The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

When my mother gave birth to me, she was knocked out with medication just before delivery, after suffering 20 hours of labor. This was considered the modern answer to childbirth pain; previously, women suffered without any anaesthesia, since after all, pain in childbirth was Eve’s punishment for eating the apple in Eden. It took Queen Victoria’s decision to use an anaesthetic for it to become acceptable, I’ve read; religious leaders backed down and let women suffer less. However, women then missed the actual birth, missed the wonder of having the child you have carried for ten months (not nine) being placed on your stomach for you to see, marvel at, and bond with.

When I was pregnant in 1970, a wonderful woman who had had four kids gave me all her old Lamaze manuals, and urged me to sign up for ‘natural childbirth’ classes. I’m so glad she did. It worked wonders. Doing this special kind of breathing gives a woman more control over her labor, since it distracts her, relaxes her and therefore minimizes the pain. It also gives the husband something constructive to do, as his counting at the start of each contraction (while using a watch to time it) lets the woman know the contraction will be soon over and is very encouraging for her. However, an epidural is still something a woman should have her doctor arrange to have as a back-up if things get out of hand.

When my husband and I were taking Lamaze breathing lessons, our instructor gave us a tip that I think really worked, however crazy it may sound. She said that, during our practicing, my husband should first pinch my inner thigh while I wasn’t doing the breathing, gradually increasing the intensity of his pinch, for a count of ten. It would hurt me, of course. Then, he should do the same thing while I did the proper breathing technique. It wouldn’t hurt as much, in fact, would hardly be noticeable, since I was concentrating on the breathing (which by the way, was to the mental tune of Yankee Doodle!). If we continued to practice that way, I would become convinced, mentally, that the breathing would work. Well, I was very skeptical, but we did it, and it seems to have worked, probably on the basis of the power of suggestion.

In any case, I felt no pain during labor, even without an epidural, since my Lamaze breathing was working so well that as I just concentrated on my breathing while my husband counted down the contractions, I somehow went into a trance state where ‘pain’ was merely a kind of ache like mild menstrual cramps. It was something I had never experienced before and haven’t experienced since. And no one has been able to properly explain it.

After I gave birth, many women didn’t believe me or were resentful when I told them about my birthing experience, as if I the fact that I felt no pain meant that I hadn’t really given birth. And I discovered after giving birth that women brag about the amount of pain and the number of hours of labor they have gone through.

Back when I had first found that I was pregnant, I had asked Dr. Buka, my ob-gyn (who is still practicing in the Seaforth Medical here in Montreal) if giving birth had to hurt so much. My sister had just gone through 16 hours of very painful labor, the kind where you curse your husband and swear you’ll never have another baby, and I was fearful that I would have to do the same.

Dr. Buka said there was no reason on earth in 1970 why a woman had to have a baby in pain, since epidurals were now available. He also said that it was because women kept wanting to have ‘natural’ childbirth that there was still pain in childbirth. He said there were still doctors (usually male) who thought that doing it without an epidural was the best way (which he considered heartless), but mainly blamed the desire for a ‘natural’, anesthetic-free labor on the women in the Women’s Movement who believed that giving birth was natural and shouldn’t be treated like it was an illness, therefore should be experienced without medication and if possible without doctors around.

It was Buka’s opinion that although there was some good in this idea (especially in giving birth in a pleasant space, being able to walk around during labor, listen to music, have upbeat friends around, etcetera), it was forcing women to undergo needless pain in order to do it all the so-called ‘natural’ way. As he said, “Would you have root canal surgery without novocaine, just to experience it all ‘naturally’?”

The analogy isn’t very apt, of course, since there is the matter of labor sometimes slowing down once a woman has had an epidural, or the woman’s not being able to feel her contractions so as to be able to push when the time comes to push. But, as I found when I was given an epidural just before delivery (since the anaethesiologist was going off duty and said it was my last chance if I wanted one, and I said yes because I was sure that the pain would finally hit me during delivery), one of the nurses in the delivery room simply put her hand on my stomach and told me when to push, so that wasn’t a problem.

So much has changed since then, I am told, concerning birthing, much of it thanks to the Women’s Movement. Labor rooms in hospitals are better now than when I labored in a cubicle the size of two toilet stalls, surrounded by screaming women and interrupted constantly by nursing wanting to check to see how much I had dilated (my husband had to tell them to wait until the end of a contraction, so as not to spoil my concentration on the breathing technique). The Royal Victoria Hospital was good, apparently, when my daughter gave birth. The Jewish General, I hear, also has rooms that are peaceful and big enough for several people to join you, and for you to walk around while in labor. You don’t really need to be at a special birthing center any more with only a midwife to help you. Or, a midwife can now come to the hospital–or so I believe. Check to find out.

