Category Archives: Musings

Sianna Sherman on Storytelling (+ My Illustrated Notes)

Yoga and Storytelling: My Notes Illustrated- part 1

Yoga and Storytelling: My Notes Illustrated- part 2

I listened to a podcast recently of Sianna Sherman on the Power of Myth and Storytelling through the International Association of Yoga Therapists and in true illustrated note taking fashion, drew and wrote what I heard. Above are some snap shots from my notes.

Sianna makes some interesting points about the healing power of story in the context of the yoga tradition. I would add that mining ones personal life stories and sharing them with others are equally as valuable, and perhaps more personally transformative then reading an already famous, classic story and trying to find yourself in that story. And while I’m all for plummeting the riches of ancient religious texts in search of meaning and applying it to ones life, ( if that is your thing) I think we all carry this kind of wisdom inside of us already if we can learn to access and also share it with each other then we our lives as we know it will be transformed. No analyzing of ancient yoga texts required. You can find more out about this process here. Below are a few of my favorite points from Sianna’s talk:

Stories are alive.
Stories feed life.
When stories are told it helps the world to flower.
When we hold the space for the flowering of the story inside us then it catches [something important] inside. [edit-mine]
Discovering the teachings of yoga through storytelling is a creative way for the soul to come to life and for us to have insight into our own lives through the story.

A poem for your Aliveness

Here’s to your aliveness!

May you experience you whole life as a practice for this very moment:

To rewrite the blueprint that has been etched across you hearts, you bones and you mind.

To mend that great divide, one cell at a time.

To be able to give yourself full permission to put away the ruler, and throw away the mask.

To feel wildly uninhibited

To shout, “My experience matters” and “I belong!” as you fling open the rusty, 200 pound door you have crammed your life behind.

Then, most importantly; may you have the courage to lay the palm open and to risk receiving.

To dive beneath the surface of things and learn to trust again, regardless of what life has in store for you.

To let the warm liquid of life flow like milk, all the way down to the belly.

To say “I’m choosing to let love in now”

Darwin’s Complaint, and other favorite things by Maira Kalman

I found many interesing treasures in Maira Kalman’s book My favorite things. The book is a walk through both Kalman’s personal history and aesthetic taste in words, illustrations and photographs. It reminds me that some artist’s are both collectors as well as archeologists, and edified my own propensity to collect random things that most people would call “junk” (much to my husband’s dissapointment). I was particualrly touched by her penchant for collecting broken chairs. But by far the thing that most facinated me was a letter that was written by Charles Darwin. It is a complaint that reads like a diary entry about an obviously difficult time in his life. His dissiluusionment is apparent, but so his his sense of humor. I’ve included a copy of it below. The quality is rather poor, so I suggest you check out Kalman’s book for the better version and to see the many other curiosities she’s collected.

Charles Darwin’s Complaint

I just finished reading this book by Cheryl Strayed: Tiny beautiful things: advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book is a memoir which is cleverly disguised in series of online advice columns that she wrote for the Rumpus. Though I am not a fan of advice columns, or memoirs, I appreciated Cheryl’s skillful blending of the two genres. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book. Of course, I was most interesting in her perspective on parenthood.

On Being Raised by a single mother: Advice to a single mother who is struggling.

“As a single mother—and by that I mean truly a mother alone like you, Oh Mama, one does not share custody or co-parent—she had to be her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be. And you know what’s never endingly beautiful to me? She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be.
And that is the gift of my life.”

On having expectations as a parent: Advise to a man who had lost his son in a tragic accident.
“Letting go of expectations when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

On deciding to become pregnant in her mid-30’s :
“I decided to become pregnant when I did because I was nearing the final years of my fertility and because my desire to do this thing everyone said was so profound was just barely stronger than my doubts about it were.”

“If a magic baby fairy had come to me when I was childless and thirty four and promised to grant me another ten years of fertility so I could live a while longer in the serene, feline-focused, fabulously unfettered life I had, I’d have taken it in a flash.”

