Birth and Bread

 

As I started a loaf of sourdough this morning and fed the starter in anticipation of a yummy breakfast discard recipe over the weekend my mind wandered to the other people I know who make sourdough. Somehow my brain made a leap and it struck me – making sourdough is similar to having a ‘natural’ birth.

I know, I know, some eyes just rolled. And some people just got really excited and shouted YES!! Because it does sound kind of predictable, very much fits a type or echo chamber in a time obsessed with classifying ourselves and others. But bear with me and we’ll try to hash it out.

 Depending on the circles one runs in, both slowly making delicious naturally fermented bread at home and having babies without the aid of pain-relieving medications are having a bit of a moment and amassing lots of new converts despite being the way these things were done for time out of mind until the very recent past. People who do it can have very strong feelings ranging from pride, a profound respect, a concern for health -their own and that of their children, to judgment on those who don’t do it, and yes, even a bit of smugness or elitism.

There is also a distinct camp that does neither of these things, and thinks to do them is kind of silly or even crazy in a stone age kind of way- unnecessarily hard or unpleasant-even dangerous- when modern conveniences render them antiquated. And some truly do not feel capable, even as they are in awe of those who do it.

In the Elephant and Piggie book I’m a Frog! Gerld’s mind is blown when Piggie tells him you can pretend to be something you’re not- she’s pretending to be a frog. “And you can just do that?!... Even grown-up people?” he exclaims, a whole new universe of potential unleashed. I think as a culture we’re having a lot of “wait, you can just do that?!” moments right now and bread making and birthing babies are a few of them.  

 

I’m not here to shame anyone for her birth story or plan. Healthy baby, healthy mama is always the goal! Since our first kid my husband and I’s philosophy has been that the body is designed to do these things, but we sure are thankful for recent medical interventions when needed. We’ve elected to have all four of our babies at the hospital, all ‘natural’ as in vaginal and no epidural though we did induce our most recent for the baby’s sake and needed the NICU, both of which we were deeply thankful for. If we have any more we’ll do the same because once again we appreciate that safety net. But I know people who have had successful home births – both planned and unplanned, had babies at birthing centers, and many who like us have chosen the hospital but sans epidural. In no way is my way is the only or best way. And a lot of women have really strong feelings about birth because it is a truly amazing and incredible process. I have always felt like a badass after. 

Thank you NICU!

 

But I know a young woman with brain cancer who cannot experience active labor because the strain might rupture the tumors in her head. She needed to schedule a C-section before her body went into labor. Thanks be to God for the procedure, because of one she’s got a beautiful one year old boy who is thriving and so is she. There’s also placenta previa, wherein there is literally not an exit path for the babe through the cervix so without intervention mother and baby could both die. There’s preeclampsia and the sheer fact of geometry when a giant baby will not pass through a tiny or narrow pelvis. Or situations where active labor stretches on for days, exhausting and stressing both mother and baby to the point of death or permanent damage. Again, Thank God for epidurals and other interventions and the rest, recharge and assistance they can provide.

But sometime in the not too distant past these interventions just became par for the course. Even as we’ve had our children labor and delivery nurses have been surprised and kind of amazed when we arrive and are ushered through triage that my pain management plan is “just deal with it.” Yes, it does hurt to have a baby. But we can do painful things, and I’ve always appreciated being able to walk pretty soon after delivering. Yes, it is hard and inconvenient to be at the mercy of labor’s timeline which might laugh in the face of your very thoughtful and important-to-you birth plan and muck up the daily or weekly schedule. But maybe we’re not as good at waiting or being patient as we used to be and have a false sense of how much we can control things.

I think making bread is the same. I’ve made bread using yeast in the past in fits and bursts. Over the last year or so I’ve started making our yogurt in an insta-pot and a friend brought me into the fermented drink fold after babysitting her kombucha SCOBY while she was on vacation last summer. Both of these things seemed big and hard and like I didn’t want to mess them up at the start, and like other people do that but am I ‘those people?’ I checked the instructions 50 million times the first few attempts, and nervously looked for signs of my family falling ill from botulism or some other nefarious bacteria after sampling our own kombucha. My three year old especially loves it, and after telling him early on that kombucha is a “sippin’ drink” lest he guzzle it in one swallow he now verifies as he nurses each small glass, “mama, Is bucha a sippin’ drink?”

