Lauren on Living

A Lifestyle Blog about Simplifying Healthy Living

Happy Mother’s Day // 2015

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Dear Asher and Bennett,

Thank you! Thank you for making me a mother.

Thank you for teaching me true selflessness, for testing me every day, for bringing me infinite joy, for helping me learn patience and for showing me that detachment is a hard won virtue.

Thank you for your sweet cuddles and for your chubby cheeks, which are just so kissable.

Thank you for filling my heart with so much love that at times I feel that it may burst, because no heart should be able to hold this much love, and yet, it does. And the more I get to know you, with every passing day, I only love you more.

I’m sorry for my short comings. I’m sorry for yelling sometimes, I’m sorry for not giving you 100% of my attention every second of every day, because you deserve all my attention. You deserve all my time.

I promise I’ll keep striving to be better. I know I’ve made mistakes and I know I’ll make more but thank you for forgiving me and for loving me anyway.

You are unequivocally the best things I have ever done. I just feel so deeply blessed and humbled that I get to be the person you call “mom”.

I love you!

xx

Mommy

The Great Vaccine Debate

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Here I am with yet another hot button topic (I just can’t seem to stay away from them): vaccines.  Whether or not to vaccinate your children has become an increasingly controversial subject, but honestly I just don’t get it.  There are a lot of ‘anti-vaccination’ and ‘vaccines cause autism’ propaganda out there that aren’t based in evidence whatsoever.  In my experience, when I’ve been talking to someone who is against vaccinating and I ask them why and then follow up by asking for scientific evidence that backs up that belief, more often than not they don’t have the evidence or I am directed to some blog post someone has written or some article on some natural health website, none of which have any scientific evidence based research to back them up.

I mean I get it.  The thought of doing anything that could lead to a negative outcome for your child is really scary, but I can not abide fear mongering. I can’t stress enough, that parents need to do their due diligence and do some actual research, talk about it in depth with your child’s pediatrician in order to determine the best vaccination schedule for your child, read scientific journal articles on the subject and take what other parents say with a HUGE grain of salt.

The truth is: vaccines save lives.  

The second truth is: vaccines do not cause autism. (1) 

I am pro vaccination.  Not only am I protecting my family by choosing to vaccinate, but I’m also helping to protect the entire population.  I think everyone should get vaccinated but that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to follow the same vaccination schedule.  It is important to talk to your pediatrician about coming up with vaccination schedule that is right for your child, that may mean sticking to the standard one or it could mean coming up with something different, just as long the end result is the same.  However, it is important to note that the risk of autism is not increased by the amount of vaccines you get at once. (2)

Some of you may be thinking: “Wait a minute what about the study by Andrew Wakefield that was published in the Lancet back in 1998?”  Well, I suggest you read the actual study and then read this.

What are your thoughts on vaccination?

Sources:

(1). Gerber, J. S., & Offit, P. A. (2009). Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses. Clinical Infectious Diseases , 456-461.

(2). DeSefano, F. (2013). Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism. The Journal of Pediatrics , 561-567. (If you don’t feel like reading the whole article, this sums it up nicely).

For Your Reading Pleasure // How to Talk to Little Girls

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Lisa Bloom

We live in a world full of gender stereotypes.  Even before our children are born, the way they are meant to fit into and experience the world is dictated for them.  Little girls are ‘pretty princesses’ and little boys are ‘big and strong.’  Girls get inundated with pink, while boys get blue.  Girls get dolls, and boys get trucks.  It goes on and on.  This article by Lisa Bloom touches on one half of an issue that has been weighing heavily on my mind.

I’m extremely sensitive to gender stereotypes, primarily in how they affect the station of women in society.  I wholeheartedly agree with the point that Bloom is making.  We need to engage the minds’ of our girls and stop putting so much focus on the superficial.  However, I also believe that it’s important for little girls to hear that they are beautiful, especially since we live in a society that is constantly telling them that they will never be pretty enough.  So how do we strike this balance?  How do we instill in our daughters the truth of their beauty without making it the focal point of their lives?  Women are often lead to believe that they can be either beautiful or smart, but almost never both.  How can we break down these notions?

I mentioned earlier that this article only touches on one half of the issue at hand, and I said that because it fails to touch on how we talk to little boys.  This to me is crucial.  Not only will the battle for true equality never be won unless men are advocating for it just as fiercely as women are, but we are also sending our boys many messages about their own roles and the roles of their sisters in this world.  When we tell a little boy that he runs like a girl, we are really telling him that girls are ‘less than’.  When we tell our sons that big boys don’t cry, we’re really telling him that emotions are not a part of being a man.  The messages we send to boys are just as dangerous and insidious as the ones we are sending to girls, maybe even more so, since this is still a male dominated society.