On the path not taken:
I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Reading: The truth of my brutal pastime

Site of a Recent Kill

Even before I became a parent I rarely read a book cover to cover. It would be highly unusual for me to read every word that was written in a predicatble sequence. Instead I read like a hunter. I have a very specific agenda. I’m on the hunt for words or phrase that surprise, sentences that draw me in, and ideas that almost leap of the page and bite me. Sometimes there are also images or bits of dialogue that are just too juicy to ignore. I underline those words, to copy down at a later date, then I throw the rest away. Meaning, I don’t go back to read the parts I missed or finish the story. I return the book to the library or donate it to a friend who I think may enjoy it. I feel no allegiance to the author or the characters in the book. It’s a brutal pastime really.

I rarely talk about my approach of readin to other people, espcially other writers, or anyone who has written and published a long body of work, as it makes them flinch just a little bit. Because of this habit, I am always “reading” several books at once.

When my husband and I were first dating he was initially impressed by the amount of books I read. They were often piled high along the floor of my couch, some flung open on the kitchen table, dog eared, bookmarked and underlined.

I knew our relationship had reached a new level of intimacy when he discovered how I read them. The conversation went something like this:

“How could you just skip ahead to the final chapter when you haven’t even read the second one yet?!”

“Because I can” “…And because I want to see if the book is worth my time”.

“But you’ve already spoiled it!”

“Uh-huh.”

Perhaps the real reason I skim read everything– and I mean everything: fiction, non-fiction, cereal boxes, poetry—Is that I don’t read for information, entertainment, or escape. It’s fine to be transported to some other time, place, or reality, but that doesn’t interest me much.

I read to be moved. If something doesn’t move me I move on. It doesn’t have to be much: a word, phrase or piece of dioloque, the way a certain character is decribed. Then I take out my scalpel, trim away the fat and store those juicy bits in the refridgerator of my heart and mind for later use. I read like a scavenger, like a thief, like a hunter and like a bandit.

I have no remorse.

I am hungry and restless. But I read.

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

-Einstein

A friend of mine who has been scanning my drawings for me included a scan of his face. I decided it would make a good “man on the moon” image and took some creative liberties.

His reaction?

“Scarey. Don’t show anyone unless you want to make them uncomfortable.”

My Birth Story: Illustrated – Part 3

The pain surged, eased up a bit then surged again. I yelped each time a contraction hit. Adam stood behind me as the pain rose and leaned his full body weight into my sacrum, as though he were trying to close and overly full suitecase. It was the only thing that brought relief. Katie, our Doula, entered through our front door and watched me quietly at first then stated matter-of-factly, “You are in the late stages of labor”.

The contractions came crashing down on me like waves, one after another, and I leaped from the floor every time. She got down on the floor with me and coached me to channel the sound from high in my throat to deep in my pelvis and to be fierce “like a mama bear”. It worked. My voice broke open and became a deep moan. Suddenly I felt a surge of power I had not experienced before.

She whispered something to Adam. I heard him frantically running around the house. (He told me later it was “get the stuff ready for the car, now!”) We all knew what this meant. There was a moment of calm and then a moment of panic as we scrabbled down the steps of our apartment to the car.

Even Katie, despite her calm demeanor, appeared frazzled and accidentally locked her keys in the car just as we were about to leave. She was forced to ride with us, which was a godsend. I got on my hands and knees in the back seat and she pushed on my sacrum while I moaned as Adam drove. The contractions seemed fast and unpredictable.

Normally the hospital is a 20-minute drive from our house. But at 8:15am we found ourselves gridlocked in rush hour traffic. I moaned and breathed as we lurched along. At one point I felt the overwhelming urge to push. “Are you pushing?” Katie asked. She sounded almost accusatory. “Don’t push!” She held my bottom as though to keep the baby inside. Then her voice became composed and she spoke quietly as though to herself “It’s alright. I’ve never delivered a baby by myself before, but if it happens before we get to the hospital, we are going to be alright.” Adam leaned on the horn and I felt the car jump forward.

When we arrived at the hospital the on-call nurse took us into a back room instructed me strip, put on a robe and get on the table and push. I hopped on the bed on my hands and knees and gripped the metal rails. My OBGYN who was also caught in rush hour traffic arrived 2O minutes later and gave me a quick check.