 Even after making these things, sourdough still seemed too hard, too next level and needy, I was not going out of my way to get on that train even as many people I knew did it- I love that! for you... At Christmas time though I was unexpectedly invited onto it when my sister-in-law shared some awesome starter with my father-in-law who passed some on to me. Even then I felt kind of overwhelmed – gah! I wasn’t planning on this! What’s the order of operation? How often do I have to feed it? Do I really have to use distilled water? Which recipe do I follow! So many best practices! I’m tuning out skimming the pages of commentary on it on this homesteading blog!

yes, I take pics of bread

As a Little House fan I reminded myself that Ma Ingalls didn’t have a reverse osmosis water filter or digital scale and she managed to make bread to feed her family so I probably could too. Others further along in their sourdough relationship also encouraged me that the process is much more forgiving than the bazillion recipes online infer.  In the words of one friend, “Making sourdough has just been so healing for me! The process is so forgiving and it’s like a science experiment- you learn as you go and every loaf is beautiful!…” and another, “fermented foods help me with my control issues.”

 

 

Now about a month into the journey I’m not intimidated anymore. I’ve made relatively few things but find that keeping it small and simple and honestly kind of not paying attention to it helps. The starter can sit in the fridge just fine for a week or so. And the more I think about it and hear about people freezing or drying it and it bouncing back to life when needed I think sourdough might be the primordial life force ha.  I mess up and occasionally entirely miss a step or two. But I bake the break and my family and friends happily consume it, often telling me it’s the “best bread EVER!” I feel like a badass.

Just as I am not only good with but very thankful for medical interventions when needed for giving birth, I really appreciate grocery stores. I am glad I don’t have to generate and process all my family’s food supply and as it is February, barely subsist on meager amounts bread from flour ground in our coffee grinder a-la- The Long Winter (I told you I’m a Little House fan.) I don’t make pasta or cheese or keep a diary cow or goat to milk. We don’t keep chickens and we eat a lot of eggs. I don’t even make all our bread. I like being able to buy these things and even get fast food and take-out food sometimes.  Once again- my goal is not committing to one of the polarities of helpless dependency v.s. total self-sufficiency. I’d like to strike the balance somewhere between the people in Wall-E and isolated homesteaders who have to generate everything and haven’t seen another human in thirty years.

I realize my current station in life lends itself to being available for a few hours at a time to stretch the dough every thirty minutes. Many will say would be nice, but I work and I don’t have time. But maybe there is time- in the evenings just before bed as you decompress over a movie or show or first thing in the morning on a day off when you’re awake but not stirring from the house yet. Or maybe you can enlist a family member or roommate to help with a few steps- YOU don’t have to do EVERYTHING (talk about challenging control issues!). Maybe some other time just needs to be repurposed and that is a discipline that will need to be developed, and change can be uncomfortable.

As a country there are a lot of feelings around our health and food supply right now- confusion, curiosity, rage, a feeling of helplessness, worries about trade wars and spiking food prices, and more. It seems like everyone knows or is someone dealing with mystery ailments no doc can seem to diagnose or improve, kids seem to have more and more weird stuff going on, and a whole ton of people just feel disconnected from the food source and kind of bleh chugging through life in a not awesome way. We don’t all have to fall under the MAHA banner about it. We don’t have to be beautifully done up Trad Wives or crunchy hippies to care either. This is an everyone thing.

There are also what feels like an increasing number of people dreaming about getting their own little piece of land somewhere and growing their own food, having a go at raising some animals and just feeling closer to the earth. My own family has been gardening for a few years and hopes to take it to the next level this season.

