit. Don't participate in the proliferation of mom-guilt on the hardworking women of the world. We get enough of it every day from people wearing Christmas sweaters. We want your magazine to be a safe space.

I think I'm going out to buy a big bottle of Advil tomorrow.

(Hey--if you're feeling carpal tunnel-type pain from lifting or carrying a baby or toddler, before you despair or get cortizone shots or dope yourself up on a pain reliver that starts with M that I'll never buy again, try homeopathy. Go to a health food store and plunk down $6 for a tube of pellets of Rhus Toxicodendron. Get 30x if they have them--if not get whatever dose they have. Take one under your tongue three times a day. If it's the proper remedy for your kind of pain, you should feel less inflammation and pain within three to four days. Keep taking until the pain is gone. If it isn't doing anything after four days, then it's the wrong remedy for you, so you can stop. Safe for breastfeeding, and no interactions with anything else! I had debilitating carpal tunnel from lifting my horse of a firstborn, and his pediatrician, who is also a homeopath, prescribed Rhus toxicodendron for me, and it worked like a charm. So I'm passing it on to you, the pain sufferers of the internet.)

Exhale, and Q&A: baby acne

Well. That was a significantly less traumatic process than it could have been. And the concession and acceptance speech were both amazing, and made me proud of my country.

So on to baby-related stuff. Anon wrote to ask if I knew how to get rid of baby acne.

As far as I know, baby acne is caused by all the hormones cycling out of the baby's system. Which means that there are going to be certain times when the hormones are surging more than others, and there's no real way to stop the acne except waiting it out.

There are definitely folk remedies that you can try. If nothing else, they'll give you something to do while you wait for the acne to go away on its own.

If you're breastfeeding, try squirting some on the affected area. (I just said "affected area" like I'm a medical person. Heh.) Breastmilk has antibiotic properties, and cures a number of random things, from rashes to pinkeye. Plus, it's free. So it's worth a shot.

If you're not nursing, or breastmilk doesn't do anything, you can try unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar. Make sure you get the kind with the "mother" still in it (like Mrs. Braggs brand). Cut the vinegar with a little water, and dab it on.

Does anyone else have any harmless folk remedies for baby acne? If your child had it, when did it peak?

Terrible Tuesday

So I've been trying to keep my nose to the grindstone and eyes on the prize and all that stuff, but the election today in the US is freaking me out.

I'm just so scared of what's going to happen. Scared of getting my hopes up and then having them dashed. Scared of what people will do unfettered, and scared of what kinds of sabotage and institutional corruption can happen. Scared of watching the returns and seeing the states fill in the color I don't want to see. Scared that the winners won't be gracious and that the losers won't be respectful.

When I was in college, I noticed that when I got really anxious about something, my hands and fingers would start to ache. (It's what I imagine RA or another auto-immune illness feels like.) My hands have been aching on and off for the last week.

I'm setting this to auto-post at 4 am EST, so it's probably going to be another 20 hours before we know. Unless there's some nightmarish repeat of 2000, in which case my hands will probably fall right off.

Small consolation:

* Ben & Jerry's locations are giving a free scoop from 5-8 pm to people who have voted.

* Starbucks will give you a free cup of coffee if you come in after you vote and tell them who you voted for.

* If you live in NYC or Seattle, you can get a free adult toy from Babeland if you show you voted.

* This is an excellent chance to teach your kids some geography, and about how the electoral college works.

* By tomorrow it should all be over.

Wah.

Please, no specifics. I think we all have the same fears, whether we're voting for Obama/Biden, McCain/Palin, or some other combo. Reports from voting sites would be fun, though.

Q&A: TIme change and its evil spawn

So now that those of us in North America and Europe are done with this fall time change, it's all starting to hit the fan. Some of the problems are kid-related: kids waking up too early, going to sleep too late, or just being all screwed up.

The solutions to those problems are, as with all things parenting, a choose-your-own-adventure. Some people just go cold turkey to the new ("new"?) time. So if your child has been going to bed at 8 pm (or 6:30 pm if you live in Seattle), even though 8 is 9 to the kid, keep them up until 8. After a week or so they'll adjust. Others bump the kid up to the new bedtime 10 minutes a night. So you'd start with 7:10 tonight, then 7:20 tomorrow night, etc. until the kid is going to bed at 8 by the weekend. Others will seize the opportunity and start putting the child to bed at 7.

