Lisa Gould Rubin, Author at The Good Birth Project

Mother’s Day 2020

It’s Mother’s Day and the whole world is postpartum right now. At least, that’s what life feels like to me in this Pandemic. Everyone’s in their pajamas for a chunk of the day, we’re all isolated, cooking, cleaning, care taking, working – rinsing and repeating. Everyone’s having one long day; not knowing which day and what time it is.

Unlike those postpartum weeks though, where we feel so alone, thinking the whole world is just continuing on at warp speed without us, Covid-19 has us all in the exact same time warp. Remember how you never heard the word “fussy” until you had a baby? Then every other word was fussy, fussy, fussy. Now the word is “pivot”; pivot, pivot, pivot.

In mid-March, Indy, Dave & Lena (now 16 months if we’re talking time warp) came up to visit with us in our sweet, little (emphasis on little) cottage in Vermont for a long weekend. Then New York City turned into a war zone and there was no going back to Brooklyn.

I get to kiss Lena good morning and good night. I get to feed her, change her and bathe her. We have our weekday afternoon adventures on the farm while Mommy & Daddy tend to people feeling all the Pandemic/ Postpartum feelings

I get to say, “chuka, chuka, chuka, chuka….allllll aboard the schlafe (“sleep”) express; passing on tradition from my Viennese mother, before she goes up to bed. I get to rock her when she wakes up from her nap, still not quite ready to take on the rest of the day. I get to inhale that intoxicating elixir of warm sleep wafting from her head. Living with Lena brings me back the feelings, all of them, the sensory experiences, the physicality and the cadence of mothering a toddler. As a grandmother and as a mother living alongside Indy as she mothers.

I have no idea how long all of this will last; how many more months I will get to live in this intensely cozy, magnificently messy multigenerational family. All I do know is that I will treasure this time for the rest of my days. And I have a Pandemic to thank for this Mother’s Day gift.

These pictures, left to right are Indy & Hallie with Liberty just after I gave birth, Hallie & Liberty with Lena after Indy gave birth and Hallie and Liberty with Lennon after Hallie gave birth. There is life to be lived, even in a Pandemic…

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone everywhere who has mothered or is mothering anyone……
with so very much love,

Lisa

The Valentine’s Fairy

Valentine’s Day has always been my favorite day of the year. It’s simple. It’s about love.

In the years when I was on my own, Valentine’s Day could be confusing, empty, hopeful, Hallmark-y and weirdly laced with pressure. Once I partnered and had my babies, all that changed.

It began with Indy when she was nine months old; her first Valentine’s Day. I got a lot of pink and red construction paper and cut out hearts of all sizes. It required lots and lots of hearts to create a trail of hearts that led from her crib all the way across the catwalk, down the stairs, through the great room into the kitchen to the base of her highchair. There in the tray were a few more hearts sprinkled around a little gift with a note from the Valentine Fairy.

Every year, there were more hearts to be cut out to refresh the trail leading to a doily with a heart drawn around “Indy & The Valentine Fairy, 4/ever” with the requisite Cupid’s arrow through it.

As time went on, the Valentine Fairy’s trail led from Indy’s bed and Hallie’s crib, then Indy and Hallie’s bed and Liberty’s crib and ultimately three trails merging just outside of their bedrooms into one trail of hearts leading across the catwalk and down those same stairs to their cozy chairs in the family room with a love note and little gift from the Valentine Fairy.

As they each went off to college, travelled the world and lived near and far, the Valentine Fairy followed them. Every now and then, one would ask if the Valentine Fairy would be coming this year given the distance. “The Valentine Fairy”, I said, “will always be able to find her way to you, no matter where in the world you may be.”

I send a text now, at the request of the Valentine Fairy, giving a head’s up that she’s winging her way to Brooklyn, San Diego and San Francisco. Each package she carries contains some of the hearts collected over all those years from her magical trails. Her love is forever…

Would you share with me some of your special rituals on Valentine’s Day?
I would so love to hear them!

Great Gifts For New Parents

2019 brought me two new grandbabies and four “new parents”. They helped me compile a list of great, really practical, digital gift ideas for the parents (which in turn, benefits the babies). There are so many advantages to digital gifts, the obvious being that they can be purchased and sent instantly (such a relief once you’re done perseverating over what to give). What was your favorite gift you received as a new parent? Let me know in the comments!

