Comfort at Wally World

In my last post (or rant) I claimed that your delivery choices won't fuck up your kid but your decision to breastfeed or formula feed will. I hope it was obvious that this was a joke. Especially because you will never do anything right in the eyes of some people, so you might as well give up now.

Whenever the parental doubts start to creep up on me and I start to think that maybe I'm a terrible mother after all, I take a quick trip to remind myself that short of abuse (which I don't do) it's actually pretty hard to fuck up a child. I pack up my daughter and we go to the trashiest Wal-Mart in town. We don't go to the new Wal-Mart with spacious aisles, no. We go to the Wal-Mart that has trash and broken carts and a possible meth-head or two in the parking lot. Bumper stickers like "Stand up for America, Be an American" or "Hunt Life" abound. This is not an enlightened Wal-Mart, this is the Wal-Mart made famous by popular culture.

Chances are that you'll start feeling better about your parenting skills as soon as you pull into the parking lot. It will become increasingly obvious once you get inside that if all these people can reproduce and raise children that you can do it too. It's an instant confidence booster and you can pick up some cheap DVDs since you know you're not leaving the house ever again after this little foray.

My Natural Pet Peeve

I'm going to come right out and say it before my first cup of coffee really kicks in and I think better about sharing my opinion.

I absolutely abhor the phrase "natural childbirth". All too frequently it's used as a benchmark of superiority and it isn't even an accurate phrase. If you want to accurately describe your childbirth experience use phrases such as: intervention-free, non-medicated, medicated-to-the-gills, doctor-assisted, cut open like a holiday bird, etc.

The choices for delivery are not, contrary to popular blogging belief, natural or unnatural. The choice isn't even natural or medicated. Your ONLY delivery options are vaginal or cesarean section (c-section) and either way involves humans. As far as I know, we can't send a pregnant robot in our stead.

The other reason that the phrase "natural childbirth" rankles my already-fraught nerves is that many of the pain-relieving drugs used to alleviate the pain of childbirth are a form of narcotics, which are found in NATURE, which makes them NATURAL. By this reasoning, if you have an epidural, which uses a combination of narcotics and other drugs culled from nature, you had a "natural childbirth".

Either way you slice it (or push it), childbirth hurts. Throughout the ages, women were kept from pain relief during childbirth. The turn to more medical interventions and pain relief became a matter of women's rights. Much like the right to own property, vote or have access to birth control. Instead of seeing medical interventions and pain relief as a way for doctors to make more money and have more control, we need to see it as an option for women who want it based on the long history of women not having many choices.

In the end it doesn't matter to me what you choose. But it does matter that you have a choice. Just remember, you won't start fucking up your kid in the delivery room. You will begin when you decide whether to give you child formula or breastmilk.