Vertical Birthing

As I was reading around on Reuters this morning, I came across this article about a medical clinic in Peru that is now promoting and offering "vertical birthing" to indigenous women, who traditionally have given birth standing or squatting. It's sad when it's "news" that birthing is safer and typically goes better when women aren't lying flat on their backs. And yet the article still presented the idea of unmedicated childbirth as horrific, terrifying, excruciatingly painful and the author held it in continual contrast with her Western birth that was "painless." Yes, Cuzco has a maternal death rate that is unacceptable, but less intervention in the birthing process and accepting birth as something a woman's body was designed to do is not the same as a horror. 

The trouble with the article is that the headline was not something like, "Ill-Equipped Birth Clinic in Cuzco Leaves Women Screaming in Pain."  The article instead was about an "Old World Practice in the Modern Age."  

I was mortified by paragraphs like this one:

"On the second day of the story, an obstetrician named Guido told me that this was the night of a full moon, and that there would be many births so I should stay overnight. He was right. I was fortunate to witness four births that night. Just being there was a privilege, as well as an exhausting and hallucinating experience. These births are natural, without anesthesia. The pre-labor room, where the women endure the pains before actually giving birth, is really a chamber of terror in which the women scream out their pain, lying on the floor or pacing. They suffer, endure and survive in spite of not receiving anything for the pain."

Later she wrote this:

"They tried lying her down on a bed to cut her perineum because she wouldn’t dilate enough to allow more than the head to be seen. Amidst an atmosphere of butchery, with the blunt instruments that wouldn’t cut and the lack of anesthesia, there was a blackout. The clinic had neither candles nor flashlights, not to mention a generator. Guido, the obstetrician, very calmly requested a light of any kind, even if it was from a cell phone"

Yes, it's awful that there was a blackout, that it seems their instruments were "blunt," but this is an issue having to do with an underfunded and staffed medical center, not with the safety or efficacy of birthing in a position other than flat on your back.  What this article ends up being about is what happens when you bring "modern" birthing practices into a traditional setting or conclude that traditional birthing as "dangerous" and "excruciating," when in fact it has been thoroughly adulterated by the interventions and "management" of birth that we have come to consider as normal in our culture.

Nancy's Recipe for Pain in Birth:

* Artificially induce labor because the timing works better for the healthcare providers or because the woman is tired of being pregant.

* Remove the woman from any surroundings familiar to her. Put her in a place that is almost universally frightening.

* Hook her up to a variety of machines that require her to lie on her back, remain still, or in a certain position

* Have some knives and other sharp instruments close by, and make sure she knows they're there, in case she "can't do it" or she takes too long

* start the clock running

* Make her start pushing before she is fully dilated or before she feels an urge to push. If the baby doesn't come out or this hurts the mother, make a big slice near her vagina

* Make sure plenty of people come in the room where the mother is birthing. Maybe some medical residents who haven't seen this before, and especially haven't seen someone "doing it naturally," a shift-change of nurses, and, better yet, a reporter from another country with a camera who wants to show how "backwards" persons like yourselves give birth using their indigenous wisdom.

* Remind the mother that there are other women waiting to give birth behind her, and they're getting antsy in the next room. Let her listen to them scream in pain as they are "prepped" to give birth themselves or told that no, they can't push now--it's not their turn because they have to wait for you.

* Be sure that the mother knows that her birth will represent to the world what birth is like using what her family has used for generations. Her birth will prove whether this works or not.

* If "minutes seem like hours" while she's in transition or pushing, concur with her and make her feel like it really it an eternity and that this means something is wrong and you need to cut something.

* Do all of this without medication and call it a "natural childbirth." Hey, you let her stand up, and it didn't work out. See, there's a lot of risk in "going naturally." Natural childbirth hurts!

* Conclude from the trial that "natural practices" used by indigenous people leave women in a lot of pain

Even standing up, you can't push and the baby will not be birthed if the woman is not fully dilated. Episiotomy or other forms of force, cannot make something happen when the body is not yet ready. "Butchery" is what happens when we punish a body for not having the timing that is convenient to the medical staff. And the very normal process of birth is not aided by the stressful atmosphere of a busy and poorly appointed hospital or clinic, with its instruments of torture (the article repeatedly referred to how blunt the scissors and instruments were and how they could not cut) waiting to be used as soon as anything appeared to be going too slowly. In this particular article, the women were described as being lined up in a waiting area, awaiting their turn to for "vertical birth" in the room full of lights, blunt knives, and Western photographers. Women should not be "waiting in line" for birth--I assume they were induced or somehow managed so that the evening would move in an orderly procession, and those left alone "screaming in agony" in the pre-birth room were, alas, left alone to labor in an unfamiliar and hostile environment with nothing to look forward to but a rush and anything but a 'natural' delivery.

