Well my friends, my beautiful but neurotic oldest daughter finally told me today that she and her husband are going to have a baby and she's only 4 months pregnant!

I've known for about 3 months but I've waited for her to tell me before I brought it up to her. That took all my will power. It is a part of her life I really want to share with her. But I respected her privacy and the fact that she has very difficult life. She lives her whole life in constant fight or flight mode, she can't take the medications for her disorder because they increase seizure risks, her husband may be going to prison and he blames her for it.

She had told me that she had stopped taking her seizure medication and her Xanax about 3 months ago. I knew there could be only one reason she would stop her Xanax. It's not safe to take during pregnancy. She'd even told me months ago that they were not using any birth control for crying out loud. How could I not know?

I just didn't think it would have taken this long for her to tell me.

I decided to tell all my friends at work about two weeks ago. I couldn't help it. I'm so excited to be a grandma!

They asked me how I could know if she hasn't told me yet. Well....I've been a Certified Childbirth Educator for 20 years and a Certified Lactation Consultant for 10 years and most importantly I've been a mom for almost twenty freaking seven years!

You can't hide things from your mom! Everyone who has a mom worth her salt knows that. We have ways to find out everything. And contrary to some younger folks belief, us moms aren't stupid!

It's like "You've been smoking pot out your window haven't you." It's not a real question. "Oh my god mom! What kind of a person do you think I am? I would never smoke pot. I was just burning some sage in my room." "Then why don't you come over here and give your old mom a kiss." Also not a suggestion or question. "I don't want to."

"Why"

"Because I just don't! You are so mean and you think I would lie to you and your making my life so miserable. You just can't understand how hard my life is!"

"I know, but your boring me. So stop changing the subject. Give me a hug and a kiss and I'll leave you alone." She was so busted. I'd know pot breath anywhere.

Here's a classic from 10th grade. "It's 5:30 pm and dark and you were suppose to be home from school 2 hours ago. Where have you been?"

Now get ready for this, she says with a straight face, eye ball to eye ball and as innocent as the virgin Mary, with feeling and an appeal for pity look on her tragic little face, "I got lost walking home from school."

"Yeh,.... OK it's like this; you are in trouble for coming home late, you're in trouble for lying and your in trouble for being such a lame lier. I could lie so much better than that when I was 15, I'm ashamed to call you my kid." And I knew she'd have to be on acid to get lost walking home from school and I would know when someone isn't on acid any time, any where.

So, I could say, "this isn't a good time" or "you don't have any money" "what are you going to do if he goes to prison when you can't work and have no income" "you have enough problems, and babies are over rated"

But it wouldn't change the facts. We're gonna have a baby!

So we could choose to embrace this or be unhappy about it. A baby would still be coming. I also can feel happy for my daughter because she's really wanted to have a baby for a few years. She was freaking out that she was going to be 30 in about 3 years and felt her biological time clock ticking away.

So I'd like to ask for some prayers and blunder vibes for my daughter and her husband and my little grandchild.

She hasn't had any prenatal care yet. She applied for MediCal and was approved, but her card hasn't come yet. No one she's contacted would see her without the card. But she's a smart girl and is taking her prenatal vitamins, her folic acid and knows what things she should avoid. But I am worried about one thing. She's been going to the methadone clinic to get methadone for her chronic pain. I don't want anything that would make her a "high risk" pregnancy and prevent her from having kind of birth she wants.


I want this to be beautiful for her. Giving birth to her is the best day of my whole life. She was born at a 12 bed hospital in a tiny mountain town. The extent of their technology was that the bed could go up and down. Pain medication wasn't a choice so no one suggested to us that we would not be able to do this without it. I was scared, but I had all the advantages of being an earth mamma and trusted nature to do the work if I let it happen. We had a Laboye birth if anyone remembers those. They sent me home 9 hours later so the little grandpa who had been moved into the hall could be have his room back. I remember using the mountains as my focal point out the window, and it never occurred to me that anyone standing on the grass outside could have watched the whole thing. My labor started at 5 am. I got to the hospital at noon, and had my baby at 2:15. The doctor rode his bicycle over from his office and got there just in time for my 5 pushes. That's all it took. 5 pushes and 20 minutes. It was all very gentle. Everyone around me just let it happen. There was no rushing, no draping, no cutting, no suctioning, no one taking my baby away from me to a warmer across the room. My baby came out with a woosh, was immediately laid on me tummy to tummy and she just looked at me. I vividly remember her little sweet face and those eyes looking right into mine. She didn't even cry. I asked if she was OK and the doctor said, "Yes, she's just happy. Don't be so loud or you'll scare her." I never knew I could do anything that hard. I felt like I had climbed Mount Everest and made it to the top. That birth experience greatly empowered me.

