Happy Thanksgiving! (with some stoplights and birth thrown in)

Happy Thanksgiving!!! Cedric is teaching me how to play chess. It is one of those bitter sweet things because Daniel learned a few years ago and he wanted to play and would play anyone who was willing. Somehow I never managed to have time. Now I wish had had because it isn’t as hard as I’d always imagined it would be. Cedric is somewhat impatient, though, and thinks I take too long. The problem is, when Cedric moves and I say, “So, my horse can kill your Queen?” he says, “No, wait, I didn’t think.” Anyway, it’s kind of fun.

Yesterday after some general cleaning I let some children watch a movie. While they were watching, I did a lot of prep work so that after I did a goat exchange I could get to cooking/baking. The goat exchange happened without incident so Goldilocks is now home and Princess is gone. Pretty exciting.

I made  pumpkin pie

                pecan pie

                apple pie

                chocolate pie

                shoo fly pie

                sausage stuffing (ready to go in the oven)

                broccoli casserole

                cranberry sauce

                cranberry salad

                bread (because I needed some in order to make the stuffing)

I mixed rolls up so they are ready to go as soon as I get them out and get them going which needs to be soon. The turkey is in the oven.  That just leaves mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and gravy and they won’t take long once we get to them.

Anyway, the whole day was in the kitchen pretty much and I’m glad that today won’t be.

We just got a stop light by Walmart. Normally, I wouldn’t care. However, this stoplight is not that far from where I live (only 3.5 miles [2.27 as the crow flies] via road) and it has a direct effect on my life as there are times when I need or want to go somewhere and when I get to the end of Pitcherville Road (which is only 2.5 miles from the stoplight because the end of Pitcherville is one mile from our house), I sometimes have to wait for ten or twelve cars to go by before I can get out. That wastes time and we all know that time is money so it costs me money every time I am sitting there waiting. I don’t like it; it disrupts the normal ebb and flow of traffic. As I was thinking about this and how it just messes everything up (and we won’t even get into the two over by Price Chopper—mostly because they are easy enough to avoid and I don’t live in Gardner so they don’t have the same effect on my life), I thought that traffic lights are like interventions in birth.

If you have the pleasure of living somewhere where there are no stoplights, traffic just flows along. There are times when things tend to get a bit congested but eventually it clears out. Granted, lack of stoplights often means that the population isn’t as great as places that have them but quite frankly, I think urban areas are somewhat akin to a freak of nature except that they aren’t very natural.

Stop signs are introduced at intersections and generally speaking, they do add some order to the tide of traffic but only when drivers are aware of and follow the rules of the road. As the population increases, so does the number of stop signs. Stop lights are introduced at particularly dangerous intersections and as the population experiences even greater increases. While it is true that they lend some order to traffic flow, when there is too much traffic, nothing is really going to help.

Birth is a normal process. Women have been giving birth since time immemorial. For eons, women were attended by other women as they gave birth or were alone.

 Fast forward to the last 300 years when men entered the birth chamber. All of a sudden, we have stop signs. Skreeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! What the heck! Now women are told they aren’t doing it right. Never mind that the human race has managed to thrive thus far, suddenly we’re about to die out if we don’t do it the way MEN tell us to? Are you kidding me?!?!

Fast forward again, to present day when we have not only stop signs but stoplights. Now not only do women (at least in the United States) not know how to give birth (but other women in other countries do? How stupid are, we people?) but the whole process has to be micromanaged by professionals. And the whole question of professional is questionable. I mean, how does a plumber learn? By doing. How does an electrician learn? By doing. How does a mechanic learn? By doing. How does a doctor learn? By going to school? Are you serious? How the heck does a male doctor know more about birth than I do? Just because he’s gone to school? He may know more about the science of birth, be he does not know more about the experience of birth. There is no way he can because there is no way he can.

Just as traffic flows along rather nicely without aid in rural areas, so does labor progress when there are no interventions. Add the stop signs and suddenly there are rules that must be followed. They might be fairly minimal, but they are present and they do disrupt the flow, even if only slightly. Add the stop lights and suddenly the whole flow is disrupted. Now there is nothing smooth about the flow, it is disjointed and congested. Why would anyone want that?

By the way, I know that is a loaded question. People I know say, “I love Boston!” It can be New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, whatever, any city. That’s great. You can love a city if you want to. You can love birth with interventions if you want to. Everyone is different and I get that. The world would be a boring place if we were all the same. What I don’t get is why we are so complacent about blindly accepting interventions when we do not know the full extent of the consequences of using them. If the child of a mother who uses narcotics during the birth process is more likely to develop dependency on narcotics later in life, might that mother think twice before accepting them? If all the ultrasounds we are subjecting our babies to end up being responsible for the drastic increase in autism, might women think twice about using them? The kicker is, we just don’t know the full effect of these things that we do. It’s kind of like living in a city. It’s just living, right? Granted, there are more people, there is more traffic, there is more pollution. So we go out and exercise so we can be healthy because we’re not getting out and milking the goats and working in the garden and splitting and stacking wood and all the other things that people might do if they live in more rural areas. And what do we do for exercise? We go walking or running or we ride or bicycles. That’s great! Really, I mean it. I do all of those things and always feel better when I do. But in the city there’s that stuff in the air—you know what I’m talking about—pollution. It’s that stuff that comes from cars, from factories, from your furnace. It’s that nasty stuff in the air; the air that we breathe. The air that we breathe in copiously when we are exercising; the more vigorous the exercise, the more we breathe in. Hmmmm.

Did you know that the lungs of a city dweller who does not smoke look like the lungs of a smoker? Hmmm. That’s great. So, go ahead; love your city. Go ahead; love interventions during birth. Your choices are yours. Just as mine are mine. The problem really is that we aren’t the only ones who have to live with the consequences of them.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone!