Last weekend I was feeling pretty crappy, and took a walk with the baby down by the Cedar River.  The salmon had started coming back, and I watched them from the bridge while she slept on me in the baby carrier.  As we walked further down the river, I saw the great blue heron, juvenile mergansers that must be this spring's successful  hatchlings, a humming bird in the fuchsias, and many many different water birds once we reached Lake Washington.  The park along the river looked like the landscapers had been thinking of autumn when they planted -- bright red bushes, red rose hips, purple blackberries, blue berries on an ornamnetal shrub.  It was beautiful, and I felt renewed by the beauty of the colors, and by the proximity to the more-than-human world of the birds and fish. 
I am the only one awake in the house now at 10pm, but Ramona is sleeping restlessly, and I'll have to take her to the potty and nurse her back to sleep soon.  The hardest thing about parenting is not getting to choose anymore what my days look like.  It's all about her needs right now, and I try to get myself on her schedule, avoid the things that I don't want her to be exposed to.  But sometimes I have to sneak grownup time, and hopefully our hour of watching the news tonight won't rot her brain too badly.  Hopefully public radio playing in the background all the time will not give her ADD.  Work is nice because there I can focus on accomplishing tasks, which can be so difficult on baby-time at home.  I am ambivalent about returning to birth work, which requires me to give so much of myself, like mothering also does.

I am so grateful to have been able to make it out to the organic farm to pick chard and blackberries.  The chard I froze, the berries I made into canned jam for Solstice gifts.  Now, I have apples and pears cooking down into fruit butter on the stove, which I picked from the orchard on the land where my father lives.  Participating in the journey of food from farm to kitchen and then to a friend or into my own body is satisfying and meaningful for me.  It connects me to the bigger cycles, to the wheel of the year, which just turned to autumn with the Equinox last week.  Certainly, I feel the wheel turn this year.  Ramona is saying "mama" and "dada," the first harvest of all the language she has heard and the love we have given her these past seven months.  I am reaping the fruits of the seeds we have sown, figuratively and literally, as big changes come down the pike for our little family. 

I am so grateful to have found a job back with my old employer in a new part-time position with flexible hours to allow for mothering and eventually midwifery apprenticeship.  Jamie and I will now spend just about equal time away from home doing paid work, and equal time at home with the babe.  When I told a friend about this, he gave me kudos for putting my gender equity money where my mouth was, but that's not why I wanted to do this.  Jamie's been miserable at work, and although being an at-home parent is no cake-walk, we both love spending time with Ramona, and I think part of Jamie's unhappiness has been missing his time with her.  We'll both have the joy of coming home to her after a day at work, along with the joy of waking up in the morning with a whole day filled with her ahead of us.  And the added bonus of saying fuck you to traditional gender roles. 

I am so grateful that I Jamie and I love mothering my daughter, but I'm shocked by the way my mothering is policed.  At my 10 year high-school reunion, another woman with a baby approached me and gushed, "Don't you just LOVE being a mom?"  Pushing the stroller with the sleeping baby in it the other day, lost in thought, a stranger said to me, "Smile when you do that, that's the joy of your life."  And I do, and it is, but what did they know about it?  As a woman, I'm supposed to be Joyfully consumed by my baby, and otherwise happily vacant.   Jamie, however, is not really supposed to be as absorbed with Ramona, but plagued by a general anxiety about financially supporting us.  He isn't expected to smile.  And then there are the people who are shocked to hear that she's a girl, just because she isn't wearing a dress or pink or ruffles.  There are people that expect us to introduce formula, have her sleep in her crib, follow the CDC vaccination schedule, put her in day care, and on and on.  I'm glad that we're strong enough to figure out what works for us as parents without paying attention to what everyone else thinks our parenting ought to look like. 

Had a day back working at the women's reproductive health clinic on Friday.  It was a good day.  I've been thinking lately that Ramona doesn't seem to be eating very often these days (the world's too exciting for her to waste time nursing!), but in the 10 hours I was away, I pumped 12 oz of milk.  I guess she's just a very effective nurser these days, and those little two to five minute feeds are actually really getting her milk.  I felt very accomplished with my jar full of milk at the end of the day.  I also really enjoyed working -- reconnecting with the other ladies that work at the clinic, making connections with that day's patients, and having everybody tell me what a cutie Ramona is were all lovley.  I didn't worry at all about daddy and baby at home together, and that felt good too, especially becuase they did actually have a nice day together.  When I got home, Ramona looked from me to Jamie and back again, and just smiled so big.  She likes it when our family is all together, and so do we. 

Remembering to trust that things will work out, even if I don't know how, is a major struggle in my life.  Rob Brezney of Free Will Astrology coined the term "pronoia,"  the sense that the universe is conspiring to do you good.  I am seeing the fruits of my pronia these days as the world around me reflects back the intentions I set.  I had said that I hoped I would find a new preceptor in the midwives who attened my birth, and that is in the words for the winter.  I have been saying that when Ramona was 6 months old, I'd start figuring out about work.  Now, I have hours available at the clinic, plus a new job opportunity that I'm pursuing which would be a litle more flexible, allow Jamie to cut back his work hours, and combine nicely with apprenticeship and on-call life.  These days, we talk about moving to the Oregon coast when I get my CPM to live there and set up my midwifery practice.  I find myself more able to believe that it will truly come to pass as I see these other intentions turning into realities.  I'm grateful. 

And a moment on the soapbox:  The federal Health and Human Services has proposed a regulation change that would expand the right of refusal to provide abortions for federal employees, and the wording is wonky enough that it may include the right to refuse contraception, and covery any type of employee rather than just doctors.  Head over to the ACLU website and let HHS know that this is ridiculous at
http://action.aclu.org/hhs_comment.  And if you or anyone you know has given birth in the past few years, I encourage you/them to take this survey http://www.thebirthsurvey.com/ which will compile consumer's comments on birth care and care providers to help other families be able to make informed choices about birth care. 

Jamie and the baby are napping, but though I'm exhausted, I'm also restless.  Jamie has one more week left of his leave, and while he contemplates returning to a workplace which is not quite the same, I contemplate what it will mean to be at home with Ramona.   I hope we settle into a routine that involves my schoolwork getting done, the house remaining acceptably clean, and plenty of quality time.  I can easily see any one of these three taking most of my time -- hoping to find balance.  We've had an amazing babymoon, and are especially lucky that it was three moons long.  Now to be done with mooning, to create the new normal, but not get to used to it, as I'll have to find paying work at some point, and I still have no idea what that will look like.  There is no such thing as getting back to normal after having a kid, there is only going forward into the unknown.  I can't imagine not being with Ramona all the time right now, and I hope that it's not as hard on Jamie as I think it would be on me.