As Seen From Above

This past weekend, after a several year hiatus, mainly attributed to the pregnancy/birth of our first child, my husband decided to go downhill mountain biking.

For those of you formerly familiar with the sport (as I thought I was), mountain biking has evolved. In the last few years, it has gone from a quiet trip through the woods on a barely maintained gravel path requiring merely a set of thicker tires to an extreme sport that demands full body armor, a helmet with face mask and a piece of equipment that more accurately resembles a Flinstone-powered monster truck (think 28 inch studded tires, full shocks, and disk brakes). The activity is also accomplished on trails with man-made high bank turns, rollers, jumps, and rock and log “features” all aimed at maximizing the aerial potential of the experience.

The plan was to make this a family outing during which our fifteen-month-old daughter and I would hike to the top of the chairlift and meet Joe after one of his many downhill runs. This was also part of my not-so-secret plan to check that he and the bike (which we had rented without damage protection even after it had been offered to us by two separate sales associates) were still in one piece.

After a few pictures and hugging goodbye in a mock scene from the Titanic's departure, we parted ways. Joe riding up the chairlift while Sophie (dangling contentedly from a backpack) and I headed up the hiking trail.

Two things surprised me in the first fifteen minutes of our venture. First, we were the only duo hiking up (everyone else came bouncing down the steep gravel trail with a walking stick in hand to slow their decent and a lift ticket dangling from their necks). Second, we were directly under the chairlift and so immediately subject to an inordinate amount of easily audible heckling erupting from above.

Seeing as an important part of extreme sports involves being watched in the act (think of the TV network and vast number of DVDs and online content spawned by the action sports industry) I wondered why the bikers themselves had been spared this particular (in) dignity (depending on your point of view).

Instead, by some trick of trail (in) design (again depending on your view point), it was my daughter and I on display as chair after chair of onlookers ogled at our relatively slow, uphill ascent.

Their comments ranged from cheers and impressed encouragement (one fully packed lift of twenty-something males decked out in extreme-ride regalia shouted down, “Best time on the mountain,” when they realized that my daughter was comfortably sacked out for our upward journey) to outright jeers (another similarly loaded lift yelled simply, “That has got to suck”).

Our presence also sparked sweet reminisces that were not necessarily intended for our ears. One father began to narrate a tale to his teenage daughter and son about when they were young enough to be carried in packs. (Because it was only the three of them, I couldn't help but wonder about what else this man might have been missing in watching us, although maybe his spouse was somewhere off on her bike as was my own.)

Perhaps because I was hefting an thirty extra pounds, the exact weight I gained during the first forty weeks of carrying our daughter, it struck me that this experience was amazingly like pregnancy. Almost everyone who passed (this time from above) had something to say about our presence. I couldn't help but be transported back to walking the halls at work amidst such innumerable comments, some welcomed (Oh, this is the best time of your life) to others from whom I wanted to turn and run yet could only slowly waddle (Wow, you're as big as a house. Are you past due?). It brought back that same mix of joyful anxiety of the highly anticipated unknown combined with just plain anxiety and a deep desire to hide from the tide of judgment that seemed to reign at every turn.

When a man and his son stopped to ask how far I intended to “make it,” it was all I could do to grit my teeth and smile politely as I had so many times before. (He had after all stopped to take our picture.) Yet, when he went on to tell me that he had five kids now grown whom he expected would someday carry him, I had little trouble picturing them as his pallbearers. What is it exactly about the act of being with child that seems to grant everyone cart blanch to comment on your life and its eminent trajectory?

While I was immensely enjoying our hike (as I had our pregnancy), I was relieved when the trail finally dropped into the woods after about an hour. In many ways, this hike, like pregnancy, was an invitation for me to finally and appropriately love my body for what it could do for us in this world: carry us to new heights (literally in this case) and afford us an experience we could not have had otherwise.

I found this a welcome interruption to the lifetime I've spent bemoaning myself for an unsightly stretch mark or a stubborn piece of flesh that does not hang the way I want it to in a bikini. Or in a less superficial way (infinitely truer and more important), a lifetime of having to constantly prove myself because I am a woman (and somehow lesser than the guys).