My second birth was 150% the opposite. In a modern hospital where no one respected women or their wishes. You had to fight to be allowed to just have your baby without being hooked up to machines. I had to argue with my doctor about not being draped for the delivery and to be able to have my baby right away. He said he'd try but he didn't know if he'd remember when he came to my delivery. So I told him I could write it on the inside of my thigh if he thought it would help. I finally told him that if he didn't respect my wishes I would have the baby at home. That's when he finally started the difficult task of actually considering letting his patient have choices. You couldn't even use the restroom without permission. They wanted me in that bed and to stay there. The nurses were mean. I ended up with a crash c-section and a horrible 4 days of the most painful and disempowering experience of my life. Every night they would try to take my baby away from me. And when the would get her they wouldn't bring her back for hours. I was told the doctors do their rounds at 2:30 in the morning and that is why they had to take my baby and keep her for 5 hours. The next night I walked her down to the nursery at 2:30 myself and told the nurse I would wait for the doctor to finish than take my baby back. She looked at me like she wanted to eat me alive. I was actually cowed into turning my baby over and going back to my room. I felt as about as empowered as a 6 year old. Though, I do think when it came down to it my doctor did really try his best to let me have choices as best as he could under the circumstances. That birth is the reason I chose the profession I'm in. I wanted to empower women and bond families. No one should feel degraded and have all their rights stripped away while having their baby or during any other experience just because they are in a hospital or ill, a patient but not a person.

I'm going to contact some midwives in a private free standing birth center to see if they give childbirth classes for my girl and my boy and see if my girl can have her baby with them. There she will be allowed to birth her baby. She doesn't need a surgeon to deliver it. Pregnancy isn't a disease. She will be able to move around during labor and can even have a water birth is she wants.

Well, thanks for the blunder vibes and the therapy session. I'm sorry I always write such long posts. You guys should start charging me for reading my rambling, novel length letters.

Love and Peace,
Primula Brandybuck

You're not the first one around here to ramble on ... there's very high-placed precedent for that!

All the best to all of you, and healthy-baby blundervibes as well as the general kind.

sending good vibes from New Jersey.

Sending some Mystic vibes to everyone, too.

Was it your first or second experience that inspired you to become a childbirth educator?
Tho both of my experiences became c-secs, they were still so different. Except that they made me feel like I might be killing him for not letting them give him a bottle (and I couldn't nurse until the shakes from the drugs calmed down-another story in itself) The second hospital stay wasn't so bad.
Sending all the best wishes for your family.

Prayers & vibes just sent. Congrats on being a grandma & hope all goes well...

CONGRATULATIONS!!! Vibes on the way for baby to change all in your daughters life to good. Babies tend to do that!!

Don't worry that she waited to talk to you - at least she's communicating. You're so right to make her feel comfy coming TO you.

Im very happy for you....!

REG

Congrats!!! I hope eveything goes well.
My baby is also 27 and if I had my time over I would do it a little different too!

Louise, Im sure you did everything fine - as well as any young mother could.

While raising my kids - I would have changed some circumstances...like I would magically have had more money, time, energy, and most of all some kind of positive family interaction....but as far as what I did - I wouldn't have changed a thing I did. I did everything the best I could with the tools I had. I'm sure that is true with you (& P) too.

Well maybe I worded it wrong. It was the giving birth part I would have done differently. That's the part you try to get some serious knowledge on but when the time comes, well back then anyway, you kinda think the doctor knows their job!

I was the baby (no. 3) of my family but luckily my beloved had SIX youger siblings! Three of them were triplets born when he was 13. So he'd had plenty of takin' care of babies experience!

