Lauren on Living

A Lifestyle Blog about Simplifying Healthy Living

The Stay at Home Mom Stereotype – Breaking the Mold

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In my last post, I hinted at the feelings of self-worth I have been struggling with as a stay at home wife/homemaker, but I didn’t really delve into the topic too deeply because I wasn’t certain about how I wanted to approach it.  In general I have a problem with the term “working mom” as compared to a stay at home mom.  The reason being, I think the term “working mom” sends the message that stay at home moms don’t work.  It is especially important to be careful when using these terms around children.  I think when it comes to our kids we need to be super careful about the messages we’re sending them consciously or subconsciously.

My mom was a stay at home mom for most of my youth, in fact because the Island we lived on lacked good schools, she even home schooled my brothers and I up until high school.  Let me tell you, I know we were a huge handful, and home schooling us must have been a huge challenge for her.  She really did make the ultimate sacrifice for us.  However when I was younger I can remember over hearing conversations between my parents where my dad would saying something like, “well I have to work” and I can remember how upset this made my mom and how my dad would quickly try to rectify the situation, but I think on some subconscious level these snip-its even though they were immediately retracted sent me the message that the work of being a stay at home mom wasn’t as valued or recognized as the work one does outside the home.  So I have long since struggled against the idea of being a domesticated house wife.  Yet, the rational side of my brain knows full well that there is tremendous value in being a stay at home mom.  The challenge is redefining that role and perhaps my own perceptions of it and making it into something that I feel just as proud to display (if I end up assuming this role) as I would being a top CEO.

This blog post by my amazing cousin, couldn’t sum up my own feelings better.

What are your thoughts?

Juggling: Reconciling career dreams with motherhood

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I don’t have the answer to this issue.  My biggest dream has always been to have children of my own but in recent years I’ve also developed a new dream of having a thriving career in my professional field, one that I love by the way.  When Raf and I got married we decided that we would wait 4-5 years before starting a family, while knowing full well that I would be in graduate school around that time.

Well, I got pregnant with this little boy in my last semester of grad school, which I couldn’t have been happier about, but suddenly I started worrying about what this would do to my career.  I was applying for jobs and soon after graduating I went on a bunch of interviews but none of them seemed to work out and then I became VISIBLY pregnant so we decided that I should table the job hunt until after the baby arrives.  In any case I never felt good about keeping my pregnancy a secret from potential employers during the interviews, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still did it, because I knew that despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to discriminate, that the pregnancy would hurt my chances of being hired.  It’s just the reality of the world we live in, but still it felt icky to keep the secret.

Here’s the thing.  I want to have a career.  I have a passionate desire to make an impact on the world that goes beyond my nuclear family.  I also want to be a mom AND I don’t like the thought of anyone other than my husband or I raising our children.  So how do I reconcile these two things, without feeling like I’m giving something up?

The other issue is that we want to have our children be close in age, so if we have 3 children, spaces roughly 2 years apart that could mean 10 years before the youngest is in pre-school.  It would be brutal for my career aspects to take the first 10 years straight out of graduate school to raise my children before pursuing my career.  How would I explain that 10 year gap on my resume?  How would I stay current during that time?

I don’t have hard and fast answers to these questions. I know loads of women make it work, but I’m not sure how I am going to make it work yet.  Perhaps I need to look into finding a way to work from home, or working on a flexible schedule, or finding something part-time for a while.  I just don’t know.  Right now I can’t really have an exact idea because our son isn’t born yet and I know that my feelings and thoughts on this subject will be a lot easier to sort out once he gets here…or I least I’m hoping they will be.

The last issue is that we have a TON of student loan debt.  Even though Raf has a good job (not to mention we have very supportive families), I feel guilty about putting the financial burden solely on his shoulders, and it’s not just guilt either that eating me.  I find myself struggling with feelings about my own self-worth.  Right now since the baby hasn’t arrived yet, I’m feeling pretty useless as a stay at home wife.   Again I’m hoping these feelings change once I have our son gets here, because then I’ll feel like we’re both contributing equally to the family, albeit in very different ways.

I wish I had the answers to these questions, but I just don’t.  The only thing I know for sure, is that if I had to sacrifice one of these things, if I was forced to choose, I would without a doubt sacrifice my career for my children.  I just hope it doesn’t come to that.

