My 8 Year Bout With Christianity

In continuing with putting together the segmented pieces of my life, I imagine this next part will be the most difficult to write.  Not because I have terrible memories attached to this time, but because it is a part of my life I have thoroughly left behind.  Of course, I have some friends that only knew me during these years, and to them, I assume it is a total mystery how I got the way I am today, which is vastly different than I used to be.
At 12 years old, my family moved from Northern BC to Southern Alberta.  My parents bought 60 acres outside of Calgary and put a mobile home on it, eventually had a house built there.  By the 7th grade, I was beginning to get curious about spirituality.  As I laid in bed at night, my mind would drift to the big questions of the universe:  Who are we?  Why are we here?  What is the meaning of life?  Who, or what is god?  What about the afterlife?  Being the only spiritual book I had access to at the time, I started to read the bible.
In the New Testament (where I started), things seemed pretty innocent.  You had this bearded dude in a while robe and sandals talking about peace and love.  And, oh yes, there were miracles.  Blind people suddenly given sight and the dead coming back to life.  Knowing that there were other religions in the world, I was hesitant to commit to this one, but since this was the only one I seemed to have a road map for, I decided to give it a try. 
They call the area I lived in Cowboy Country, so naturally, the local community church featured someone in wranglers and a western shirt strumming an acoustic guitar.  Of course, my teenage self was far too cool for country music, but the people were welcoming.  One Sunday, a guest speaker was introduced as a prophet.  I stayed after the sermon and went up to see him, think perhaps he could tell my future.  After praying for me, he said that he saw me on the crest of a wave, with a crowd of people from my generation following.  It never occurred to me to wonder if he gave this prophesy to all the young girls, I simply believed it.  That summer, the church held an outdoor baptism service, and I got baptized in the Sheep River.
And the rest of my teenage life went along fairly normally for a few years.  I played a lot of sports, basketball and volleyball, had sleepovers with friends and crushes on boys.  I was fairly creative but scored only average marks, which didn't matter nearly as much to me as it did to my parents.  I chose my high school, a small school of about 350 students.
In the 10th grade, a friend brought me to visit her church in Calgary.  Now, big city churches have guitars, drums, bass guitars and keyboards, the style was soft of rock/blues, with plenty of gospel thrown in (pun intended).  But this church was quite a scene.  People were dancing in the isles, jumping up and down, spinning in circles, waving ribbons and flags.  It was colorful and over the top.  There people there would line up across the front of the church, and as the pastor came along to pray for them, he would put his hand on their forehead, and they would fall down on the floor and stay there for a good long time.  Being the curious soul that I am, I went up to get prayed for, and guess what?  I fell down, too.  The energy in that church is what drew me to it.  Plus, we could show up at church with dyed hair and wild clothing, which in the raver years of the late 90's, was important.  I joined the youth group and soon became a leader in the youth group, committing to be there an extra weekday as well as Sundays. 
I the 11th grade I started a youth group in my school.  The type of Christianity I was involved in is very evangelistic, meaning they are all about "saving the world".  We had a few converts, but mostly we just annoyed a lot of people.  In case you haven't noticed, Christians can be very dogmatic and close minded.  I was the poster child for that.  The same year, my volleyball coach recognized that I had potential and offered to work with me to get me a full scholarship to university.  I told him that I didn't want to go to university, because I wanted to go to bible college and become a pastor.  He offered to help me get a scholarship for a Christian university.  I told him I planned to go to the community bible college that was owned by the church I was in.
So after graduation I went off to bible college, and my first year went off without a hitch.  Technically, I earned a certificate in Biblical Studies.  I had to pay for my second year myself.  I worked all summer as a waitress and saved enough for tuition and board.  Then one morning I woke up with the most excruciating pain in my face, throbbing and making my vision blur.  I needed an emergency root canal.  Hello root canal, goodbye college tuition.  I signed up for a couple of courses by correspondence, moved home and got a job at a local private school, as an assistant phys. ed teacher and volleyball coach.  I went back for my second semester, but didn't quite earn enough credits to complete my second year, a Diploma in Christian Leadership.
By the end of year two in bible college, it didn't matter anymore.  I had become disillusioned with the church, fed up with the politics, and frustrated by the limitations of my religion and the close mindedness of those around me.  My brother had gone to film school, and we talked on the phone about stream of consciousness writing.  You simply start writing and keep writing, keeping your pen moving until you get into a flow.  You don't critique or edit as you write, just wait and see what comes out.  Eventually, it is like writing straight from the soul.
So, I made the decision not to go back to bible college for my third year.  I got an apartment and a job at a nearby coffee shop and started writing.  I filled up notebooks and binders and loose leaf.  I wrote on anything I could find.  I was finding myself, discovering my true inner self, writing about pain, love, joy, disappointment, abandonment, elation, wonder and all the messy and mystical feelings we experience as humans.  Some of my work was quite good.  Some didn't make any sense at all.  At one point, I took a few of my favorite poems to show my pastor.  He was very disapproving.  I was hurt about the outright rejection of the poems that were like little pieces of my soul, laid out on paper for all to see.  I truly felt I had been following my own inner voice and was on the path I needed to be on.  My pastor warned me against being a "lone wolf", which I guess means developing my own ideas independent of church teaching.  I felt I needed to grow and learn outside of the confines of established and acceptable doctrine, and to express myself that way as well.  So we went our separate ways, the church and all the friends I made there continuing to do what they do, and I off on my own, ready to experience the world with open eyes.  Thus ended my eight year relationship with the church.