Articles like this anger me because they serve only to reconfirm to those who are not familiar with the experience of normal birth that birth without all of our Western medical interventions is horrible, risky, and like being "butchered, " but they fail to see how often well-intentioned medical providers create the very situation they are saying is so horrific. How unlike butchering is it that 30% or more of women in our country give birth in a room filled with knives, scalpels, and the tools of opening flesh? Having your perineum cut because you are not dilated and can't push out your baby when you are told to stand and deliver is butchering wherever it occurs, including in America.

Here is the full text of the article: http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2008/07/12/old-birthing-in-the-new-world/



There is an alternative! "Vertical birthing" is the best way to work with your body and is safe for your baby. Having had two "vertical" births and one horizontal one, including all that 'wonderful' pain relief, I can hands down say that birth is far more comfortable, faster, and works in harmony with the work your body is doing when you are standing, squatting, or otherwise in a position where gravity is assisting your baby and the action of your muscles. And as Ina May Gaskin so aptly puts it, sphincters don't like to open when other people are watching, shining lights at them, or shouting at them.

The two most incredible moments of my life were the power and strength I felt at the moment when Frances and Rutledge were born. Frances was born in a hospital, and there were lights and monitors and unfamiliar faces. But having been largely left alone, having labored in my own home (and own car...at least it was familiar to me!) with only those people around me who would support my birth, relax me, and give me strength, and having surrounded myself with information and affirmation that birth is normal, intervention is risky, and that I could do this, I was in a strong position to not only have my baby without anesthesia, medication to augment my labor, or IVs, but also to experience the joy that our bodies are designed to feel when we bring forth a new life into the world. There were moments of discomfort, moments when I felt like I couldn't go on another minute, but any "pain" was with a purpose and a result of my body's hard work (I love the phrase "powerful sensations that can not be ignored"), not pain inflicted by another person or object. With Rutledge, I was in my own most comfortable environment, again with the privacy and support of loving people around me and not self-conscious about being with strangers. I knew I would not be pressured to move at any pace other than the one that was happening on its own. When I felt out of control, when I was saying I couldn't do it, I not only had people reminding me that I really could and that it was almost over and I was "doing it," but they offered whatever they had to help me through what I was feeling. I was never left to do it on my own, never left in a "prep" room where I had to wait for someone else to hurry up and finish what they were doing.

What is sad about our culture when it comes to birth is that we are so hasty to form conclusions that match our biases. We are so blind to how our actions and what we consider a "norm" or "progress" contribute to the negative or unpleasant outcomes we see.

Point to ponder for today:

How do you pronounce the name of that most important city of the Aztecs? The other night, I was watching something on History International, and I heard a pronunciation that was just so terribly wrong that I started to seriously doubt my own pronunciation. It was so wrong that I can't remember exactly how wrong it was--wrong in a Mad Gab kind of way.

And then there's "chipotle." Almost everyone I hear pronounces it "chip-ohl-tay," and lacking confidence as I do, I was wondering, in words of Aztec descent, are certain consonant sounds transposed? So I've spent/wasted my Saturday night investigating these matters online. Something has to fill those dead hours.

The most exciting event of the day, without a doubt, was seeing High School Musical 3. What an inspiration! Makes me want to go back and redo high school again because I had no idea that it was supposed to be like *that*! ;) Really, it was a great deal of fun to experience the atmosphere of a theatre full of 7-10 year old girls and to fantasize about how high school might have been if Kempsville had been put on by Disney....

I am heading off to knit while watching the Big O's favorite movie: Child's Play. If you had asked me 8 years ago, or even one year ago whether I'd ever let a child of mine watch this movie, there would have been no question: No way. But here I am, watching the babysitter get hit with a hammer and fall out of a 6th floor window to her doom on the street. Ah, how parenting changes us.

Art comes before everything else at our house. Frances is deeply inspired by Salad People, by Molly Katzen.

Here was today: fewer than 30 minutes at home from 10:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m.

10:30 Out to pick up birthday gift

11:00 Home again because I left the team leotard at home for the pictures at 4

11:30 Birthday Party at CiCi's Pizza

12:45 Locked my keys in the car while fishing for a few quarters for a whining child who wanted more crap from a vending machine

1:10 Chess Club

2:00 Book Club

4:00 Gymnastics Team Pictures

5:30 30 minutes late for Little Company ballet rehearsal

7:00 Party for adults at a friend's house

I'm wiped!

