One: From my “mommy years”. Too often, moms are the ones behind the camera, instead of in front of it – we can go for our children’s whole childhood with few images of ourselves interacting with our kids, and as Allison Tate pointed out, that’s sad (and problematic) for a variety of reasons.

But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons need to see how young and beautiful and human their mamas were. Our daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves — women, mamas, people living lives. Avoiding the camera because we don’t like to see our own pictures? How can that be okay?

I don’t know about other moms, but I sometimes take selfies with my kids to capture something we’re doing together. These are some of my favorite pictures, because we have to be snuggled pretty close to all get into the picture, so I get cuddles and also capture something about the moment – win! This reminds me of a story my mom used to tell about her favorite drivers’ license picture: I was with her at the dmv and wanted to be in the picture, and the lovely person working the photo area had me stand right in front of my mom (low enough that I wasn’t ACTUALLY in the picture, of course) and my mom had the best DMV smile ever. So there’s that.

The other thing is from my academia years, and it’s been a while since I’ve flexed those muscles but it’s something like this. When a woman takes a self portrait (and yes, even goofy selfies are a kind of self portrait) she’s making herself the object of the viewers gaze – but by taking the photo herself she’s also the one who chooses how to frame herself. I’m not suggesting that people are consciously thinking “what is the subject-object significance of this selfie” but they do decide “yes I want to share this picture of myself” or “nope, that’s not how I want to portray myself” – that’s giving a voice and power to the “subject” in a way that is really important and valuable and powerful.

I was struck today by the response to this “debate” (there’s that word again) on the internets. The #feministselfies were powerful and empowering, beautiful and goofy, poignant and snarky. Sharing real pictures of real people is empowering and subversive.

#feministselfie in a feminist shirt

Welcome to the July 2013 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Learning About Diversity

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how they teach their children to embrace and respect the variety of people and cultures that surround us. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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For Allan (1946-2013)

A few weeks ago, I attended a summit hosted by the Breastfeeding Coalition of Washington to begin to address issues of Inequity in Breastfeeding Support. The room was full of women – those who work professionally in the field of birth and breastfeeding support as lactation consultants and midwives, peer counselors (primarily working through WIC), women who do mother-to-mother support, and maybe most wonderful, the infants and toddlers and teenaged children of many of these women. Throughout the two day summit, we came together in groups – sometimes all together, sometimes by topic of interest, sometimes by professional affiliation, and sometimes by race. I participated in a session that reframed the “invisible knapsack” as an invisible “diaper bag” of white privilege (looking at the ways white privilege is hidden in the birth/breastfeeding/support process) – an exercise that was eye opening to me and the (mostly white) women at my table.

There was a lot of talk this weekend about what to do NEXT. It’s easy to say, “There aren’t enough images of women of color breastfeeding in our books and promotional materials. Let’s use different photos.” — it’s harder to figure out how to increase actual diversity on the board of directors of our professional organization or within communities. To have women of color represented in more than token fashion on a board of directors means having diversity within the membership from which we draw the board, which means diversity within the profession, which means increased educational access and breastfeeding rates, which means we have to go back and back and back to becoming aware of the inequities that permeate our culture and education.

I left the summit with my thoughts swirling. Talking about this stuff is HARD. It’s hard as a well-off white woman in the suburbs, who mostly works with other white women in the suburbs. It’s hard to know where to go and what to do next. But it’s so so important, and there was a room FULL of people who GOT that and are trying and that seems like the first chapter to a great book.

And the kids in the room — the babies at breast in the sessions, the toddlers playing on the floor, the older kids helping out and role-playing and carrying the mic around the room — maybe they won’t have to work so hard at this when they’re older.

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Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be updated by afternoon July 9 with all the carnival links.)