In any case, it’s safer giving birth at a hospital. My sister in law almost bled to death during labor for her second child, for no reason that could have been discernible ahead of time, and we were all very glad that she was at the Jewish, believe me. And yesterday a colleague told me that 8 months ago, 18 hours into her labor, she remembered my words about epidurals and wished she had changed her mind about ‘natural childbirth’. Luckily she was at a hospital, since she wasn’t dilating fast enough, and labor finally had to be induced–with an epidural. She was glad, then, that she hadn’t gone to a birthing center, where an epidural wasn’t even a fall-back position if things got out of hand. And she also was so exhausted after laboring for 18 hours that she took a long time to recover afterwards, so couldn’t enjoy her son as much at first. Next time, she says, she will definitely have an epidural as soon as possible.

I think that not only should a woman use the Lamaze breathing technique, but her husband should stand behind or at least at her head during both labor and delivery, not down where all the action is. That’s where my husband stood, next to my face, where I could see his eyes and grip his hand. He was a great help to me by being so close to me.

These days, husbands too often try to put the whole thing on videotape and want to be practically looking over the doctor’s shoulder. They are more liable to faint, etc. if they do so. (My doctor wouldn’t let husbands down there since he said that a few had attacked him for hurting their wives! These were, of course, wives who weren’t using epidurals. He insisted that husbands stand up by the woman’s face.) The woman also doesn’t have to worry, that way, that her husband is seeing her at her worst, all spread-legged and bloody. I’ve even heard a husband say, after being ‘down there’, filming, that he never wanted to get this wife pregnant again after seeing things from that angle and felt very “unerotic” towards her for a long time afterwards. A husband needs to be by her side, with or without a camera. And if she has had an epidural at this point she will feel nothing but warmth in her lower extremities and it will be wonderful!

I feel very strongly about all this, as you can see. I hate the thought of people in needless pain, even if the result is a beautiful baby, and even if women do forget the pain afterwards. The difference is whether or not one is just begging for it all to be over while giving birth, or feels a kind of epiphany. And there is a better chance for the latter if a mixture of Lamaze and modern medication are used.

The squirrels died because I didn’t feed them for two days earlier this week, when this weather began. I didn’t want to go out in such weather to buy peanuts, so I just selfishly failed to feed them. This all reminds me of the old Chinese saying about how, if you save someone’s life, you are thereafter responsible for looking after it. I had introduced myself to those squirrels as a source of food, had fed them (and their ancestors) for years. Then I just selfishly stopped, because I didn’t want to cross the street to the depanneur. ARRRG.

It is bitterly cold out today, something like minus 22, and I seem to have killed all the squirrels.

Either that, or they have all gone elsewhere. There used to be six of them that came out every day to eat the peanuts I threw under the cherry tree. Now there are none.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” combines del Toro’s two fascinations: fantasy a la “Hell Boy” and fascism a la ‘The Devil’s Backbone.” He combines these two in such a way that they don’t seem to be opposites. As a result, there is no chance for the ten year old girl, Ofelia, to escape into a bright fantasy world of charming fairies and magic to avoid the harshness of life with her stepfather, a fascist Captain, and her suffering, pregnant mother, not when the world of fantasy she finds in an ancient labyrinth near where she is staying is just as dark and fearsome. . Thus we are only momentarily distracted from the horrors of the fascist world by the horrors of the fantasy world she finds. (BTW, there are really no spoilers below; I mention only what reviewers have already commented on.)

Even Pan, the faun who makes Mr. Tumnus of “Narnia” look (as one reviewer said), like Woody Allen, is a scary figure, enormous, with horns that would unbalance any other decent antlered creature in a second and eyes that desperately need re-alligning by plastic surgery. And ’seeing’ seems to be one of the themes here, for there is also the monster Ofelia encounters who is able to see only with the eyeballs in his hands–a new take on the ogre, as the paintings around him suggest. Yet what is the point to this theme of seeing?

It’s not that Ofelia needs to see or understand anything in particular. She is instinctively able to tell that her stepfather is a monster and that the housekeeper, Mercedes, is someone she can trust. She is so intuitive that half the time, the viewer wonders if the things that Pan tells her to do are really just things that her instincts tell her to do, given full shape and voice. (Except for the business of the mandrake root. No child could come up with that idea. It’s worth the price of admission to this film to see the mandrake sequences that leave you wondering what kind of odd, chlthonic belief system it came out of.)

