Earlier today, I texted Sweetie that there was "no gnus." I was just now looking through March 2008 posts on here to see what I was thinking and feeling before Z was born, and I found a post called "No gnus is good gnus."
Here is what I found.
Last time, I was sure she was going to come early. She didn't.
This time, I've been sure he is going to come early. We're at 39 weeks and 2 days. It's not looking good.
Last time, I was having lots of contractions, but I didn't know what they were.
This time, I'm having lots of contractions. This time, I know what they are.
Last time, I stopped working a week before she was due.
This time, I stopped working 6 days before he is due (although I had a long vacation first).
Last time, I was killing time watching Deadwood, starring Timothy Oliphant.
This time, I am killing time watching Justified, starring Timothy Oliphant.
Anyway, there is not much going on, although I keep psyching myself out to think there is. I'll let you know if that changes!
Friday, August 29, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
Why are they like that? Some theories...
So, like, I don't want to go revisit all that writing I did on Trayvon Martin, but with the latest murder (this time by the police) of an unarmed black teenager and the subsequent smearing of his character, I have some thoughts.
First of all, it doesn't surprise me at all that the police are attempting to smear the character of Mike Brown. It's... inevitable. And so ugly -- after days of protest, they finally released the name of the officer who shot Brown, but prefaced it by saying that Brown was the primary suspect in a "strong-arm robbery" that had occurred a few minutes prior to the officer pulling him over.
Yeah, so since then, they've had to admit that the officer knew nothing about that and his stopping the kid was unrelated. (It may also be of note that the "strong-arm robbery" was basically shoplifting a pack of Swisher Sweets cigarillos.)
Three eye-witnesses have all told the same story, that after stopping Brown for walking in the street, the officer pulled Brown to the window of the car, there was some kind of tussle, a shot was fired, and then Brown ran away. The officer shot at him from some distance, and Brown turned around with his hands up, at which point he was shot several more times.
Perhaps you know enough about police procedures to know that one generally doesn't shoot someone who is running away or who has his hands in the air.
The autopsy report came out today, and showed that he was shot in the front of the arms and the top of the head. It certainly seems consistent with shooting someone who is facing you with his arms held in the air, then someone falling forward and a bullet entering the top of his head.
That's wrong. And the police response has been all wrong (they're tear-gassing 8-year-olds during largely peaceful protests, and intimidating and arresting journalists). But what perhaps disgusts me the most is that EVERY article I read on the subject is followed by people justifying the killing.
Well, he was just involved in a robbery! If you don't want to get shot, don't commit crimes.
The officer had NO IDEA Brown might have committed a crime.
Brown was posing an active threat. He reached for the officer's gun.
You are pulling that out of thin air. Plus, he certainly wasn't reaching for that gun anymore as he ran away.
He was a felon!
Nope. You have to get convicted of a felony to be a felon. And even if you stretch the circumstances of the robbery to be violent or whatever, the punishment for robbery isn't instant execution with no trial.
The bullet in the top of his head shows he was charging the officer like a bull.
Okay, really? He ran away, then a shot was fired, so he turned around and ran into the gunfire, head down? Yeeeeeeaaahhh.
I read so many justifications for Brown's murder that I started thinking to myself, why is it so important for these people to believe it wasn't another example of a young man's race working against him?
I have some ideas.
First, there's the white-privilege-never-did-nothing-for-me theory. It goes like this: My life isn't awesome, so there can't be white privilege, which means there also can't be racism. It's not great thinking, but it does make some sense. The people who feel this way are so caught up in their own struggles (economic or otherwise) that it doesn't seem real to them that there are people who have other forces actively working against them.
Similar to this is the center-of-the-universe theory. This one is that you are the star of your own story, and you have not witnessed racism, so how could it be real? It's particularly narcissistic, but lord knows we don't have to look far to find some narcissistic folks.
Next up is trickier, and perhaps too generous (I know my husband will think so): the cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance is when your actions don't match your view of yourself. So if there IS racism, and YOU are a good and just person, and you are doing nothing to fix the inequality, then there is dissonance. So you have to do something to resolve this. Either you start working for change, or you decide there must not really be inequality (because if there was, you would be doing something about it).
Finally, there is the I-am-awesome theory. In this theory, the person believes they have never been harassed by the police because they are a good person, therefore if someone does get harassed by the police, it is because they are a bad person. It inflates their ego and erases tricky evidence of racism all at the same time.
I mean, this obviously doesn't cover I'm-a-douchey-racist-cracker, which is probably self-explanatory, and may cover 75% of these actual commenters. But I can't otherwise explain how so many people find it so important to label these murdered black kids thugs, gangsters, trouble, asking-for-it, deserving-of-it... instead of college and high school kids. Sons, brothers, boyfriends. Why take a victim and make him responsible for his own death? As with the similar attitude towards rape victims, sometimes it feels like it's a hex against something like it happening to you.