• A gift for my daugther — Amanda, a special education teacher for students with multiple exceptionalities, discusses at My Life in a Nutshell how she will enrich her daughter’s life by educating her the amazing gifts her students will bring to the world.
• The Beauty in Our Differences — Meegs at A New Day writes about her discussions with her daughter about how accepting ourselves and those around us, with all our beautiful differences and similarities, makes the world a better place.
• Accepting Acceptance and Tolerating Tolerance — Destany at They Are All of Me examines the origins of and reasons behind present day social conformity.
• Differences — sustainablemum discusses what she feels to be the important skills for embracing diversity in her family home.
• Turning Japanese — Erin Yuki at And Now, for Something Completely Different shares how she teaches her kiddos about Japanese culture, and offers ideas about “semi immersion” language learning.
• Celebrating Diversity at the International House Cottages — Mommy at Playing for Peace discovers the cultures of the world with her family at local cultural festivals
• Learning About Diversity by Honoring Your Child’s Multiple Heritages — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama looks at the importance of truly knowing your roots and heritage and how to help children honor their multiple heritages.
• People. PEOPLE! — Kellie at Our Mindful Life is trying to teach her children to use language that reflects respect for others, even when their language doesn’t seem to them to be disrespectful.
• Call Me Clarice, I Don’t Care – A True Message in Diversity — Lisa at The Squishable Baby knows that learning to understand others produces empathetic children and empathetic families.
• Diversity of Families — Family can be much more then a blood relation. Jana at Jananas on why friends are so important for her little family of three.
• Diverse Thoughts Tamed by Mutual Respect — Amy at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work thinks that diversity is indispensable to our vitality, but that all of our many differences require a different sort of perspective, one led by compassion and mutual respect.
• Just Shut Up! — At Old New Legacy, Becky gives a few poignant examples in her life when listening, communication and friendship have helped her become more accepting of diversity.
• The World is our Oyster — Mercedes at Project Procrastinot is thankful for the experiences that an expat lifestyle will provide for herself as well as for her children.
• Children’s black & white views (no pun intended … kind of) — Lauren at Hobo Mama wonders how to guide her kids past a childish me vs. them view of the world without shutting down useful conversation.
• Raising White Kids in a Multicultural World — Leanna at All Done Monkey offers her two cents on how to raise white children to be self-confident, contributing members of a colorful world. Unity in diversity, anyone?
• Ramadan Star and Moon Craft — Celebrate Ramadan with this star and moon craft from Stephanie at InCultureParent, made out of recycled materials, including your kid’s art!
• Race Matters: Discussing History, Discrimination, and Prejudice with Children — At Living Peacefully with Children, Mandy discusses how her family deals with the discrimination against others and how she and her husband are raising children who are making a difference.
• The Difference is Me – Living as the Rainbow Generation — Terri at Child of the Nature Isle, guest posting at Natural Parents Network, is used to being the odd-one-out, but walking an alternative path with children means digging deeper, answering lots of questions and opening to more love.
• My daughter will only know same-sex marriage as normal — Doña at Nurtured Mama realizes that the recent Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage will change the way she talks to her daughter about her own past.
• Montessori-Inspired Respect for Diversity — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now tells about her multicultural family and shares Montessori-inspired ideas for encouraging respect for diversity.
• EveryDay Diversity — Ana at Panda & Ananaso makes diversity a part of everyday living, focusing on raising of compassionate and respectful child.
• Diversity as Part of Life — Even though Laura at Authentic Parenting thought she had diversity covered, she found out that some things are hard to control.
• Inequity and Privilege — Jona is unpacking questions raised by a summit addressing inequity in breastfeeding support at Life, Intertwined.
• 3 Ways to Teach Young Children About Diversity — Charise at I Thought I Knew Mama recognizes her family’s place of privilege and shares how she is teaching her little ones about diversity in their suburban community.
• Teaching diversity: tales from public school — A former public high school teacher and current public school parent, Jessica at Crunchy-Chewy Mama values living in a diverse community.
• 30 Ideas to Encourage Learning about Diversity While Traveling — Traveling with kids can bring any subject alive. Dionna at Code Name: Mama has come up with a variety of ways you can incorporate diversity education into your family travels (regardless of whether you homeschool). From couch surfing to transformative reading, celebrate diversity on your next trip!
• Diversity, huh? — Jorje of Momma Jorje doesn’t do anything BIG to teach about diversity; it’s more about the little things.
• Chosen and Loved — From Laura at Pug in the Kitchen: Color doesn’t matter. Ethnicity doesn’t matter. Love matters.
• The One With The Bright Skin — Stefanie at Very Very Fine tries to recover from a graceless response to her son’s apparent prejudice.

I am at a place now where I think I need an outlet again. Post-relocation and the basics of settling in, and right in the midst of a new set of thoughts and concerns and hopes and dreams and sadnesses. Will I write frequently? Probably not.  But as I skimmed through the feeds that I transferred over, I felt a tug.  Blogging only ever worked for me when I needed it – not for an audience or self-promotion, but to record and process.  And right now? I think I need it.

