Groundhog Day

I was nursing the baby to sleep tonight and I happened to glance over at the clock, which displays the wrong time and the wrong date. We use it as a sound machine to cover up my husband's snoring. It doesn't work. I slept in the hallway the other night (after ripping the comforter off of my husband and grabbing one of the five pillows he was using). I shut the door. peace. no. I turned on the dryer, the laundry room was right next to me head, there was change in it. Cachink, cachink, cachink... ah peace. All until I almost gave myself hypothermia because of sleeping on a cold tile floor. By this time the baby was next to me, kicking... she was probably trying to tell me that she was getting hypothermia too.

Anyhow, the date on the clock said 2-02. Groundhog's day. I never notice the time or date on this clock, but somehow this struck me as ironic. Why exactly, I'm unsure. Maybe it was the fact that I know what rocking a "pack and play" sounds like, whish, whish. I have been doing it for four years now.

I'm not thinking of the holiday necessarily, but the movie. The one where he wakes up over and over to the same day. I guess we all do it to a certain extent. This happened to me while I was pregnant for the second time. Every time I turned around, it was Wednesday. There's no distinct marker to Wednesday necessarily in my life, but it stood out more than the other days. Not sure why. Hump day, huh, that's what got me in my predicament in the first place.

I thought of naming the baby Wednesday, but due to the Adam's family rugrat, I thought it might be a bad idea. "Adam's Family Values" was on the other night. I never watch TV, but it was background noise for some sewing that I was TRYING to do (I don't sew, but thought that I could at the moment).

I caught the part of Morticia in labor. Peaceful, happily grim, not moving an inch. Way different than me on all fours in the shower yelling at my husband to stop asking if I was okay and to tell me that I was doing great. Morticia, the ultimate Macho mom in labor. No epidural. She should have had a home birth.

I just met with one of my "mommy" friends in the park the other day. Her second is about a month old. She had a home birth. And she had a retained placenta. And a nice little trip to the hospital. And 4 units of blood (we only have 5 in our bodies). She had Smurf hallucinations because they shot her up with PCP for the pain.

I am all for "back to nature", I harvest edible wild plants, get my produce from a co-op farm. Why women would give birth at home though is beyond me. Just think of the mess. Who's going to clean that up?

My oldest asked me today, in view of the hospital, if that's where all babies are born. I listed at least a half-dozen babies that had not been born there, but born at home. Granted, we live in a hoodoo town where naval-gazing is the norm. Healers run amok selling their stuff, whatever that might be. I actually had a neighbor admit to me that he was on hallucinogens and lighting fires at the top of our hill behind our house. He said it proudly. He was having a "very powerful ceremony" up there. a huh...

What I am wondering is, do we do these things to get out of the norm of everyday life? Nine to five is definitely not our nature anymore, and we need to prove it to the world. We are better than that. We can give birth at home, who needs those doctors anyhow? We fill our kids with alternative medicine until their eardrums burst because they have an infection that we thought we could treat ourselves. Everyone is a medicine man.

Are our lives so filled with the mundane that we feel we need to take chances to get closer to nature? I can understand why we don't trust our "medicine men" anymore. I can understand that our insurance/health care system is corrupt. But this is not about the masses, it's about the educated and relatively wealthy. You don't see welfare moms giving birth at home, at least not on purpose.

Well to each his own and I am not making any judgments. I simply think that women have enough burden on them in our society without raising the bar even more. Life choices that bring us back to nature shouldn't happen for just the intense moments, but for the simple ones too. Everyday we do our thing. Over and over we do it. It's this over and over that matters in the long run. It's the small choices that we make that add up and in the long run bring us back to nature.

Nature will take care of us. That is until we need a trip to the hospital.