Without sounding like a fatalist and demonizing all modern conveniences or waxing too quixotic about the pastoral life and trying to close the circuit on this long ramble; I think both the exercise of growing or making your own food- specifically something like sourdough that involves time and stages – and giving birth are very human experiences that we’ve recently been more cut off from for various reasons. While I admire and aspire to be more like Ma Ingalls in some respects; I also firmly believe THIS is the day the Lord has made, we were all put in the time and place we were for a reason. We do not need an apocalyptic event and swear off society and modern life to realize some of these connections again.

Just as I will never shame a mom for her birth story or plan I will exuberantly encourage any who thinks I have guide halo for foregoing an epidural that you could probably do it too! Excluding deeply necessary reasons, just a few mentioned above, you might be tougher than you think! And you also might be able to nurture and prepare more of these “alive” foods than you think too.

Piggie is pretending to be a frog but once he wraps his head around the whole concept Gerald decides he’d actually rather pretend to be a cow. So maybe sourdough is not your thing and maybe you lack the uterus, cervix and baby to have a baby “the old fashioned way” [though I maintain my husband has always been an instrumental helper and part of our births]. But maybe your thing is a little counter top herb garden, or making sauerkraut, backyard chickens, or learning how to sew or crochet and making some of your own clothes or household linens. Or possibly screwing around with and maintaining your own swamp cooler or sprinkler system, or collecting and chopping your firewood in the summer for cozy fires the following winter. Maybe going in on buying part of a whole cow or pig with a few friends and having it processed locally. Or even sometimes walking or riding a bike to the store, post office, appointment, coffee shop or whatever when it would be faster and easier to drive.

 Basically the only criteria for reestablishing some of these connections to our humanity is do something that is in some way inconvenient or hard and a process that for most of human history people did a little differently than we do today. You might surprise yourself with a latent ability or skill chosen by curiosity, desire or necessity. And I’m pretty sure you’ll feel like a badass, maybe even get a little smug about it.

Chore Parties, becasue Obviously

 

My husband and I have a joke about basically being the last person in the world to find out about something. Specifically, Bruno Mars had been around a while, but I didn’t know that when I started to enjoy one of his catchy tunes. So now when one of us is late to the knowing something party we say “hey guys, Bruno Mars?”

My Bruno Mars of the moment is what I’m calling Chore Parties. Over the last year or so I’ve taken on the new role of stay-at-home mom with three littles and worked through some self-reliance issues. I have many friends who have gone through or are going through the same thing in part or parcel. I also have a friend who took her own life in September after suffering from postpartum depression. I’m not in any way minimizing the complexities of that sickness or saying “jeez, she should have just told someone!” but I’m on this campaign now to get everyone better able to articulate when they’re not ok.

Mom’s groups, play dates, just getting coffee or meeting up to exercise or hike is all fantastic and necessary; but there’s still a moment when you get home and still have all the everything to do. The house looks like a tornadoe is still actively occurring inside, sink might be full of dishes, you’re supposed to start dinner and all the kids are screaming or needing to be read to RIGHT NOW! Sure the time is always there, it’s just how we organize it. But sometimes it’s really hard to figure out the correct order of prioritization when you both need your cup filled by community and the family has to eat.

This doesn’t just apply to stay at home parents- shoot probably even more so for single parents, working parents or even those without kids but who still have all the things and seemingly no time to do it and by default less built in people to help.

Enter chore parties. Simply put a number of people go to one person’s house and help with whatever chore just can’t be gotten to or said person really hates. Maybe you can never get the laundry done, folded and put away all in the same day [or week]. Maybe you’re not sure the last time you vacuumed or mopped, or you just can’t get up the gumption to clean the bathrooms, or the yard has gone feral and you might disappear into the weeds if you venture out there alone. So everyone goes to this person’s house and helps with that task while you talk, shoot the breeze, help watch kids, build community, etc.

