Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Triumphant Working Mom Tale

I’m a huge fan of the talk show Morning Joe on MSNBC (6-9 a.m. weekdays), chiefly because I like the easy rapport and smart, witty banter between the co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. (My three kids now know the hosts by name and have been known to pause while eating their breakfast cereal to ask, “What is Joe TALKING about?”)

Despite having been a regular viewer of this show for a little more than a year, I didn’t know that Brzezinski had been let go by CBS in 2005 when she was 39 (when she learned “coincidentally” that one of the network higher ups didn’t think she was attractive enough, though she says that she doesn’t think that’s why she was fired). The mom of two went into a deep funk, wound up taking a job which paid a fraction of her original salary at CBS and . . . now she’s a successful TV host. Her interview with More Magazine in the October issue – which has the awesome Sela Ward on the cover — is worth reading if only to learn her philosophy about trying to succeed at your job and raise a family at the same time. “I’d rather spend one good hour with my kids a day than eight bad ones,” she said.

Item #2: Hollywood Babies After 40

 In that same issue of More Magazine, there was a feature about 10 celebs who have given birth to their first child after the age of 40, a trend which seems to be gaining traction in Hollywood. “The birthrate for women ages 40 to 44 has more than doubled in the past 25 years, and Hollywood is no exception to the trend,” More reported. Among those on the list: Holly Hunter who had twins at age 47, Mariska Hargitay who had her first son at age 42 and Marcia Cross who also had twins at 45.

Item #3: Welcome Home Daddy

One of the things about which members of the media were excited when a president with young children moved into the White House were photos like the ones taken recently of 8-year-old Sasha Obama, who was so excited that her dad, the president, had arrived home from a business trip that she ran to him and leapt into his arms. The same thing happens in my household when The Spouse gets home and our 8-year-old son launches himself into The Spouse’s arms, thrilled . . . only there’s no White House press corps to document it. Just me.

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I’m getting a kick out of watching Betty Draper’s pregnancy playing out on this season’s Mad Men. It’s such a study in contrasts. In that day and age — 1963 — pregnant women drank and smoked and no one said a word to them about it. The women didn’t think twice about it. (They also referred to pregnancy as a “condition.”) In the latest Mad Men episode there were two pregnant women drinking and no one blinked an eye.

Compare that to now when if the pregnancy police see a gestating woman eating unpasteurized cheese or holding a Starbucks cup in her hand, the pregnant woman would potentially subject herself to a public scolding, at the very minimum.

I’m dying to find out how much more Mad Men creator Matt Weiner is going to delve into Betty’s pregnancy and eventual delivery. I’m also wondering if they’ll be any discussion about baby formula (vs breastfeeding) and disposable diapers.

Meanwhile, over on Showtime, circa 2009, the off-beat show Weeds had its main character, Nancy Botwin, give birth to a Mexican drug lord/politician’s baby midway through the season and spent the last few episodes tackling issues such as sleeping through the night, circumcision and breastfeeding/formula.

One of the funniest episodes – actually it was painfully funny — occurred two weeks after Nancy gave birth to her baby and she went out to dinner with her former brother-in-law. While there, she became engorged with breastmilk. She brought her hand-held breast pump into the women’s bathroom in order to relieve the pressure, but it broke. She took rather *cough* unorthodox measures to deal with the situation.

Nancy’s unorthodox life choices in the wake of her first husband’s death — turning to pot dealing and then spiraling down in the abyss of the drug trade — along with the impact of those choices on her two sons were the grist for several of the latest episodes. (One of her sons has gone from a wimpy kid getting trounced on a suburban soccer field to a violent maniac, while the other has tried to make a living by peddling medicinal pot in California.)

The video below is a snippet of conversation with her kids about  breastfeeding their baby brother, the son of the drug lord/politician.

The Obama family has officially been living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a little over a week now and already folks are posting images of Michelle Obama online where they scrawl all over her mid-section suggesting that the First Lady is carrying the First Fetus.

I’ve stated many times before how much I loathe this fetish that web sites and so-called “journalists” have made of dissecting photos of female celebs, suggesting that if women have any contour at all to their bellies that they MUST be pregnant. I find the whole practice invasive and tacky.

When people openly hypothesize online, in print and on TV about whether someone might be pregnant — and that person won’t comment about the subject — did those folks ever think that perhaps there’s a good reason for the silence and that perhaps it would be in good taste to back off? If the woman is pregnant, maybe she’s had difficulties in the past (such as miscarriages) and wants to wait until she’s further along in her pregnancy to announce the news. If the woman isn’t pregnant, maybe it’s a case where she was photographed wearing a baggy outfit, or maybe she missed a month’s worth of Pilates classes. Either way, what’s the harm in waiting to report on these things until you know for sure? It’s not like a pregnancy will be a secret for long.

That being said, I’m ALREADY sick of the speculation that Michelle Obama might be pregnant. I seriously don’t want to endure four years of bloggers and entertainment “journalists” writing all over Michelle photos.

Image credit: AP/Telegraph.

When the story about the pregnant Gloucester High School girls (all 16 and under) was being wildly hyped up across the media universe recently, I kept mum about it here at the Picket Fence Post. I had no initial desire to leap into the fray on that particular issue.