First of all, it doesn't surprise me at all that the police are attempting to smear the character of Mike Brown. It's... inevitable. And so ugly -- after days of protest, they finally released the name of the officer who shot Brown, but prefaced it by saying that Brown was the primary suspect in a "strong-arm robbery" that had occurred a few minutes prior to the officer pulling him over.
Yeah, so since then, they've had to admit that the officer knew nothing about that and his stopping the kid was unrelated. (It may also be of note that the "strong-arm robbery" was basically shoplifting a pack of Swisher Sweets cigarillos.)
Three eye-witnesses have all told the same story, that after stopping Brown for walking in the street, the officer pulled Brown to the window of the car, there was some kind of tussle, a shot was fired, and then Brown ran away. The officer shot at him from some distance, and Brown turned around with his hands up, at which point he was shot several more times.
Perhaps you know enough about police procedures to know that one generally doesn't shoot someone who is running away or who has his hands in the air.
The autopsy report came out today, and showed that he was shot in the front of the arms and the top of the head. It certainly seems consistent with shooting someone who is facing you with his arms held in the air, then someone falling forward and a bullet entering the top of his head.
That's wrong. And the police response has been all wrong (they're tear-gassing 8-year-olds during largely peaceful protests, and intimidating and arresting journalists). But what perhaps disgusts me the most is that EVERY article I read on the subject is followed by people justifying the killing.
Well, he was just involved in a robbery! If you don't want to get shot, don't commit crimes.
The officer had NO IDEA Brown might have committed a crime.
Brown was posing an active threat. He reached for the officer's gun.
You are pulling that out of thin air. Plus, he certainly wasn't reaching for that gun anymore as he ran away.
He was a felon!
Nope. You have to get convicted of a felony to be a felon. And even if you stretch the circumstances of the robbery to be violent or whatever, the punishment for robbery isn't instant execution with no trial.
The bullet in the top of his head shows he was charging the officer like a bull.
Okay, really? He ran away, then a shot was fired, so he turned around and ran into the gunfire, head down? Yeeeeeeaaahhh.
I read so many justifications for Brown's murder that I started thinking to myself, why is it so important for these people to believe it wasn't another example of a young man's race working against him?
I have some ideas.
First, there's the white-privilege-never-did-nothing-for-me theory. It goes like this: My life isn't awesome, so there can't be white privilege, which means there also can't be racism. It's not great thinking, but it does make some sense. The people who feel this way are so caught up in their own struggles (economic or otherwise) that it doesn't seem real to them that there are people who have other forces actively working against them.
Similar to this is the center-of-the-universe theory. This one is that you are the star of your own story, and you have not witnessed racism, so how could it be real? It's particularly narcissistic, but lord knows we don't have to look far to find some narcissistic folks.
Next up is trickier, and perhaps too generous (I know my husband will think so): the cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance is when your actions don't match your view of yourself. So if there IS racism, and YOU are a good and just person, and you are doing nothing to fix the inequality, then there is dissonance. So you have to do something to resolve this. Either you start working for change, or you decide there must not really be inequality (because if there was, you would be doing something about it).
Finally, there is the I-am-awesome theory. In this theory, the person believes they have never been harassed by the police because they are a good person, therefore if someone does get harassed by the police, it is because they are a bad person. It inflates their ego and erases tricky evidence of racism all at the same time.
I mean, this obviously doesn't cover I'm-a-douchey-racist-cracker, which is probably self-explanatory, and may cover 75% of these actual commenters. But I can't otherwise explain how so many people find it so important to label these murdered black kids thugs, gangsters, trouble, asking-for-it, deserving-of-it... instead of college and high school kids. Sons, brothers, boyfriends. Why take a victim and make him responsible for his own death? As with the similar attitude towards rape victims, sometimes it feels like it's a hex against something like it happening to you.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Birthday approaches
So, we're down to 20 days until the baby's due date. I'm excited -- truly -- and looking forward to meeting him.
I'm also scared shitless in a way I wasn't before Z was born. Before she was born, labor and delivery was something that, although it looked painful, was normal and ended, generally, with perfectly healthy results. My mom's story of birthing me, which is the story I know better than any other, is a story of having me so fast the hospital wasn't really ready for me.
But as you may know, the story of birthing Zadie was somewhat different. It took several twists and turns, involved a pretty serious mistake, and although it ended up with a healthy girl, there were moments of a blue and non-breathing one. Which is the SCARIEST SHIT EVER. And because of the interventions we had, labor was much, much more painful than I expected.
And as I look forward to the birth, I'm also looking backward at what happened then. Because although when we tell the story, we tell it that a sleepy midwife's mistake caused the whole scary ball to get rolling, there were two other problems that contributed, and both were mine alone.