The answer lies, in part, in actively engaging our children in discourse about the world around them and the messages that society is sending them.  We can’t shield them from the world or prevent them from being bombarded by these messages or even stop them from absorbing our own flaws.  What we can do is teach them to process all the information around them and to think about what they are taking in rather than mindlessly letting these things penetrate their consciousness.  I can ask my son what he thinks about when the phrase, ‘you blank like a girl’, is used, and we can discuss its intricacies and the effect they have on the people that hear them.  If I’m ever blessed with a daughter, I can sit down with her to talk about self worth and the idea of beauty and how it isn’t really what society wants us to believe it is.  I can also accept Lisa Bloom’s challenge to leave the superficial out when talking to little girls I meet, but I also leave you with a challenge of my own:  Let’s try to elevate the conversation with any children we meet, not just girls.  When we meet little boys, lets talk to them about something other than their Spider-man pajamas or their train collection.  Instead let us engage our children in a higher level of discourse and by doing so empower the next generation to bring about lasting change to the benefit of society and the world.

So go read this.

For Your Reading Pleasure // Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?

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Christine Gross-Loh

I firmly agree with this article by Christine Gross-Loh.  As Americans most of us are far too over protective of our children and I think it is doing them a disservice.  Children need to be allowed the freedom to experience the world relatively untethered.  If you’re constantly following your child around making sure they don’t fall down and get hurt, how will they ever learn to be respect the laws of nature?  They’ll keep flinging themselves down stairs and off of furniture  because they have been taught that you will always catch them, they aren’t learning that their actions have consequences.  They aren’t learning to be cautious.  I can remember my dad teaching me to use a kitchen knife when I was 4 or 5 years old.  A few years ago I asked my parents how they could be so relaxed about my brothers and I running around the jungle wielding machetes, especially since they had no idea where we were at any given moment.  My dad replied that they knew we viewed the machetes as tools and not weapons.  We respected the tool and weren’t reckless with it.

I want to channel that little nugget of parenting wisdom.  I really hope I can give my own children a childhood as amazing as the one my parents gave me. This article only confirms my assertion at the importance of having a global vision.

So read this.

For Your Reading Pleasure // Precious Treasure

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UHJ
The below quote really resonated with me.  Children are our future and we need to guard them fiercely.  Too often is the value that children bring to society forgotten.  The littlest members of our lives carry the keys to our future.  We need to not only see them but also HEAR them.  They are a precious treasure. There is no screening process to be parents but the way this sacred role is carried out shapes the world we live in.
 
I hope you enjoy the following as much I did:
 
“Children are the most precious treasure a community can possess, for in them are the promise and guarantee of the future. They bear the seeds of the character of future society which is largely shaped by what the adults constituting the community do or fail to do with respect to children. They are a trust no community can neglect with impunity. An all-embracing love of children, the manner of treating them, the quality of attention shown them, the spirit of adult behavior toward them – – these are all among the vital aspects of the requisite attitude. Love demands discipline, the courage to accustom children to hardship, not to indulge their whims or leave them entirely to their own devices. An atmosphere needs to be maintained in which children feel that they belong to the community and share in its purpose.”
 
– Universal House of Justice,  Ridván Message, 2000

The Most Rewarding

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Almost every time I tell anyone that being a stay at home mom is the hardest thing I have ever done, they immediately reply with “but also the most rewarding, right?”.  To which I generally say “yes, of course!”  However, I am always left feeling guilty because deep down I’m not sure I see it that way.  Maybe I need to redefine my definition of rewarding.

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE being a mom.  It is my biggest dream come true, but when I think of something being rewarding, I don’t generally envision changing diapers, being covered in spit-up, sleep deprivation and going days without any meaningful adult interaction, instead I think of having a career I’m passionate about.  Curing cancer would be rewarding.  Establishing public health practices in under served communities would be rewarding.

I love the fact that I get to be present for all of Asher’s firsts.  His first smile, his first laugh, first roll, etc.  Is being a stay at home mom really the ‘most rewarding’ though?  Not really.  At least not yet, not for me.  It is hard work.  It is lonely.  It is testing.  Sure it can be deeply rewarding in the sense that I have brought this amazing soul into this world, but I wouldn’t classify it as the most rewarding.  The most important? Yes.  The most rewarding? Not yet.  Maybe this will change, after all my son is only four months old. I just think it’s important to be honest about these things, because if I’m feeling them, then someone else is too. There is too much of a culture of shame in the parenting community.  It’s almost as though parents aren’t allowed to complain about how hard it can get, without also reaffirming how amazing it is and sometimes all this ‘putting our best feet forward’ is exhausting and leaves everyone feeling like they aren’t doing as good of a job as someone else.