My father used to sew, too – on the industrial Singer sewing machine he got from HIS father, who repaired them, oiling and tuning the machinery. When my dad was ready to part with it, I claimed it as my own, and he drove it down to me – three hours – and showed me how to tighten the leather belt, how to oil it. That machine sat in my workroom, unused once I upgraded to a shiny multi-function machine. I couldn’t part with it for years, though we finally sold it in preparation for this move. Instead of the machine, I am holding onto the memory of my father and my son, heads together, giving the machine its final tune-up before passing it along to a new home.

House hunting is hard. I feel like Goldilocks, only so far everything has been too small or too far or too new and nothing has been just right. I know it will come – the house that fits just right where we can put down roots is waiting for us, and we will find it.

And in the meantime, life goes on. We joined a gym with a shallow pool where the kids can play (and a kids play program three mornings a week so I can get at least a bit of a break from full time parenting). We have gone exploring – to the local library, retail, and off to a cute small town where we walked along the river and wandered into an antiques shop.

We aren’t settled yet, but we are close – and when the right house in the right neighborhood comes along, we will be ready to settle in and stay for a while. I just hope our “just right” comes along soon.

And now the flip side seems to be true for me – the bigger the event, the more significant the news, the less I am able to capture the moments – to hold onto them, find their significance, recount them. Current happenings in our lives are so big I cannot begin to capture them completely, and so I freeze up and don’t even begin. But without the baby steps, the mini-moments along the way, the major event looms larger and even harder to capture. And so I will begin.

—

We are on the cusp of a different sort of two week wait. In another time, on another journey, the two week wait was a pause, the great unknown. Are we or aren’t we? What if? When will we know? This time, the two week wait is a countdown to a known endpoint. In two weeks, movers will arrive at our house to pack up all of our things, load them on a giant truck (we have a LOT of things), and move them 1200 miles away to our next big adventure.

But the ambiguity remains. What will come next? Where will this journey take us? (And more concretely: Where will we be living after our month of temporary housing? What school will the kids attend in the fall? Can I sign the kids up for summer camp from afar? And so on, into the night.)

I don’t know how much of this journey I will be able to capture, but I’ll try, lest my grown-up diary journal turn into an abandoned chronicle.

I am a planner by nature. A researcher. Collector of details and tidbits. The state of unknown is unnerving. I over-research – there are so many options – and then I pull myself to a halt. Breathe, I say. Wait.

—

I know it’s February, but I had planned to write about New Year’s Resolutions sometime in January. If I were a person who made resolutions of the goal-setting type, I might resolve to follow through on planned posts. But instead, I view the new year as an opportunity to look back, then look forward. To focus and set goals. To see what’s working and what could change.

I do this in the Fall, too. The combination of the Jewish New Year and the start of a new school year always seems a time of reassessment and refresh.

I am making some commitments this year. To improve my health, both physical and mental. To connect more with my family. To continue to work for a better world for my children. I know self-help seminars suggest setting small, manageable goals but I think sometimes what I’m missing is a sense of focus, a way to help direct and reign in my scattered thoughts, procrastination, distraction. I think a set of broad goals or commitments, posted on the wall or scrawled in my journal, easy to look to when I feel myself wandering. Does this work toward one of my goals? What could I be doing differently to get back on my path?

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It’s easy to get paralyzed by the unknown. I have found myself hunkered down, scared to move forward because I don’t know where I’m going. But staying frozen is not the answer. I am casting my net wide, keeping options open, until the path becomes clear and I can focus again.

This is the sound of one voice
One spirit, one voice
The sound of one who makes a choice
This is the sound of one voice

Midwife Karen Feltham is a Clinical Instructor of Nursing at Binghamton University, and a volunteer with Circle of Health International, an organization working with women and their communities in times of crisis and disaster to ensure access to quality reproductive, maternal and newborn care. She visited Haiti shortly after the massive earthquake two years ago to help provide maternity care to women in around Fond Parisien, Haiti (30 miles east of Port-au-Prince), and is volunteering her time and expertise for a return trip this month.