What the ’seeing’ image seems to relate to is that of the film viewer: it enable us to see what fascism is really like. If all you know of it has been gained by studies of the Holocaust and images of Hitler shouting at massive crowds at Nurenberg, it is enlightening to see this kind of individual fascism, the kind where an individual believes so strongly in a master race or simply a definite class system that he is willing to kill anyone he doesn’t like and torture at length, shows no pity, never sees his own flaws or mistakes, and is so brutal that he actually is scarier than the ogre with the eyeballs in his hands. Even scenes where he’s shaving with an old, straight razor keep you on edge; you keep wondering if he’ll slash out at someone, even though he’s alone in such scenes, and I kept hoping his hand would slip and make him draw his own blood.

Against such a back drop, Ofelia’s tasks (which she must accomplish before going back to a kingdom in the earth where she really is a princess) are just part of the same cruel landscape. She is a plucky little heroine, like Alice, if one could imagine Alice crawling through mud and slime and then returning from the rabbit hole frequently, only to meet monsters instead of a pretty British meadow and her nanny.

I don’t know if I can recommend this movie. At least twice, I had my eyes screwed tight and fingers in my ears and was doing a mental ‘la la la’ in attempts to not hear what was going on on the screen. The rest of the time I was clutching my husband’s hand and he was clutching back. If you don’t mind scenes of torture, or if you can simply refer to this as a horror film and forget the fantasy label, you might be able to see it and enjoy it the way you might ‘enjoy’ “Saw” or some other such horrific, bloody entertainment. Or you may like it for its style, which seems to be influenced by Goya (“Uranus Eating His Children”, for example, but other war pictures as well),Picasso’s Guernica, and possibly British artist and fairy-tale illustrationist Arthur Rackham, if someone had taken away all his colored paints and forced him to paint with only browns and blacks.

Watched the second half of ‘The Virgin Queen’ last night on PBS. My goodness, what amazing makeup on the girl who played Elizabeth !. In this two part series, she ages from her teens to her fifties, and she really looks the part as she ages. The actress wears no apparent makeup, but rather a bare-looking, raw face, has no eyebrows or even visible eyelashes even as a girl, has a receding hairline that eventually recedes into mere white hair clinging to her head, like a wraith’s (as we see in one awful scene when someone—Essex, I think–bursts into her rooms unannounced and finds her soaking her feet in water, wigless, in some kind of white wrap that looks like a shroud.) Most of the time she wears elaborate red wigs and as she gets older, paints her face white. The makeup made her so plain that it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to marry her. Or Dudley, her favorite, or Essex, actually wanting her for anything else but the power that they would get by being married to her. Surely she was prettier than that.

The show did, however, capture her spirit, especially when she rides to the battle camp of her soldiers who are somehow involved in fighting the Spanish during the time of the Armada (I can’t quite figure this out, since it was a sea battle, yet these guys are in tents, definitely an army.) In any case, she gives a speech from horseback which is reminiscent of Henry V just before Agincourt, and builds up their spirits, despite her terrible ugliness, which makes her look like a figure of death (to me, at least). And she stays in camp until the sea battle has been won, which I didn’t know.

But how one’s heart goes out to her. She had no one to confide him whom she could trust. Was all alone in a crowd of people at court. Was always being bullied to marry just about anyone–except the one–Dudley–she really loved, but whom her advisers didn’t trust, and neither did she. And, when she’s dying, there was a scene when she stood 15 hours by a window because she was afraid that if she sat or lay down, she’d never rise again. Oh! To never have a nice husband, a real partner, plus a child! And to have, instead, such a great burden of queen-ship!Why would anyone ever want to be a queen? But of course, queens do not choose to be queens, do they.

And now I hear from Paze that apparently that’s just one side of the story. A Phillippa Gregory novel she’s been reading, called ‘The Queen’s Fool’, told from the POV of a girl of the court, who served first Mary and then Elizabeth, shows that ‘bloody Mary’ was a sympathetic character too, one just as lost and alone, whose many acts of torture, etcetera, were done without her wanting them done, insisted on by her Catholic advisers, just as Elizabeth experienced it. And one does have to think that after all, Mary never had Elizabeth killed, just kept in the Tower of London under the equivalent of house arrest, even though she knew that E. was a threat to her, that the people of England preferred E. to her, mainly because she was bringing back Catholicism to a nation that had been Protestantized by Henry VIII, and then by his son Edward. I’m sure the Catholic view of Mary that is taught in Catholic school is quite different from how she is perceived by Protestant views….