I`m going to do something illegal this weekend, and I`m going to do it with gusto!  I`m going to walk into the forest with my family and chop down a small Christmas tree and bring it home.  And all with out a permit (gasp)!

I fully believe in my right to do this.  First of all, I believe that all plants are put on this earth for my use.  I believe I have every right to take a tree from crown land once a year, and would be willing to defend my choice in a court of law should anyone have a problem with it.  I also believe in my right to celebrate the ancient pagan tradition of decorating a tree for the solstice, which makes this a religious right as well. 

As far as paying the government for a permit, I don`t believe I should have to.  The government refused to send me my child tax money until I jump through their hoops, and delayed me getting this money before Christmas when everybody else`s money came in on the 13th.  There really was no reason for the delay, and all it accomplished was to add more stress to a family that is already struggling financially.  These are the kind of decisions our government makes.

The government may not trust its citizens, but I trust my ability to use the earth`s resources wisely, without having the government police my use of plants (trees or any other type of plants).  A corporation or oil company is somehow allowed to rip up hundreds of acres of boreal forest and desecrate the land, but the citizens are not allowed to go out into nature and pick a tree for their holiday celebrations?  I can`t agree with this.

So, as an act of civil disobedience, I`m going to pick a Christmas tree from the forest.  And I`m going to have a good time doing it.  I`m going to teach my children how to pick a Christmas tree.  I`ll probably even post pictures.

History Part 1 - Living in the Canadian Wilderness

It occurs to me that most people that know me are only familiar with a small segment of my life.  I don't know about you, but my life has been very compartmentalized.  In these years, I was here, hung out with these people, in those years, these people, over there.  And the different segments of my life have never met in the middle and blended themselves into a cohesive whole.  I think this creates a kind of dissonance, a feeling of being disconnected from my true self.  That's what I'm trying to overcome.  So for those of you who have only known me in a certain context (that's just about all of you), I'd like to fill you in on the other details that are missing from the equation, the missing pieces of the puzzle.

I was born in the states, and got my Canadian citizenship when I moved to Canada at six months old.  My mom is Canadian and my dad is American, but now has duel citizenship as well.  My parents bought 360 acres of crown land in northern BC, a plot of mostly boreal forests and muskeg.  They cleared and plowed about 20 acres of hay fields.  For the first five years, we lived in a two bedroom house.  We had some electricity and a shared, party line phone, but no running water.  There was an outhouse in the yard.  My parents hauled water from town, and to bathe her kids, my mom heated up water on the stove and poured it into a big metal basin in the middle of the kitchen.  She was able to garden in the northern climate, potatoes, peas and lettuce grew especially well.  They tried their hands at chickens and pigs, they had a milk cow and a couple of horses.  My dad was a farrier and also worked at a sawmill, and my mom worked as a nurse.

Considering their big city backgrounds, my parents fit into life in the Canadian wilderness quite well.  My dad trapped and traded furs, drove a snowmobile, and chopped wood in 40 below.  He did hunting trips on horseback, and would come home every year with a moose for us to eat.  He built a log house, three stories tall, with logs from our property that he cut himself.  Many of these logs were so huge that a grown adult could wrap their arms around them and not touch their fingers together.  The house was beautiful, and took forever to build, a big log house with a red roof, a bay window, and log pillar supports inside.  We moved in when I was 5, around the time my youngest brother was born.