“Fully dilated and I can see the head coming though. He’s got a full head of hair.”

She instructed me to lie on my back and I protested. I did not want to work against gravity. We compromised and I agreed to lie on my side so she could see. For the next hour and a half she and a chorus of nurses encouraged and applauded me while I tried to bear down. Medical staff came in and out of the room, chatting amongst themselves.

“what have we here?”

“A natural birth. She came in fully dilated. Says she doesn’t remember her water breaking. Her underwear was soaked when she got here.”

“Second child? No first, but it’s behaving like a second. Very exciting. Did you record the show last night?”

I felt the slippery head slide out an inch from my body with each push, and then frustratingly, slide back in once the contraction was over.

“Will you guys kindly shut up, I’m trying to concentrate here!” I snapped.

“One more push” My OBGYN whispered over and over again. She addressed my doula “She’s got an incredible amount of control, it’s as if she’s taken Pitocin.”

“She’s a yoga teacher” my doula answered by way of explanation. “She’s been practicing for more than ten years”. I chuckled to myself. Yes, yoga probably helps, but in a sense my whole life had been a practice for this moment: Long walks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, hours of drawing and dancing, authentic movement, years of therapy, and overcoming my fear of singing and speaking in public, and probably most importantly: the ability to trust the process and let the chips fall as they may, regardless of what life has in store for me.

At 10:58 am our baby “Z” emerged from my body and into this world, tiny, red and alarmed. He had the softest cry I had ever heard. They laid his slippery, wet body on my chest and covered him with a blanket. After a minute he grew quiet. His wide, grayish blue eyes surveyed the surroundings: the nurses, me and Adam, the room of bright florescent lights. Then he rested his weary, head back down on my chest and practiced breathing.

My Birth Story: Illustrated – Part 2

Where did I Leave off? To start from the beginning go to: My Birth Story Illustrated – Part 1

One thing I’ve learned is that if you want to have natural childbirth, you must be willing to be wildly uninhibited. It helps to have an exhibitionistic streak. Plus, a large dose of stubbornness.

Both my OBGYN, doula and prenatal yoga teacher confirmed this suspicion when I asked.

To practice I imagined screaming profanity at the top of my lungs while lying on my back in our living room with my legs wide open. I practiced animal noises in the car while driving. I imagined surrendering completely to the pain as it washed over me.

No one ever mentioned that natural child birth was a lot like having kinky, unorthodox sex.

As someone who has dabbled in community theatre, I was not immune to taking social risk, was even looking forward to the “performance” at the hospital. Still, we were warned that the labor process was long and mostly an endurance sport. In our hospital ready bag we had prepared playing cards, drawing pads, pens, and music. If my labor was really long we might we considered going for a hike or seeing a movie. I felt vibrant and healthy throughout most of my pregnancy, right up until the very end, and so was game for just about anything.

In the end we could have left the bag at home. In birthing class we learned that labor can look like anything, but in the end there is only one thing you can depend on: it will not turn out the way you planned. This truism is supposed to prepare us for parenthood. And I guess like any parental clichés (of which there are many) there is some truth to it.

In the end my labor was either three days long, or pretty damn quick, depending on how you look at it. Three days before Z was born I experienced Braxton Hicks contractions. Often called “false labor pains” these muscle spasms feel like labor though they are not. I thought they felt like menstrual cramps, and was not particularly bothered by them, except that they seemed to come on only at night when I was trying to sleep. Looking back, this was a ominous foreshadowing and preparation for the profound lack of sleep I would experience as a new mom.

Uncertain if the pangs I was experiencing were the real deal, I called my doula at 3am.

“I think I might be in labor…but I’m not sure.”

“Are you having contractions?”

“I don’t know. What do contractions feel like?”

She let out a long sigh. “You’ll know when you have them.”

She told me to get some rest, call her if anything changes and then politely hung up. I felt stupid. How could I be so close to labor and not know whether or not I was actually in labor? I felt like I had flunked some sort of pregnancy test. I tried to think back to my child birth preparation class, clearly there was something that I missed. But I don’t remember the actual sensory experience of contractions being discussed in childbirth class, only the annoying blanket statement “it’s different for every woman”.