I say this is what my husband and I dub a Bruno Mars moment because cultures the world over and women down the ages knew this- we’re not supposed to do it alone and we can’t. Think of Amish barn raisings, women sitting around quilting or stuffing feather mattresses, washing clothes at the river as one of my friends likes to harken back to. Socializing and social fabric building happened in the midst of work, it’s the everyday stuff of life.

Maybe it’s the current paradox of being so connected and yet still so isolated. I saw a headline recently saying single people are having a harder go in this inflation than married people; and I’d just like to extrapolate out that single nuclear family units trying to do everything solo are also having a harder time than those more used to living multi-generationally or just in closer proximity to others and sharing the burdens.

Speaking of current inflation, paying someone to come clean is probably not in budget for many people right now, and I argue that in a lot of cases it probably shouldn’t be. I’m not knocking the practice entirely or chastising those who provide home cleaning services for currency but when we literally pay for our inconveniences to be handled or make life neat and transactional it’s harder to get close to people or help and be helped if that makes sense. If a favor is done we might be mentally keeping score whether we know it or not instead of just knowing that we help each other in different ways at different times and that’s called being human. You can’t help but be closer to someone once he or she has scrubbed your toilet or folded your underwear!

I also saw an article about a women on Youtube whose house is a total disaster (I think she’s also a stay at home mom) but then she slowly starts to clean up in the videos and this is apparently very edifying to people.  You guys! Step away from the computer! (I realize the irony as you’re probably reading this on a computer or mobile device). Go to a friend’s house and actually help him or her clean!

The internet is a double edged sword because we can be connected to so many more people near and far and that’s great, but also connected in a superficial way, most often just sharing the fantastic stuff. I remember when I studied in Prague we took a quick language and culture crash-course and they told us that the greeting ‘how are you,’ most of the time followed by a quick ‘good’ is not as common as in the United States. If you ask a Czech lady how she is she’ll unload all the crap going on in her life right now. So on all the various social networks we can say we’re just great, and leave it at that. I think in part that has made it harder for us to tell people when we’re really not great.

If we feel like or are a mess – both emotionally and literally in our spaces like home, it’s really hard to invite someone in to see all that chaos. We don’t want to be a burden, we don’t want to be embarrassed. We’re supposed to do it all, and well enough to post curated pictures of it on Insta and Facebook or Youtube. If we need something we don’t necessarily want to inconvenience others so we use handy services like Prime or Instacart to quickly and efficiently get things delivered to our door. But when the proverbial cup of sugar easily lands on our doorstep we’re still alone and missed that chance to banter with a neighbor.

So- once again my theory is we need to get better and taking down the curtain or barrier to others especially in regards to what is hard for us. It’s a symbiotic relationship because it’s as good for us to help others as it is to be helped. When you’re focusing your energies outward towards someone else you aren’t as caved in on yourself and all your travails.

This does happen - A friend did some ironing for one of my sister-in-laws after she had a baby. My sister -in-law does not particularly like this chore, so felt bad this woman offered to do it but turns out this friend actually loves to iron and also said “it blesses me to bless you.” While another friend was very pregnant with her 2^nd and had a busy toddler running around one of her friends came over and told her to take a nap while she (the friend) cleaned the bathroom and one of her daughters played with the smaller child. It was a huge gift to my friend. I have been privileged to be on the giving and getting end of many a meal train especially after a new baby and I love this way of taking care of people. I’m just suggesting we all get in the habit of helping and asking for help in the “ordinary time” so to speak, not just the big mile stones or life changes.

So, hey guys, chore parties?! Though I’m totally willing to accept that once again I’ve been living under a rock.

Being a Stay at Home Mom is like...

 

I’ve been doing the SAHM gig about 90 days now which is a healthy probationary break-in period for most jobs and people have been asking how it’s going. We’ve had our fantastic days, a few really terrible ones and overall I think I have the gist of what the job entails. As a fan of analogy and cross application, and drawing from the professional industry I just left, I’d say it’s like being a service advisor on a crazy busy quick service drive.