We lived there until I was 12.  Mostly, we played outside, rode horses, skated on the dugout, built snowmen, climbed trees, played with our dog, a black lab, and argued with our siblings.  But there were times we were snowed in, or when it was too cold to go outside.  We played cards or dominoes, cops and robbers, cowboys and circus, did many many art projects, impromptu dance recitals and theater productions, and argued with our siblings.  We read books.  TV was something my parents were really strict about, and we only had one channel anyway, so there wasn't much to watch.  Family TV on Sunday nights, pancakes for dinner.

My best friend lived a few miles down the road and had a reindeer farm.  They once had an orphan reindeer that they adopted and fed with a bottle, called him Rudolf.  At Christmas they would take 8 reindeer to town and show them off, ones with names like Cupid and Blitzen.  My friend and I mostly spent our time riding horses, trail riding or preparing for horse shows (showing western in community fairs).  We had plenty of adventures, a few that would have you sitting on the edge of your seat if I took the time to tell you them, horses falling in muskeg or running into bears on the trail.  We were brave kids, fearless really, always trying to push the boundaries.  Go a little further into the woods than we went last time, run the horses a little faster, explore a little bit more.

So that about covers the first 12 years, up until the time I moved to Alberta, which I'll have to write about some other time, since there's work to be done here.  Thanks for reading.  Enjoy your day!

The 144,000 City

When I was flipping through my old books, I came across this page and just had to laugh.  Yes I admit, it's cheesy, but some of these are genuinely funny.  I wrote this in 2005, when I was 24 years old.  Perhaps funnier still is the idea that a 24 year old would sit around thinking up names for a prophesied city that has never existed.  A city which she was hoping to someday build.  Crazy?  Yes, very.  But if this doesn't at least make you smile, I think you should check your pulse.

You don't have to like all of them, or any of them.  I don't even like all of them, and I wrote it!  (Whadda Beach, though?  That's pure genius!)  Beyond all the religious rhetoric, the fighting over who owns the rights to what, or the ridiculous idea of trying to establish uniform beliefs among groups of people, the city itself is not a bad idea.
I think if we were to build it in Canada, it could be an eco-paradise, with green infastructure and sustainable technology.  It would promote harmony between humans and nature, using our resources wisely so as to preserve nature for later generations, and harmony between humans, with true democracy, equality and co-operation.  I could see it as a peaceful refuge from the greed and violence in the rest of the world. 
The way I figure, someone's gotta build this thing, it might as well be us in Canada.  Why not?  Although I can't necessarily tell you all the steps to get us from here to there, I'd like to invite you to dream.  We can create a city in our thoughts.  Of course, if you have any clever name suggestions, I'm all ears!

Kids Throwing up and other Sicknesses

Feelings new to touch and taste
Sundried emotions
Jump out and dance against the wall
Colors of Pluto and Neptune exploding
And I can't seem to find myself
Lost and drifting
On waves of purple cotton
Or is it blue?
Or can I say I never loved him
To find the time to not have pain
But anger is a friend of mine
And abandonment my brother
So when I find myself again
When I have figured out the wall
When I find the pearl amidst the stack
     Of papers that lay cowering on the floor
          Rejected and unacceptable
When I find it I won't sleep
I won't shake hands and I won't eat
I won't move a finger, I'll hold it tight
Then it can't leave me in the night.

- Shay Sampson, 2001

So, Eagle was throwing up yesterday, and last night both girls started.  They threw up all night, all over the place.  When my kids puke, it happens without warning.   Suddenly.  Brian stayed awake with them, washed their blankets, got them fresh buckets, got Ocean in the tub when she woke up with puke all through her hair.  These are the moments you don't think about when becoming a parent.  So today is clean up day.  Cleaned the bathroom (puke all over the floor, the toilet and up the walls), and the downstairs, where puke was on the carpet and couch down there.  The kids are starting to feel better, mom and dad are fighting it off.

So after cleaning up the basement, Brian and I were sitting down there drinking coffee while Eagle played, and Brian was juggling and being silly for Eagle who thought it was just hilarious.  And he started talking about how that was the best part of parenting, when you get to laugh and play with your kids.  You make them happy and they make you happy.  I laughed that he would still talk that way, even after staying up all night with puking kids.