The uncertainty and the contractions lasted three long days.

The pangs would come on at night and disappear by morning only to appear again the next evening. I affectionately referred to them as Dracula Contractions.

By the third evening I was sick of it. We had just made a plaster cast of my torso to immortalize my swollen belly and I was standing in the middle of our living room encased in a cocoon of plaster to let myself air dry when I felt the sudden and unbearable urge to pee. The feeling was so intense I had to sit down.

“Help get this Fr*ckin cast off me” I called to my husband as I began to flail around the room trying to break free of the cast. From the outside I must have looked like a strange and slightly obscene fifth grade science project. Like one of those volcanoes you make with baking soda and vinegar to watch explode.

He grabbed ahold of a seam and started to pull but I quickly swatted him away. I realized I could control the pain more if I did it myself. Again, more foreshadowing. In the end my husband could help, but he could not do labor for me, only I knew what needed to be done and could do it. The cast was stuck on some parts of my body more than others and rather than simply ripping the cast off, which would have been quick but painful, I opted for a more gentle but still excruciating shimmy. After what seemed like eternity, I broke free from the cast and waddled hastily to the bathroom.

I felt like giant water pitcher ready to tip over at any minute. A trickle of water came out. How could this be? I looked again. It was slightly pink and glistened.

“I think my water just broke,” I told my husband, “but I’m not sure”. Not sure? How could I not be sure?! But I was not sure of anything anymore. None of this fit the experience of birth I had read about or heard from others. Welcome to parenthood.

He suggested I call our Doula and ask about the trickle, but I did not want to bother her again with another false alarm. Besides I had an appointment the next morning with my OBGYN, I would ask her then.

I flopped belly up on the couch as the Dracula contractions began to take over and prepared myself for another night of no sleep. I was seriously irritated.

Everyone emphasized how important it was to get a good night sleep before the baby came, but it was proving to be impossible! Stubbornly, I refused to let these false labor pains deprive me of one more night’s sleep. I piled the pillows high on our couch and tried to find a somewhat comfortable sleeping position. (At this point our bed had become too uncomfortable so I had succumbed to sleeping in the living room.) When that didn’t work, I decided to practice the relaxation and pain management techniques I had learned in childbirth class to prepare for the real thing.

Whenever the pain subsided, even a little bit I tried to rest and relax fully into the experience. When it rose again I did not resist or try to manage it. “Surrender. Surrender” I kept repeating to myself over and over again. I drifted in and out of consciousness for what seemed like forever.

The night before my little one arrive I did not sleep a single hour. Instead I lay belly-up on our couch, observing my breath as I drifted in and out of consciousness. This pain will go away I thought just like the other ones had the nights before. At approximately 5 a.m the sunlight began seeping through our blinds. Feeling a little defeated I got up and began preparing myself for another groggy day. As I steadied myself from the couch a new pang rose and then fell. It was still here?! It seemed a little more intense then I remembered. Could this be it? Naw.

Just to be sure I waited. The sensation came and left quickly. Was this a pattern? Maybe I was just delusional from lack of sleep. Reluctantly I woke Adam. “I don’t think this is labor, but can you measure the time in between these things, just in case?” He did. They were 2-3 minutes apart.

“I’m calling Katie,” he said, and marched into the bedroom to get his phone.

“You’re wasting your time,” I called after him. I was still not convinced.

By the time he came back into the living room I had thrown up on our hardwood floor and was on my hands and knees in pain. My low back throbbed. Maybe I really was in labor!

My Birth Story: Illustrated – Part 1

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I was dead set on having a natural childbirth.

I had heard and read enough hospital horror stories about women being pressured to medicate when they might otherwise be fine going natural. Especially as a woman in the “advanced age” category I knew that in the eyes of the medical community I was considered higher risk just by being over the age of 35.

I was determined.

I queried everyone I could think of who had seen or experienced a successful natural birth: my OBGYN, my doula, friends, family members, random women in the grocery store who had babies.