First, to recap what happened briefly, my water broke on a Saturday night. We went to the hospital early Sunday morning, where a midwife assured us that if my water had actually broken, it was fine, and there was still plenty of fluid. She sent us home. The implication was that I was mistaken, and that perhaps I had peed myself. She was wrong, and it did ultimately cause a lot of the problems we faced. But I was wrong, too -- I should have advocated more strongly for myself, perhaps asked for a second opinion. I knew for sure I hadn't peed myself, and I am still not certain why I allowed myself to be turned away. I am not a shrinking violet, but in the face of a medical professional, I just went "Oh, okay, I guess" and went home.
The good news is, I wouldn't repeat that mistake.
But the other mistake was my body's. See, usually when a woman's water breaks, she's in labor already, having contractions. Or if not, they follow pretty quickly. Mine didn't react that way. I had a backache, my water broke, and then I walked around for two days with no other symptoms of labor. Which meant that by the time I was told to go to the hospital by my doctor, I was about 42 hours past when I should have originally gone in, and at that point, it was an emergency. I needed Pitocin to start contractions, I needed extra fluids to replace what I'd lost, etc. I was IVed and cathetered and stuck to the bed. And a lot of that was sleepy CNM's fault -- but some of it was my body's.
Which is why, going into this next labor and delivery scenario, I'm a little nervous. I need to be able to rely on my body to do what it's supposed to, and it let me down last time.
Since I can't control that, I'm working hardest on controlling this fear, which I know can't be good for me and won't help anything. I'm listening to a hypnosis MP3, and I imagine that will help somewhat, although since I am the queen of half-assedness*, I've never actually sat in a quiet place and listened to the whole thing. I multi-task, listening to it while gardening or baking, and when the soft voice instructs, "close your eyes," I think, "yeah, yeah, I can do that," and then I deadhead a couple more roses.
Que sera, sera, I guess.
*I'd love to see the Mary Engelbreit illustration of that.
I'm also scared shitless in a way I wasn't before Z was born. Before she was born, labor and delivery was something that, although it looked painful, was normal and ended, generally, with perfectly healthy results. My mom's story of birthing me, which is the story I know better than any other, is a story of having me so fast the hospital wasn't really ready for me.
But as you may know, the story of birthing Zadie was somewhat different. It took several twists and turns, involved a pretty serious mistake, and although it ended up with a healthy girl, there were moments of a blue and non-breathing one. Which is the SCARIEST SHIT EVER. And because of the interventions we had, labor was much, much more painful than I expected.
And as I look forward to the birth, I'm also looking backward at what happened then. Because although when we tell the story, we tell it that a sleepy midwife's mistake caused the whole scary ball to get rolling, there were two other problems that contributed, and both were mine alone.
First, to recap what happened briefly, my water broke on a Saturday night. We went to the hospital early Sunday morning, where a midwife assured us that if my water had actually broken, it was fine, and there was still plenty of fluid. She sent us home. The implication was that I was mistaken, and that perhaps I had peed myself. She was wrong, and it did ultimately cause a lot of the problems we faced. But I was wrong, too -- I should have advocated more strongly for myself, perhaps asked for a second opinion. I knew for sure I hadn't peed myself, and I am still not certain why I allowed myself to be turned away. I am not a shrinking violet, but in the face of a medical professional, I just went "Oh, okay, I guess" and went home.
The good news is, I wouldn't repeat that mistake.
But the other mistake was my body's. See, usually when a woman's water breaks, she's in labor already, having contractions. Or if not, they follow pretty quickly. Mine didn't react that way. I had a backache, my water broke, and then I walked around for two days with no other symptoms of labor. Which meant that by the time I was told to go to the hospital by my doctor, I was about 42 hours past when I should have originally gone in, and at that point, it was an emergency. I needed Pitocin to start contractions, I needed extra fluids to replace what I'd lost, etc. I was IVed and cathetered and stuck to the bed. And a lot of that was sleepy CNM's fault -- but some of it was my body's.
Which is why, going into this next labor and delivery scenario, I'm a little nervous. I need to be able to rely on my body to do what it's supposed to, and it let me down last time.
Since I can't control that, I'm working hardest on controlling this fear, which I know can't be good for me and won't help anything. I'm listening to a hypnosis MP3, and I imagine that will help somewhat, although since I am the queen of half-assedness*, I've never actually sat in a quiet place and listened to the whole thing. I multi-task, listening to it while gardening or baking, and when the soft voice instructs, "close your eyes," I think, "yeah, yeah, I can do that," and then I deadhead a couple more roses.
Que sera, sera, I guess.
*I'd love to see the Mary Engelbreit illustration of that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)