Failure to be crunchy

In the months and years before Duncan and Tristan were born I read a lot about pregnancy, child birth and baby care. Nearly every book, blog and Web site I encountered warned me that none of these things was likely play out exactly as I planned. But I blithely formed some strong opinions about how Dane and I were going to proceed through the whole process. And while on a large scale things are going according to plan -- we have two happy babies who grow more neck and leg rolls all of the time -- I'm baffled and amused by how utterly the universe has failed to bend itself to my will in terms of procreation.

I should start by saying that I was raised in a home that was kind of crunchy. My parents were too young to be hippies, but that didn't completely stop them. There was something of a back-to-the-earth, do-it-yourself, self-sufficiency theme to the things they did and the way we lived -- for that matter, there still is. We definitely made trips to K-mart and the grocery store, but my mom sewed many of our clothes, and baked our bread. We ate a lot of vegetables, whole grains and legumes. My dad killed most of our meat with bows and arrows he made himself. My parents' anachronistic (or progressive) philosophies definitely extended to childbearing and rearing. My mom had two natural births, breastfed my brother and I exclusively, and used cloth diapers.

So, long before I knew anything about Ina May Gaskin, or watched The Business of Being Born, or read any lovely birth stories online, I was sold on the naturalistic approach to this stuff. Everything I read and watched re-enforced my ideas. I was going to exercise all through pregnancy. I was going to take Bradley classes to prepare for a drug-free midwife-assisted home birth. I was going to do everything I could to stay out of the hospital and far from the pitocin, the epidurals, the episiotomies, and the emergency C-sections. I wasn't going to be subjected to the hospital policies that pushed infant formula and discouraged breast feeding. I was going to breastfeed exclusively, on demand, starting at birth. I was going to use only cloth diapers. I was informed! I had a plan!

You can probably see where this is going. The plan changed. Radically. I will only say in my defense that it was a good plan, and if I was ever pregnant again with a single baby I would still try hard to execute it.

Things went haywire at the very beginning of the pregnancy. Exercise was the first part of my plan to fall victim to reality. I would go to the skating rink and my legs would shake so hard I would fall. Ten hours of skating each week became seven, then five, then four, and so on. I withdrew from a skating test I'd been training for for months. I was exhausted just walking back and forth to work. Then we found out about the twins, and the restrictions started popping up. There was a grim 6-month progression: No lifting heavy objects, no skating, no walking to the park, no swimming, no leaving the house, no stretching, no sitting in a chair, no making myself a sandwich. And certainly no natural birth classes, which could induce labor.

And, of course, no drug free home birth. That was the second part of my plan to vanish. There are midwives who will deliver twins at home, but it turns out they are few and far between. And there are doctors who will deliver twins vaginally, but not when there are other complications. I had to find a new OB at 20 weeks. Two minutes after the doctor met me he told me that I was having a C-section or finding another doctor at a different hospital. At Stanford they might, might let me try a natural delivery. But probably not. And, presented with the facts, I didn't even disagree. I struggled with the decision. I re-read articles and re-watched documentaries. But when it came down to it, cave women and cave babies (ha!) in our situation died. There wasn't any point in trying to be "natural."

It was good that I came to that realization early, since the C-section decision was the just beginning of the many medical interventions it took to get the twins to 34 weeks gestation, and then to keep them growing and healthy in the hospital. There were drugs and tubes and needles and breast pumps and many many small disposable diapers. And I said yes, yes, yes to all of them and didn't mind one bit. I was glad. Really glad.

So, here I am, two months later, still pumping most of the breast milk the babies eat. Still preparing formula once a day. Still with about 90 disposable diapers in my house. Very far from my vision of all this. I'm still clinging to the breast feeding, despite the looming shadow of my return to work. And as of two days ago, I'm trying to grit my teeth and actually use the heaps of cloth diapers in the dresser. But, oh my! They make cleaning up the babies grosser! And there are a lot of them to wash! Those disposables are oh-so-tempting, and I haven't weaned myself off of them at night. I'm not sure I'll even try!

Worse, much worse, there is a 42" flat screen television in my living room. It came with the apartment. We watch movies on it while the babies are with us. Drinking from bottles! The bottles I can excuse as a medical necessity. But exposing my tiny babies to Conan the Barbarian?! I'm afraid that the C-section and the NICU put me on a slippery slope to parenting in much less naturalistic way than I'd planned. After the home birth, Dane and I were going to have a very Waldorf School home environment for our (single) baby. But instead, twins and Conan.

The funny thing about all this is that I'm not upset about abandoning some of my principles. It turns out that having twins has given me a heavy dose of pragmatism and very strong sense of self preservation. If I were Han Solo, I would shoot first. Or make Boba Fett wash a load of dirty diapers and heat bottles of expressed breast milk at gun point. So I could take a break and mess around on the internet. In the same way I always hoped to have a natural pregnancy and birth, I hoped my parenting style would be more Laura Ingalls Wilder and less Star Wars. More knitting and singing and hanging laundry on the line. Fewer computers and machines that sound like Darth Vader. But what can I do? It's hard to keep the cook stove blacked and the cabin floors scrubbed when I have to spend so much time gloating over my fat rosy babies! (And posting pictures of them on the internet.)

And with that oddly mixed set of cultural references, I will turn off my breast pump and get back to work. The storm troopers need me.

Update: I didn't post this when I wrote it a month ago. Since then, the cloth diaper experiment has met with moderate success. We use them between 6 am and 10 pm, and still use disposables at night. Dealing with the cloth at 2 am makes me feel like I'm going to have a mental break down -- which people did out on the prairie! On the upside, we went for a walk last week and I realized that every member of my family was wearing something I'd knitted for them. Maybe my parenting style will reach some sort of Little House on the Big Asteroid compromise. Fingers crossed.