I wish more parents would talk about the challenges they face or the tests they endure rather than always presenting their lives as perfect packages filled with rainbows, ribbons and professional looking photographs of gourmet meals that they post on pinterest.  Let’s have a balanced perspective please.  Yes, being a mom is wonderful and fulfilling in ways I never imagined and I am so thankful every single day for being able to take on this role, but if you drop by unannounced, you will find my house in various stages of disorder and chaos.  The bed won’t be made, there will be a laundry basket of clean clothes that has been sitting in the living room for days waiting to be folded, baby clothes, pacifiers and tissues will be strewn about the house and don’t even ask when the last time the house was vacuumed.  My son will generally be smiling after having just completed his most recent abstract expressionism masterpiece consisting of curdled sour milk spit-up in my hair, seriously, I don’t even bother to change into clean clothes most of the time because there is just no point.  Being a parent is the best thing I have ever done but it has yet to be the most rewarding and that’s okay, it doesn’t make me any less of a great mom.

When the unthinkable happens

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I thought this quote from the Bahá’í writings was very timely and fitting in light of the recent events in Newtown, Connecticut.

“O thou beloved maidservant of God, although the loss of a son is indeed heart-breaking and beyond the limits of human endurance, yet one who knoweth and understandeth is assured that the son hath not been lost but, rather, hath stepped from this world into another, and she will find him in the divine realm. That reunion shall be for eternity, while in this world separation is inevitable and bringeth with it a burning grief.
Praise be unto God that thou hast faith, art turning thy face toward the everlasting Kingdom and believest in the existence of a heavenly world. Therefore be thou not disconsolate, do not languish, do not sigh, neither wail nor weep; for agitation and mourning deeply affect his soul in the divine realm.
That beloved child addresseth thee from the hidden world: ‘O thou kind Mother, thank divine Providence that I have been freed from a small and gloomy cage and, like the birds of the meadows, have soared to the divine world—a world which is spacious, illumined, and ever gay and jubilant. Therefore, lament not, O Mother, and be not grieved; I am not of the lost, nor have I been obliterated and destroyed. I have shaken off the mortal form and have raised my banner in this spiritual world. Following this separation is everlasting companionship. Thou shalt find me in the heaven of the Lord, immersed in an ocean of light.”

-‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Bahá’í World Centre, 1982 lightweight edition, pg 320

Juggling: Reconciling career dreams with motherhood

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I don’t have the answer to this issue.  My biggest dream has always been to have children of my own but in recent years I’ve also developed a new dream of having a thriving career in my professional field, one that I love by the way.  When Raf and I got married we decided that we would wait 4-5 years before starting a family, while knowing full well that I would be in graduate school around that time.

Well, I got pregnant with this little boy in my last semester of grad school, which I couldn’t have been happier about, but suddenly I started worrying about what this would do to my career.  I was applying for jobs and soon after graduating I went on a bunch of interviews but none of them seemed to work out and then I became VISIBLY pregnant so we decided that I should table the job hunt until after the baby arrives.  In any case I never felt good about keeping my pregnancy a secret from potential employers during the interviews, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still did it, because I knew that despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to discriminate, that the pregnancy would hurt my chances of being hired.  It’s just the reality of the world we live in, but still it felt icky to keep the secret.

Here’s the thing.  I want to have a career.  I have a passionate desire to make an impact on the world that goes beyond my nuclear family.  I also want to be a mom AND I don’t like the thought of anyone other than my husband or I raising our children.  So how do I reconcile these two things, without feeling like I’m giving something up?

The other issue is that we want to have our children be close in age, so if we have 3 children, spaces roughly 2 years apart that could mean 10 years before the youngest is in pre-school.  It would be brutal for my career aspects to take the first 10 years straight out of graduate school to raise my children before pursuing my career.  How would I explain that 10 year gap on my resume?  How would I stay current during that time?

I don’t have hard and fast answers to these questions. I know loads of women make it work, but I’m not sure how I am going to make it work yet.  Perhaps I need to look into finding a way to work from home, or working on a flexible schedule, or finding something part-time for a while.  I just don’t know.  Right now I can’t really have an exact idea because our son isn’t born yet and I know that my feelings and thoughts on this subject will be a lot easier to sort out once he gets here…or I least I’m hoping they will be.

The last issue is that we have a TON of student loan debt.  Even though Raf has a good job (not to mention we have very supportive families), I feel guilty about putting the financial burden solely on his shoulders, and it’s not just guilt either that eating me.  I find myself struggling with feelings about my own self-worth.  Right now since the baby hasn’t arrived yet, I’m feeling pretty useless as a stay at home wife.   Again I’m hoping these feelings change once I have our son gets here, because then I’ll feel like we’re both contributing equally to the family, albeit in very different ways.

I wish I had the answers to these questions, but I just don’t.  The only thing I know for sure, is that if I had to sacrifice one of these things, if I was forced to choose, I would without a doubt sacrifice my career for my children.  I just hope it doesn’t come to that.

I wonder if anyone has it truly figured out, or if this is something that all moms with career aspirations face.  If anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them.  How do you reconcile career goals with parenting desires?