A few months ago I read a book called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl’ by Shauna Reid. She is an Australian woman, a couple of years younger than me, now living in Scotland. She wrote the book (and the blog it started out as) to chronicle her weight loss ‘adventure’ and it was a hilarious, touching story. She began her diet when she was tipping the scales at 351lbs and now weighs literally half that at 175.5lbs. I don’t read a lot of diet books so I can’t say whether or not this is not your average diet book, but I suspect it isn’t your average diet book. There’s a lot more to Shauna’s life than her battle with her weight, and all that extra stuff makes for some hilarious passages in her book. I could go on but I don’t want to sound too much like her pimp.

One of the things she talks about is her relationship with food as a young child, and the role her parents played in her weight gain. I’ve watched enough episodes of Oprah and Dr Phil to know that ‘eating issues’ are often established in childhood, and I have family members and school friends who can trace their weight problems back to their parents’ insistence that they finish everything on their plate before they could leave the table.

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There are few things more pathetic (and I mean that in the ‘causing and provoking pity’ sense of the word, not the ‘miserably or contemptibly inadequate’ sense - thanks, dictionary.com) than the site of my ten year old girl, tucked up on the sofa for the second day in a row, completely at the mercy of this dreaded winter ‘flu.

Here in Australia, and in freezing-cold Canberra to be exact, there are some nasty winter bugs going around, and the girls in this family have all succumbed, one by one. My eight year old had it a fortnight ago, last week was my turn, and now it’s Madeleine’s. This poor kid’s annual winter bout of the ‘flu usually involves a trip to the ER in the middle of the night for a dose of something to open her airways. She has a tendency to develop croup when she catches a cold, and I’ve seen her lips turn blue enough times now that we now know to take her in the minute she starts sounding even remotely seal-like. We took her last night at about 8.30pm, and fourteen hours later she’s happily ensconced on the sofa with her iPod, the remote control, her Nintendo, the electronic thermometer and a banana smoothie, breathing easier. She never complains, she just looks at me with bloodshot, teary eyes and pulls Buster the Bear in a bit tighter. Which is all a parent really needs to hear, really. More chocolate, darling? OK. Here, have a whole block.

Compare this act of incredible bravery with my own experience a few days ago. I was actually weeping. I would like to tell you that my aches and pains were FAR WORSE than Madeleine’s struggle to breathe but I’m pretty sure that argument wouldn’t fly. But I really, really felt terrible. Everything ached, nothing fixed it, and nobody was giving me chocolate. And did I complain? You BET I did. I complained to my husband at every opportunity, begged him to make the nasty aches go away, implored him to do something, anything, to make my life less miserable. Yes, it was extremely undignified.

Why do we complain? Does it actually make us feel better, somehow, to be explaining to somebody else just how rotten we feel? Do we do it for the sympathy, for the chance for a cuddle or some flowers or just some acknowledgment that what we’re going through really is awful? Is complaining just another way of seeking validation? Maybe it is. But that doesn’t explain why some people complain and others don’t. Don’t we all need validation for the way we are feeling?

I’m a shameless complainer. OK, maybe not completely shameless. Sure, I feel a bit ridiculous afterwards, especially if the person I’m complaining to calls me on it and points out how pathetic - in the miserably or contemptibly inadequate sense - it is to see a grown woman weeping about a little upper respiratory infection. A dear friend of mine has just been through several harrowing sessions of chemotherapy and the only time I’ve heard her complain was when she was getting frustrated with the turban covering her bald head, because it kept slipping sideways. I’ve heard about chemo, I’ve seen people in the movies go through it - it looks like sheer bloody hell, but I never once heard a peep of a ‘why me??’ from my friend. Why doesn’t she ask for sympathy? Doesn’t she need somebody to tell her ‘you poor bugger, I’m so sorry, that must be awful, you’re very brave’?

Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she has made peace with the fact that this is just something she has to go through, something that will eventually make her stronger and wiser. Maybe when you’ve got something that awful happening to you, it just seems like a complete waste of energy to be undignified and ask someone else to agree with you that it’s awful. Yes, that must be it. And that would explain, I suppose, why I wept at my aching body… in the great scheme of things, a mild upper respiratory infection really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty contemptibly inadequate. I wasn’t weeping because it hurt so much, I was weeping because of the futility of having a cold that had knocked me completely on my arse without teaching me anything profound about myself other than the certainty of my own pathetic-ness.

