#marinalind

[marinalindschmitt]

the boys who’ve had my heart

the boy who was out of my league  the boy who didn't follow up the boy who shared his heart the day i left the country the boy who was too wise the summer before college and the boy who got married last week

[marinalindschmitt]

writing, writing, writing. i have to keep writing to keep this all from boiling out: your hand on my back, your face in the firelight, theology over lunch, pasta for supper, sailing in the morning, on the lake, a breath away from you. quoting books in the last of the light, your kindness always, and especially when i am not.

marina lind

[marinalindschmitt]

#3

Hands black with bicycle grease, instant oatmeal in aluminum mugs, sitting in the stairwell on the third floor. That two mile stretch of greenbelt. Stringed instruments and voices rising. The overstuffed couches that are home to us, and the hard, armless ones that know us now. Sleeping in hammocks hung between bed frames, giving and borrowing rather faithfully, spending all of our money at REI garage sales, becoming family. Learning about patience and loneliness. Campus at night. Bike lights flashing through the window; riding through the rain. Steadfast strength, seeking out the truth and laying down your life. Work pants, fleece, and sandals. Black coffee at the M, one eighty. The difference between kindness and gentleness. The teasing and sharing of old stories. Late night movies, flat tires, popcorn failures, and long drives home with many breathing bodies. Standing on an icy street corner in the dark of a winter night. Asking hard questions and being honest.

[marinalindschmitt]

#2

Sitting in school hallways, running across campus, coffee between us. Plans for road trips and surprise visits. Anger tumbling out of love and loyalty. Neon clothing and hikes up the mountain. Broad shoulders, opening doors, old spice, learning, the hard way the value of hard work and being persistent.  Watching you grow from boy into man. Mountains and food. The black bulk of a camera in hand. A little lost, but thoughtful and faithful and going home. Working through pages of math homework, sitting at picnic benches on fall afternoons and video calls from stuffy New York apartments to cool cabins in the Cascades. Celebrating our friends’ joys as we discover our own. Dark evergreen forests and blue rivers. Still waters run deep. Full crockpots, green aprons, goofy faces, North Face jackets, country music, and board games. Sitting on top of dusty bookshelves and at blue cafeteria tables, pulling out the truth.

[marinalindschmitt]

Entry #6

Some women are choosing to use midwives and give birth naturally. So what? I mean, that’s great and all that they were able to make that choice for them, but what does it mean for the rest of the world? Does it have any impact on us? The answer is a resounding yes! When I began writing this paper, I wanted to write about the reentry of midwives in the Seattle neighborhood largely because it’s a subject that is dear to many of my friends, and as a hopeful future midwife myself, important for me to know about! I wanted to look at birth on an individual level. Why are these women choosing natural birth? What made them make this decision? However, my thesis has evolved into an examination of some of the arguments against the American way of birth in this, the early twenty-first century. Why is birth headed in the “wrong” direction? What needs to change? What is wrong about it?

The culture of American birth is headed in a direction completely opposite from that which it began. A rite-of-passage that is about two people, a woman and her baby, has been turned into an affair that effects an entire hospital staff and their team of executives. Did you know that childbirth is the only reason we go to the hospital when we are not ill or think we are ill? Sure, it is uncomfortable during pregnancy and excruciating during labor, but it is all part of a normal process and not because a part of our body is not working properly. We see birth as a medical procedure that requires the attentions of nurses, doctors, and hospitals, when it’s not at all true. Birth should be a triumphant and empowering event! A woman should be able to look back on her birth experience and say, “I hit the tallest wall of my life, and I scaled it” (The Business of Being Born).

Childbirth is spiraling into a hospital controlled medical phenomenon. The truth is, it’s not. It’s a powerful moment in a woman’s life when her body does exactly what is what built to do. She’s not sick. She’s proving to the world that she is a woman and she can do mighty, beautiful things. So. Are we going to let birth become an clouded medical mystery that happens behind closed doors in the hospital with monitors galore, or are we going to retake birth and give it back its joy?