I wonder if anyone has it truly figured out, or if this is something that all moms with career aspirations face.  If anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them.  How do you reconcile career goals with parenting desires?

Did You Know? Eating for Two

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Did you know that the whole “you’re eating for two and therefore you can eat twice as much” while you’re pregnant philosophy is a complete myth?  Well it is.  While it is true that you are technically providing sustenance for 2 people, yourself and your baby, it is not true that that means you can or should eat twice as much.  In fact during pregnancy you only need 300 extra calories a day (that’s like an apple and a yogurt cup).  So when people try to add food to your plate or tell you to eat more because you’re “eating for two”, just smile polity and go about your business OR you can give them a lesson on caloric intake during pregnancy, however I have found that this isn’t always received very warmly.  I generally recommend that pregnant women eat when they’re truly hungry.  I say ‘truly’ hungry because I find that a lot of women give themselves a free-pass to eat as much and as often as they want during pregnancy and that doesn’t always translate into eating because they’re hungry.  It could mean eating because they feel like indulging, or are bored and they justify it by telling themselves that they are eating for two.  Also what you eat matters, but I’ll be doing a separate post about nutrition in pregnancy so check back for that.

“Boy” colors vs. “Girl” colors

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Seeing as I was the first and only girl in my family and the first born grand daughter on both sides on my family I had a lot of pink when I was little and I mean A LOT.  Admittedly, in those early years it was my favorite color, but how could it not be, everything I owned and everything anyone gave me was pink.  I soon became so sick of the color that it was relegated to my most hated color, not to mention I was a tom boy and pink was just way to girly girl for me.  Since that experience I have always been drawn to non-conventional girl clothing.  Whenever I find out a friend is having a baby girl I always opt for baby girl outfits that are blue, brown, green, etc.  but never pink and rarely purple.  Just because I hate the notion of a certain set of colors being girl colors or boy colors.

When I found out I was having a boy I was totally disappointed at the lack of variety in color when it comes to baby boy clothes.  Everything was red, navy, baby blue, burnt orange, brown olive green or grey.  Where were all the vibrate colors such as turquoise, sunny yellow, lime green, purple and dare I say it…pink?  Well they were all over on the baby girl side of the store and I found this to be really upsetting.  Not to mention I didn’t want to put my son in clothing with trucks, motorcycles or skulls and bones on them, I don’t want to pigeon hole him like that.  So I set out to find him something pink.  Now admittedly, I don’t love the color but I felt strongly about my son growing up knowing that there is no such thing as “boy” colors and “girl” colors, but that there were only ‘colors.’

With the help of my mom and mother-in law we were able to find these two shirts (don’t mind the wrinkles).  One fushia pink and the other lilac!  It may be a small thing but it felt like a huge victory.  We weren’t going to be constrained by societal gender stereotypes!!  In any case it’s all so subjective anyway and totally subject to change, did you know that pink used to be considered a baby boy color and blue was designated for baby girls?  True story. Not to mention both my husband and I look best in bright, vibrant colors, so there’s a strong chance those colors will suite our son too.  And you know what?  If he decides that pink isn’t his favorite color, then that’s totally his choice but he won’t ever get the message from Rafaan and I that pink is only for girls or that trucks and bland colors are only for boys.

On Getting Pregnant

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In March 2011 Rafaan and I decided that we were ready to start a family and much to our surprise I got pregnant after only 1 month of trying.  Sadly that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in June 2011 and after waiting the two months that were recommended by my care provider we decided to start trying again in August 2011.  Well things did not happen as quickly the second time around, it took us 7 months to get pregnant, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t very long, but after having a miscarriage it felt like an eternity and I began to worry that something was wrong.  So this is our journey with trying to conceive (TTC), what worked for us and some general preconception health information.

First off let me say that ANY and ALL women who are sexually active should be taking a daily prenatal vitamin, even if you are not intending to get pregnant and even if you are actively trying to prevent pregnancy.  The reason for this being that accidents happen.  In fact in the US nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended.  Prenatal vitamins specifically contain folic acid which helps prevent neural tube defects and in the 2 weeks between fertilization and a missed period those neural tubes have already begun to form, so it’s important that folic acid already be in the mother’s system.  Just take a prenatal vitamin in place of a daily women’s multi-vitamin and go about your merry way.