I think I’ll just stick to my job as chief medicine-distributor and chocolate-provider and try to remember to take some echinacea next winter so I can avoid getting sick and miserable in the first place.

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We are an extremely gullible society, believing any health report and following any trend if an expert assures us it is valid.

Unfortunately, our standards of “expertness” aren’t really up to par. We tend to believe any news anchor, medical reporter, or lifestyle columnist that comes along. No good can possibly come of this. That lack of attention to detail is how the fitness movement, the theory of global warming, and the scourge that is decaffeinated coffee all got a foothold on us.

Global warming. In the case of global warming I suspect that the entire “theory” was actually invented by a couple of bored scientists who wanted to pull a fast one on their lab partners. Chuckling maniacally, they circulated a memo claiming that hair-spray or some such nonsense was going to bring about the end of the world through a bizarre chain reaction involving icebergs, the rain forest, and Aqua Net - and then sat back for some belly laughs when the other scientists stumbled onto their practical joke.

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There is a certain comfort to be taken in the knowledge that some things are probably never going to change.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; the earth will continue to rotate around the sun, and I will not get even one iota smarter this summer over last.

Learned lesson. After three plus decades on this earth you would think that by now I would have learned just a little bit about sunscreen. You would be wrong. I have, however, recently learned quite a bit about aloe.

I sum it up thusly, on the first day God made the sun so the devil had no choice but to counter with sunburn.

For the record, I am much better at parenting then I am self-preservation.

Stupid mistake. Despite remembering to coat both children with a thick layer of sunblock, I still managed to believe it a fine idea to stand IN THE WATER under a blazing hot sun for more than four hours with nothing between me and the sun but my own stupidity. I know, just typing it I’m embarrassed all over again.

I honestly don’t know which hurt worse — the peeling or my pride.

What I really suffer from is a case of rampant optimism.

A little sun. Despite years of cause and effect training which would have trained even a gerbil to recognize “sun minus sunscreen = burn,” I continue to operate under the delusion that I, the whitest white girl in America — can get “just a little sun.” This is akin to believing you can get “just a little pregnant” or “just a little nuclear radiation exposure.”

I persist in this belief because in my teens I could — and did — tan.

Tanning goal. That was really my whole life goal back then. Study? Maybe. College? Yeah, whatever.

A nice golden copper toned glow — I’ll work on it day after day until I achieved my goal with only a backyard lawn chair, a couple hundred gallons of baby oil, and my ability to lie completely prostrate for hours at a time to guide me.

Brown baby. They also tell me I used to get “brown as a berry” as a baby. Apparently, I am supposed to take great solace in the fact that I was a real babe when I was FOUR.

Meanwhile back at the pool, well meaning friends tried to warn me. By late afternoon my back was starting to feel a wee bit warm and I thought about sunscreen for a nano-second, but my children blissfully sliding time and again down a waterslide and my need to be waiting at the bottom because, after all, how could I trust the no less than THREE lifeguards on duty, seemed the more pressing matter.

By the time we left the pool, my upper body was the approximate color of a ruby red grape. I radiated enough heat to toast a marshmallow and people just passing by clucked in sympathy and then, I don’t doubt, laughed uproariously when out of my earshot at how stupid some people can be.

Phase two. Now, a few days later, I am currently in phase two of the sunburn process, phase one being the getting burnt part.

Phase two is the back-slapping phase. In this phase people who have never shown even the slightest iota of interest in you previously, people who don’t even KNOW you, will suddenly be seized by the need to slap you on the back.

It’s as if there is a primordial siren call of seared skin. Seemingly unbidden they are moved to “slap!” you on the back with a hearty hail fellow well met even if they know not why.

As you cringe and slither to the floor in a heap of blinding red hot pain, they are left to state the obvious to soothe you, “little burnt huh?” “Little burnt huh?” is obviously code for “I hate you enormously and I wish to see you dead!,” that is the only possible explanation for this.

The only possible defense to back slapping is to make the universally recognized sunburn warning noise whereby you grit your teeth, pull back your lips, inhale briskly and spasm your body inward in the standing equivalent of the fetal position.