If it's the morning that's particularly screwed up, you could try blackout shades, or "blackout shades": cardboard and/or aluminum foil over the windows.

The older I get, and the older my kids get, the more I find that the time change messes with me more than it does them. And it's not the time part, but the light part. For some reason, it doesn't much bother me how light or not it is when I wake up in the morning. But it makes me truly and seriously sad when it's so dark so early at night.

I've been trying to figure out how to deal with this, as it's an actual problem. And what I'm coming up with is trying to work things so that I can just coast through the hours that feel too dark to me (for me, now that daylight savings time is over, here at the eastern end of the time zone in NYC, that's about 5:30-7:30 pm). I'm going to do as much dinner prep ahead of time as possible, and make sure I have things all set up for the kids to go to bed, so I'm not doing any scrambling when it's time to get them down for the night.

Does anyone else have this issue? It almost feels like SAD (which I sometimes get a touch of, and which my aunt has seriously and has described to me). If so, how do you manage it? Does anyone else have the opposite problem, of being depressed by getting up in the dark? How do you cope?

Sleepless/Seattle

We had a great meetup here in Seattle last night. There were around 15 women who came, with or without kids, to have dinner at the Seredipity Cafe. (Which was excellent, we thought. Mmmm, mac and cheese with truffle oil...)

We talked about a bunch of things, ranging from food allergies to couples' therapy to baby signing to food and politics. But one thing we talked a lot about was sleep.

I've been saying for years that I think sleep is our generation's thing. Our big problem, and the thing that seems to hurt us most and make us feel most inadequate. Past generations had different things--my grandmother was upset that my dad wasn't potty-trained by the time he was a year old, for example. But sleep is ours.

I think there are several reasons for that. Probably the single biggest one is that we don't put our kids to sleep on their stomachs. Our parents put us down on a full belly and we'd fall and stay asleep easily. Since we know we can't do that because of the SIDS risk, we lack the one surefire trick past generations used to use. (I also think this is why we don't get much sympathy from older generations about the sleep thing, because they just didn't experience the same number of problems we did.)

Another factor is that past generations were more likely to have an adult at home during the day, which meant there wasn't that same crazy pressure to get everything Perfect before maternity leave ended. Past generations were also more likely to live closer to home, and have family support. Lots of us now don't have any kind of safety net, and are doing it all alone or close to alone. That makes the sleep thing more high-stakes.

And yet another factor is that we have so many more "experts" now. In the past, there was basically Dr. Spock and maybe one or two others. So if what he wrote didn't work for your kid, you just confronted the Dark Night of the Soul of being a parenting failure, made peace with it, and moved on.

Now, if you absolutely can't conform to what an expert says, you feel like a failure, but you move on to another expert, and the cycle begins afresh. How many times have you heard "Weissbluth made me feel like a failure and Pantley was totally useless but the Sleep Lady Shuffle saved me!" or "Dr. Sears can suck it but Ferber changed my life!"? So much drama, trying to follow someone else's Method. If you'd just been allowed to trust yourself, and given a list of possible things to try, you'd have gotten there in the same amount of time, but feeling empowered by your ability to figure your own kid out. (this is also why there's such passion about CIO vs. not--if everyone just was allowed to figure it out for their own kid without feeling like it indicated anything about them or the kid, it wouldn't be such a huge symbol of everything that we all had to get defensive about.)

Any thoughts? Lamentations? Words of hope for those in the trenches? Other hypotheses?

The class that made me take myself more seriously

Last week I mentioned that part of gaining the courage to quit my full-time job came from a class I'm taking. My last class was last night, so I'm posting about it now.

The class was a class in....burlesque performance.

Yeah, I know. A little, um, interesting. On the one hand, kind of cool, but on the other hand, who takes a class about stripping? Only it wasn't about stripping off clothes, but about stripping off these ideas I had about myself and my body.

I took the class because a friend had taken it and said she felt it helped her come to grips with some body issues. I have body issues. (So do you, I'm betting.) And being/feeling sexy wasn't really part of my marriage, so I wanted to be able to get past that to be able to move forward with my life. Ruthless, brutal honesty with myself is what I've been working toward, so I thought this class would force me to confront my body images, my mental image of myself, and maybe help me be able to be sexy in the future.