But getting puke everywhere motivates me to not just clean up the puke, but to clean the whole room, so maybe even the worst parts of parenting are blessings in disguise.  And in the process of cleaning, the thought occurred to me that some of the heartache that I have been through in life has given me motivation to take a stand against injustice that I might have otherwise overlooked.  I do so in the hopes that my children will grow up in a better world than I did, with more equality, freedom and peace.

I wrote the above poem in 2001, and included it in a group of 17 poems that were to become songs, my first album.  Half of them had melodies already.  At one point I printed them all out and mailed them to myself, registered mail, a primitive attempt to copywrite my work.  I've been carrying that unopened envelope around for years!  I just opened it up the other day, and this one was #16.  I guess I finally realized that I don't need to be worried about someone stealing my work, because no one in their right mind would want to pretend they were me!  I doubt very much that anyone out there would want to walk a mile in my shoes.

Well, I hope this Tuesday finds you all well!

Dreams and Reality

What do these dreams mean?
Visions seeing through time.
In my head, whispers pound
about days gone by.
They show eternity in an instant.

Shay Sampson, 2003. 

Eagle is sick today, poor little guy.  He's throwing up.  His little 14 month old body coming up with nothing but breast milk.  In between nursing him, catching his throw up, and rubbing his back as he drifted off in my arms, I wrote this:

Innocent until proven guitlty
Is a human right all people have.
If anyone has an accusation,
The accused has the right to a fair trial.

Meaning, in the case of drone warfare,
The president does not have the right
To put someone on the hit list and kill them
Without giving them the opportunity to defend themselves

When at all possible, violence should be avoided,
and unless a violent act can be justified in a court of law,
The perpetrator of violence should have to stand trial.

Seems a strange thing to be writing while nursing a sick baby, but I got a bit of drawing done today too.  Baby duties take over, and I'll most likely be holding him the rest of the night.  Making dinner for the kids, and watching Brian get things done towards the project.  Something great, we hope will be done by the end of the week.

If you want to learn more about drone warfare, what is going on, and how innocent people are being killed, their murderers never brought to justice, here is a link to a video of a speech about drone warfare.  It is worth a watch to stay aware of what's happening in the world around you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUryRgQR0W8

Christmas in the North Art Series

Today I want to show what I've been working on most of the week.  I drew a family portrait for a friend, and am having it printed as Christmas cards.  They wanted a winter scene with snowshoes, and had all these great pictures of one of their family tree hunts for me to go from.  I try to draw these in a traditional Canadian style with a modern edge. My depiction of the northern lights is in the sky. Their children, Zion and Henry, are on their backs.

I do custom Christmas or holiday greetings on the inside of the cards.  My friend chose a poem to be printed on the inside.  

As well as the Christmas cards to send out, the family also gets the original 11x14 drawing to frame. I'm offering to do more of these stylized family portraits next year.  The portrait will be $240, plus $2 per card and $20 for 8x10 prints.  At most, I can do one a week for 48 weeks of the year.  If you want to reserve a spot, look on a calendar for 2013 and choose any Friday.  Let me know if you're interested.

Starry Dreams and Lofty Ideals

There are some things that we keep hidden, not allowing them into the light.  It may be due to fear that something bad will happen if we do, or possibly that some of our power might be gone if we share our experiences.  I wonder sometimes if we are afraid to give power away to others, thinking that will make us less powerful.

I have had some very intense and strangely symbolic dreams.  In the past, telling some of my more poignant dreams has been met with some hostility and caused rifts to be formed among friends.  One dream, which I have never shared with anyone except my husband, occured when I was 23 years old.  I think I never shared it because to me it was special, a small secret holding some power as long as it was mine.  At the time, I felt so much had been taken from me, an innocence stolen that I would never regain.  Although I fought hard against it, the heartache caused me to close up, build walls, go into isolation in a way.  So I kept this dream to myself, my own little light under a bushel, and now I am 31.  It has been 8 years. 

In the dream I was with a crowd of people, some my age, some younger, and we were all together in this tiny house, and we were trapped.  Outside was a dinosaur, like a tyranosaurus rex, gnashing his teeth, trying to stick his head in the windows.  Everybody was afraid that he would make a meal out of us.  That's when I found an ax and chopped a hole in the ceiling.  I climbed up into the attic and started helping others do the same.  Eventually, we were able to get up on the roof and get free, and as I woke up from this dream, I heard a voice, clear as day, singing "If that was true you never should have entered seventeen."