It is only in becoming a mother that I've been able to escape some of that constant self worth questioning, that general hatred of my too fat, too awkward, too womanly body, which (as trivial as it sounds) becomes hard to separate from self. I love the strength motherhood has given me to call back at those hecklers (oh boys, too bad you'll never know what you are missing).

Yet, the truth of the mater is the realization comes easier in private than in public, and its relatively easy to fall back into my old way of thinking, especially when surrounded by judgment so easily sprouting from other's lips.

When we finally came into view of the chairlift again, this time (thankfully) it was my husband calling to us as he got off the lift. Somehow, without the assistance of our cell phones, we had arrived on top of the mountain at the very same time (although neither of us questioned who had had the harder journey). We joked together about how must be training to enter the family version of the Amazing Race, the show that guarantees any couple the thrill of a lifetime in circumscribing the globe (although they may no longer be speaking to one another at the end of it.)

While something tells me that these scenes would indeed make for good TV(especially when it comes to finding a suitable spot above 10,000 feet for a diaper change), I don't think I would take Bruckhiemer's call. Too much simply gets missed as a spectator sport.

Performance Artist

Curtain opens. The murmuring of the crowd dims. (Although the teenagers along the front row continue to send text messages, their feet up on the railing.)

The juggler appears center stage. Ball one (self). Ball two (marriage). The juggler completes her task with (as is appropriately conceived) one hand tied behind her back, smiling.

When Ball Three (baby) is introduced, maybe a few in the crowd sit up, but nobody sucks in their breath. The juggler knows her job too well: Make it look easy. Lull the crowd into believing that nothing here is precarious. Perhaps they should get up and join her or start their own side act. (Although fewer are attempting to manage this feat, at least statistically speaking.)

Her act looks ordinary, usual, proper (quaint? kitsch?). Barely enough to hold anyone's interest. Even the juggler starts to look away and wonder where the woman in the third row gets her highlights done or what the man sitting next to her looks like in swim trunks before the juggler's fingers slip on a ball spinning midair and she steps uneasily to the side to catch it. (Three, it turns out, is enough to hold the juggler's own attention.)

She continues to smile out at the crowd (she is, after all, enjoying herself) even as she watches the couple in the back row vacate their seats and the teenagers tap restlessly on the keys of their cell phones.

She begins to wonder how many balls it will take, four (a promotion) five (another child), ten (her spouse's promotion, another degree or certification, after-school activities, winning a Pulitzer/Grammy/mention in the local paper/coffee mug with her name on it, getting her children into Harvard/Princeton/Vassar/community college) before anyone will be captivated by her performance.

What if she lights the balls on fire? Is that what it takes to have someone (anyone) sit up and take notice? When is it that the crowd will realize the balls (regardless of their number or chemical state) will drop the minute she turns away?

Newton: Didn't you ever notice it was your mother who stood in the way of gravity?

Modern Inconvenience

After twelve months, two weeks, and roughly 3,528 ounces, I coil the tubes of my breast pump and cram them along with several collection bottles, two breast shields (the clear plastic forms that resemble miniature bullhorns and literally suck half your flesh into the opening), and a few stray pre-sterilized zip-lock baggies into a black, nylon impostor of a designer purse (aka the Medela Pump in Style Advanced with 2-Phase Expression, “the ideal electric breast pump for active or working mothers to support a long breastfeeding period,” which the WHO now recommends as two years).

I unplug the cord from the wall, making sure to place the small, plastic safety cap snuggly over the outlet. (My husband has almost always had to reminded me to do this a half hour later when he comes down the stairs to present me with our fully-dressed daughter so that the two of us can struggle into the car laden with diaper bag, pump bag, laptop, lunch sack, cell phone, ear bud, pacifier, blanket, teddy bear, rattle, or other musical toy with buttons to push, and begin our morning commute.)

I fold the cord deliberately, taking the time to press it smooth and avoid making knots in the wire. I wedge it carefully up against the small square motor to be sure I am doing no damage to this expensive and irreplaceable part, the soul of the machine that made it thump like a heart beat—suck-release, suck-release—which played as a voice in my head chanting “in a hurry, in a hurry” for some forty-odd cycles per minute for twenty minutes, two to three times each and every day. Then, slowly, I zip the front pocket for the last time. I whisk the bag off my kitchen table, and instead of lugging it into my car, I tramp it down the stairs for storage in my basement.