The teacher is amazing. She's a performer herself, and some of what she does is burlesque. She's really thoughtful about the process, and her idea of burlesque is that it's not about dancing, not about taking things off, but about making a connection with the audience, about being honest and being present and giving a gift.

A lot of the work we did was on roles, movement, archetypes, and some acting exercises to get us out of our usual habits of body. The goal of the class is to put together one burlesque performance piece that we finish and then do for the class the last day (the class is only for women). Before the class even started I had my music picked out, and it was going to be this funny piece, with this sort of hapless character that just sort of ended up taking things off in the middle of a funny song.

Over the course of the class, I realized that I've been telling myself this lie for years: That I am this hapless, Lucy-in-the-candy-factory character, sweet and well-intentioned, just trying to make her way through life.

In reality, I am strong and powerful and sexy and smart, and also funny.

I have been using fear as a way to rein in my power and to stop myself from doing what I really can do.

So I decided just to stop being afraid and move forward. It was that same "WTF am I doing??" feeling I had two years ago when I decided to start trusting people. So I started small by changing my music and my burlesque piece, to be one that's straight-up sexy and kind of provocative. And powerful. And also funny, but just because it hits a chord in people (so say my classmates).

And then I lined up my stuff (ran numbers on insurance and other costs and reached out to people about freelance work) and screwed up my courage to displease the owners of my company, and quit. To do what I'm good at doing, and live the life I'm still a little afraid to live.

Here are some other insights I've had over the course of the class:

* My being sexy and owning my power makes other women sexy, too.

* If you think you are, you are, and it has nothing to do with the size or shape of your body.

* Taking off just a little is way better than all the way. In class we went down to what you'd see on the (an American) beach, but that's so powerful when done with intention and presence.

* It's usually easier to figure out what you think you should be doing, but your body is telling you what you really should be doing. Pay more attention to your body, and less attention to the voices in your head.

* It's a process. You're never all the way there. And it's never too late.

The next time my teacher runs the class, I'll post the info and encourage any of you in the NYC area to take it.

Edited to add: She's got some workshops scheduled. The first one is a one-time intro, and the second one (the 6-week workshop) is the one I did.

Intro to Burlesque
Saturday, December 13th, 4 - 7pm
Studios 353
353 W. 48th Street (btn 8th & 9th Ave.)
Fee:  $50 (credit card also accepted)
Max of eight students
Pre-registration required:  howlingvic@yahoo.com

In this afternoon workshop, Victoria Libertore will take you through the basics of stage presence, the secret of seduction and the art of taking off a glove.  Enjoy being in your body and tapping into your Goddess energy. (women only)
______________________________

_______________________________________ Goddess Burlesque  Six-week Workshop Mondays (Jan 5th - Feb 9th, 7 - 10pm Studios 353 353 W. 48th St. (btn 8th & 9th Ave) Fee:  $300 (credit card also accepted) ($150 deposit due by Dec 29th) Max of eight students Pre-registration required:  howlingvic@yahoo.com Let loose of your inhibitions and get comfortable in your own skin!  In this six-week workshop, Victoria Libertore aka Howling Vic will share her unique skills to help you develop a three to five-minute performance piece that reflects your individual attributes.   Using tools of physical theatre, archetypal energy, intuition, character exploration and imagery, you'll build a solo performance incorporating a striptease and learn how to be comfortable while doing it!  Come and release the Goddess within.  (women only) Victoria Libertore (Howling Vic) is performance artist, actress, playwright, improviser, curator, producer and teacher. She has performed her work throughout New York City and in Boston, DC, Montreal, Philadelphia, Provincetown and Toronto.  She is a 2008-2009 BAX Theatre Artist in Residence.   Howlingvic.com

Insitutions vs. individuals

You know how sometimes it seems like the universe/God/chance wants you to get a message, so the same thing keeps happening?

For the past few weeks I've been getting the lesson again and again that while institutions may be inflexible, inhumane, disorganized, and cruel, individual people are kind, resourceful, funny, and generous.

Huge line at airport security? People in line are funny and holding stuff for each other while we take off our shoes.

Baby crying because we've been on the tarmack for 70 minutes? People start digging in their purses and pockets for stuff the baby can play with.

Presentation about to be screwed up because the hosting location lied about their tech capabilities? Taxi driver who drives like the wind and tells funny jokes will wait for me to get backup stuff from my hotel.