You better be there with your running shoes tied tight first thing because there could be 10 cars waiting and you’re on your own, or it might be crickets but you just don’t know when that first rush is going to start. So sip your coffee while you can, hopefully you have a well-insulated mug otherwise it will be tepid by the time you get around to it.

When the clients do start trickling in it’s physical work- greeting them at the car with a smile on your face, walking back to the desk, back to the car, back to the techs around the corner, telling the new customer you’ll be right with them, pulling up another client’s vehicle, and so on. Maybe you’re into a pedometer and maybe you’re not but I assure you you’re getting the steps. As physical as it is for your body so it is for your mouth- so.much.talking.

The tasks are overall pretty simple and limited. We’re not talking rebuilding transmissions, sneaky error codes the master tech can’t diagnose or dealing with the woes of trying to claim something under warranty but the factory keeps denying it and it drags on for months. Those things might come up but for most SAHM’s it won’t be your bread and butter. No- you’re doing oil change, after oil change, after oil change. You’ll do some brakes, sell some tires and throw in a few fluid exchanges for good measure. Most jobs will be completed and billed that day.

Since you’re doing mostly the same thing on repeat, consistency is rewarded. Those who really nail the word tracks and review the MPI’s (multi point inspections) with their clients and technicians will be rewarded with good relationships, trust, a good routine with accurate expectations and overall pleasant experiences. Those who do not will probably encounter distrust, frustration, miscommunication, maybe even outbursts. I mean, all moms will get the outbursts at some point ha!

I said you’re doing the same thing over and over but that does not mean every day is the same- a lot of the allure of your side of the shop is that appointments might be allowed but drop-ins are the big draw. So maybe you allow for 3 of 4 appointments a day- that leaves a whole lot of blank space that might fill up in any number of configurations. Or maybe you are a shop that only accepts appointments or none at all- that will depend on your shop and capacity therein.

While maintenance work doesn’t seem all that impressive or interesting it’s super important for the protection of the investment. How a vehicle is maintained determines its longevity, performance and overall condition. People get oil changes and tire rotations a heck of a lot more often than buying a new car so being a quality quick lube advisor is more than a trifle. It means really helping clients take care of their unique vehicle- not just printing off the general manufacturer recommended service intervals they could find online (I mean that’s part of it for sure) for year/make/model but also the wear and tear of components on that specific vehicle based on driving habits or conditions or whatever. Just pencil whipping an MPI form could lead to missing red flags or trying to upsell something that isn’t really necessary. So again, a quick lube advisor who is really paying attention is almost invaluable anymore.

Some days there is just so much whining from customers and techs alike that beyond being fine with him or her talking to your manager you’d frankly like to have a word with the boss yourself. You crave the chance to sneak away and sit in your car while staring at your phone for 20 minutes. Maybe you’re nibbling on a PB&J you brought from home or maybe you scarf down some fast food because there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

When the waiting room clears out you don’t really have a break- that’s when you need to refill the printer paper, clean up the coffee station that’s littered with dirty napkins, quarter filled cups and chewed stirring straws, brew a fresh pot, straighten out the chairs and track down a sales manager to figure out who threw a set of keys on your desk and what they heck you’re supposed to do with them.

Finally—and I don’t mean this from direct experience, my husband is fantastic and supportive—a lot of people who work in different departments think your job is pretty easy.

I don’t mean this to be a moan piece or portray myself as some martyr. I love the work I’m doing now. Being able to just be with my children and devote most of my headspace to them and taking care of our home is really a gift and feels tangible and important. When I was in a hiring role though I always liked to lead with the crappy parts of the job because there’s no sense selling a false impression and maybe there’s a little false perception floating around out there that being a stay at home mom means endless weekends and just hanging out. I guess it might be that way for some, but hasn’t been my experience.  

So, let me know if you need a translation-  I used customer, tech and vehicle interchangeably as "child." For whatever it’s worth I know if I was still trying to recruit and hire quick lube advisors I’d be tailoring my ads way more towards former stay at home moms trying to get back into the workforce. You can teach them the information but you can’t always cultivate that raw ability!