1. Gift Certificate to a meal service kit delivery (try Blue Apron) or one that specializes in delivering fully prepared meals (like Freshly). This is beyond helpful to take off their plates…I couldn’t resist. Check out this article from Epicurious where they compare a few of their favorite meal-kit brands!

2. Misfits Market delivers fresh, organic produce that farms and stores can’t sell for a fraction of the cost right to their door!

3. Appropriately named Insomnia Cookies, are the perfect sweet treat for those late-night feedings. Their delicious cookies are available to ship nationwide, and in many cities, they deliver fresh-baked warm cookies on-demand as late as 3am! These are VERY VERY good for the soul.

4. Arrange a Dog Walker through Rover – This app allows you to safely match up with local pet-lovers who are available to take Fluffy on a 30-minute walk or even dog sit for a whole weekend!

5. Gift them one hour of Virtual Doula Postpartum Support with me so they have an expert, day and night, to help them with every single thing that comes up! Fill out the form on my site and let me know you’re interested in giving this as a gift. They’ll receive a beautiful gift certificate from you!

6. The days are long but the weeks are short…and the chores never get done. Giving them a gift card for house cleaning, grocery delivery, even assembling baby equipment through a service like TaskRabbit is one of those ‘OMG… HEAVEN!!’ gifts for any family.

7. Massages. They BOTH need one…trust me. Check out a list of spas near them to find the perfect gift of ~zen~.

Happy Gifting!

The 2nd Big Thing and a Mother’s Day Story

My last post was about two big things. I wrote about being MotherDoula, supporting my firstborn daughter having her firstborn daughter. The other big thing I mentioned, but did not go into detail, was moving from our home of 32 years. Now I want to share an experience about that as a Mother’s Day story.

Many years ago, I was clearing out baby clothes once again, after my third baby and my last. I sat on the playroom carpet sorting; visceral memories arising with pairs of leggings, tiny dresses and tee shirts. When I got to the shoes, I wept. It was so hard to put all of this “away”. It was my husband Peter’s brilliant idea to create a way to see the things I loved every day.

And so, I curated a collection of “firsts” of each daughter – Indy’s first moccasins, Hallie’s first paddock boots, Liberty’s first ballet slippers and leg warmers, first rain boots and umbrella, first Keds, party shoes, pocket book and gardening gloves.

I lovingly placed these treasures on the nineteenth century quilt rack above our fireplace in the great room where I would see them throughout my days from the kitchen, sitting in my rocker, eating at our table for years to come.

When it came time to pack up our home of decades, to strike the set where I had raised my three girls and myself, the absolutely very last thing to come down was that quilt rack with all of the firsts. I carefully and lovingly took each thing off the rack and stored them all together for some unforeseen future time in some unforeseen future context.

Fast forward to a year later in our storage unit in Burlington, VT. Indy and Dave are expecting their first baby and moving into a bigger apartment in Brooklyn. They are filling a U-Haul with much of our furniture and furnishings from the house. Indy gazes up at the tippy top of the storage unit and spots the quilt rack. She mentions that the big wall above their bed would be a great spot for it. Could they take it? She is sensitive to my split-second hesitation and says she totally understands if I don’t want to send it with them.

It takes me some moments to adjust my perspective. This quilt rack tells the story of my life as a mother. It is a part of my soul. And, I came to realize, I will be able to see it far more often in their home than in a storage unit.

“Of course you should take it.”

Now Indy hesitates, “But Mom, is it okay if I don’t take the shoes?”

In an instant, the longing and the clinginess disappeared, replaced by a clarity that I can only describe as an innate, timeless, Mother Wisdom.

“Indy, you cannot have the shoes. They are the story of my children and my life as a mother. You have to find your own children’s shoes, their “firsts”, to tell your own story as a mother.”

Happy first Mother’s Day to my Indy girl, who made me a mother on Mother’s Day, thirty-four years ago.

I can’t wait to see what you’ll put on the quilt rack first…

And Happy Mother’s Day to mothers everywhere; I am so grateful for you all in this perfectly imperfect, organized chaos that is motherhood.