At the time, I wasn't even aware that I had "entered seventeen" or even that such a thing were possible.  This was all news to me!  I laugh about it now.  The whole thing seems so bizzare, but still, some of the mystery remains.  What could it all mean?  For years I kept the dream hidden, maybe for fear that it would be seen as an ego trip.  Maybe because of the anger I felt at the world for having stolen my innocence, my happiness, my peace and comfort, not to mention having almost ruined my marriage.  I won't get into the messiness of all that, as it's almost too scary to mention, and not really a pertinant part of the story.

Jump ahead several years, after years of "workin' for the man", letting them control my schedule and  affect my parenting, relationships and liesure.  I quit my job last August, and I cashed out my pension.  My RRSP was $17,000, and I had to go to the bank to cash it.  And like any trip to the bank, it was almost hell on earth. (who can attest?)  At first no one wanted to help.  The receptionist wouldn't give me the time of day, so I just ignored her and walked right into the manager's office and (nicely) asked him to pull some strings.  Even then he suggested to me that rather than giving me cash he would give me overdraft (trying to convince me that this is as good as cash!).  I told him that I was not there for overdraft, but for my money, and that I don't qualify for overdraft anyway.  Looking at the paperwork, and seeing that they have $17,000 of my money, he said "Oh, something must have happened in your past."  I LAUGHED out loud at this!  "WTF, man, have you been living under a rock?"  was all I could think.  So, eventually, he did what he could have done from the very beginning, which is to call the company and confirm that the money was there and the check was legit.  I think what turned him around was that I threatened to basically camp out at the bank, by telling him that if I didn't get my money I wouldn't have the gas to drive home.  I was glad to finally get it, but pissed off that he basically made me beg for it.  Just a little power trip they play there.

And I guess that's why, if the dream were real, I still would have helped everyone into the attic, because I know what it's like to be shit on, to be taken advantage of, to be stolen from.  And I also know what it's like to feel like you're in danger, on the run, or have your survival threatened in some way (this is assuming you are about to get eaten by a giant nasty dinosaur). 

Two of my best friends died this August, which has brought the uncertanty of life crashing down on me.  We never know how much time we have.  Eric and Lindsay didn't know they were going to die on August 12th, at 33 and 27 years old.  But they had a fatal car accident, the other car in the wrong lane.  They had stopped to watch a mountain goat cross the road, and were just beginning to take off again.  On our way to the funeral, we drove the #1 to the spot where they died.  This was hard, and we were all really feeling the loss.  We left two beers by the the cross on the side of the road.  There were pieces of debris all over the road and in the ditch, spreading 20 feet up the mountainside.  I met Eric when I was 20, the same day I met my husband.

And life has been really hard this whole time, in the years I spent fighting off the slings and arrows, the time I spent working for the city, and in dealing with a good friend's death, and the mourning and everything I've learned from it.  I have stuggled to overcome these hurdles in my life, and to raise my kids to the best of my ability, and I continue to do so.

At the same time, I am ready to move on, and look to the future and move into it.  And so, with my money, I'm going to live for a while and support myself while I work on my own business and become self employed.  I'm looking to start something really great, a way of helping other independant people, artists, crafters, musicians as well as providing an opportunity for people to teach others their knowledge or skills.  I think there are a lot of skills out there which would otherwise be lost if we don't teach them.  And whatever I have to offer, I refuse to live in hiding anymore.  I have piles of books full of poems, drawings, stories and journal entries that I have written, and I am going to start sharing them with the world.  I'll start here on my blog, and try to post something every day throughout the week.  Just a short blurb, and if you want to take ten minutes of your time to stop in here and check out what I'm posting, you are welcome to.  Also, please feel free to give your feedback in the comments, as I'd like to hear what you think.

Maybe there is such a thing as sharing too much, and maybe some of my personal power will be lost, but perhaps I will gain something more, a community of people willing to be open and honest with eachother, where people feel free to be their true selves, where people want to help and to teach, and also to learn together.   This, to me, is worth far more than whatever is gained by hoarding knowledge and keeping secrets.   It just might be that a community based on cooperation and acceptance is enough to shine a little light in an often dark and scary world, one where we sometimes feel that a dinosaur lurking outside could chomp on us at any moment.  At least it might be enough to spread a little light within our own circle of influence, and give those people around us the freedom to do the same.

