Our Favorite Guest Writers

Happy Birthday, J.D.
Mary Litchfield Tuel – 5 January

Our older son, John Devon, or JD as he goes, was born 28 years ago tomorrow morning. A friend told me the other day that she had found a 1982 journal which she never used, and hey, guess what? 1982 and 2010 are the same! So she's using her 1982 journal this year.

So it was on a rainy Monday night 28 years ago I was lying on the couch watching a PBS version of “The Elephant Man.” It was a play, I think – it was not the movie of the same name that starred John Hurt and was a big hit at the time. So I was lying on the couch when I felt a “woosh” of water coming out of me.

Oh great, I thought. I've finally lost complete control of my bladder.

So I went to empty out what was left in my bladder, I thought, and was most intrigued to see little white specks of something floating around in the urine. I called my midwife, Susan Anemone, to report this strange turn of events, and she said, “Oh! Your water's broken! You're going to go into labor!” She was very chipper about it. I was stunned.

You'd think that nine months would be enough to prepare for giving birth. That's what nature gives you, more or less, in the usual order of things. I had wallowed in being pregnant. Loved to go around telling people how much I was enjoying pregnancy, I felt great, and that was true. When I was pregnant, my migraines went away, for one thing, and that was like being let out of prison. So I loved it. I read books and waddled around with a big grin and generally acted and felt like I was the only woman who had ever conceived a child. So, hurray, pregnancy.

Of course there was that point about half way through when I sat down and sobbed because of the lonely truth that there was only one way that baby was coming out, and it wasn't going to feel good. I was scared of labor. I was even more scared of how my life would be after the baby came. I would never have a private moment again. My days of puttering around the quiet house with classical music playing in the background were going to be over. These are the fears of a person who had never had much to do with children. I was right about that loss of privacy and solitude, but oh well.

There was a huge storm that night of January 4-5. We were swamped with snow. Down in California the rains were torrential. Mudslides in the Santa Cruz Mountains killed people that night, and elsewhere Highway 101 was closed by slides. I've heard since that many babies are born on stormy nights. Something about the drop in the barometric pressure, or something, sets off labor.

We were snowed in and all the plumbing frozen for days after John Devon was born. I finally begged, nagged, and entreated Rick to make it possible for me to take a bath. He took pity and thawed out the plumbing. I showered and was so happy.

But that night, that snowy stormy night, there I was about to be a mother and not believing it. Could this really be happening? Proof was soon to strike in the form of labor.

The first contraction hit about ten to midnight, and hit is the right word. Holy gazoly. There was no gradual build-up in intensity – it was just bang, hard labor, right now. Contractions that knocked me down and took my wallet.

Rick timed the contractions and breathed with me, and after a while we thought we should call Susan and ask her to come. She lived two or three miles up the Westside Highway from us. She was one of the founders of the Seattle Midwifery School, and the plan was for one of her partners to catch a ferry and come over when I went into labor. Well, it was two in the morning and there was a raging blizzard. She realized that she was going to have to improvise.

Susan woke up her husband, Barry, bundled up their nine-week-old son, Gabriel, and they traveled the two or three miles to our house in the snow. It took them about 45 minutes.

By this time I was completely lost in labor. My leg muscles were quivering like jelly and I really didn't see how I was going to make it through, but somewhere in there I decided that since I'd made it this far, I might as well carry on. Nice when reason decides to defer to reality.

Susan put Gabriel to bed in the crib that was waiting for our baby, and she and Barry and Rick were my team, coaching me, encouraging me, telling me what a good job I was doing. About five in the morning she said I was ready to push, and I did, for about forty minutes, and then, at ten to six in the morning of January 5, 1982, almost exactly six hours after the first contraction, our baby boy came out to meet the outer world.

He was, of course, the most beautiful thing we'd ever seen. We were instantly in love, absolutely mad with adoration for this child. Barry and Rick pulled the labor sheets off the bed, and removed the plastic sheeting that had kept a set of sheets underneath clean, and baby John Devon and I crawled in to have a well-deserved rest, after first calling the relatives, of course. Susan and Barry took Gabriel (who had slept through the whole thing) home.

The world outside was a snowy wonderland, and the world inside was the world of baby love. We were well and truly besotted, as most new parents are, and so taken with this tiny miracle.

Another midwife had given me the lowdown on children when I was pregnant: “This kid is going to give you some knocks.” I'm not sure why she said it; maybe I was so naive that she felt the need to slap me around with a little reality. I was a little shocked, and a little hurt. My baby was an angel, my baby...

Well, 28 years on I'd say she had a good point, but I'm not sure I needed to hear it mid-pregnancy. The dashing of parental dreams happens in its own time, naturally. Babies turn out to be children, and children become teenagers, and teenagers become adults, and by that time a parent's innocent dreams of long ago are a dim memory. I know I had them. They have been overwritten by 28 years of days.

JD, it was a good day when you were born. We were so happy. We had never loved anybody like we loved you, and that memory is not dim at all. It is bright and I can feel that love all over again thinking about that time.

Happy 28th birthday, kid.

And our pal, Susan Bardwell, from the Weekly Journal of Angleton TX, writes:

Trying to grasp Haiti's need
By S.K. Bardwell – Mon 18 January

I doubt if I can come anywhere near comprehending what it’s like in Haiti now. I try, though, every time I watch the news.

I try to imagine the fear, the despair, the hunger and thirst, the exhaustion, the sleeplessness, the stench, the bugs. Searching for and not finding loved ones. The inability to find out what’s going on. The powerlessness.

