pregnancy

Just to let you know I am also micro-blogging on Twitter as: nycdoula

Follow me if you are interested in hearing about my adventures as a doula in NYC, in addition to news and articles related to reproductive health, and resources for mamas and papas, and mamas and papas to be.

Yesterday my grandmother threw a “luncheon” so that all her friends could finally meet little miss Hazel, my amazing, gorgeous niece who is nearly 16 months now.  Some of us ladies were all discussing Hazel’s shyness and how she is so shy at first, but slowly emerges throughout the course of any social gathering to reveal her true self, which is not shy at all.  I think my sister and I are both like that as well, and I added that to the conversation, and asked my mom who was shyer as a child - me or Melissa?  She said Melissa.

I was surprised and tried to refute her answer by pointing out several stories from my early childhood.  To this my mother responded, “You weren’t shy!  I couldn’t get you to stop telling the teacher things I taught you at home, like when you explained how the sperm fertilizes the egg to everyone in nursery school!”  I remembered this story also.. when I was 4 my mother explained to me how babies were made, not so much in terms of human love making, but on the level of sperm meets egg to create baby, using a volume from a children’s encyclopedia as a visual aid.  I have a memory of an illustration of several squiggly sperm swimming toward a balloon-like egg.

My mother was helping out with my nursery school class those days, so imagine her embarrassment when I raised my hand and said, “Teacher!  Teacher!  I want to tell you something!”  And jumped up and explained human reproduction to the whole class of 4 year olds at Honey Brook Early Learning Center!

Although I’ve always known this story, the connection to what I’m still doing, over a couple decades later, never struck me until now.  Still telling everyone about reproduction only really because I have a hard time not talking about it because I still find it so interesting!

I remember being blown away when I first found out the plants also have eggs and sperm!  What?!?!

Human heredity is crazy though.. and you don’t even really realize until you see it with your own eyes.  When I looked at Hazel this time, a bit more grown up since the last time I saw her a few months ago, and she was close to my face and looking at me, “having a conversation” with me, I saw parts of myself looking at me and talking to me.  She doesn’t say a whole lot yet, but with isolated words, some sign language signs, some of her own hand motions, sounds and nodding, we did manage to have a sort of conversation.  And I saw some of my facial features, making my facial movements on a little adorable face.  If that’s never happened to you, let me just say it’s kind of a mind-blowing experience.

Kids at that age have the capacity to understand so much, even though they may not be talking at any length.  Since Hazel is still nursing, Melissa refers to her breasts as “milkies” to Hazel.  Now, Hazel has made the connection to her own, and if you ask Hazel where her own “milkies” are, she’ll look down at them on her body.  At 16 months, she already understands a fair amount of basic anatomical terminology, including vagina.  After pointing out a few body parts, prompted by Melissa saying, “Show me where your _____ is,” she was asked where her vagina was, and turned around and pointed to me!  Ha, who knows, maybe Vagina sounds enough like Aunt Jill?  We laughed at her mistake, but she pointed at me every time we asked her.  Until my mother was around, then she pointed to Grandmom Karen.

Along the same lines of kids doing/saying the darndest things, my mother pointed out that not only did I repeat things she taught me to my nursery school and kindergarten teachers, I also repeated anything my parents told me about myself.  I guess the more you hear something the more you believe it.. so I told my kindergarten teacher just what my parents always said to me, that I was “cute as a button, and just right!”

Signed,

Aunt Vagina - “I’m (still) cute as a button and just right!”

Wow. If I didn’t urge you to see “The Business of Being Born” when it was playing in very select theaters, I’m definitely urging you to see it now. For free. Online. It doesn’t get much easier than that. I just watched it for the 2nd time and it was as amazing, emotional and thought-provoking as the first time. Two of my favorite birth scholars, Robbie Davis-Floyd and Michel Odent are in the film.  Also, the documentary is set in NYC, so many of the names, faces and places are familiar to me. If Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake didn’t make this, I would have. Seriously.

I’ve been preoccupied with finishing up the very last of my coursework.. so I haven’t been blogging for a while, despite all the interesting articles I’ve come across, not to mention the running list of reproduction-related topics that I’ve been wanting to research and communicate on, in this form. Now the semester is over and I’m sitting in Philadelphia waiting for my sister, and only sibling, to go into labor for the first time. In other words, I will be a first-time aunt! I’ll be the doula of course. Stay tuned for blog entries about the imminent experience..

In other news, a friend forwarded me some information a month or so ago about a really interesting situation in southwestern Nigeria. In the town of Igbo-Ora, population 60,000, a local elder asserts that there is hardly a family without a set of twins or triplets. Some parents in the town even have several sets of twins! According to population experts, Nigeria as a country has one of the highest rates of multiple births, but this particular part of the country seems to be particularly populated with high numbers of multiples.

No one seems to really be quite sure why this is. Some have suggested that it is perhaps a genetic predisposition that accounts for this strange phenomenon. Most interestingly, is the diet-related hypothesis. The Igbo-Ora population consumes a local yam, called agida (Dioscorea, I imagine) in high quantities, utilizing it as a staple food. Yams contain compounds which mimic human estrogens. This was demonstrated for the first time this year by Cheng et al., who found estrogenic activity in all 7 species/varieties of Dioscorea they screened.

It’s interesting to review and compile all these different articles related to the effects of estrogen or lack of estrogen on the human body. It is related to my doctoral work and helps me to have a greater understanding of hormonal regulation of various physiological functions. For instance, one example currently very relevant is my sister’s pregnancy. She has experienced fertility issues for the last several years. In the spring, after I had been reading extensively on female hormones and health for months to prepare for writing grant proposals and beginning my research, I noticed that she had been displaying signs of estrogen deficiency. I suggested that she begin taking a mixed phytoestrogen supplement, and a month later she was pregnant! Now 9 months later, here we are this moment trying to determine if her contractions are indicative of the onset of true labor or if bebe needs a few more days before she’s ready.

Image credit: AFP

Estrogenic yam study reference: Cheng, Wei-Yi, Yueh-Hsiung Kuo and Ching-Jang Huang. 2007. Isolation and Identification of Novel Estrogenic Compounds in Yam Tuber (Dioscorea alata Cv. Tainung No. 2). J. Agric. Food Chem. 55: 7350-7358.