I have just spent over an hour watching Steve Jobs introduce the new IPhone. Wow! It’s got everything. And I am so proud of him, as only Mac lovers can be of anything Apple.

First of all, just watching the video of his presentation was wonderful. He is perfectly filmed, as if he were on t.v. as he stands alternately at center stage or behind a small lectern to one side. And he uses a great visual aid to show off the new product, so that you are watching as he touches the screen of his own IPhone while it appears on the big screen behind him. Soon we are listening to its music selections, fllipping with him through possible albums and choices, complete with videos, all at the touch of a finger on a screen, or a scroll with the finger. No stylus, no mouse, just a finger touch.

Then he shows how to watch movies or tv shows that have been down-loaded onto it. The picture and sound are very clear on these, and you can either have wide screen or narrow screen, holding the device upright or long-ways. And as for computing, Yahoo and Google and Safari are part of it too, so you can do anything you normally would on a computer, including email and sending pictures, all without keys to punch, all of it as easily as talking.

I have always felt that people using PCs might as well be using Betamax. Well, PCs are cheaper in price, I guess. Still, Mac and Apple are so cool to use that I’m surprised that anyone wants any other kind of computer. In fact, the only minor problems with Apple are caused only by the fact that some things are made only for PCs. I always note that the heroes in movies always use Apple laptops. And I’m tickled by the ads showing the conservative old PC complaining to the hip-looking Mac about the problems he has.

I know, I know. It’s like a cult following. There was the audience, made up of what were obviously Apple fans, gasping and applauding at each new thing Jobs said as if he were some charismatic leader speaking about spiritual enlightenment rather than technology. But I was gasping, too. And I’m not the kind of person who would normally be taken in by a cult.

I remember Umberto Ecco’s essay in which he compared PC users to Protestants and Mac users to Catholics.He said Mac users, like Catholics, want the whole computing package to be easily accessed and already figured out ahead of time. PC users, like Protestants, don’t mind the difficulties of trying to do things themselves because they were at least not part of some all-enveloping system or ideology. Since I hate Catholicism with a passion, I was rather surprised at this comparison, but it doesn’t faze me. I would say, rather, that Mac is more like liberalism, with few rules, a sense of humor, an appreciation of human nature and a desire to make things better for people, whereas PCs are like Conservatives or Republicans, serious, somewhat joyless, interested mainly in moneymaking aspects and suspicious of fun.

I know, I know. PC users like my daughter and son in law will bristle at this. And I know so little about what can be done with a PC that I shouldn’t say anything. But every time I sit down at a PC (as I did recently in the Dawson College library to check my emails and look at blogs, etc,), I am struck with how stiff they are to use, how barely user- friendly they are. It always seems like you’d have to wear a suit to be a PC fan. I guess using one’s personal PC, especially while utilizing all kinds of interesting programs, must be different to use, more friendly, etcetera. But being a Mac fan is like being a liberal; you can’t imagine any one you know being anything else. And it’s as clear cut a product choice, with as much emotional input, as loving Coke rather than Pepsi.

Hello and best wishes to all.

Well, once again, we have survived another holiday season none the worse for wear.

The Xmas meal turned out okay despite all my wailings and forebodings. We had invited Joan Mc, who was witty and chatty and kept D&E and the girls entertained while John and I did last minute stuff in the kitchen. We ended up with 5 side dishes: mashed potatoes (made by potato-mistress Edith), a braised red cabbage and raisins dish, the ratatouille from the caterers, and green beans fried with arugula. The turkey seemed very dry, but good nevertheless. And our guests brought us gifts: a bottle of ice cider from D&E, plus a bott of absinthe which we have yet tried.

Snow fell heavily on Boxing Day, giving us a sort of white Xmas. My birthday dinner was delicious at Lombardi’s, our favorite pasta resto. Devon was an absolute angel as we adults chatted, since she played with her new Polly Pocket dolls. P&J gave me some lovely things, including a pair of amethyst earrings. And I ate pasta with not only shrimps but mussels as well. Yum.

The New Year’s Eve’s party at the house of one of John’s lesser known colleagues confirmed all our bad feelings about such events, since only 8 people out of 80 that the host invited actually came, leaving a small group of people we didn’t know to rattle around in a rather gloomy old house across the street from a highway span down in Verdun somewhere. Yet even that was not bad; John and I did what we could to begin conversations which everyone could all take part in, and at midnight, we at least didn’t feel too much that we had wasted our New Year’s Eve. It had been an adventure.

Today Devon went back to daycare. Tomorrow I start work, as does Jeff. Paze and John are off to see Borat tomorrow. And today is a sunny, although cold, day. We are broke, but content.