Today, I am giving up the pump.

As with several first-time aspects of new motherhood, I have experienced a love-hate relationship with my pump. I loved that pumping forced me to sit still twice a day for twenty minutes (a simple sounding pleasure that quickly takes on the dignity of the sublime for anyone with an infant).

I hated that once I started back to work, I often spent those twenty minutes sitting at my desk, checking email. (I've also pumped while driving, although I do not recommend this.)

I loved that pumping enabled us to donate 739 ounces to the Mother's Milk Bank at St. Luke's in Denver to nourish other infants, suffering from digestive problems and whose mothers could not sustain their own supply. (I say “us” because without my daughter, this gift would not have been possible.)

I hated that pumping led me to discover (with increasing disappointment) that bathrooms are designed with outlets only in the most visible of places—always in front of large mirrors at the entrance and never behind the safe seclusion of stall doors—so that more than half of the female student body at the university where I work has probably seen my breasts at one time or another. (This repeated event, of course, prompted me to ask one gawking undergraduate if this was cautioning her to rethink the feminist movement.)

I loved the release, even if it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.

I hated that it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.

First patented back in 1854, the pump is essentially a miniaturized version of that which is used in commercial dairy operations. It has seen little improvement in engineering since Einar Egnell's groundbreaking 1956 work “Viewpoints on what happens mechanically in the female breast during various methods of milk collection.” The fact that this research was conducted at the height of the era of the Feminine Mystique renders our history of that time a bit suspect. While cultural mythology tells me that my own mother was learning the trade of changing her brother's diapers under her own mother's careful tutelage, Egnell was simultaneously laying the groundwork for her to be the breastfeeding working mother she was in the 1980s when I was born.

I hated them both when I finally admitted to the fact that I would indeed be returning to work at the end of my too-short, twelve-week maternity leave and so sat down one night to read the fat, impossible instruction book, complete with threatening chart for when and how your milk would go bad if not properly stored. I also read several online advice columns of a long list of things I would need in order to successfully produce while pumping: a photo of my daughter, a relaxing quiet space, an eight ounce glass of water for consumption before and after pumping. I was also instructed to spread my arms up over my head and flap them several times as well as to message both breasts. Mood music was also recommended, although I never figured out exactly what kind of music was supposed to get me in the mood. (Brahms lullaby perhaps? “Milk” by Garbage or Sons of Leon? “Safe as Milk” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band? The multi-album recordings by Neutral Milk Hotel?) Because the machine came with a $400 price tag, I was more afraid of breaking it than it breaking me.

Thankfully, I am proud to report that both the machine and my breasts have survived this experience in tact and I did not need to find a breast pumping symphony in order to successfully "produce." My daughter made it through her infancy without a drop of IQ-draining formula (even if no one from the prenatal classes where I first heard this claim could ever actually produce the study that renders this suspect "fact" as truth.)

However, before I go on to bash my pump as a hellish invention, a modern inconvenience that keeps job-protected maternity leave down to a mere twelve weeks (but only for the lucky ones who work for companies that employ 50 or more people, which is less than half of the companies in today's marketplace); my pump did exactly what it was supposed to: enabled me to continue to be the breastfeeding, on-call, ever-present, calm-my-daughter-by-walking-in-the-room mother I wanted to be and be the hard-driving, energetic, I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-better, accomplished career woman I was pre-pregnancy/pre-birth.

Or did it?

The truth is I weep in the privacy of my car nearly every day I drop my daughter off with her nanny, even though she learns sign language or comes home with her wispy thin hair in tiny pigtails I'd never have the patience to put in. She is as eager to see me when I pick her up as she is when I come into her room in the mornings to retrieve her from the crib. She goes swimming and visits the new born foals just down the street from her nanny's house who are growing like she is with every passing day. I cry, not for her loss of happiness (she is actually, delightedly happy), but instead because I am missing it.

The truth is every time I successfully lead a project to conclusion, hear my boss or colleagues impressed with an idea I have at work, make a difference in the way we are doing things, delivering a better experience for our constituency, I am no less thrilled than I was before.

What I hated the most about my pump was the fact that it made it possible for me to step away from my daughter in those early moments when she needed me the most.

What I loved? For those few minutes a day, it upheld the illusion. It made the impossible seem easy, convenient, sane.