It's A Hard Knock Life: Some Heads Need Harder Knocks

From a very young age I remember perceiving life as an emotional and spiritual evolution. I would go through various trials and tribulations in this lifetime, learning from each experience. As I aged I would advance to higher and higher states of being, attempting to chip away at my flaws. I planned on spending my adulthood in a sort of yogi-like understanding of myself and the world around me. But as the years passed, this plan proved much harder to implement. Many days are spent going two steps back instead of forward and progress is slow going.

I think nearly everyone has a time in their life where they become very jaded and disillusioned. I distinctly remember at age thirteen, becoming painfully aware that the adults in my life were fallible and that I could not fully trust anyone. I do not see this as bad, necessarily. There is not one perfect person walking this planet, that person died long ago. But somewhere between thirteen and my thirties that lesson faded into the background. The idealism came back and I trusted that the people close to me would always remain close to me, that as they aged they would strive, as I strove, to be a better human being.

Due to recent developments with family members, I am re-learning the lesson of trust. You can only trust God to be on your side. Not your spouse, your children, your sister, your brother, etc...I can add another lesson. That not everyone is on an upward trajectory in life. There are people who will continually seek and cause chaos. They will let it enter their life and the lives of those around them. These people use it as a method of control. If someone chooses to constantly play the role of the victim, they do this so that they never have to fully grow up and the people around them can be their caretakers. And then there are the bullies. The people holding the carrot at the end of the stick, trying to make you dance like a puppet. They do this through chaos manufacturing, creating mountains out of mole hills to get the desired reaction.

Now I am pushed through the canal again, seeing the people around me with new eyes, reassessing their place in my life. As a Christian, forgiveness is part of the walk. I have forgiven those who have hurt me many times over. But I too am only human, and I find a bitterness at these same people needing forgiveness once again. The family as fragmented now as it was decades ago. The same situations, only a different day. I find solace in knowing I can choose to evolve while others retread the same paths. I had hoped that by the time I had a child, old wounds would be healed and everyone could move forward. But I must take this as a reminder from God that we are all on very different paths and only once in a while do they converge in a harmonious conjunction.

Forever Family

Forever Family

We come from a place

Where no amount of time can erase

Everyone knows your name

Where you came from

Where you have gone

What you have done

We are here, whether you like it or not

We are here, even if you have forgot

Good times, bad times

Engraved in our minds

Search through the treasures

What will you find?

This is here forever

The ones who won't go away

Neither sun, nor clouds, nor rain

We will enjoy your pain

Forever and ever amen

Forever and ever until then?

Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex: A Personal Account

When I first found out that I was going to have a baby I knew immediately that I wanted to breastfeed. I spent the next nine months reading materials and taking a class so that I could be prepared. But sometimes life just has a different plan than the one you have had firmly cemented in your head. And you either have to go with it, or go through the hell that I put myself through.

I remember when my daughter first latched and I was so happy. She took to it easily and I thought to myself, “This is going to be a piece-of-cake”. I didn't spend much time in the hospital and soon enough I was home, trying to establish a routine. Our daughter was born with jaundice so we had many follow-up appointments to check her levels and I would meet with the lactation consultant. It was very over-whelming at the time. I had never spent the night in the hospital, never had a procedure done, and here I was, spending all this time in a place, that to be honest, I hated.

So I was determined to get things right with the lactation consultant so that we could begin our nesting phase. The latching, as I stated, went extremely well, but I was not producing enough milk, and my little one was starting to lose weight. This was the first blow. I tried not to let this affect me as I plunged ahead. But she still kept losing weight and eventually we had to supplement formula. I was getting extremely upset at this time. What had started out so wonderfully was slowly turning into a waking nightmare.

Finally I started producing more milk but then as if on cue, another problematic monkey leaped onto my back. Whenever I would begin the feeding process, a wave of incredible sadness and revulsion would come over me. My husband witnessed as I became somewhat catatonic before and after feeding. My pupils would dilate and it was like another person would take over. No matter how happy I was before the feeding time, it would always, and I do mean, always happen. I tried switching locations in the house, tried different television shows, not having the TV on, and it didn't matter. What should have been a happy, bonding time with my daughter usually ended up with me in tears. I was crying while breastfeeding and I knew this wasn't normal.

But for all the reading I had done, I had not heard of this happening. Eventually I started to pin it all on myself and my failures as a mother. Then I developed postpartum anxiety, which is different from postpartum depression. I had never had a panic attack in my life and now I was having a few a day. They were uncontrollable. Nothing had prepared me for this. I don't even think reading about this would have prepared me for the actual experience. I felt like I had been broken into a million pieces and I was desperately trying to put myself back together.

