Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (113 page)

Here’s my advice:

Hold off on vaccinations until babies are at least three months old—especially if you have a family history of ADHD, autism, allergies, type 1 diabetes, or asthma. Natural health expert Joseph Mercola, D.O., writes on his website (
www.mercola.com
) about research done in Japan where DPT immunization was delayed until children were two years old. The study reports that these children experienced 85 to 90 percent fewer severe complications than babies who received the vaccine at three to five months.

Limit the number of vaccinations given at one time.

Avoid vaccines containing mercury. (Call ahead to ask your doctor to check the package insert to see if the vaccine contains mercury, and if it does, ask for a different type.)

Don’t immunize your child if she’s sick or fighting an infection. If the baby’s immune system is already working overtime, a vaccine will unnecessarily stress it further.

Be selective about the vaccines your child receives. I am not a fan of the chicken pox vaccine, for example, because this disease is very benign in the vast majority of children, but more severe for adults who contract it. If all children are vaccinated against chicken pox, they won’t get natural lifelong immunity, and then more people will get this disease as adults and when pregnant, when its effects are much more serious. Similarly, I also don’t recommend the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine until a girl is old enough to get pregnant because those who get it in childhood may well have fewer antibodies against rubella in adulthood, when immunity is important to prevent infection in pregnancy. I would also hold off on vaccinating a newborn for hepatitis B unless a parent or family member had active hepatitis B when the child was born.

If you’re breast-feeding, increase your intake of vitamin C to about 3,000 mg both before and after your child’s immunization, because the vitamin will pass into the breast milk and help protect the child against tissue damage.

Don’t make vaccines your primary way of preventing illnesses while ignoring other aspects of immunity and health.

For more information on vaccines, I recommend reading
Saying
No to Vaccines: A Resource Guide for All Ages
(NMA Press, 2008) by osteopathic physician Sherri Tenpenny, an expert on the adverse effects of vaccines who substantiates her work with citations directly from CDC documents and respected, peer-reviewed journals, offering irrefutable facts that fly in the face of information generally regarded as truth in traditional medical circles. Also see Dr. Tenpenny’s website, the Vaccine Information Center, at
http://drtenpenny.com
.

MOTHERING IN A DOMINATOR CULTURE:
THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD

The only thing that seems eternal and natural in motherhood is
ambivalence.

—Jane Lazare

Some women say that the most fulfilling time of their mothering was when their babies were small. Others find it exhausting. For me, having young children was—bar none—the most taxing part of my life, a time that I wouldn’t care to repeat again unless I had two beloved nannies, sisters, or friends living with me full-time to help with child care.

The author Lynn Andrews once wrote that there are two kinds of mothers: Earth Mothers and Creative Rainbow Mothers. Earth Mothers thrive on nurturing and feeding. Our society rewards this kind of woman as the “good mother.”

Creative Rainbow Mothers, on the other hand, inspire their chil dren without necessarily having meals on the table on time. I know that, beyond a doubt, I’m a Creative Rainbow Mother. I once read the cookbook
Laurel’s
Kitchen
and fantasized about how wonderful it would be to bake bread daily, relish being what Laurel calls the “Keeper of the Keys,” and create that ever-important nurturing home space. But this is not who I am—and to have tried to be something I wasn’t ultimately would have done my children and me a great disservice. I love to be alone. I love to read. I love quiet and music and writing. My soul is fed by long hours of unbroken creative time. Young children require a much different type of energy—a type of energy I don’t have in abundance.

When my children were little, I became aware of how difficult it is for women to do
anything
for themselves with little children around. Children get and keep our attention through any means possible. They are phenomenal little energy suckers. (I don’t blame them for this—it’s normal. They’re developing healthy egos when they are young. Our culture, however, expects
mothers
alone to meet all their children’s attention needs. This is a setup.)

Roughly one-third of all children in this country—more than 24 million— live apart from their fathers.
²⁹
“Among the children of divorce,” writes Ellen Goodman, “half have never visited their father’s home. In a typical year, 40 percent of them don’t see their father. One out of five haven’t seen their father in five years. . . . It is no wonder that the search for a man missing in the action of parenthood is such a recurrent theme in our culture and conversation these days.”
³⁰

Sometimes a woman with young children needs free time, space, and sleep. But for many, there’s no one to take over the burden of raising a child. I once said to Anne Wilson Schaef that I thought the optimal adult-child ratio was three adults to one child. “I think your workaholism is showing,” she replied. Then she went on to tell me about an Aboriginal culture of Australia she had recently visited where all of the mother’s sisters—the child’s aunts— are considered the child’s mothers. All the father’s brothers—the uncles—are considered the fathers. If you ask an Aboriginal child who her mother is, she will point not only to her biological mother but to all her aunts as well. Same with the father. If her biological mother feels the need to go on a “walkabout”—a spiritual initiation—she knows that the child always has a place in the group and is not dependent solely on her, as children so often are in our patriarchal society.

Can you even begin to imagine what life would be like for women if they didn’t have the crushing responsibility to provide most of their children’s emotional and physical nurturing? What would it be like if we knew that our society would care for our child if we had to work late at the office one night? What would it be like if a woman could still pursue her own interests, even if she had just had a baby? What if we lived in a society in which a woman didn’t have to choose between her needs, those of her job, and those of her family? Dream on that for a while.

None of us, male or female, should have to be a prisoner in our own home caring for young children for hours each day without meeting our adult needs for rest, conversation, time alone, and creative pursuits. I remember that the best time I ever had with my children when they were little (three months and two years) was when I went to visit my mother while my sister and her children were visiting. My sister was also nursing a baby at the time, so when I wanted to go out for a while, she simply nursed Kate for me, as women have been doing for centuries. (Kate looked up at her, wide-eyed, the first time, as if to say, “Who is this?” Then she settled right down to her meal.) Our children played together happily, and I was able to enjoy the company of adults
at the same time
that I was enjoying my children. This was my only experience of what a loving tribe must have felt like. On a recent trip to Italy, it was clear to me that everyone in the village cared for the children— not just their mothers.