Learning #16 : Don't judge a book by its Berkeley

When I was pregnant, I immediately started reading books loaned to me by other mom friends.  In reading these books, it was painfully clear that I had some immediate homework to do - namely, to come up with a "birth plan."

This seemed like a lot of work.  I mean, I was really not aware that we would need a plan beyond "I'll go into labor, we'll head to the hospital, the baby will come out," but Ricki Lake definitely felt otherwise.

And so, somewhere toward the middle of my first trimester, I started interviewing doulas.

Now, at this point I was not hugely attuned to the difference between a doula and a midwife.  (In a nutshell, for those who haven't used either: a doula is a labor coach there to help you through labor.   This includes giving your partner a break, etc.  The midwife, like a doctor, is there to get the baby out.)

Living in the Bay Area means that you can pretty much swing a cat and hit a doula (though doing that around here might get both the animal rights and the doula rights people after you).  But I wanted to make sure that the person getting on-board to shepherd me through labor was a good personality fit, because, being my first pregnancy and all, we weren't exactly sure how things were going to shake out on The Big Day.

And so we ended up in Berkeley one sunny morning with Betsy Appell, who seemed to know what she was doing, had trained with midwives, had a toddler herself courtesy a homebirth with one of the midwives I'd interviewed, had a super mellow and nurturing energy, and - as an extra bonus - taught a Zen birthing class as part of her services.

Knowing even less about the Zen tradition that I did about birth ("The Art of Zen" having sat, untouched, on my bookshelf for years - right next to "The Art of War," actually, which I have read), I felt like I'd be in good hands with Berkeley Betsy, who was also a prenatal yoga teacher and probably a vegetarian or something and, therefore, we assumed (correctly) that she would be a nice calming influence when The Big Day arrived.

What I hadn't counted upon was the homework.  Betsy immediately sent us a CD that we were supposed to start listening to, like, immediately.  So, always one to do my homework on time, I uploaded the CD into my iTunes and set about this hypnobirthing prep business.

It should be noted here that I am frightfully nearsighted.  Without my contacts in or my glasses on I really can't see anything but suggestive shapes and blurs.  It's sort of like living in a Monet painting, with less color and far less water lilies - the last of which is a good thing, I suppose, because if I'm without my contacts next to a body of water, well... it just sounds like a bad idea.

It should also be noted here that we did not have an iPod docking station in the bedroom at the time.  And so, since we were supposed to listen to the CD before bed, we just used my laptop.

The Zen lesson started out normally enough: "Get into a comfortable position, and either close your eyes, or open your eyes, looking downward with a soft gaze..."

Details after that are fuzzy, because my partner generally fell asleep practically at the end of this sentence, and I was usually out by the time we were laying on my magical beach.

But then, there was the song.

Having usually drifted off to sleep before the talking ended, I started being awakened by this weird song at the end of the exercise.  It started out somewhat normally enough, with a sort of hippie-ish guitar that could definitely be the choice of a yoga teacher who lived in Berkeley.  But then the guy started singing, and the first lines of the song seemed just like a really odd choice for a Zen hypnobirthing practice CD:

She left her father, been 30 years

She drew some water to dry his tears

She said I'm sorry, I've been lonely.  I need another

Um... what?  What was Betsy trying to tell us with this song?  That we shouldn't cling to our child and make her look after us for 30 years?  That the baby was lucky to have 2 moms?  I wasn't sure, but the song went on:

She crossed through deserts and rivers wide

She walked through valleys and mountains high

She crossed the seas through storm and night

To find a lover

???????

Was Betsy trying to tell us that we need to nurture our child and teach her about love early, so that she doesn't have to circumnavigate the globe to find it?

Now, bear in mind that I'm half asleep here.  Not for long, though, because suddenly the song picks up tempo and the singer starts bellowing pretty loudly:

LOOOOOOOOOVE Bet-SAAAAAY

Somebody is going to love you someday

It was at this point that I figured that Betsy either hadn't really listened to the words of this song, or that she was in dire need of a hug.

The first explanation seemed more probable.  I figured that this song was her signoff.  Like, "Thanks for doing your Zen birthing homework!  Love, Betsy."  I mean, that seemed like a nice thing to do, something that maybe a Berkeley yogi might do.

And so, seeing as how she was a tea-drinking probable vegetarian Zen student prenatal yoga teacher from Berkeley, this explanation made sense to me.  And so we continued to listen to the lesson, every night, with my partner continuing to fall asleep within 5 minutes and me generally falling asleep at some point, only to be awakened by that freaking song.  And then I started dreading the song, so sometimes I didn't manage to fall asleep at all, and I started waiting for the perfect time to turn off the computer so that I could avoid that Stupid Freaking Song which made No Freaking Sense and was seriously putting a dent into My Freaking Zen.

I thought about talking to Betsy about this.  Maybe giving her a helpful tip, like,"You know... I like the lesson, but the song is just a wee bit disruptive..."  But I figured that Zenmaster Betsy knew what she was doing, so I let it be.

Her husband actually called us to reschedule our first birth class (Berkeley Betsy being at a Berkeley Birth), and I asked him about it.  I said, "We fall asleep before the CD is over - my partner falls asleep like 5 minutes in, and I usually fall asleep before the song," and he told me a funny story about how he fell asleep while she was making the CD.

No mention of the song.  And so I didn't mention it again.

