A week old or so

Yums

el baby daddy

oldie but goodie

I predict I won’t be around much. I don’t desire having a mommy blog like I used to. I really love staying at home with Lou-cici and have been doing very little outside of being her mommy 24 tittie 7. G’bye!!

“You’re about to take the biggest most beautiful shit of your life!”

The contractions got more painful but not closer together. Marc and I walked to Xalisco, where we met our friend Alex. CNN pulsated on the flatscreen. I ordered the Mexi-Bowl.

“Ay mi’ja, when are you having your baby?”

Today! Today was October 30th, a Thursday, and all the chattering and TV in Xalisco annoyed me as my uterus began to feel more squished and my back more pinched. I called my midwife and sensed that she didn’t really believe me. I kind of didn’t believe me either; my due date was a month away and I had no idea what labor really felt like!

Later, I would stand in the shower and let steaming water hit my back. And soak in a tub, requesting that Marc bring me a cup to pee in so I wouldn’t have to get out. Around five PM I began to feel rather scared. The pain was beginning to make me very uncomfortable, and I wanted my mommy. Honestly. So we drove to my mom’s. The pain began to take on sharper tones on the drive over there… I discovered the joy of crying out. I cried out in pain like Ohhhhhhh!

At my mom’s, I began to bleed and I felt the strange sensation of stretching, almost tearing. Ohhhhhh! I spent a lot of time on all fours on my mom’s couch, my sisters myspacing and texting away nearby. My mom showed Marc how to effectively apply pressure to my lower back, something I began to beg for when the contractions came every few minutes. It was surreal; there was the clench of the eyes and jaw that suddenly reopened to let out a slow howl and then silence and for me, pure black as I didn’t open my eyes. I just relished the quietude between contractions. And eventually, I began to dread the next contraction. I remember thinking there was noooo fucking way my pelvis and back could hurt any more without me fainting. The contraction after that musing was terrifying: I suddenly had the urge to bear down, and I couldn’t help it! And I was still at my mom’s house, thirty minutes away from the birthing center!

“We have to go right now!”

The midwife didn’t really believe Marc when he said I was unable to bear any more pain and felt like pushing. Apparently first-time mothers don’t give birth very quickly. She ordered Marc, who was driving my sisters in a different car than my mom and I were in, to go get me some fruit.

I stopped yelling and starting puffing. I couldn’t help pushing. The urge was unstoppable- my baby was trying to escape on the freeway!

We arrived at 9:50PM, my dress soaking with amniotic fluid and me swearing that I could feel the baby in my coochie. For some reason, the midwife still did not think I was about to give birth and had the student midwife check my progress in the clinic. Ten centimeters and a bag of waters clogging my coochie! It was too late to go to the birthing rooms, I was gonna have to give birth right there on the clinic chair! And Marc was still at the store.

I began to feel what we called ‘indian’ burn as children- in my coochie. The baby was crowning! The contractions were barely a minute apart and lasted more than a minute. I felt like I was losing control, and I kept shrieking “Where’s Marc?!”

I must have had another couple of contractions because there are a few minutes that are blurry in memory. I remember Marc arriving and the midwives encouraging me to press my feet into their hips. They braced their selves against my fierce pushing.

I felt the last unbelievable stretch of my skin. Then a smooth gliding sensation.

Everyone in the room forgot to check the gender of the baby as we stared. Transfixed.

She let out lusty cries and flailed her little arms. She quieted on my stomach as they cleaned her and I rubbed her all over. Marc and I spent the night in one of the birthing rooms, slept on the comfy beds and sipped on the apple juice they supplied.

I don’t know what to say. It’s been a month since. She loves the milk I make special for her in my chi chis. People call her princess. She had a full head of straight black hair at birth. She rarely cries. We cuddle to sleep. Marc has been doing everything around the house since I’ve got a miniature person attached to my chest most of the time. She makes a fish face. Her poops are explosive and loud. She follows people and things around. She projectile shits on me every once in a while. She is ‘sitting’ in my lap right now, asleep, and I am typing with my left arm in a very painful position.

Lucia Demarco

I felt so goddamn scared last night. I told Marc I didn’t wanna succumb to the romance myth. That we can’t treat each other as if we dislike each other just because we see nothing but each other all day. We have to keep a good grip. We have to be realistic for Lucia. We can’t pretend to love absolutely everything about each other because damnit, I don’t. He doesn’t. This is a talk for another time- Lucia is stirring and my chi chis are starting to dribble.