So I'm spending my down time at nearly midnight watching a reenactor pretending to be Teddy Roosevelt sighting the Skunk Ape. I think Walter may have a career after all!

A Plug for High School Theatre

I'll admit, I can belt it out when anything from High School Musical comes on the radio.  And I have to put in a big plug for high school theater in general.  It's the untapped resource in the community that isn't given its due!  Recently when we've been to some of the professional theatre productions, particularly the "theatre for families," we've been sort of disappointed.  And it gets kind of expensive, takes a trip downtown (gotta think about use of resources these days), and parking is an adventure much of the time.  What I've discovered is that right down the street are high schools with amazing, incredible talent in them. 

Tonight we saw "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."  I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough that I don't want to see someone dressed as a dog for Snoopy, but the kids had a great time, and there's always the real draw of live theater--intermission and a soft drink and candy!  I'd like to get us over to see "South Pacific" and "Into the Woods" next weekend.  

I think that as you have more children, you get to the point where you just kind of accept these "phases" that they go through. For the moment, we're past the one where the toddler/preschoolers wears rainboots everywhere. Now we're at the one where Rutledge will only wear "Army Man Pants," which means camouflage . He has at least three pairs of camo shorts, including the typical army green, grey, and khaki, but now that real fall/early winter is here, they're not quite cutting it. Yesterday I found him three pairs of pants at a consignment store, so I think that's enough to get our Army Man operation going. He also got a pair of "Army Man" work boots, which, unfortunately, are at least two sizes too big. No problem.

Here's one of those archetypal preschool moments from our week: Gum In The Hair. Yes, a mohawk of it from front to back, and then another strip from the temples, up over the ear, to the nape of his neck. I tried the peanut butter method of removal (see below--the filthy face). I think with a few more minutes of patience on his part, this might have been enough, but when you have a child with sensory issues, there is only so much he can take.



I had only one solution: shaving it.

I also checked one more thing off my list today: winter boots for Walter and Ollie and snowpants for whichever one of them was lacking them. Now I think we're officially ready for any kind of weather that might come along. Ollie could really use a decent winter coat, but I'm holding tight until I run across an affordable one that will last a while (if he doesn't lose it...). It's been years since I've thought much about winter apparel, and we haven't really had/spent money on snow stuff much since we've lived here, but between the dire predictions of the Farmer's Almanac and simply the observations of how the weather has been so far this fall (colder, a bit wetter at times than normal), we could be in for a difference.

Positive moment for the day: running into a fellow knitting friend who helped me recover from a big disaster right in the middle of the elf hat I'm working on. I was about 25 rows up when I made The Big Mistake that I tried to repair myself (Big Mistake #2). I lost about 7 rows of work, but since this is a hat I'm making for someone else to give as a gift, it's worth the slight extra work. This is the 4th one of these hats that I've made, and I'm getting much more reliable and better as I continue to knit, especially as I make multiples of some of my recent projects. But I'm still not quite a Zen Knitter--if I don't watch myself, I tend to do lots of spacey, dumb things ;)

Everyone's concerned about the state of both the Economy with a capital E and also their own--we've switched in our family from freely working from home and working flexibly to a greater sense of the need to make a constant appearance in the physical offices so that he might make the impression of being more indispensible. I sure hope it works. So in the spirit of supporting this Improvement of Appearances and Commitment to Work as well as the necessary conservative belt-tightening, I've made a little list of some things I'd like to have if we didn't have to be fiscally responsible at the moment.

* Rachmaninoff Wind Chimes, which play "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini." This song was so intensely, incredibly significant, in that way that so many things are in high school. My friend Donna and I went crazy over this song, the movie "Somewhere in Time," and some odd little writing project we started about a protagonist named Jeremy Edmond Stone. Ah, the good old days. What I think is amazing is that my wind would blow so that the chimes hit in the correct order. On some fundamental level, I feel like we're just screwed when we believe that we have any control over nature.

* I'd also like one of those garden plaques that says, "I TRIED, BUT IT DIED."

* I've never been a jewelry person, but I'd really like a silver bracelet that says something simple and thoughtful on it.

* I still want a better bread machine. I do it by hand, and I didn't adore my old and yucky bread machine, but when the paddle started to bubble and the coating buckled, I was completely icked out.