Sure, they’ll STILL slap you on the back, but with these motions you are slightly less likely to want to punch them. As if you could really lift your arms to take a swing anyway.

As the days have passed I have regained near normal movement in my upper limbs.

Shedding skin. I have also started to shed skin like a snake, lending whole new meaning to the phrase “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours!” My husband, lucky man that he is, gets to witness it all.

All I can say is that when it comes to reliving the sheer stupidity of the moment when I chose to eschew the necessity of sunscreen for the certainty of a not-so-slow burn, all I can say, is boy, was my face red.

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I used to drink. A lot. Too much, really, for someone with my family history and proclivity for creating chaos and drama. So I stopped. About 8 months ago. And life has gotten much better…. but that’s a story for another time.

Like many imperfect parents, I’m more or less a very good parent on most days… but this requires a certain amount of concentrated effort and a whole lot of help. I used to get help in a bottle, and now I get help from a variety of sources.

But I still need and want a vice.. something that serves no other purpose than pleasure and rebellion. A way to cut loose and be onesself without getting mistaken for a “ma’am” or a “sir”… or someone who is, say, turning 40.

I like to joke about starting a respite center for mothers staffed with hot Italian boys (or girls, depending on your preferences).. and I’m only sort of joking. Seriously, it’s so very easy to take parenting too farging seriously these days.

But the thing is, I miss having a vice. I don’t want anything life or health or marriage threatening, just something to spice things up and remind me of the wild girl I used to be long long ago.

So when my friend told me of her new “thing” for nicotine-free cigarettes (doesn’t that sound like “no strings attached” sex?? nice idea but highly unlikely?), I thought I’d give them a try.

I’ll report back soon.. but until then.. any vices you’d recommend?

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I would like to be able to tell you that I am one of those perpetually peaceful people who seem to radiate a slightly smug contentedness from deep within their soul. I would like to be able to tell you that I write in a gratitude diary every day, right after my 6am Yogalates session and bowl of organic muesli. I would like to be able to tell you that I am able to handle anything my children throw at me – figuratively speaking – because I am inherently calm and happy and balanced. I would like to be able to tell you I’m like that because I would like to be like that but the thing is, I’m not. Maybe in a parallel universe, but not this one. I’m just not good at relaxing. During the birth of my second daughter, I tried very hard to breathe deeply through the contractions, to focus my energies inward and breathe the pain out. My husband later told me that I sounded like a horse.

In this universe, I’m just your average, garden-variety ineffective parent whose favourite method for calming down involves a large glass of shiraz and an even larger block of chocolate, and whose body would simply snap in half if made to do the downward dog.

When my mother was a stay-at-home-mother of four she went to yoga classes once a week – we used to say she was going to Yoghurt Classes – and she once told me that yoga saved her sanity in those days. So one day I went to a yoga class for new mothers and stretched for about 50 minutes before being told to lie down and listen to the lovely music and breathe deeply and just as I felt the tension melt away and the thoughts leave my troubled mind and just as I reached that state of blissful contentment… I fell asleep. I might have snored. Well, at least I didn’t neigh.

I really love the idea of meditation, but although I have tried I just can’t do it without the snoring. So, like all good mothers, I am living the life of a calm and contented human being vicariously through my children. My kids are learning to meditate. In our house, every day ends with reading from a book called The Wishing Star: Meditations for Children by Marneta Viegas. There’s a good reason why this is a good thing.

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BPA — or bisphenol-a to you nerdy types — has been in the news a lot lately. Wal-Mart and Toys ‘R Us are the latest to listen to consumer demand (go free market!) and are starting to pull baby bottles containing BPA. Canada’s push for a full ban is moving forward, and more and more companies are starting to manufacture BPA-free alternatives. Why? Because experiments on lab animals has linked BPA to “changes in the brain, early puberty, and possible tumors.” Not exactly something you want to make it’s way into your baby’s body (or yours for that matter — Nalgene, a manufacturer of reusable drinking bottles, is also starting to phase out BPA in its production process).

We’re certainly not ones to shy away from a trend when there’s good science and our kids’ health involved, so we’ve convinced Medela to give away a Breastmilk Feeding & Storage Set containing three BPA-free bottles, lids and nipples, to 5 of our lucky readers to get started down a toxin-free path. (Pssst, we have a sneaky feeling these bottles would be just fine for formula feeding as well.) The entry form is here.