My firstborn daughter has given birth to her firstborn daughter

Baby Lena made her way in at 2:25 pm on January 7, 2019. I was there as MotherDoula.

Everyone gushed about how excited I must be to become a grandmother. I was really excited that I finally was going to have a “take my daughter to work day”! But I couldn’t really know what it would feel like to become a grandmother. I’d never been one. What I did know was that in my lifetime I deeply hoped for the opportunity to usher my three daughters into motherhood.

Right from the beginning of Indy’s pregnancy, I realized that there was an inherent conflict in our circumstances. Indy wanted my support, guidance and expertise as a doula and as her mother. Yet I know both professionally and personally that daughters need to separate from their mothers in order to become mothers themselves.

As a birth worker, these roles are inextricably intertwined. Doula IS mother. I am, essentially, a professional mother; mothering mothers. How would I gracefully navigate this very tricky space; a nuanced combination of input and no-put and know when to do which.

I started to learn that when there was pushback, I needed to let it go; sometimes with palpable frustration and sometimes with grace. And as a professional, responsibly follow up with articles and research, signing off with “let me know your thoughts”.

When Indy wrestled with getting an epidural in labor, she said in a moment of frustration, “Just tell me what to do, Mom!”. As her mother and her doula, having been asked this very same question many times over the decades, minus the “Mom”, I gently, knowingly and lovingly told her, “I cannot do that, Ind. Only you can make that decision for yourself.”

Knowing how terrified Indy was of getting an epidural, I knew from that very deep Mother place exactly what I needed to do. I went out to the nurse’s station, where they were all sitting around. I had specifically decided not to wear scrubs as I always do to show up as mother. One nurse swiveled in her chair toward me and asked in that tone I have heard too many times throughout the years; the one that implies you are a nuisance and why are you interrupting us? (Interrupting what is debatable…). “Can I help you?”. “Yes”, I said nodding my head slowly, “Yes. You can. The patient in room four; she’s my daughter. And I am also a doula of thirty-five years. She is waiting for her epidural and she is absolutely terrified of the procedure. I don’t know who is on for anesthesia tonight and I am not sure what the policy here is for support people in the room, but I cannot leave my own young without either me or her husband to help her through it. So, I am asking all of you, as a mother and as a doula, to do whatever you need to do to make that happen. Please.”
Both Dave and I were in the room to help Indy get her epidural.

After Indy gave birth and was resting, she asked me if I wanted to know the baby’s name. She and Dave had kept it secret. I get this because I did the same thing with Indy and her sisters. I wasn’t interested in hearing people’s opinions about their names for nine months. In fact, the girls were given the honor of being the first to hear each sister’s name whispered into their ear just after birth and then announce it to all those gathered. Only this time, twenty-five years since the last sister was born, the name Indy was sharing was her daughter’s.
Lena

I wept. After keeping it all together to navigate Indy’s glitchy birth, the baby having to go to the NICU and Indy requiring medication that would keep her bedridden for twenty-four hours, I lost it.

Lena was my mother’s mother’s name. My mother had to leave her parents in the middle of the night when she was seventeen. With the help of the Jewish Underground, she escaped Nazi occupied Vienna, but she never saw her parents again. My mother didn’t have her mother to help her become a mother…

Lena is amazing ?! And, she is a joyous reminder of the extraordinary gift that Indy, Lena and I have been given; that we are all here, together. We get to experience and hand down motherlove, learning how to balance loving and letting go, a life-long process that begins at birth, from mother to daughter, new mother to new daughter and grandmother to granddaughter.

And this was just my first “take my daughter to work day”…

Altered States…

I am now being invited to attend the births of my eldest daughter Indy’s friends.

Wow.

These are the same girls (now women) who sat at my kitchen table in high school eating homemade chocolate chip cookies while we discussed birth control and heartache.

Those who come to the house for Good Birth Class (instead of meeting online – I DO work with Millenials) now sit pregnant, on the very same couch they made out on. Talk about altered states…

Last month, I had the honor of helping to usher in baby Jack. Jack’s mama, Molly, has been Indy’s best friend from the time Molly was 18 months old. I helped Molly’s mother labor 27 years ago to bring in Molly’s brother.