Conversations with a 10 Year Old and One Rough Day!

So, my daughter turned 10 last weekend, and we had this conversation on her birthday.

She is very concerned that other kids think she is weird.  She doesn't want to draw any attention to herself because she's afraid people will think she's not normal.  I don't believe there is any such thing as normal.  We are all unique.  As we grow up, we come to appreciate others for their unique personality traits.  I used the example of a good friend of mine, Jo, who my daughter has known her whole life.  I said "Do I like Jo for all the ways that she is like everyone else?  Do I like her because she's so normal?"  When I put it this way, she could see how it is those unique personality traits that we come to love in our friends, these are what draw us to people.  All the kids her age are trying their best to try to be like everybody else, going around trying desperately to be normal, and sooner or later they're going to realize that there is no normal, and it is much cooler to just be yourself, which looks different for all of us.  It seemed like I was getting through to her.  I told her that once one person decided to stop believing in normal and just be themselves, then maybe that awareness would spread to the other kids, and they would start feeling free to be themselves as well.  This concept, I'm not sure she understood, but we both walked away feeling better.

Then today came.  I had to take my daughter to an appointment on the far side of the city.  It would take all day.  Today is day three after my miscarriage, and I am still passing blood clots and some tissue.  But such is life.  I'm not feeling too bad.  So I went into Staples first, and suddenly I felt a gush of blood.  Sure enough, there was blood everywhere, my pants were soaked, and I hadn't even brought my purse into the store.  This was the first disaster.  Feeling a bit nauseous and lightheaded, I got in my car and drove (probably not a good idea when you are loosing so much blood) to my sister's house.  No one was home.  I sat in my car outside her house, and since it was cold, I let the car run with the heat on.  Then my car started to sputter, and it dawned on me that I had meant to fuel up before leaving the NW.  Not only that, but when I looked for my wallet with my gas money in it, I discovered that I had forgotten it in Staples.  I was out of gas, and now my car wouldn't start.  Great, so now I am sitting in my car, bleeding, out of gas, with my baby sleeping in the back, and soon it will be cold.  And for those of you who don't know, I don't have a cell phone.  I pleaded to the universe to send me some help, which was all I could think of to do at the time. 

I saw a car driving towards me and thought it might be my sister coming home.  No, that car had a headlight out.  My sister would never drive around with only one headlight.  In fact, she would never find herself in this predicament at all.  No, my sister does the right thing.  She's not a space-brained mom who drives around in precarious old beaters with no cell phone, running out of gas on cold days, with her kids in the car, showing up at her sister's house unannounced with bloody pants.  In fact, it seems she hardly has any problems at all.  This, I find very frustrating.  Not that she has no problems, but that I seem to have all of them.  As I watched the one headlight car drive past me, I wondered what the hell is wrong with me, and why can't I seem to get my shit together like everybody else.

Then I remembered the conversation I had a few days ago, with a 10 year old girl concerned with being normal.  I guess that feeling affects us all to some extent.  Eventually, my sister and brother in law came and helped out my sorry ass, and I was back on the road in enough time to get my wallet back and pick up my daughter. In the end, what I hope my daughter realizes, is that her real friends and family love and accept her for who she is, including all her faults and idiosyncrasies.  Admitedly, there are some ways that I am downright weird.  :)  The biggest challenge is learning to love and accept ourselves.

It feels like labor.  A miscarriage.  That's where I'm at right now.  Dull cramps in my legs have become periodic tightenings of my uterus.  It's not super intense, but I breath through them.  I expand my belly with each inhale.  It's a labor trick, relaxes the surrounding muscles and makes it hurt less.  And, like labor, the more relaxed I can stay, and the less upset or stressed, the faster it will all be over.  Not getting upset is hard when you're miscarrying.  The tightenings come in waves and I breath.  "I am neutral. I am the earth."  I imagine my body lying flat in the soil, arms spread.  I am woman, and this is the cross we bear.  This happens more than we think.
I am sad, but not totally surprised.  My cervix was low and a bit flat, with a line instead of a dot, whereas typically in pregnancy, the cervix will be high and shaped like a nose, moving forward and thinning out towards the end.  But this past week when I checked, it seemed to have moved back and changed shape, so I started to suspect that the danger had passed.  But then last night, I started spotting.  I went to bed, and woke up at 2:20.  Now, two hours later, I feel my body bearing down.  I'm glad it's going fast.
I was only 8 weeks pregnant.  It is much worse for women who miscarry further along in their pregnancies, or for those who have very tramatic experiences during their miscarriage.  It was certainly worse for me the first time around (this is my second miscarriage).  I had a sneaking suspicion this pregnancy might not work out, and I promised myself I wouldn't be heartbroken if it didn't.  The timing is not ideal.  My daughter's 10th birthday is this afternoon.  I just hope I'm well enough to go.  Life doesn't stop because I'm miscarrying, which is another cross that women bear.  We still have mouths to feed, and duties to attend to.
But I suddenly had a gush of blood, and now I am lying in a rather large pool of it.  So I suppose that is all I can write for now. 