Then the July 4th weekend parade in a Boston suburb came along. It crudely lampooned the girls – the minors – the kids who’d gotten pregnant and had no real idea of how drastically their lives were about to change. And some folks in the media and elsewhere said it was important to ridicule these girls so as to dissuade future teens from getting (or desiring to get) pregnant, because, as we all know, it was reported that some of the Gloucester girls wanted to get pregnant.

That’s when I felt compelled to chime in, seeing as though the girls were being called every sexual slur in the book, while the boys/men who got them pregnant (they haven’t been identified other than one 24-year-old homeless man whose name hasn’t been released) somehow escaped all manner of excoriating commentary. The vulnerable girls, with their swollen pregnant bellies, make for much better targets it seems. So I wrote this piece on Mommy Track’d about the media’s and public’s treatment of the girls and of other single women who get pregnant.

And, although I didn’t mention it in the column, pundits repeatedly suggested that a “Juno effect” was at work here, referencing the popular film about a 16-year-old girl from a stable, two-parent household who accidentally got pregnant during her sole sexual interlude then gave the baby up for adoption. So I watched Juno again with The Spouse to see if it could be considered an inducement to teen girls to get pregnant. We agreed that it in no way made the teenaged character seem cool because she was pregnant and didn’t make teen pregnancy seem easy (she was ostracized, she missed her school’s big dance, she was scorned by most adults), though The Spouse did add that he thought she “bounced back” from the pregnancy well, better than most girls, he suggested. I think this moving, quirky film got a bad rap in the post-Gloucester news cycles.

Image credit: Fox Searchlight via Media Bistro.

Item #1: HS ‘Pregnancy Pact’

I must admit, a question mark lingers over my head in a cartoonish balloon when it comes to this story. I’m sure you’ve heard about it if you listen to talk radio or watch cable chattering head shows (which I’ll be watching tonight while The Girl commandeers the “good” TV to watch Camp Rock on the Disney Channel). A large group of teens, all ages 16 and under, from Gloucester, Mass. made a pact to all get pregnant at around the same time so they’d all become moms at the same time. And 17 are pregnant. The story was featured in Time Magazine and makes my heart sick on so many different levels. Why would girls be focused on procreating instead of going to college or pursuing a career? (Don’t blame Juno as they made the pact before the charming, independent film about the teen who got pregnant by accident and gave her baby up for adoption, was released.)

The magazine reports:

“The girls who made the pregnancy pact — some of whom, according to [Gloucester High School Principal Joseph] Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers — declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. ‘They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,’ Ireland says. ‘I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.’”

Item #2: Michelle Obama, Target Customer

US Weekly, which usually trafficks in sensational celeb-related garbage reporting, features Barack and Michelle Obama on its cover this week bearing the headline, “Why Barack Loves Her.” The story is largely a pro-Obama puff piece but has a number of interesting mom-related tidbits of info. “. . . [W]hen not on the road, the mom [Michelle Obama] can be seen in her Chicago neighborhood driving to Target for toilet paper and buying clothing for her girls at The Gap and Limited Too.”

The Obamas had difficulty getting pregnant, according to Us, and now are hands-on parents, when they’re home with the 6- and 10-year-old girls, a challenge these days for their presidential nominee father who’s on the road most of the time. Us said: “With the help of a housekeeper but no nanny, Michelle certainly has found her smart-mom shortcuts: She relies on headbands for bad-hair days, claims dessert at school potlucks so she can buy a pie and, until recently, packed Oscar Mayer Lunchables and juice boxes into her kids’ lunches. (She has now cut out processed food, after her pediatrician worried her oldest daughter ‘was tipping the scale,’ as she puts it.)”

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The Bay State is teeming — teeming I tell you — with twins, according to a page one story in the Boston Globe:

“The combination of an unusually large number of pregnancies in older women, who are more likely to have multiples, and a heavy reliance on readily available infertility treatments, which also increases the odds, has propelled Massachusetts to the top: The state has a twin birth rate of 4.5 for every 100 live births, compared with a national rate of 3.2, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

What does this mean? Well, sometimes, bad, bad things, according to the article which included quotes from physicians about the dangers of pre-term births (most twins are born early) and the drain multiple births are putting on Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). Typical stuff. No article on multiples is quite complete without the not-so-subtle bashing of parents of multiples for selfishly pursuing infertility treatments (usually uttered by people with no fertility challenges) and blaming them for hogging hospital resources when they forge ahead with a multiple pregnancy in which babies which could be born early.

As a mother of nearly 10-year-old twins, I have a special loathing for these kinds of articles which start out fine and then go downhill quickly. I’m the first one to acknowledge that twin pregnancies are difficult (though I had a harder time with my singleton pregnancy), that babies born early do sometimes require time in the NICU (as mine did), that twins born very early can suffer from health problems (mine, thankfully, did not). Attempts have been made by physicians administering infertility treatments, as noted in the article, to reduce the number of multiples. All of that is fair game . . . to a point.

But then I read quotes like this one from the chief of newborn medicine at a Boston hospital: “The usual condition is one baby per uterus. That’s the way the system is designed. Mother nature does not take kindly to anything being unusual — even if she created it.”

I’m glad I didn’t give birth to my twins in his hospital where I could benefit from his warm understanding and compassion.