Since the birth part I think we did a pretty good job together and now have a wonderful daughter. But who knows if we'd had more kids things with them might have turned out different, sometimes no matter how hard you try things don't turn out hearts and flowers do they?

Our extended families and everyones families have problems but we can only do the best we can eh?

Louise, I have two kids. I am very proud of how both of them turned out. Confident, educated, self-sufficient.

One is very kind to me and Im sure would do anything for me (except maybe shop LOL - but that's ok we both hate it) and the other one hasnt talked to me in three years and told me her biggest fear is to be like me.

Same Mom, biology. Brother & Sister. Who knows?

louise, this is the most guilt ridden and thankless job on the planet. Guilt comes built in as soon as the baby comes out. Heck, my kid could make me feel guilty for making her clean her room! I'd walk away and say to myself, "wait a minute! good moms are suppose to make their kids clean their rooms. She got me again!"

But as soon as I held that baby in my arms I thought, my mom was right. I don't love her as much as she loves me! She used to say, "you don't know how much I love you." and I would say, "Yes I do." But I didn't. Not until I had my own child. I always appreciated my mom, but not as much as I did after I was a mom myself. Me and my mom just had a talk on the phone yesterday about how guilty she feels for how her divorcing my dad had such an impact on our lives. She says sees now how painful divorce is for the children as she watches our lives. It's been 40 years and she's still feeling guilty!

I said, "Well, you could of stayed with him and he would have eventually killed you and then I would have been motherless and my dad would have been the person who murdered my mom in a fit of rage. I'd say you picked the best available choice you had. Oh, he would have felt really bad afterwards and probably would have said she shouldn't have made me so mad and then I wouldn't have accidentally strangled her."

You know what? If I could do it over again, I would not have spent all the money I did and sacrificed so much to be able to send my kids to private school. I look around now at the other kids the same age as mine who went to public school and I can't see that it made one bit of difference for the better. Think of the great family vacations or the better house we could have had if I wasn't scraping to pay $3000. a year each, for two kids to go to a private school. So we lived in a tiny little 800 sq,ft house on the crappy side of town, and I drove 3 hours every morning to take my kids across the city to school then get to my job. My husband did the same thing every afternoon for years. There's no way we can know those things in advance.

I believe our kids know that what ever we did, it was because we love them. I'm sure your's do too.

Want to know what's worse? Before I got on estrogen, I was the hatchet murderer mother from hell. I did a lot of yelling and screaming at my kids and I don't see them any worse for wear than if I hadn't.

One day daughter number 2 came home in 8th grade and said, "Mom! You can't believe how disrespectfully so and so talks to her mother. It's because her mom never gets her in trouble. It really upset me and I told her that is was wrong and that my mom would have killed me for that. I think she really needs a lot more discipline." I'm not making this up!!!

But send me to just one stupid conference on postpartum depression and how it ruins babies and I can get the worst migraine you could ever imagine.

Our culture blames moms for anything that goes wrong with a kid and I'm here to tell you it's a bucket of crap! Life's a bitch no matter who you are or where you grew up. It's all perspective. My teenagers would go on and on about how hard their life was. I'd tell them, "well there's a lot of kids on this planet that don't even have two pairs of underwear." You know what? My kids didn't care. They still thought their life was terribly hard even though they had everything they needed and a lot of things they wanted. They weren't from a "broken home", there was no physical abuse, no drug or substance abuse, their parents didn't fight, they had their dad wrapped around their little finger, they had plenty of extended family that loved them, I can't even tell you how much I spent on counseling in case they needed someone else to confide in when they were having problems. Now I thinkin' maybe I protected them and helped them too much.

We can't let ourselves go to the blaming place, as Allen Moon might have said. It's not a creative place or a musical place and we'll all make ourselves crazy. Listen to me giving advice, I go there all the time.

Easy to say, hard to do.

We'll just keep working to bring love and peace to the world as best we can,
Primula Brandybuck

Congratulations on your up coming grandchild! Thanks for sharing your story and advice Pirmula. I used to worry about my son, who is now 30. Looked like he made a wrong turn there for a while, but he is now doing very well and has turned out to be a very good man with good character. He's even happy. I could not possibly ask for more. Being a grandma is great, I hope you enjoy every minute.