What is Attachment Parenting? (My response to the TIME cover)

You know that recent TIME magazine cover with the picture of the mom breastfeeding her son?  Ever since the cover went viral, I've been getting these looks.  Cautious, suspicious, curious.  I've been noticing looks from strangers as if to say "Oh, she's one of THOSE moms."  Do I wear a sign that says "I'm an attachment parent!  Feel free to stare"?  Well, at the grocery store, I do normally wrap my seven month old up on my back using a long piece of colored fabric, so I guess that's hard to miss.  But I feel there are a lot of misconceptions out there, so I'd like to clear a few things up.  To begin with, what is attachment parenting, and why would I practice it?

The subject of the TIME article, attachment parenting, is a style covered in Dr. Sears' The Baby Book. In his book, he explains that “the seven Baby B’s (birth bonding, breastfeeding, babywearing, bedding close to baby, belief in baby’s cries, beware of baby trainers, and balance) are starter tools (remember, tools not rules) to help parents and infants get to know each other better. And families can modify these tools to fit their individual family situation.” (Dr. Sears' facebook response toTIME's article) I first heard of attachment parenting right before my second daughter was born, in '06.  Far from being extreme, the ideas just made sense to me.

I went through such a hard start with my first daughter. We had a rough birth and a hard time breastfeeding. We didn't co-sleep, and rather than trying to follow my daughter's cues, I tried to fit her into a feeding schedule, which is (I think) what Dr. Sears means by baby trainers. In short, I wasn't much of an attachment parent-er. Not because I didn't want to be attached to my kid, but because parenting was really hard. My daughter cried a lot as a baby, because I would put her in her crib and try to get her to fall asleep at specific times. I would try to feed her at regular intervals, rather than watching her cues to see when she wanted to nurse. Trying to stick to a schedule caused a lot of frustration for both me and my daughter.

I didn't want to go through those frustrations again, so when I had my second daughter, I did things differently. I tried my hand at attachment parenting. I had a peaceful birth, with plenty of skin to skin contact afterwards. I breastfed her when she made the cue that meant she wanted to nurse. I carried her in a sling, especially when I couldn't find another way to get her to stop crying. I didn't stress nap times, but instead let her fall asleep when ever she got tired. We slept in the same bed, making night nursing sessions easier. To my delight, it worked. My life was easier. My daughter's life was easier. My house was usually quiet and peaceful, no baby crying! No mama crying! ;) So not only did I find that attachment parenting made sense after reading the whys and hows, I tried it and found it worked.

To be specific, I found that it made mom's and baby's lives easier. But in reality, that's not attachment parenting's goal. The goal is to create a secure bond with our children, a relationship that will withstand the hardships that our children may face in life. It has probably become so popular (at least in part), due to so many people of our generation feeling disconnected from our parents and others in our life. Probably because we want to be deeply connected to our loved ones, our family, our children. It's important for all of us to feel loved, listened to, cared for and connected, and we want our children to feel that way, too.

Now I practice attachment parenting with my son, who is seven months old. Although it hasn't always been a picnic, I'm glad to have these practices. I can only imagine how much harder the baby stage would be without them. The thing I love most about AP (attachment parenting), is the closeness I have with the little guy. It really brings out that intoxicating baby love, where you feel like you could just breath in the smell of him all day long. In my experience, it makes for very cuddly babies.But I am hoping that my efforts to practice attachment do more than help the baby stage.  My goal for my kids is to help them reach adulthood feeling secure and confident, able to make good decisions and build strong relationships.  I feel a close knit relationship with parents goes a long way towards helping kids get there.