Breastfeeding became something otherworldly, as I sat there and cried, while doing something that should be natural to every female creature. Eventually I couldn't even think of my breasts without overwhelming revulsion. I discussed this with my OB and she said that yes this happens to some women and that I shouldn't beat myself up. So I made the call and decided to stop breastfeeding. It was a painful decision. One that I still feel to this day. The postpartum anxiety only got worse after this, as I went through mother guilt, and I had to take a temporary medication to get me back to normal.

It was only months later that I learned my condition had a name. I don't even think my OB knew that there was an actual term for this. It is called Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex or D-MER. It is described as “an abrupt emotional "drop" that occurs in some women just before milk release and continues for not more than a few minutes. The brief negative feelings range in severity from wistfulness to self-loathing, and appear to have a physiological cause. The authors suggest that an abrupt drop in dopamine may occur when milk release is triggered, resulting in a real or relative brief dopamine deficit for affected women”. http://www.internationalbreastfeedingjournal.com/content/6/1/6

When I read this I felt such a weight off of my shoulders. I had put it all on myself and my shortcomings. I didn't know that what I was experiencing was hormonally related. It doesn't seem that this condition is widely known or discussed. I had let myself and others make me feel incredibly guilty for failing at breastfeeding. And yes, unfortunately, women do not support each other very well when it comes to this issue. I have had little jabs thrown at me by friends, “mother's milk is best”, to insinuating that I didn't try hard enough and therefore must not care about my daughter. I won't name names but women have got to stop this. We should support each other in whatever decisions we make for our children instead of using these decisions to feel superior over another. But I am a realist and I know how catty and controlling most women are so I don't expect this behavior to end anytime soon. All you have to do is read the message boards on this issue. It is sad and shocking to me how judgmental others are when it comes to another persons child, when really I think they care more about lording over someone than whether that child is receiving “proper nutrition”.

With this new information, I feel that I can now move forward. My daughter is happy, healthy, and feisty. I was formula fed, most people I know were formula fed, and there shouldn't be the shame that is now attached with that. I graduated college as a formula fed person, rarely get any colds or sickness as a formula fed person. I don't have asthma or eczema. I am here today to tell those who have made the decision not to breastfeed, to not feel guilty or let others make you feel that way. As long as your baby is healthy and happy you are doing a GOOD JOB! Learn to love yourself, no matter what feeding method, and your child will reap the benefits of a happy home.

As In the Days of Noah

 

Every Fall it seems that yellow jackets find a way to build a nest somewhere on my house. For many years they were able to get into our eaves. So we blocked that off but this past season they found a little place by our backdoor and started a good-sized nest in our siding. I've never been stung and I was petrified to use that door.

Eventually my husband started setting out dishes of soap with Karo syrup and the yellow jackets began dying in the hundreds. Each day he would set out a new trap and more would die. The traps worked and the hive began to die off. I finally worked up the courage to go out there and take a look one day. I noticed a yellow jacket on the ground, trying to pick something up. I watched as he struggled to take flight with one of his fallen comrades.

I knew at that moment I was meant to witness this scene. I was meant to see this creature turn on his fellow, after working in concert to build one of natures most beautiful machines. The hive had been starved off and now they had turned on each other. I thought of our society and how community is encouraged. There are more people living in urban and suburban settings than ever before. I thought of my own city with little parks scattered about, nice walking trails, schools, grocery stores, and churches. It functions well enough, the city planners didn't do a terrible job of laying out the city. But if we faced a threat such as starvation how fast would this illusion unravel?

A yellow jacket's nest, if attacked, will act as one, even chasing the attacker for up to a mile. That is if they are faced with a sudden attack or threat. But in the case of a war of attrition, they will eventually turn on each other, as I witnessed that day. Again I thought of my community. My city is faced with flooding every so often and we diligently fill and place sandbags to prevent a catastrophe. But if food became scarce I wonder how long that friendly Scandinavian spirit would last. Would we turn on each other, much like any tightly grouped species on this planet?

As our nations debt spirals out of control and, as evidenced by the Benghazi attacks, we find ourselves more vulnerable to attack than ever before, it has become prudent to not put much faith into civilization staying civilized in a time of unrest. It is quite ironic that when we are more hive-like than ever before we have a community organizer at the helm. But as mother nature allowed me to see, you cannot depend on others, even those who you trusted, to have your back when vital resources are at stake. I urge my friends and family to get prepared. Hurricane Sandy also showed us how quickly infrastructure can fall apart and how necessary it is to have food, water, and an alternate power source available to you in a time of crisis.