Right now I'm watching a news piece on "Living on Only $20 for One Week." Hmmm. I think that's for one person. And only includes food. Is that really living?

My musings for today: which part of a year is the out-of-sync one for children? A friend said she thinks it's the 2nd half of the year, which is disheartening considering that we're in our first halves with Walter and Frances, and they're having a rough enough time already. Or perhaps it's simply that they are working on other skills (others ones than the ones that I see them struggling with right now), the way that a toddler often lags in language when making huge strides in gross motor skills...or vice versa. At any rate, despite some rough spots in the road, Frances is hitting a kind of flow in some areas. She's long been a slacker through much of gymnastics and dance, but in the past two weeks or so, she seems to have turned a corner. When she concentrates, which is certainly not all the time, she really does some amazing things. She recently mastered the shoot through, which is where she does a back turn up onto the uneven bar and then casts and pushes one leg through and onto the bar. She doesn't always control her flip around the bar afterwards, but it's a big achievement. Then, after some very rocky weeks in her modern dance class, she was acting like a limp noodle, sleepy, or just goofy. But yesterday, she was all on (thanks to her very untalented and crotchety mother joining in the class), and by the end she was remembered multi-step choreography and had learned the pretzel roll and the fan and was putting them together without any major blunders. It was pretty cool to watch. This followed up on a high-flow day in pottery class as well. Her teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I need to keep Frances in art classes because she is thriving there. Her trivet was pretty amazing, and then she made a small army of half inch long fruit, including an extremely cute pineapple. The pieces will be fired in two weeks, and then they'll do the glazing, at which point I'll have pictures. Walter has also had some big improvements in trumpet lately, especially in tempo and timing.

But our non-flow areas right now are math (Walter), anything academic (Walter), impulse control (Frances), and emotional stability. I'm kind of holding out with the belief that these things always seem to come around, just not all at the same time.

I hate my computer. I hate all things with batteries. I hate all things that are electronic and purport to have online or live help but really don't help you all all.

I recently got a card for Henrico County Public Library, which is a sort of neighboring county, because I knew that they had Joy Hakim's _History of US_ available to download. Hours later, I still haven't heard a darn thing. The download won't play on my computer. The Microsoft free download of Windows Media Player is giving me some kind of error and refusing to download onto my Mac. Without WMP, I can't play the file at all. And the format isn't compatible with the iPod, which is a pain. If your Macbook is like mine, you can barely hear audio on it, even at the highest level. And I don't want to drag around what probably amounts to 40 hours of audio on my computer to listen to it. And you can't burn it to CD because it expires and probably isn't compatible with however you transfer it. What good is an eAudiobook if you can't hear it anywhere??? And what good is hours lost with nothing to show for them?? I'd gladly pay $100 for a CD set of this book, but I don't think one is made. At least not that I've seen. I'm frustrated.

{Whenever I want to hurl some thing with a battery cover that requires a screwdriver to get off or anything involving the words "Windows," "download," "Error," or "You Must Enable...," I just have to look at this sweet face that was in my kitchen tonight, wearing his "Army Man Pants and Folk Festival Shirt" and I feel calm again...}

It's late already tonight, but tonight's other thought is about choosing the best books for your children. Someone told me tonight that I should write a book or a guide or something to choosing right books at the right time for your children based on their age. We're all guilty at times of choosing the right book at the wrong time, or the wrong book period, or pushing ahead of where our children are or even, at times, ruining the experience of an amazing book by having our children read it too early, because they can fully appreciate and enjoy it the way they might have been able to if it had come along a bit later. And homeschoolers can be sort of paradoxically guilty of both pushing ahead (because as we all know, All Homeschoolers Are Brilliant) and of also embracing delayed academics, acknowledging that we have some children who are "later readers" than what the mainstream academic society would like. So while we're simultaneously pushing them beyond what is recommended by whatever sources might be recommending appropriate material and at the same time letting them develop at their own pace, which sometimes includes not decoding on their own at all, they often are not getting quite what they need, what will be most mind-blowing, most engaging, most-able-to-relate-to, most life-changing, most makes-me-want-to-find-even-more-books-like-this. And that's kind of a shame.

We've been discovering a lot of books in our family now that seem, well, perhaps not all that challenging to some. They're not super-thick. They won't always amaze you with their SAT vocabulary. They aren't always written very recently. They don't all have very trendy themes. Their "reading level" is below where my children test, and often even below their grade or age chronologically. And yet the kids are eating them up, or, at the least, not complaining when I assign some of them as something I'd like them to do as part of "school."