Again, wow.

In the midst of all of this, I am keenly aware that we are currently living in an altered state…

What keeps me afloat in these unsettling times are the babies; the reminder of this continuity over millennia, of the repetitive renewal and infinite possibility that comes with each birth.

I need to say this. We need to protect our mothers and babies. We need to safeguard their health and their passage in our communities, our country, our continents and our cosmos.

Birth is sacred and it preserves our humanity. It is the key.

Peace on earth really does begin at birth. I see it there every time…

Let me know if you want to talk or have coffee. I am here.

My Mother’s Day Dream

I dreamt early this morning that I was having a baby. I knew it was time for me to go through the closet where everything is stored to get what is needed so I could wash and dry it, fold it and put it in the baby’s room. It had this wonderful, familiar feeling of that ritual that I have done so long ago now, just in the days and weeks before birth. Which is what I am about to do…

What a beautiful feeling to have on Mother’s Day before giving birth to
The Good Birth Project – on Labor Day!

In my world, every day is Mother’s Day.

My Youngest Leaves Home

Yesterday, I took Liberty to college.
I have seen this moment coming, slowly gaining momentum, for some time.

Much like any life cycle event, there is no preparing for it really. As in marriage, pregnancy and birth, everyone has something to say; a story to tell, an opinion to give (invited or not). And all of those events have rituals to help one get ready – bridal showers, baby showers and various religious rituals once the baby arrives.

But there is no formal ritual for empty nesting.

I am beyond elated for Liberty. She is attending the school with which she fell in love. Her roommate is wonderful. They share a corner room in a great location on campus and there are two windows. (For those of you who have not yet done the dormitory do-si-do, this qualifies as hitting the jackpot.)

A team of kids greeted us as we pulled up to the curb and welcomed Libby. One of them whisked her off to sign in, get her key and help her find her room. I was to stay with the car while the rest of the team helped me unpack and carted everything up. I was then directed to a parking lot which was so far away I figured I was in the next state. As I walked back, it occurred to me that maybe this was a contrivance created by the college as one of the first steps to help with separation…

I found Libby in her room and we set about setting up her side – moving furniture around, putting clothes away in her closet and drawers, nailing up the shoe rack and mirror, adhesing corkboard to the wall with photos of her friends and family and all our animals…weaving extension cords and surge protectors into all the right locations for her computer, printer, alarm clock and fan (which provides the white noise she still needs to fall asleep; a ritual I initiate at birth).

Then comes the most important act – the making of the bed.

This is the bed where my children sleep when they move away from their home; our home together – the home in which the last two, Liberty included, were literally born in my bed. Bed is the place where I have lain with all three of them for countless hours, make that years, of nursing; nursing to feed them, nursing them through illness, nursing them through break-ups, hours of reading and years of conversation; listening, asking, processing. I have had the honor of being in their daily lives.

And so we begin what I have come to recognize as our ritual; Libby and I make her bed together.

“Your bed”, I remind her as she climbs up to try it out, “is your anchor; the place where you feel cozy, grounded and safe.”

Over the years, in my work with young mothers, I have often shared the wisdom I once heard as a young mother myself:
If we get our job right, they eventually leave us.

As Peter and I drove away, we passed a huge banner draped over a building on the Green that read: Welcome Home.

The Whole College Thing

I read in the NY Times this past weekend that Jose Arguelles passed away. He was the guy who organized the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 where people from all over the world gathered that August to hum, handhold and meditate. I can tell you that it sure looked like some weird version of that these last few days here in our household.

Today marks the end of the week in which Liberty, my 17-year-old, heard back from all of the colleges to which she applied. There was something to be said for the fact that hundreds of thousands of high school seniors were having the same experience all over the country and, because college application has gone global, all over the world.

I can say without any equivocation, that the whole college process is crazed. It has spun itself way out of control. We have spun it way out of control. Obviously, it is different from when I applied to college in 1971. It is absolutely different from when Liberty’s eldest sister applied in 2001 and different again from when the next sister applied four years ago. All sorts of things are different, but from what I gather, it’s really our fault, we baby boomers. There were lots of us and we had a lot of children. And apparently tons of kids abroad want to go to college here too. I keep envisioning that little square plastic puzzle where you have to move the little tiles around in an attempt to get the numbers to line up.