Ultimately our fate is dictated according to God's will, but if you ever feel led to prepare, much like Noah, then you need to heed that call. Remember it is not up the government to make sure you are fed, only our security is under their jurisdiction.

“By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” Hebrews 11:7

Behind the Curtain, Alternative title: Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie!

 
“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

Lately a sort of malaise has befallen me, the kind that comes after a bout with gluttony. I'm not quite sure it is possible but I believe I overindulged in truth. I watched too many documentaries, and read too many articles. Now I feel bogged down, my neurons overloaded with new information that I have yet to process.

Throughout my life something inside of me has had a great need for truth, no matter the price to myself. I remember reading the Time Life, “Mysteries of the Unknown” series when I was young and lying awake in bed, scared of ghosts and aliens. But I persevered and read the whole series. This pattern has persisted and many years later I find myself watching documentaries and reading books I know will frighten me.

But my fears have changed. They have become more pragmatic. I worry about what will happen to my daughter if she attends public school. If she is struggling will she get the attention she needs? Will she see violence and be exposed to things I don't want her to see or hear? Should I home school her? So I search for answers, watching documentaries about the school system, listening to the stories of the parents around me.

I have found that the search for truth can oftentimes be a lonely road to travel. I can research and gain this knowledge but that does not mean everyone will accept this as their truth. More often than not, most people I know will choose to live in a world that is deemed acceptable by the rest of society. They will send their kids to public school, vaccinate them with every recommended vaccine, vote for either Romney or Obama, take what authority figures with fat paychecks say as gospel, while they reject the gospel of the one who received nothing and gave everything. They will see what the man behind the curtain wants them to see and ignore that there is a curtain, living in illusions where the path to the Superbowl isn't rigged, owning something with the Apple logo makes you better than the next person, the money from buying pink items actually goes to breast cancer research and not administrative costs, and the shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico are perfectly safe to eat. Mmmm, yummy Corexit.

James A. Garfield, our twentieth President, once stated that, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable”. And that is probably why this is such a lonely road. People do not want the misery or the additional responsibility that comes with knowing the truth. Because once you see something for what it is you have a choice to make.  You have to choose to eat gulf shrimp, knowing that it may still contain remnants of the dispersant used to clean up the BP oil spill.  (http://gizmodo.com/5903021/bp-oil-spill-aftermath-eyeless-shrimp-clawless-crabs-and-fish-with-oozing-sores).

As I overcome this latest overindulgence, I know I have put more responsibility upon myself, more choices to make. Masochism might be involved, maybe I enjoy the misery of each new truth I discover. Ultimately one could argue that truth is subjective and that I am the one living a lie.  I am the one who has created a world of my own illusions.  I will not disagree with that but it is my world and not one given to me, that in itself is truth. 

Last Sunday while reading the paper, I came across an unusual real estate ad. It listed for sale an Anti-Ballistic Missile complex located near the Canadian border in Nekoma, ND. I am familiar with this site and was actually a bit appalled that this was for sale to the general public and not in a preservation status. According to the Cold War Tourist's website, it is the only facility of its kind, responding to Soviet threats to the Grand Forks Air Force Base with nuclear capabilities. Of course it is no longer operational and gauging by the pictures on the Cold War Tourist's site, in need of a major restoration.

As I sat and looked at the picture of this historic site, it conjured up early memories of duck and cover drills in elementary school. Living with the threat of a nuclear holocaust must have wedged itself into my psyche and those around me. I remember “playing war” with a few other children in elementary. We would grab some encyclopedias and look up military items to battle each other with, a version of a role-playing game I suppose. My anti-aircraft gun takes out your Messerschmitt! War must have seemed so remote, so far away, for us to treat it as a game. Our childish minds did not grasp the reality that living in eastern North Dakota placed us on the front line.

At the time, there were over 150 minuteman missile sites connected to the Grand Forks AFB. I don't think this truth ever really hit home for those of us who grew up in the region. We would read in a book that Grand Forks was number 3 on a list of targets for the Soviet Union and laugh about it. As residents of a small town we saw ourselves as so provincial. “Who would ever want to attack us North Dakotans?” We would say. The land of lefse and lutefisk. What is there to attack? Towns with nearly as many bars as churches, some roads weren't even paved, the cafe where farmers congregated in the mornings to discuss nothing more pressing than the soybean harvest. We simply did not understand what was literally under our feet. It was nothing personal. If we had met our Russian counterparts we may have had a lot in common.