This is the sound of voices two
The sound of me singing with you
Helping each other to make it through
This is the sound of voices two

The Fond Parisien birth center is staffed by two Haitian midwives and serves more than 2,000 women a year. The midwives provide high quality care and effectively manage routine births, but outcomes for mothers and babies could be improved with additional training and support. Birth Centers like the one at Fond Parisian provide a model of care for other areas in Haiti and around the world, where maternal mortality is at the highest rate in the Western Hemisphere, with 630 deaths per 100,000 live births (compared to 11 deaths per 100,000 births in the US).

This is the sound of voices three
Singing together in harmony
Surrendering to the mystery
This is the sound of voices three

The midwives at the clinic provide high quality care for the women they serve, however outcomes for both mothers and their babies could be improved with additional training and support. During Karen’s visit, she will provide peer-to-peer support to the two local midwives, and will work toward three specific goals:

1. Review existing protocols for managing emergencies and deciding when to transfer to the local hospital. Provide clinical support and skill-building where it could improve outcomes for Haitian women and their babies. Karen says, “The midwives have good skills, but they don’t have an emergency plan. If you take some simple steps – like having all of your equipment in the same place every time, and deciding beforehand who is responsible for what in an emergency, it can make all the difference.”
2. Run emergency drills using improved protocol for complications most likely to be seen at the clinic, including shoulder dystocia and postpartum hemorrhage.
3. Improve monitoring processes so that the clinic can evaluate their existing protocols and make improvements based on evidence, not just anecdotal understanding.

This is the sound of all of us
Singing with love and the will to trust
Leave the rest behind it will turn to dust
This is the sound of all of us

Karen is donating her time, but needs transportation to Haiti (about $800 in airfare and local travel) and room and board on the compound where the birth center is located (about $300). The wonderful ladies of  BirthSwell are collaborating with COHI on a grassroots fundraising campaign to support Karen’s travel expenses, and I’ve signed on as a sponsor to help spread the word. While larger donations are of course welcome, the goal of the campaign is to bring in many many small donations, which will add up to help us reach our goal and get Karen to Haiti.

We need your help!

This is the sound of one voice
One people, one voice
A song for every one of us
This is the sound of one voice
This is the sound of one voice*

*The lyrics are “One Voice” by the Wailin’ Jennys. They’re not affiliated with the event at all, I just really love this song and thought it fit beautifully.

I wanted to say Don’t worry about the people who are glaring. They are, it’s true, but you won’t see them again and anyway they’ve either been there or will be there or aren’t parents and don’t get it.

People always tell you how fast the time will move, but it’s hard to grasp until you’re in that moment, thinking “I was there, not that long ago, and it all seems so distant now.”

The transition to kindergarten has not been entirely smooth. Despite years spent in a full-day preschool, the kindergarten environment is… different. More kids, fewer teachers. More work, less play. More waiting, less fun.

Some roughness in the transition is to be expected, of course. The shift from a play-based, nurturing environment to a focus on curriculum, benchmarks, evaluation would be rough under the best of circumstances. And these are not the best circumstances. There are 25 kids in each class, with one teacher and no aide. This seems to be about average in our school system, but that doesn’t make it okay. It means some kids are being pushed too hard, and some kids are bored. Some kids have never been in any preschool program – they need to learn how to line up, how to raise their hands, wait their turns. Some kids do not know how to hold a pencil or write their names. And others are reading and doing math problems. With 25 students, one teacher – no matter how experienced – can’t meet each child where they are, as individuals. There is, by necessity, some grouping, pushing, waiting. It is not – cannot be – a system of individualized learning.

I don’t know how much of our rough patch is simply a response to the challenge of transition itself – of newness and settling. How much is best handled through perseverance and cheerfulness, on getting through each day and thinking it will get easier and easier. On pushing through when something is hard – even if it’s the transition and not the work itself. Or, whether this really is too much. That even at it’s best, it’s not enough. That the crying and clinging and transition challenges are the warning signs that this is not the place for us.

My wish for my children – and for each child in their classes – is to be met where they are, nurtured and encouraged. Challenged and pushed to achieve their best – whatever that is. For some kids, that may be learning how to be away from home, how to follow instructions, how to write their letters. For some kids, that may be reading or writing stories, doing math problems or science experiments.

I don’t claim that my kids are geniuses, that they need special treatment or special schools. They need what every kid needs – to be met where they are, to be challenged and encouraged, supported and nurtured. And right now, they’re being let down.

They all are.