“Did you have a natural birth? If so, what do you think helped make it possible?” Most women I talked to did not have a natural birth, though many had planned on it. I was curious about this and decided to go directly to the professionals

“Of the women who give birth in this hospital, how many actually go on to have a natural birth?” I asked My OBGYN during a pelvic exam.

She scribbled something in my chart, and then peered over her glasses.

“Not many”, she said without blinking. I pressed her for numbers, actual statistics. Surely they track this stuff.

Nope.

“I don’t know, maybe one in ten women.” She seemed bored with my question like she had heard it too many times before. She went on to explain that many women intend to have a natural birth but end up caving when the pain becomes unbearable… Or the baby has other plans.

“You should be open minded.” She cautioned. “A natural birth is not always the positive experience people make it out to be.”

My jaw tightened. I felt a fleeting impulse to wrestle her to the ground.

“You see a lot of women and a lot of births. Can you often predict the kind of birth experience a woman will have, just by talking to her during these exams?”

She looked me in the eye and nodded. “Occasionally people surprise me”.

After that appointment I became obsessed with numbers: Odds, birth statistics, natural birth percentages. This surprised me, as I am just not a numbers person. I have always hated them. I also dislike rulers, graph paper, measuring cups, decimal points, and hash tags. They remind me too much of math, a subject that has troubled me since elementary school.

Suddenly, now numbers had become purveyors of truth, hopefulness and certainty. They signaled how hard (or not hard) it would be to believe in myself, my support system,my baby and the birth professionals surrounding me. Were the chances of having a natural birth really as low as people were telling me? Did I have the audacity to try anyway? Was it true for women who had already planned to have a hospital birth, or was it the case for women who had originally set out to have a home birth, but did not? Let’s measure and see!

I asked my doula for her perspective. Her numbers were better than my OBGYN, but still surprisingly conservative. Roughly, one in five women she worked with went on to have a natural birth. I was shocked. Why were the numbers so low? Haven’t women been giving birth naturally for centuries without medical intervention? Was it really that hard? A male friend of mine reminded me that women and babies have also been dying in labor for centuries, and it was not until the advent of modern medicine that those figures dramatically decreased.

During my third trimester a close friend of mine who was also pregnant, lost her baby at 28 weeks. Another friend of mine lost her baby just days after it was born. The news shook me. I cried often, burring my head in my husband’s shoulder as dark, wet patches formed on his sweaters. I clung to the railing a little tighter as I teetered down the icy steps of our house. Everything in the world seemed precarious and uncertain; especially death and life. As a pregnant women, both are likely possibilities at some point in her productive life. This is the part of pregnancy people don’t often talk about: miscarriages, still births and traumatic births, though they are quite common.

But at no other time in a woman’s life is the dance of death and life so intimately intertwined as during pregnancy. For the first time in my life I felt truly mortal. Not fragile, just soft, tender, vulnerable.

Each time I stepped one foot off the curb of a side walk, was a gamble. Death. Life. Death. Life. The scales could tip either way at any moment. This feeling only increased once my son was born.

At my next prenatal check-up I decided to up my line of questioning.

“On a purely psychological level, assuming that mom and baby are healthy, and both capable of having a natural birth, what do you think enables those few women to have a natural labor?”

My OBGYN: “They are hard headed. Once they set their mind to something they don’t back down”.

This did not sound exactly positive, unless, you’re talking corporate takeovers, or brutal contact sports.

My doula had a softer perspective. “Surrender”, she said.

“You have to be able to surrender the illusion of control. Women who have natural births are not afraid of losing face or looking foolish in front of their husbands, the hospital staff and however else is present for the birth.”

My prenatal yoga teacher was even more specific. “Imagine pooping in front of a room full of people while they watch. If you can do this and stay relaxed enough to not close off your [anal] sphincter then you can have a natural birth. The experience is pretty similar”. The class was silent.

So stubbornness and willingness to be un-apologetically uninhibited; even brazenly antisocial, was what was required to increase your chances of having an natural child birth; to be able to give yourself full permission to put away the ruler, and throw away the mask.

Cool. Child birth was beginning to sound like fun!

My Birth Story: Illustrated – Part 2