Age has brought a new perspective to that scenario, if it had ever unfolded. I no longer laugh that my region of the planet was high on the list of targets. To the people in charge, it is all just a grand chessboard, or like a game of Risk. Place some missiles here, away from the centers of power, where the elite lived in their mansions and high-rises. We meant nothing more to them than collateral damage. We were not people in their eyes but the sacrificial lambs for the glory of the United States.

The cold war was history's largest pissing contest, an attempt to fill the power void left after WWII. Although it was presented as such, it was not to actually protect freedoms or a way of life, but to say, “my gun is bigger than yours and I have more of them”.  The irony is that while I was playing the game of war, so were the people at the top.

The pyramidal shape of the Stanley Mickelson site rises unnaturally from the beauty of the surrounding prairie. Much like the actual pyramids at Giza, it is representative of the goals of the powers that be, made possible on the backs of ordinary people. Although thousands of years separate us from the ancient Egyptians, the average person is still seen as expendable to the ruling elite of the planet. Right now in Pakistan, the Obama administration conducts drone strikes where, unfortunately, civilians are killed on a regular basis. But on paper they are just numbers in another senseless, unauthorized war. The Mickelson site should serve as a reminder to all people, no matter if they are Russian, American, or Pakistani, that the people in charge of our safety and security, really only care about their own safety and security.

Source and for additional information please visit the Cold War Tourist's Website.

http://coldwartourist.com/ 

Raising Peter to Pay Paul

Recently I became a parent for the first time. It's a very exciting time period for me. I love to watch her grow and change almost on a daily basis. But what I'm not loving so much are the reams of unwanted advice. I was warned it would happen but I had no clue how annoying it would be. Not only from people close to me but from the free baby magazines I am now receiving. The magazines irk me the most because they assume that children develop essentially at the same rate. I am finding out that is certainly not the case.

According to the magazines, my baby should be rolling around by now. However, my wee one has a different agenda in mind. She is simply content to look at toys, suck on her fingers, and watch football with her dad. Naturally I began to worry because the two different baby mags state she should be doing this by now. I've tried to show her how to do it, rolling her back and forth. I've put her on her tummy, hoping she would eventually figure it out. But she just gets mad and defiantly sucks on her fingers again. I discussed this with my brother and sister-in-law (they have 4 boys and have seen it all). They assured me that every baby is different and she will just do these things when she is ready.

The advice calmed my merves (a sort of nervousness you only acquire after becoming a mother). But this left me wondering why the magazines and books seem to push certain ideas and subsequently why we end up trying to nudge our children along before they are ready. What goal are we pushing our children toward and why?

The depressing thought struck me that the end result of all that prodding is to form a child who will one day enter the workforce and become a productive member of society. That is the only plausible reason I could come up with as to why we believe our children need to hit these milestones at certain points in their life. We do not view them as individuals, who will develop at their own pace, but as future workers for the corporation we call America. Even in these first few months of their life the expectations are already there. Graduate high school, go to college, and get a good job.

We have forgotten the value of raising a child who belongs, not to the hive, but to fulfilling their destiny as an individual under the guidance of their creator. I'm certain people in Mozambique aren't waiting for their babies to roll over, and worrying, as we do, about their development. I have read that they don't even name their children until their 1^st birthday. They are simply happy that their children are alive and basically healthy.

So many wonder what has gone wrong in our society. I believe one reason is that we don't view people as people anymore. We do not appreciate the various facets that make them who they are. Due to great advances in science and medicine, we forget how truly precious life is on this planet. It is really a first world problem to worry about whether our children are behaving like the rest. We are not content with the fact that they are here and learning to function as a human being (which I can safely say I have not fully mastered at the age of 32).

I don't know what my child will decide to do with her life. It is, after all, ultimately her decision as a free and sentient being. I've heard people say around me that their child has no option but to attend college someday. I believe we really pigeonhole our children when we make statements like these. We think we are giving them the world, when in reality we are greatly limiting what they can do with this life. It reduces them to nothing but a slave to a broken system. One in which we are taught to rob Peter to pay Paul. Where one half works to accommodate the needs of the other half.

So I watch as my baby lies comfortably on her playmat, staring up in wonder at the various toys above her. She seems content for now. I know she will gain more mobility on her time. Until then, I will facilitate her needs and simply be happy that she is here with me. I hope to give her an agenda free life where she isn't sent on a path to support a dysfunctional system.