And then, one day, I talked to my partner about this annoying, annoying song, and asked her if it bothered her at all.  Being the world's soundest sleeper and having never actually made it to the song, she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I pulled out my laptop and, having the benefit of my contact lenses in my eyes at this point, I realized something important:

The Freaking Song, as it turned out, wasn't actually part of the hypnobirthing lesson.  It was a Big Head Todd and the Monsters nong, called "Love Betsy."  And the reason that it played at the end of our hypnobirthing lesson is because, without the benefit of my contacts in or my glasses on (which is generally how I go to sleep), I was just squinting horribly at iTunes and typing "Betsy" into the search box primarily by muscle memory, assuming that the only thing that would come up would be Betsy Appell's Greatest Zen Birthing hits.  And I could sort of see that the search result was quite short, so it never occurred to me that some random, terrible Big Head Todd song had surfaced.  Hell, I didn't even know I had a Big Head Todd album, let alone a Big Head Todd album with the world's cheesiest song about a lonely Betsy who apparently lived with her father for 30 years before traveling the globe to find... well, to find another.

It was at this point that my partner began to laugh.  Reeeeeeally hard.  Once she listened to the song we were both just howling.

I then sent the song to Betsy, with an explanation of what had happened.  Apparently the Zen tradition allows for uncontrollable laughter, which is nice.

Namaste.

Learning #15 : Time ages everything

This photo, like me, aging over time...

Sometimes it's easy to forget that I was cute once.

Photo scanning being all the rage these days, my Dad was nice enough to scan this picture of me when I was around 3 months old, to compare with my then 3-month-old daughter. Here is a list of things we learned in this experience, in no particular order:

1) The hardest part about finding a matching yellow lion toy is that the sheer volume of plush lion toys is enough to make one wonder whether or not their numbers exceed real-life lions. So if you were worried about the status of the lion on the endangered plush-species list, don't be. Population: stable.

2) A single old photo scan takes kind of a long time, and it still looks about as comparatively good as the person in it after all that time. By the time my Dad scanned it, touched it up and emailed it to me, he'd spent 20 minutes on this. (And if he's saying 20, I'm saying 30...)

3) I was cute once. See? And I was way, way ahead of the fauxhawk trend.

4) Sending your child a decades-old baby photo that depicts her at the same age her first baby is makes it far too tempting to spend far too much time planning to take an identical-as-possible photo of her own baby.

And thus we arrive at the series of photos taken of my somewhat unwilling offspring after I spent an embarrassing chunk of a Saturday morning finding Just The Right Yellow Lion Toy for the occasion.


Now, I'm not exactly proud of myself for fancying up my child and subjecting her to the apparently unruly Mr. Yellow Lionface, but fancy her up I did.  She's in a frilly dress and everything.  Hey, we're making memories here, people.

After the ordeal, it then occurred to me that it might be nice to scan my whole baby book so that I might compare the 200-ish photos commemorating my entire childhood with the 2000-ish photos I managed to accrue in the first few months of my child's life.  Not to mention that, given the condition of my baby pic, it's probably a good idea to get these things scanned before they fade any more.

But man - the time it would take.  Do I want to spend an entire weekend scanning and touching up old photos?  Um... no way.  It was bad enough spending 2 hours looking for that lion.

And so, as I write this, I am waiting on my baby book to come back from Red Bluff, CA, home to the magical scanning elves at GoPhoto.  I sent 2 boxes, literally crammed with every piece of photography I could find: photo albums, random envelopes full of miscellaneous negatives, loose pictures - they all made the journey up North, along with my baby book.  I didn't bother sorting through anything; since you can delete any of the scans you don't keep and don't have to pay for them, I figured it's easier to sort through them online once everything's digitized.

(So once I decide that, perhaps, my Freshman 15 doesn't need to be immortalized quite so thoroughly, well, there's a handy delete button.)

As for the lion toy, he regrettably met a swift end at the paws (er, teeth...) of my dogs.  I'm just glad we got to commemorate his short, baby-slobbered life with a series of somewhat amateurish photographs.  Sleep well, Yellow Lion Toy.  And don't worry: Mr. Giraffe is still around to play with the baby.

Learning #14: read the safety instructions...

(...if you can see)

When an eye care company who makes a product for contact lenses knows that this product might, like, burn your cornea off your freaking eyeball if your eyeball comes into contact with it, you'd think that they'd:

1) Not make their bottle look like a saline bottle, and
2) Not pretend that they aren't making their bottle look like a saline bottle by putting a tiny red stripe on the label -

- since, after all, people using their product have contact lenses.  Which means that, in the course of using said product, it's very possible that some extremely nearsighted people will be in frightfully close proximity to a white-ish saline-shaped bottle that's next to the saline, because they were of course using this product when they took their contact lenses out and so the bottle is still sitting there, because who's cleaning the bathroom before bedtime when they can't even see?  And it's entirely possible, too, you know, that these people might then the next morning remove their lenses from their overnight sterile de-funking bubble bath, and then accidentally wash their lenses with this product and then actually insert a contact lens, thus relegating her their eyes to hostile, burning, stormy tornadoes of searing pain, and of course now these folks are going to have to go to the freaking optometrist and explain what happened while the desk staff sort of snickers behind their hands and everyone pretends that you these poor, poor, misled consumers aren't complete eejits -

And all this could be avoided with better packaging.  Make the entire freaking bottle red, people!  Don't try to invoke some fuzzy "this is good for your eyes" feeling by trying to make your bottle look like a Bausch & Lomb saline bottle.  Because this product isn't actually for the eyes, it's some crazed Lysol-like sterilizer for the actual lenses, and as such the packaging would be more appropriate if the bottle were shaped like a cleansing solution bottle.  Or a branding iron.

I mean, I'm just saying.

Learning #13 : Actually...

...Keeping track of these numbers isn't that difficult, since my dashboard lists them all for me.  I think I was just being lazy.  Or cranky.  Or both.

Learning #12 : Keeping track of these numbers is...

...a huge pain in the arse.  And, thusly, they shall therefore cease to be numbered.