In your dreams, baby

Lately I’ve been dreaming I’m pregnant. When I’m asleep, that is. During the day I’m so very not-pregnant that no one even bothers anymore to say oooh, maybe you’re pregnant when I complain of nausea or tiredness. This could be because I’ve made it so abundantly clear to anyone who’ll listen that I’m Not Ready or perhaps it’s just that everyone knows I go to bed exhausted at about 8:30 these days and nobody believes in immaculate conceptions anymore. Where’s the faith, people?

I think there are three types of pregnant dreams. The first are just plain bizarre (the baby is a green martian with George Clooney’s face/the person having the dream is a man, or Paris Hilton.) Others are wishful thinking (the woman wakes feeling warm… then empty). And the third kind: nightmares (not really any need for explanation here, is there?)

I think my dreams have been a heady cocktail of the latter two types. Being pregnant with Little Bean was such a magical experience. If I conveniently forget the weeks spent more attached to a bucket than any other person or object, that is. But there really is something awesome about literally being pregnant with expectation. Reading all the books and talking quietly into the night about how little foetus is now the size of a walnut or a grapefruit. Musing over names and equipment and imagining future family holidays (back before I learned that Family Holiday is an oxymoron). Feeling utterly connected.

Honestly I think that the Bean’s decision to wean has increased my nostalgia for those womb days. I guess breastfeeding is a kind of dynamic umbilicus and feeling the loss of it can lead to yearnings. And tantrums muffled by a few litres of amniotic fluid might be a little quieter too. Is that why mothers of toddlers still bravely get themselves knocked up again? So they can at least have someone quiet in their family, if only for a few months?

Anyway, these dreams are simply that. Given that I still haven’t recovered from the emotional shock of the early weeks with The Bean, having two children is pretty much my nightmare scenario right now. And the possibility of having twins keeps me awake at night (counting days to see if a period is late takes time, you know.)

Deep down I know that the longing will win out over the fear sooner or later. Part of me can’t wait. Right now though, the other part of me is going to take advantage of nap time and make a cup of tea because we all know that if I have another kid that won’t be happening. Except in my dreams.

Baby’s Got Blue Eyes

Eugenics is cool all over again!

We knew it would happen. I’m not that surprised. But can I wail and cry about it anyway, please?

A Los Angeles fertility clinic is offering to design a baby to the parents’ preferences.

The Fertility Institutes service gives the chance to select physical traits, such as hair, skin and eye colour, through “cosmetic medicine”.

Other fertility specialists are outraged that the clinic is seeking to capitalise on advances in embryo cell analysis aimed at identifying dangerous diseases and defects in the unborn.

They claimed that the “bespoke baby” in-vitro fertilisation service is distracting public attention from how the medical technology can produce children free of debilitating genetic conditions.

But the clinic’s director, Jeff Steinberg, who was in the team involved in the 1978 birth in Britain of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, is undeterred.

“I live in LA and everyone here wants to have a straight nose and high cheekbones and are perfectly happy to pay for cosmetic surgery,” he said.

“I understand the trepidation and concerns, but we cannot escape the fact that science is moving forward. If I have to get smacked around by people who think it is inappropriate, then I’m willing to live with that.”

Dr Steinberg’s clinic, the world’s largest provider of gender choice, has had “five or six” requests for the new service, which involves embryo selection not genetic modification.

He expects the first “trait selection” baby to be born next year. The cost for the process will be about $US18,000 ($28,000).

It is based on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that has for several years allowed doctors to identify potentially lethal diseases or conditions in embryos.

Yet scientists have recently made dramatic advances in their ability to analyse a cell. At a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics last year, William Kearns, a medical geneticist, said he had been able to get enough DNA from a cell to identify thousands of characteristics of the embryo.

Dr Kearns explained the technique for medical use, but Dr Steinberg spotted other potential.

His proposal to offer trait selection has outraged Dr Kearns.

“I won’t sell my soul for any amount,” he said. “Steinberg has jumped on my research but I’m totally against this. My goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases.”

Dr Steinberg said IVF was once viewed with fear, but now “is not even a cocktail party curiosity”.