I have had a tough time myself coming up with my own personal stance about assigned reading. We have the freedom to not have forced reading, to not be reading things that bore us to death, that we hate, or that someone else thinks we should be reading for some reason or another (it's on an Accelerated Reader list; there's a prize for it; it's a "Battle of the Books" selection; questions about it will appear on a standardized test, etc.). And I'm of the belief that the way to raise a child who loves to read because the act itself is pleasurable--and the material being read does not need to be lengthy, chaptered fiction to count--is not to require a timer or an adult signature to say it was done. Nonetheless, as part of what we do as schoolwork, which admittedly is determined by my own whims at times, reading a book of fiction or non-fiction is part of what I'd like us to cover or discuss. So while my kids do spend time every day reading, time that I don't measure by a clock, that I don't supervise, that I don't sign off on, that I don't even know happens all the time, I'm careful not to make reading into an "academic" subject handed from another person but something that is done at times for information, as a means of expanding our knowledge about another subject (not reading for the sake of reading), or at many times, as a special time when we can just be together doing something that we all enjoy together.

We've been guided a lot by the Sonlight reading lists this year. I'm not a Follow The Schedule type person, so even though I have the big binders of Sonlight materials, I only look at them to get a general sense of their time frame and sometimes to try to get a clue as to why a particular book was chosen as part of the program. Right now we're reading Mother West Wind's Children, a book that I still can't figure out quite why they chose it. It's a fine book--not exactly my type of story or set of stories, but still, it has its good points. And interestingly, Ollie is the one enjoying it most, since he finds the humor in the ways that the animals act toward each other, in their anthropomorphism, in their foolishness; he gets it. But most of the other books chosen for the "read-alone" list are, I've determined, pretty short and not very challenging as reading material. And yet they've turned out to be kind of perfect for me to expect of the kids.

Here are some of the titles we've done in the past 3 months:

A whole passel by Clyde Robert Bulla: Pocahontas and the Strangers, A Lion to Guard Us, Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims, and these led us on to read a number of other titles by him

All of those Jean Fritz books with titles like, "And Then What Happened, Paul Revere." These are books we get through in 30 minutes, including talking about them, but they're not entirely without substance. And combined with the other reading and videos and history work we do, they give the kids just enough work on their own so that they're having to actively participate in what we're doing, but no one is going to feel overwhelmed or like we're perseverating on the same thing for weeks.

Very short novels, like _Stone Fox_--about a race, about two cultures, about debt, about love of the land, about kindness, about determination, about the effects of stress. Not the most challenging book to decode and "read," but a book of substance with real issues that a 10 year old boy might relate to or think about.

These have led us on to bumping into other books in the library of about this length--50-100 pages, some full page pictures to look forward to, chapters that move quickly so they give a sense of accomplishment (I'm 36 and still need this to be happy while I read!). Books about Christmas on the Mayflower, what George Washington ate for breakfast, Lewis and Clark, Eli Whitney. All short, one-night reads, but with enough of a story to keep everyone focused.

That's what has been on my mind tonight.

And not what I was thinking about while I was rock climbing. Tonight I got a little bit further along in my ability here. Up until now, I don't think I've made it to the top of a 5.8 wall, but tonight I conquered one of my first try. I did have to do a 5.7, which I thought shouldn't have been a 5.7, twice to hit the top without cheating (using a wrong color), and I felt pretty good about that, too. At best, rock climbing gives me the same high as giving birth, as silly as that sounds. That same sense of, "My body rocks! I did something amazing that I didn't think I could do!" Some nights aren't quite so satisfying, but when you're hanging on the side of a wall, looking at the next steps and seeing no way possible for you to get there using only your body, it's a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you overcome the fear of heights and the seemingly impossible to solve a problem that only you and your body can get through. I probably will never be a 5.10 climber, but every little bit of improvement amazes me.

Fall used to be my favorite season, and it still is, in its purest form. What has knocked fall down a notch for me since having children is that is the launching point for Illness Season, which is definitely *not* my favorite time of year. Now I find myself looking forward to spring as the reprieve from sniffles and the threat of vomit. But it's hard not to have your heart simply ache at the beauty of the leaves covering the ground and the vibrancy of the trees against a perfect blue sky.