A Blog Post on Natural Birth

[marinalindschmitt]

Entry #5

At the beginning of the quarter, I sat down to write about how midwives were reentering the birthing scene, specifically in the Pacific Northwest. In my feasibility exercise, I considered addressing the relationships between doctors and midwives, the pros and cons of giving birth in personal homes, birth centers, and hospitals, the lower caesarean rates associated with midwives, nationalities, and home births. I planned to continue in the vein of midwives in the Pacific Northwest, however, my research drew me to hone in on how most midwives lead their clients through birth: naturally. In my “Question-Hypothesis-Question” exercise, I asked questions like “Why have some expectant mothers chosen to use a midwife instead of an OBGYN to birth their children?” and “What roles do epidural analgesia and oxytocin play in labor?” and “How do midwives approach birth differently than doctors do?” The latter I addressed more clearly in my alternative hypothesis essay, and I intend to further explore it in my synthesis essay when I combine the two, but I spoke of the more natural, holistic, and personal approach that midwives take to birth. In my Q-H-Q I wrote what I knew about birthing drugs (not much). Since then, I have learned a great deal about epidural analgesia, oxytocin, and other birthing interventions in watching the documentary The Business of Being Born, all of which will ultimately be incorporated in my final draft of the synthesis essay. I don’t know that my opinions concerning their widespread use have changed; I still hold that they ignite a snowball of interventions and that they should definitely be used, but only when medically necessary. Using birthing drugs gives the power to the caretaker, instead of leaving it to the woman and her body. As for my first question, “Why have some expectant mothers chosen to use a midwife instead of an OBGYN to birth their children?” it turns out that the answer is incredibly more vast than I had expected. I can trace trends in birthing choices and study statistics, but really, the choice is different for each woman. Surely, it encompasses similar things: a more personal and constant relationship with their caretaker, the ability for both mother and baby to be aware and wholly present during the birth, less expense, lowered statistical rates of caesareans and mortality, and a healthier and innate way of bringing children into the world.

I have been fascinated to learn about the control that fear and education present in the birthing world. In modern day America, many women learn about birth through watching TV shows and Hollywood films where the mother is being rushed down the hallway in terror and the doctor has to come in to save the day. They hear about the horror stories of forty hour labors and emergency caesareans more often than they do about the still painful, but peaceful and calm normal and natural births. I am not proposing to force feed women natural birth, but I am suggesting that the hospitals are reticent about talking about options other than birth their way, with any amount of interventions. Women deserve to have the choice of how to bring their babies into the world.

[marinalindschmitt]

Entry #3

The greater part of the information that I have uncovered in the second half of my research process has to do with the use of epidural analgesia and oxytocin in birth and the correlations they have with disempowered women, morbidity rates, and postpartum effects. The article “Analyzing adverse effects of epidural analgesia in labour” spoke especially to this effect. It pointed out that in a large Japanese in hospital in Tokyo, pain during childbirth “is seen as normal physiological event” (Tamagawa & Weaver, 2012, p. 704). It also mentions the lack of discussion about the adverse effects of epidural analgesia with pregnant women. Among the articles I have found discussing the adverse effects of oxytocin and epidural analgesia—or even just research in general—not one has been conducted by Americans. Are we too afraid of what might be revealed that we do not even look into the possible problem?

In the course of my research for this essay, I made a survey broadly asking about how an individual learned about birth and about their personal experiences with medical intervention in birth (if any). I hope to gain a better insight on how many women have really used interventions, how they came out of feeling, and whether or not natural birth is something they would ever consider pursuing.

I have also interviewed Heidi D., a mother who has chosen natural birth to birth her children. She is a young mother of four children, and explains that she chose natural birth after learning of her own mother’s experiences and because of the knowledge she has gained through a time of apprenticeship with a midwife and her own personal research.

“[My mother] had three children in the hospital, with drugs, and other medical intervention, and when [my brother] was born there were some, there were some really bad—like, the way that the epidural was given, and then when he was born, they were afraid that he had gotten the full dose of the epidural in his head. So she didn’t even get to hold him, he was rushed off to the UW hospital. Clearly, he’s fine now: a professor in English before he was thirty! But, that was really scary and made her really dig into ‘why do we do things this way?’ and so [T] was born in a birth center and [J] was born at a hospital but with an independent midwife, and naturally.”

If you were to have more children, would you plan to use natural birth again? Why?

“I would. Because, I think that it is better for the children. If we’re all healthy, and there’s no medical needs for intervention, I think that it is a gentler way for babies to enter the world, and that, there’s so many parts of natural birth that contribute to them. Like, just one example: when they go through the birth canal, their lungs are squeezed and it squeezes all the amniotic fluid out so that their lungs are ready to breathe air. There’s so many little pieces like that that, when you start messing up with it—it doesn’t mean that your children are not going to be born healthy. But if you can choose! And I think that the drugs affect the mom’s feelings and the baby’s ability to react and respond with the world around them, and, with the exception of when I gave birth to Peter and felt like I was just run over by a train, I just feel so good after doing birth and I’m able to stand up and walk around and hold my babies and take care of them.”

The interview was far and away the most valuable research I have done for this essay. Not just because Heidi’s experiences support my topic, but because hearing real stories about real stories is the best way to learn things in life—and we truly have so much we can learn.