Ed. note: The Imperfect Parent did not receive any compensation for this post

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I, like many of my friends, am a smoker. I know, I know – I should quit (back off!). I choose to smoke, as is my choice. And while I am a girl of few rules, there are four that I live by:

1. When there are kids in the car – NO SMOKING
2. When there are kids in the house – NO SMOKING
3. When I am near my pregnant sister – NO SMOKING
4. And when I am in the vicinity of children – NO SMOKING

If I happened to be outside smoking and I see someone approaching – especially if that someone is a child — I quickly move, attempt to blow the smoke as far away from them as possible, or hold my breath until they pass.

So, the next time I see someone smoking with a mini-van full of children, or smoking while pushing their child in a stroller and holding another kid’s hand, smoking while holding a child, or smoking while — gasp — pregnant, would it be impolite of me slap them upside the head?

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I suppose all parenting is based on some sort of ideology, but when does ideology interfere and cross the line of what is in a child’s best interest?

It’s too bad that far too often, a parent’s desire to influence a social movement leaves them vulnerable in order to make a point or act in protest.

For example, and I know this is a touchy subject with some, but parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, claiming that it’s all part of some conspiracy theory to line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies. Many parents are so busy trying to find ways that vaccinations cause more harm than good, I think they forgot why vaccines were introduced to begin with. How much evidence does one need to make the logical conclusion that your political gain may compromise the health of your child?

For example, a recent Measles outbreak in San Diego:

On Jan. 25, the 7-year-old’s parents took the youngster to the Children’s Clinic of La Jolla. The child may have coughed and sneezed in the office, thus infecting four other children.

Those four patients returned to the clinic between Feb. 5 and 8, possibly spreading the virus to 60 other children.

All of the 11 confirmed patients, from 10 months to 9 years old, were not vaccinated either because they were younger than 1 – the minimum age for measles inoculation – or because their parents objected to having them vaccinated, county officials said.

…and, although it has NEVER been proven that vaccinations cause Autism, and countless studies fail to even make a link, there are still those holdouts that don’t care what science has to offer, the political statement of pharma vitriol means more to them than what they consider to be a minuscule risk. Nevermind that the risk WIDENS and INCREASES as more and more parents decide not to vaccinate. (Oh, the irony!) Facts, in these cases, don’t seem to be a priority.
One physician tries to uncover the psychology of it all…

It seems to have taken on a life of its own and may be a good example of a socio-psychological phenomenon known as “groupthink,” a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group.

There may be many parents who will never be convinced that the benefits of immunization for their children in most cases outweigh the risks. In free countries, that is their prerogative and I, as a physician, accept that.

Society must understand that such convictions must not dictate public health policy. Failure to offer people a sound vaccination program would no doubt result in a resurgence of contagions such as polio, measles, and heaven forbid, perhaps even smallpox, should the wild virus ever be reintroduced into the world.

The human toll in lives and suffering, long forgotten by our postmodern world, would be incalculable in a jet age which rapidly spreads infectious disease to all continents.

I’m sure we all have different, conflicting examples of “group think” and some “group think” is beneficial to a child, like the disdain of child abuse, but when does group think interfere with our own sensibilities? I think the Internet, for better or worse, has propagated much of this and found validations for practices in which some critical thinking would go a long way. I can think of a bunch just off the top of my head, can’t you?

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Okay, so our site logs lead me to it…a breastfeeding.com thread in which a link to an Imperfect Parent column sparked many tangents on a debate board. Kelly Cunningham’s essay, “Don’t Even Bother: The Case Against Childbirth Education Calsses” was the target of scoff in a thread entitled: Everything wrong with birth in our birth culture. Basically, the old “natural birth vs. assisted birth” debate made for old-school debate fodder when it took a surprisingly sharp turn into the bowels of maternal control and rage, accusing doctors who intervened during the sacred process of birthing and interfering with their birthing desires, as a crime and psychological significant of being raped.

Then they argued as to whether it was rape or assault and who had actually been raped and who was qualified to categorize it as “rape”.

Yep. They call it “birth rape”.

So to all the fine, imperfect people out there, can medical intervention be classified as “rape”, if it is against the implied, specific or vague birth plan of the mother? If you wish to read where the “birth rape” started, go to page 33, post #323.

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