The first thing you should do when you begin thinking about having a baby is to go see your doctor for some pre-conception counseling.  You want to make sure you are in the best health possible when you get pregnant and going to pre-conception counseling can help get you there if you aren’t already.

Back to my story:  In August we started trying again and at first we decided that we wouldn’t actively try but that we would just stop using contraception and see what happens.  Well that plan went out the window really fast after I realized that I was still consciously trying to get pregnant regardless of us wanting to just “go with the flow.”  So that’s when I decided to buy a bunch of ovulation predictor kits (OPks) and started peeing on them every day, well despite getting positive reading from the OPKs and timing our baby making sessions around them, I still wasn’t getting pregnant and I started to feel like I didn’t have a clue about my body, and being that my chosen field was maternal and child health, this kind of made me feel a bit lost.  A friend of mine recommended the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which is an AMAZING resource. I seriously can’t say enough about how great this book is.  I believe all women should own a copy of this book because it’s about so much more than just pregnancy.  Seriously, take a look!  Through using this book I learnt how to chart my fertility cycles and to become in tuned with my body so that I could recognize when I was nearing ovulation. It only took 3 months of charting my cycles for me to get pregnant and during the process I felt really empowered and that I finally understood my body again.   For those of you who don’t know what charting your cycles entails, you basically take your waking temperature every morning using a basal body thermometer and you also keep track of your cervical mucus.  It sounds complicated, but it really is SUPER simple and easy.  If anyone wants more details about how exactly to do it or you have been charting and are confused by what you’re seeing please just leave a comment or send me an email and I’d be happy to help.

I also went to see a fertility acupuncturist, who again came highly recommended by a friend AND did fertility acupuncture work at Johns Hopkins.  She put me on 2 herbal supplements; Fertile Garden and Astra Essence  and told me that I needed to take 6 pills of each a day.  Now I can’t say whether or not these pills actually had an effect on me getting pregnant, but I can say that I got pregnant the first full month I was taking them.  The friend who recommended me also got pregnant using these pills not once but twice!  The first time it was after 10 months of TTC and she got pregnant the first month she was on the pills and then again the same thing happened with her third child.  I have since recommended these pills to a cousin of mine and she got pregnant the first month she used them too. Maybe this is all a coincidence, I can’t say for sure, but what I can say is that you should talk to a medical professional before taking any and all supplements.  Don’t self medicate!

Once I got a confirmed pregnancy test reading on April 1st, 2012, I stopped taking the herbal supplements and then tried to be as positive as possible, but actually being pregnant is a whole other story all together, so stay tuned.

Here are some articles for anyone interested in learning more about folic acid as prevention for neural tube defects:

Blencowe, H., Cousens, S., Modell, B., & Lawn, J. (2010). Folic acid to reduce neonatal mortality from neural tube disorders. International Journal of Epidemiology , 110-121.

Laurence, K. M., James, N., Miller, M. H., Tennant, G. B., & Campbell, H. (1981 ). Double-blind randomised controlled trial of folate treatment before conception to prevent recurrence of neural-tube defects. British Medical Journal , 1509-1511.

Werler, M. M., Shapiro, S., & Mitchell, A. A. (1993). Periconceptional Folic Acid Exposure and Risk of Occurrent Neural Tube Defects. JAMA , 1257-1261.  *Sorry I couldn’t find a free link to the full text of this one*

What this is all about

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I am currently 37 weeks pregnant with our first child and have been doing a LOT of reading and researching in these past 8.5 months.  I have mainly been reading mommy blogs, because I’m fascinated  by how other women are navigating this parenting role, and what choices they are making when it comes to their children.  In all my reading I felt like something was missing.  Moms would state their preferences or their view points on important topics but there was rarely any evidence based research to back their claims or opinions up, which may be perfectly fine for some people, but for me and I imagine a lot of other people out there, I wanted more. So I decided to start this blog, which I hope will be 1 part mommy blog  and 1 part informative resource.  My plan is for this blog to cover everything, from my personal journey into parenthood, to product reviews, to health information and beyond.