Worse to Come: The Bush Presidency is Over/Baby Einstein and the Bush Administration: There’s More Than Meets the Eye
Marketing Violence: The Special Toll on Young Children of Color
Last Minute Halloween costumes for Kids (lol)

We also stole our neighbors’ dog. They had him in a dark shed with no food or water and he was crying for two days straight. He stopped crying as soon as I stepped in front of the shed and I couldn’t leave him there. When I stuck my hand into the shed, he was so beside himself that there was company that he kept toppling over his own feet. Turns out he has roundworm and ringworm. We got him some dewormer at the vet and some antifungal soap and ointment at HEB. Stache is sleeping at my parents’ house for a few nights until we disinfect our house and treat the puppy. He’s only 8wks old! He looks like a pit bull, but kind of like a bulldog too. He’s just too young to know. But he is definitely a puppy. He chews on everything and his pee puddles are the size of a silver dollar. Hahaha just what we need at this high-stress time! Seriously, we’re trying to buy all the baby’s stuff and get the vaccination research done in time for the baby’s arrival. A puppy is not on the agenda. But he has encouraged us to take it easy and laugh.

So, free puppy who will be at tallest 21inches (according to the vet) and may be at least half pit bull. Still too young to have been too traumatized by his alone time and very, very alert. We’ve been feeding him garlic and unfluoridated water to help his immune system recover fully.

Something that has been irking the shit out of me is how lucky I am, just to have been born to a mother whose teaching job has us in the middle class. I don’t know the exact figures of income for middle class for our region, lower or upper, but I know we’re definitely in the lower middle class, having experienced many instances growing up that as a family we were near broke by the end of the month. But since I was 4, we’ve always lived in houses, always had a car, always had health insurance, always had new school supplies and clothes and my mom always had free time to spend with my two sisters and I. Now the income and charitable spirit of both Marc’s and my parents is helping us out immeasurably. I was able to choose not to work (now I realize I may have been happier working) while pregnant. I have learned so much these past months though, from sheer reading time; I have absorbed more information in these past months than I did in that year I was in college.

But from all this learning a feeling of panic has set in. I’ve always been a bookworm, always excelled at academia and loved to write. I also love to talk and share information I’ve gathered. This has led to me having a hidden dream to be a professor someday. And now that I’ve been slowly unlearning all my history classes and realizing that what made me hate the idea of furthuring my formal education was its irrelevancy to my life (read: high school history books had nothing to do with being a brown person on the US side of the Mexico-US border). Okay, the history of Texas has plenty to do with my life as a confused, border-town, brown girl– but not the way it was presented to me. As for that panicked feeling, I’m fretting about how I let my four-year full-paid scholarship (that I worked hard for) go down the drain, how I succumbed to drugs and partying and how I never believed that I could be ‘smart’ or articulate enough to get up there and do it, be a professor of, well, I didn’t know WHAT I wanted to profess back then. But now Chicano studies would sweep/has swept me off my feet. Border studies. Womens studies. Other stuff I don’t even know exists as part of the UT Pan American programs because I am too melancholy to look. I was extended this great opportunity and some flimsy ideology I possessed a year ago allowed me to think I’d be happy leaving the great resources at the local university. A friend named Hector was ranting about the ICC infiltrating the university, sputtering about how “this University is ours, these resources are ours, this place is for our people!” And now I realize how important it is to my mental health to have time to be a little, oh, scholarly.

I explained all this to Marc near tears today. The beautiful person of my dreams was genuinely concerned, and asked me very specific time-span questions. In his mind, it’s not a question of can Sofia do it, it’s how long will it take? And he said he’d work to put me through school, no questions asked (Marc passionately wants to be a stay-at-home daddy).

All that said, back to impending motherhood. Or parenthood, for that matter, since me going back to school would affect all three of us so intensely. I am going to continue to research positions in the Valley where I could help people in my community without going to college, or going to college for a shorter period of time. I know I could feel fulfilled doing something else related to radical change or the providing of information here in the Valley. Hell, I would even go to vocational school to do something meaningful on the side. It’s just that I’m so damn good at academic stuff, it’s that natural talent I have. Oh well- there is no conclusion to be had today, in this post. This post has already changed so drastically from what I thought I was gonna write about when I started typing.

I’m gonna try to sleep now. Marc’s been asleep for a couple of hours already, but I had to let my damn food go down so as to avoid heartburn. And as usual, I got to thinking and chewing my fingers and whatnot. And yeah, I’m off.

PS My stomach itches.