Just kind, engaged, helpful people all around. Even when they can't solve your complete problem because the system won't let them.

Happy Thanksgiving! Are they growing up too fast?

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadians out there. And Happy Columbus Day to the Americans. (I hope you got the day off.)

Someone sent me a question that touched on something I've been thinking about for months now, ever since I went back to work. The question was in the middle of a bunch of other stuff, so I'm paraphrasing the relevant sentences:

"I worry that he grew up because he had to, not because he was ready to. And that no matter what I do, not having me during the day forced him to toughen up too soon."

I've wondered the same thing about my older son. When I went back to work, it was the end of his pre-K year. We had two different babysitters in four months, and I really did not have anything organized or running smoothly. (In addition, all my emotions were in upheaval because we were dealing actively with the divorce at that point, but the kids still didn't know.)

I stayed as connected as I possibly could, but he just didn't get the face time with me that he had had before. And then when he started Kindergarten, with that teacher that we both disliked so much, I just couldn't be there when he got out of school. That killed me. He grew up and toughened up so much in that year, and it's always going to haunt me.

But I also think that it might have happened the same way if I'd been there for him at home the whole time. He's very intense and feels things deeply, but is self-contained. He might have worked through all of it mostly in his own head in those four hours every day between when he got out of school and when I got home. And it's possible that being home might have made things worse for him somehow, too.

This may just be another one of those things that I feel guilty about for the rest of my life, but that may not have had a negative effect on my child at all.

Thoughts? About this specifically, or regrets and wonder in general?

Practical ways to tighten our belts

I am so glad I put up that post yesterday. It seems like a lot of us needed it! One of of my RL friends, inspired by yesterday's post, called her credit card companies and got one of her card's rate lowered by double digits!

So here's what I'm thinking about for today: Practical ways to tighten our belts. Remember when "Y2K" was about to happen (what dorks we all were with that Y2K business) and people seemed either to go way overboard and stockpile years' worth of supplies, or do nothing? I think we could be either psyching ourselves into all kinds of belt-tightening things that are going to seriously affect our emotional lives, or else go into denial and just keep spending as if there's no tomorrow.

So I'm looking for practical ways to save money, build a little safety in, DIY, that sort of thing.

Also, please think ahead about this, which we'll post next week: More people are going to be eating from food banks. Lots of times what they end up with are food that are not high in nutrition (boxed mac 'n' cheese, anyone?), and a consistent diet of that kind of stuff is going to depress mood and cause depression, sluggishness, and weight gain. Which is exactly what people struggling to hold things together financially do NOT need.

I'm wondering if we could think of some nutritionally-good, tasty, not-too-complicated recipes that could be made out of ingredients that can be kept at a food bank. That means nothing frozen, and no fresh meat or dairy (right? It's been years since I was actually at a food bank and saw the facilities.) We're talking mostly boxed and canned, with some fresh produce that has a longer shelf life.

If you're willing to put your recipe-developer hats on and take up the challenge, I'm hoping we can be ready to post next Friday. Then we can figure out how to make these recipes useful. (printing out the recipe and donating the set of ingredients together? making some sort of mini-cookbook for food banks to distribute? something totally obvious I'm not thinking of?)

In the meantime, we're looking for practical ways to cut some expenditures that won't affect emotional quality of life too much.

It's the economy, smarties

Good news--but I can't share with the internets until the real-life players know. Maybe next week, so stay tuned.

As you all know, I live in NYC, where there's a whole lotta finance going on. And all the recent economic things are freaking people out here. I kind of don't know what to think. I don't anticipate that my kids and I will be out on the street, and I'm fairly certain that the economy will eventually recover.

But I know a lot of people are really worried about things. I thought maybe here would be a place where people could talk about it in a safe way, where we could share the "trivial" worries we have. If there are any economy wonk parents here maybe you could give us your predictions. I'd also be interested to hear from people who are not in the US about what's happening where you live. (And I know so many of us are waiting to see how things turn out with the US elections, but I'm hoping we can stay meta with any political analysis and not get too invested in ways that could be hurtful to others.)

I'll start with the first question: I was thinking now might be a good time to call my credit card company and ask them to lower my balance. (I'm a single mom stuck in a too-expensive apartment and a not-high-paying job--of course I carry a balance.) Do you think they'll be more willing to go lower right now?