Telegraph, London

Don’t you love the neat little descriptor: trait selection. Sounds so civilised, in a cattle-breeding kind of way. I’ll be sure to save up so I can make sure that if there’s a Bean II, he or she will have all the optimum traits. Oh wait – what do I mean he or she? Why not just choose? I wouldn’t want to be subjected to a baby of the ‘wrong’ sex, after all. That’s just upsetting for everyone, even the family dog. I predict a flood of former cosmetic surgeons into the ‘fertility’ business – how else will they earn a crust if we all start sporting optimum traits from birth?

I won’t even get into how blatantly ableist it is use genetics to eradicate ‘defects’ in the first place. They’re already doing a pretty good job of that with prenatal screening – as any parent of a child with Downs Syndrome will tell you after the fiftieth time a person assumes she must have ‘missed out on the tests.’

For once, I have no more words. Just Gahhhhhhhhh!

Who knows where the time goes…

I still can’t believe Little Bean is a year old. When people inevitably ask her age I do a little mental double-take because it doesn’t seem quite real.

They always tell you that ‘they grow up so fast’ but you don’t believe it when you’re elbow deep in newborn nappies. You don’t believe it when every breastfeed takes more than an hour and there are more than ten of them every day. You don’t believe it when you start watching the clock and  listening for a car in the driveway at 3pm and your partner doesn’t get home until 6. You don’t believe it when your three-sleeps-a-day infant is somehow still up and whining at at midnight and you’re wondering if someone is secretly smearing NoDoz on your nipples.

Living with a baby can sometimes elevate seconds to hours as you struggle to make it through one day. But it simultaneously truncates time through the sheer reality of rapid growth. There are days, a friend reminded me today, when you put a certain-sized baby down for a nap and find a larger-sized one it its place a couple of hours later.

Mothering means the days are sometimes long but the months are short and the years even shorter. It’s a land of Dali clocks and Mad Hatter calendars. And it’s at the moment you can’t remember whether your babe has slept in your arms for three minutes or three hours that you really know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

I choose to sit back, kick off the ruby red shoes and make myself comfy. This is home, now.

What a difference a year makes

 

Happy Birthday Little Bean.

No ifs, no buts

Want a surefire way to piss me off? Just start a sentence with ‘I’m not a feminist, but…’ It strikes me as odd and in poor taste to comment on how feminism makes our lives better whilst kicking feminism on its blue-stockinged arse.

Sure, sure, I know some people just don’t realise what feminism is all about and perhaps if they did realise that what they were espousing at the time was in fact feminism they might be less frightened of the label. And I also know my horse is pretty high at times.

Which brings me to my real subject. I think I’m a lactivist. Now I confess that I’ve only just cottoned on to this nifty noun lately, but it suits me. I love breastfeeding, I love breastfeeders, I love waxing lyrical about how great breastfeeding is for babies and mothers and fathers and the third world and the first world and the second world too (if anyone actually lives in that never-talked-of place.)

The thing is, I have friends who feed their babies formula. For a range of reasons. Reasons that are good for them. And I know for a fact that those friends love their babies wholeheartedly, without reservation, as I love my little boobie addict. And I also know that some of those friends tried desperately to breastfeed but weren’t able to. We all know it happens -  whether it was lack of support or information or sleep or a physical difficulty – it can be a painful decision to come to, for some, though certainly not all. I acknowledge and respect that. No doubt some are bound to find anyone blathering on about bountiful bosoms a bit hard to take.

I don’t want to offend.

And so it’s tempting to qualify. To say ‘I’m not a lactivist, but I support public breastfeeding. I’m not a lactivist but I think that breastfeeding support in hospitals should be improved. I’m not a lactivist but it drives me crazy when even doctors give out misinformation about the ‘benefits’ of formula. I’m not a lactivist but I am horrified that so many babies in developing countries still die from formula made with unsafe water each year. I’m not a lactivist but I think every baby has a right to breastmilk and every mother has a right to have her need to feed her baby honoured and accommodated, wherever she lives and works.’

I could say that, but then I’d have to kick my own arse, and that’s hard to do sitting up on this high horse.