It's been a while since we've been there, so we trekked down to Maymont Park today with some friends. The Nature Center was closed, since it's Monday (who knew?), but that was a blessing in disguise, since today was absolutely gorgeous. We're a bit past the peak of leaf beauty, but being a tad past peak doesn't mean that the beauty is over--the colors of the trees were amazing, and the clarity of the blueness of the sky could take your breath away in the way that it only can in the late fall. The kids climbed trees, scaled cliffs of rock, got lost in a bamboo forest, jumped off tall rocks into dry waterfalls, "fished" in a pool in a grotto, collected pond water to look at under the microscope (there better be a euglena in there!), rolled down a grassy hill, got hurt (what's a day out if you don't bleed a little!), got sticky little fuzzy flower parts stuck all over their clothes, and harassed some animals. This is what our free time should be all about!




It's a good thing you can't smell Rutledge's diaper from a picture. Whew, it was a bad one! Kerry came and rescued Rutledge and took Frances to gymnastics right after this picture was taken, but the boys stayed on for a while longer and climbed on the rocks. I try to be calm about this kind of thing, but I'll admit, my blood pressure went up a bit as I saw them fooling around next to what seemed like a big dropoff. This picture below is really sweet, though, of Ollie and a friend with their backs to us.

Yesterday I took three kids--Walter, Frances, and Rutledge to Annapolis, Maryland for my Uncle Bill's memorial service. I am still questioning exactly what I was thinking taking them along, since it was not an environment where they would be on their best and quietest behavior, but Kerry had to take Ollie to diving practice, which most certainly isn't a good place for accompanying sibling, and I feel strongly that it is a priority to give my children some sense of extended family, since they have fairly little of that now. They had never met my Uncle Bill, so the service was a bit boring to them.  But they were also able to meet their cousin, Quin, for the first time.  And I want them to have some chances to see the people they are related to as real people, not just lines on a family tree (not that I'm that organized at this point to have made a real family tree...).  

My heart goes out so much to my cousin, Lisa.  She has lost her father after a long, long illness that took his abilities away from him bit by bit.  And her mother had a stroke last year and requires a great deal of care.  There's not enough you can say about the gift she has given her parents by taking care of them, living with them while they need her help, and her family's dedication to each other in sickness and in health.  I ache for her because I've been through my own time of amazing pain with my mother and her death and the massive crater that has been left in my life because she is gone.  During the terrible, awful, unbelievable week when she was dying, lying semi-conscious in the hospital, the whole scene was surreal.  It felt like it was never going to end, like it was the longest week ever, and like she was always going to be held in that space between living and dying.  And yet, I can firmly say that six years later, she is definitely gone.  She's not coming back.  I don't have her with me, even in a terrible state that is nothing like she was during the time that she was living and was the mother I knew.  It feels so crazy and so wrong not to have a mother who is there to be with my children, with her grandchildren, to be someone that they know, that they do things with, who is part of their life and their childhood and their history.  Instead, at best, my children remember her as an old lady in a nursing home, and at worst...they don't remember her at all.  Worse yet, one of them never even met her.  It feels, on my feeling sorriest for myself days, that its simply unfair, that there is nothing that can ever take her place and nothing that can ever fill the role that a grandma should be filling for them, and this is a gap in their life that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  And so I feel all the more acutely sympathy for Lisa, because her little boy is just three years old, mere weeks older than Rutledge, and I know how she wants him to know and love the parents that she knew and loved, not just live through their illnesses, the hardships of the last part of their lives, the chaos that comes with a house full of nurses coming and going, medical equipment, distressing doctor visits, excruciating decisions that you never asked to have to make.  We can tell our children the stories of our parents, of our childhood, of the people that we knew them to be, but the sad fact is, we can't really make our kids know the people that meant everything to us.  I feel like my mother is as much myth as anything else to Walter, Ollie, and Frances (Rutledge can't even comprehend yet).  About as unreachable as anyone else who might appear on our family tree from the past.  The experience of losing a parent certainly is part of what has made me reassess what I want to do to bring my own family closer, to be sure that we live to the fullest together, that we have plenty of time before they inevitably grow up and move on to their own families.  Because in the end, it is, for sure, these families that we have now, our young families, that provide what healing there is out there for the giant hole that the loss of a parent causes.  And I suspect it will be, eventually, that way for my cousin as well.  There's nothing like a preschooler, with mischievous antics, little illnesses, broken bones, parties to send snacks for, Halloween costumes to pull together at the last minute, violence on the playground, and the zillions of things that we worry about with our children to force you to live in the here and now.  It doesn't really make things better, but it does take your mind off of it, and eventually, it makes you focus on what you can do with the people in your life who are still here, because you'll never be naive enough again to think that however it is, that it's going to be this way forever.