Seems like the bar is so high, no one can see it anymore. The Race To Nowhere, a powerful and timely documentary highlights how we are putting our children at risk given the educational system right now in this country. I joked with Libby that my mistake may have been not signing her up for the Peace Corps when she was five.

Libby had her “college plan” –

1. Avoid going to school where it was cold

2. Not attend school in CT just because her sisters did and they thought it had a kind of karmic symmetry

3. Try on living in a city where she wouldn’t ordinarily see herself because when else in life would she be able to do that with as much freedom (so much wisdom for one so young, I thought)

4. Not be daunted by being a plane ride away (I was daunted by this one)

5. Not be located too close to home (Ok. I get it…)

So much for college plans, not unlike birth plans. Within the first few minutes of visiting a college she felt she “should” see, where the winters are intense and last forever, Libby fell head over heels in love. The “there is no one else” kind of love.

She applied early decision. She was deferred.

I was not prepared for just how painful this was for me to see Libby in so much pain. I am no newcomer to the college process. This was my third and last college applicant. And, I am completely committed to the construct that wherever my children land is where they are and that affords them the opportunity to find their way in that exact place. Having been with hundreds of women in their pain, I have discovered that I am not always such a good “daughter doula”…

Libby chanted (through her tears) all those things that thousands of kids chant – I worked so hard – I am a really good student – I am a really good person…..

That was the one that jerked me out of my disappointment for Libby and launched me into some kind of ancient Talmudic call and response embedded deep inside of me by my own mother.
I chanted back…..

Life is unpredictable. You have no control over any one’s decisions or behavior but yours. The only person who can truly evaluate your worth is you. What matters most is that you feel good about you and your work. No one can take that from you, but you.

Libby was accepted in the end. I know that the discovery she made about herself this year will far outlast the process. And the joy she felt when she read the email will serve as a touchstone for the rest of her life to remind her to always hold on to her dreams. And, be ready to strategize if it doesn’t work out the way you envisioned.

Over the years, I have offered each one of my daughters the option of letting me home school them for college.

How much will this cost them in therapy in the years to come do you think?

The Worst Mother Of The Year Award

Around this time every year, my friend Amy and I commenced with the tally for our annual “Worst Mother of the Year Award”. We would review scenarios over the last year in which each of us had behaved in absolutely terrible, horrible, heinous fashion, without any redeeming anything, completely without reason, toward one or some of our collective seven daughters; four of them hers and three of them mine.

We would evaluate systematically all the catalogued transgressions and determine who would walk away with the title based on who had done the worst self esteem damage – hardest to recover from – requiring the most therapy in the future.

This review was conducted over lots of time together in any number of locations; on the phone over morning meeting (which we took pretty much every morning in order to get news, give news, assess who needed to be where, picked up when and fill in how), on our many-times-per-week walks with our dogs in the five thousand acre preserve down the hill from our homes (having lived 35 seconds apart for 23 years), in my kitchen, in Amy’s kitchen over breakfast, lunch, coffee, noshing, dinner or a glass of wine (our favorite!).

We laughed, we cried, we cried from laughing. Sometimes I would win, sometimes Amy would win and there were years we tied. In fact, lots of years we tied. We shared lightening speed tempers when pushed to our respective limits coupled with razor sharp tongues. Can a Viennese Jew and an Italian Catholic qualify as “tiger mothers”?

Amy passed way in November of 2009, nineteen months after being diagnosed with the most brutal type of brain tumor.

Amy might have argued that dying and leaving your children wins you the title of Worst Mother of the Year, no contest. Throw in that the eldest will be married next month without her mother by her side and that seals it.

I would argue back that this absolutely does not qualify.
This was not by choice.

When I consider all the choices I watched Amy make as a mother over the two decades of intertwined, crazy making, raising children years of our dear friendship, I can say, with complete conviction, that she made each and every one of them out of love…
deep, unconditional, no questions asked, tough love, love.

And that kind of love, the kind that will stay with her daughters for the rest of their lives, wins her, in my heart, the Wisest Mother Forever award.