Becoming Naomi Leon by Pam Munoz Ryan is the story of a girl named Naomi and her little brother who live a simple life in a trailer park with their grandmother and some loving neighbors. Life is not always easy, but it is good, until their long-absent mother shows up to stir up their emotions and threaten their future. The children's grandmother takes extreme steps to save Naomi, which result in the children finding more love and family to sustain them, but ultimately it is quiet Naomi who must to learn to find her voice and speak up for the life she needs.
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Hey, I noticed that there was a breast-feeding picture on the cover of Mothering magazine. I tend to avoid Mothering magazine because they often say really, really mean things about women who've had caesarian births. (It's one thing to go in prepared beforehand, but afterward, when you've done everything you could? Sheesh! Off topic for this post, but I'm still thinking about it. Man.)
It is very common for them to have breastfeeding pictures, which is nice, I think. I like Mothering pretty well but I think a lot of people experience them that way. I have read a lot of issues and wouldn't agree that they say mean things about women who have sections, unless I missed that issue - I do think they say quite stridently that most caesarians are not necessary and are very anti the doctors who perform so many. I agree with that for the most part but think that many women who have had c-sections (either because they did not know not to trust the docs or because they really needed them) feel hurt when they read that c-sections are bad in that way. I think Mothering would do well to include a lot more reassuring padding in those articles (and all of their advocacy articles) for the sake of people's feelings as parenting is so important to us all that we are easily hurt, I think. I vaccinate my kids and use disposable diapers, both of which they are stridently against, but I'm at a point now where it doesn't hurt my feelings when they talk about the harm that can do, though I do think they could pad the articles with a bit more reassurance that we all are making the choices that we know are right for own circumstances.
And they are nasty about women who choose to have c-sections for convenience reasons and not on a doctor's advice, for sure. I forgot about that. I wouldn't want to be that way even about that if it was just that family's choice, but I have to admit that I do feel that those women are hurting the chances of other women and babies to have the safest births they can by normalizing c-sections as the dominant hospital culture. Convenience isn't a good enough reason to do that IMHO.
Yeah, when I heard about a friend of a friend who opted for a cesarian birth because she didn't want to "damage the goods," I thought, "Yikes! Woman, your ya-ya is going to be just fine, but your abdomen is going to be in recovery for a year."
Yeah, it never seemed very convenient to me. I have clear memories of how my mom looked/felt post both vaginal and section births and that was quite enough to make up my mind that I would pick the most anti-section birth attendants I could find so I would know they would only cut me if we were maybe going to die.
I got really close to needing one with my firstborn (my former-midwife OB/GYN said "just one more hour to push this baby out!") and my mom said any other doc in the world would have cut me, she thought (and she said thank god my stepdad,a doctor, was not there, because he would have flipped), but we were just fine (bit of a fever, but no biggie; I was in a hospital so there were plenty of antibiotics around), regardless of the over 30 hours of labor post-water breaking and all that nasty pit and stadol and epidurals. It was a tough experience, though. I think if I had stayed at home for a lot longer rather than obediently going to the hospital as soon as my water broke even though there wasn't much going on yet, things might have been much better. You never really know about might-have-beens, though, so it doesn't really help anyone to second guess, I think. even though it is hard not to.
A funny thing is that now that I have had a birth with epidurals and one without any drugs at all, I wish so hard there was some way to give real knowledge of how different the experiences were to pregnant women opting for inductions or for epidurals beforehand because of fear of pain. There was so much more pain and exhaustion involved in my first birth when I had drugs, though I know that makes no sense to most people. Natural birth was the most fun I have ever had in my life. It's just impossible to convince people of the difference, but I wish they could know how much worse the pit and the epidural make things, stalling the labor and dragging everything out until you are so tired that nothing works right anymore. My epidural experience was just wretched and messed my labor up so that I almost had to have a c-section, but it seems that very few people know that epidurals do that.
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