All I have to draw on are the aftermaths of hurricanes Alicia and Ike. I spent a couple of weeks sweltering without electricity in both cases, and had to drive a long way to find ice. It made me feel vulnerable, and sorry for myself. The video from Haiti makes me ashamed that I complained.

Electricity is the least of the Haitians’ concerns. There is no safe place to sleep, no water, no food, no transportation, no medical care. The incidence of malaria, dengue, HIV and tuberculosis in Haiti was high before the earthquake. So was malnourishment.

One of the reasons I cannot imagine what it’s like in Haiti is that it isn’t just a city that’s devastated, or an area comparable to our county, or even a state. Their whole nation is ruined.

Try and imagine something that would stop our entire nation. I either can’t, or don’t want to. Haitians cannot look for any help from within its borders. It must depend “on the kindness of strangers.” That would be frightening too, I think.

The U.S. is behaving as I like it to behave, for the most part. The government, from the White House to the states to small towns across the nation, are sending whatever help they can muster – medical supplies, food, water, skilled workers.

I can’t help thinking of the boatloads of Haitian refugees turned away from our country in 2004, when the fights among Aristide’s military troops and rebel forces were killing thousands of Haitians, and the survivors couldn’t find work, or food, or even safe places to hide.

President Bush warned the Haitians not to come here to escape the political turmoil, that they’d be sent back. And they were, without hearings. Later in 2004, the violence caused Aristide himself to flee, and he remains in exile now in South Africa.

I see, by the way, that Aristide now wishes to return to Haiti to help it rebuild. I’m afraid I suspect his motives. It isn’t just our government that’s reaching out to Haiti now. People everywhere are doing what they can to help, from donating money to pushing for permission to bring orphaned Haitian children here.

Catholic Charities and a number of South Florida immigrant rights organizations are heading up that push, and the Archdiocese of Miami reports that it has received so many calls from people willing to care for Haitian children, it cannot keep count.

Some of you may remember the Pedro Pan operation that Catholic Charities organized and ran from 1960 to 1962. In all, 14,048 children were spirited alone to the U.S. mainland from Cuba, which at that time was engulfed in its own political turmoil.

Some of the children were later reunited with their families, if their families were able to make it here. Others went to foster homes or were adopted.

Here’s what lifts my spirits: Many of the calls made to the Archdiocese of Miami by those wishing to care for at-risk Haitian children, came from “Pedro Pans” who remain grateful for their rescue, and want to pass it on.

The kindness of strangers can be a beautiful thing.

Freedom from lobbyists
By Garrison Keillor | July 8, 2009
http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/07/08/healthcare/index.html

What's good for the drug companies may not be so good for the hapless pedestrian

It was a good Fourth of July where I was – no Republicans or Democrats, just a crowd of sunburned people sitting on the grass, and a brass band played amid the smell of hot dogs, and Clarence and Ralph, two World War II vets, described their European tour of 1944-45 from Normandy through the Hurtgen Forest, and it was duly noted that the Revolution was not going well in the summer of 1776 when Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Hancock put their names to the Declaration of Independence, an act of treason and great bravado, and then the crowd stood and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and discovered that, in the key of G, it is a fine piece of music and very singable. And people know the words.

It's interesting about the national anthem: First of all, nobody really wants to sing it, and if there's a soloist we won't, but if someone asks us to sing it and gives us a note and a downbeat we jump to our feet and sing and once we're into it, we love it. It is powerful and moving and when we hold the note on "free" and the sopranos wail, it's opera.

This simple less-is-more approach is the genius of conservatism – get out of their way and the people will provide – and it holds true in many areas of life, such as education, the arts, broiling hamburgers (a committee around the grill is always going to overcook the food), and not so much in others, such as national defense, bank regulation and healthcare.

In the past two weeks, I've attended two benefit concerts to raise money for musicians to pay their medical bills, and that is just ridiculous. Why should anyone, least of all a valuable contributing member of society, have to pass the hat to pay the doctor? But there I was, watching one of America's few true-blue cowboy singers hoist himself on crutches onto the stage to sing "The Old Chisholm Trail" as we put our twenties in the pot to pay for his pelvis, broken when a horse threw him. A cowboy singer can only afford the $10,000 deductible health plan, so that means that he must sell Old Paint or become a charity case.

Meanwhile, a friend visiting London forgets to look to the right while crossing the street and gets whacked by a taxi and is scooped up and taken to the hospital with a broken leg where – wait for it – nobody ever asks him for an insurance card, they just go about doing what needs to be done. A civilized people, whatever you may think of the beer, that they treat a fallen American the same as if he were one of them.

Health insurance is the business that Congress is taking up this summer with the help of hundreds of high-paid lobbyists, many of them former congressmen or congressional staffers, all of them arguing for schemes that will be good for the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies and not necessarily good for the cowboy or the careless pedestrian. Reports the size of Sears catalogs will be circulated, and smart men and women smelling of citrus and sandalwood will argue persuasively and extensively for all points of view.

Our representatives will face pages and pages of statistics, acres of numerals, and even as they wander in the great fog of data and expertise, they will be at least as confused as the rest of us. Somehow out of this dance hall and sausage mill will come legislation that must stand the light of day, a miracle if it should happen, and then we shall see if the common good was served or if we have been sold down the river into the hands of cheats and scoundrels.

I shall not be spending my summer in Washington being lectured to on healthcare issues by self-important people. I plan to write a novel instead, a genre of literature that is deeply and sincerely authoritarian. I get to decide who is in it, and I plan to include a blizzard and some ghosts and a goose dinner. I work at home, whenever I feel like it, and then once a week I write a column in which I may, if I wish, castigate public servants for their lack of heroism. I tell you, this is a great country for the indolent and the callow.

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