First, the belief that nutritionally-sound food is low in fat, calories and cholesterol is a belief perpetuated by companies looking to profit from the thin-is-in era in which we live, which is ironically coinciding with heart-disease era. Fat is necessary and good for cellular activity, calories are energy, cholesterol is only one of a thousand factors contributing to heart disease. I am saying all this to remind everyone that the food advertised on TV is food made with profit, not nutrition, in mind.

The commercials feature an exchange between two people, one who is offering a product containing HFCS and one who is refusing the product because it contains HFCS. When asked why they are refusing it, the person cannot supply an answer and proceeds to stutter until the other person interrupts and explains that HFCS is “made from corn, has the same calories as sugar and honey and is fine in moderation” or that HFCS is “made from corn, doesn’t have artificial ingredients and, like sugar, is fine in moderation.” So people who oppose the use of HFCS just haven’t done their research, duh!

These commercials are employing a fancy marketing thingy I’ll call language manipulation. There is absolutely nothing natural about the way HFCS is conceived. And I consider it more stupid than naive to believe that the corn being used to make HFCS is not genetically modified. So how is HFCS itself not a fucking artificial ingredient? Please do explain.

Then, what really gets my blood boiling is that moderation with HFCS is not easy if your income is low. All the least expensive foods have HFCS in them. For American manufacturers, HFCS is about half the price of cane sugar, due to import quotas and tariffs on cane sugar. In most other countries, sugar is still cheaper than HFCS. Aside from that, high fructose corn syrup’s shelf-life is longer. More appealing still! So HFCS has infiltrated US stores and products for its price and shelf-life, not its nutrient-richness. Not that sugar is chock-full of all those essential vitamins and minerals. My argument is, at least it’s not a genetically-modified, laboratory-created gunk.

I’m finished deconstructing the commercial’s deceptions and bias. If you wanna get fancy and stray away from mere common sense: apparently, when digested, fructose goes straight to the liver and is then released as fat, more fat than any other sugar. It also does not trigger the production of insulin from the pancreas as it normally should when sugar is ingested. Diabetes for all! Or maybe just low-income families. This is very sinister to me.

All that said, there are inexpensive options for HFCS-free foods at HEB (if you’re in Texas). I have found peanut butter, jelly, tomato sauce (plain), yogurt, ice cream and teas without HFCS. Other things, if bought cheap, soda, some juices, canned fruit, those huge gallons of ice cream, bread (this makes me especially sad), soup and frosting almost always have HFCS in them.

I would also like to point out that some things don’t even need sugar in them but they still have HFCS in them to enhance flavor and increase shelf-life. Like peanut butter, tomato sauce and yogurt. Why have an extra ingredient in there? Especially one that is so sketchy? :[

Countless of other stories of course. The St. Paul police do not want a repeat of iwitness’s success in the uncovering of police brutality and lies in 2004.

Today I had a really good discussion with a friend. It made me appreciate or re-realize that sometimes you truly do need to hear it from someone other than yourself.

She told me that asking a smoker not to smoke would almost always be unsuccessful. I was naive to think that a stranger would stop out of respect for my request, or for me, even if it was just for a short time, even if I am pregnant. But it doesn’t change the fact that the guy was just a major asshole.

I realized too that I feel validated now. Now that I can more freely express my feelings. To my mom. To my friends.

I know, I know, nothing much of interest to say. Let’s just say I’m doing all my talking and reading on other blogs like here and here, just a couple of my favorite blogs. This post about an ICE raid in Mississippi is worth looking at. But caution: it will make you sick.

At this point in my pregnancy, hunger hits hard every couple of hours and bothers me in the middle of the night. I’m back to waking up feeling slightly nauseous (well, it’s nowhere near as bad as the first couple of months). And I haven’t not cried at night in a couple of weeks. I guess my hormones are raging, although I feel like it’s not just that, it’s everything. It’s having to be anxious about the new apartment being ready for us and of Marc’s mom asking for and then completely disregarding my wants for my baby shower. I know, my problems are really good ones to have. Sometimes I just have to talk about it to realize that and stop feeling sorry for my priveleged ass.

ANYWAY.

Since I plan to not step foot in Target with my child, (at this moment, maybe naively, I can’t imagine why I would ever have to) I feel confident I can avoid at least THAT aisle. But then there are Target ads, not usually offensive, just wildly consumerist (duh, they’re ads), which are not so easy to avoid. Blogsurfing for Target-related stuff led me to this article. The ad picture speaks for itself, so I’ll include it right here:

Yes, that is a woman with her legs wide open and her crotch at the bullseye of Target’s logo- a feeble attempt at making it look like she is making a snow angel. I don’t believe anyone is being nitpicky. It’s hard not to notice this.