Self-Censored

I go to a book club once a month. It is one of the few non-work, non-child related things I still manage to do, and I generally look forward to the meetings. For reasons that don't really matter to anyone outside of the book club, we need to seriously cut back on talk about babies, birth, mothering, and all that. Now, my book club knows about this blog, and some of them even read it occasionally, so I want to be really clear that I think this is a very good idea. In fact, I was the one who suggested it.

But. (You knew there had to be a "but", didn't you?)

But it makes my heart hurt a little to think about this. There are several mothers in the club (hence the need for the change). The other mothers seem to have done a better job than I have of keeping parts of their pre-baby lives. They watch TV shows and movies, and read books other than those we've chosen for our club. I marvel at this. By the time we get our kids in bed and our chores done, Hubby and I are usually too exhausted to do much more than crawl into bed ourselves. Our book club does actually discuss the books we read, but we also talk about other things. And frankly, if I stop talking about my kids and motherhood, and don't talk about my job (which no one in the club really wants to hear about)- well, there is not much left. Except for my opinions on health care reform, I suppose, but even those are informed by my experience as a mother.

To be honest, I don't think the hurt comes from the restrictions on topics at book club so much as the general restrictions on how I interact with the rest of the world when it comes to motherhood. I must not talk about the difficulties of being a parent because no one forced me to have kids. I must not wish out loud for a more flexible work place because the accommodations made for working families are so unfair to those who don't have kids. I must not wish for better government support for working parents because we already get so many tax breaks and that is unfair to single people. If I go out in public with my children (except maybe to a park), I must be hyper vigilant to ensure that they do not disturb anyone else, because other people have a right to enjoy public spaces without being bothered by noisy little kids. And most of all, I must not imply that having children is a good thing to do, because the planet is already overcrowded.

My husband wonders why I care so much what other people think. I don't really know, but I suspect it is because I used to be "child free", too. I remember how other people's kids weren't that interesting to me, and how I wished for an adults only day at the zoo. (Really! I did. In retrospect, this was a bit silly, but I really believed it at the time.) I know that there is no way to describe how motherhood has made me a better, less selfish person without somehow implying that people without children are shallow and selfish. I certainly do not believe this to be true, so I choose instead to avoid trying to describe how transformative motherhood has been for me. And I would never tell someone that they can't truly understand something because they do not have kids (especially if in my heart of hearts I think it is true).

This self-censorship is exhausting, and more than a little isolating. I find myself wanting to spend more time with other mothers, or with the few old friends I have with whom self-censorship is entirely unnecessary. The isolation I feel is one of the reasons I read (and write) blogs. I think that this self-censorship and the concomitant search for other people who are just like me is a sad thing, not just for me and my small little social life, but because it is indicative of a larger problem in society. Thanks to technology (like blogs....) we now have the ability to choose to talk with only those people whose views will not challenge our own. This is far bigger than parents and non-parents, although I don't think that this divide is as trivial as it may seem at first. (What would happen if we worked together to bring about true flexibility in the work place? I had true flex time at my previous job, and I loved it from the beginning, long before I had kids. I loved being able to arrange my work week so that I could leave early on a Friday for a long weekend getaway.) It is also Democrats and Republicans, Tea Partiers and Progressives. When was the last time you had a political conversation with someone whose views are different from your own? Or do you politely change the topic when it becomes clear you do not agree? We have lost the ability to politely disagree with someone, but to still listen and really try to understand their point of view.

I don't know the solution. I can try to listen, but it takes two to have a true conversation, and I'm afraid to talk.

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I almost deleted this post as a little too whiny and self-absorbed. But then I decided that if I can't navel-gaze on my blog, where can I do it? (Hey! Look at all that lint!) And I really wanted to get this out of my system. Besides, self-censoring a post on self-censorship just seems wrong.

Cool Graphic on Vitamins

I came across a graphic showing the amount of evidence for various vitamins and supplements by way of Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline. It is a really cool way to look at the data, but then, the Information Is Beautiful site always has cool ways to look at the data. I thought I'd share it, particularly since I've recently been talking about the evidence supporting the use of vitamin D.

I Don't Even Have the Energy to Think of a Title

I had great plans to write something meaningful this weekend. But time change + potty training regression = exhausted mommy... I'm heading to bed as soon as I get Petunia's milk ready for tomorrow.

If anyone out there knows why an almost 3 year old who clearly can control her pottying (since she does so at day care and was doing so at home) would now choose not to do so at home, please tell me. My current theory is that my daughter is trying to drive me insane.

A Mechanism for the Effects of Vitamin D on Immune Function

Our pediatrician is a big proponent of vitamin D supplementation, and thanks to her, everyone in the family regularly takes vitamin D. She referred us to the GrassrootsHealth.org website for more info about her recommendations. I did some PubMed searching, too, and decided that I agreed that the available evidence suggested that vitamin D supplementation might be a good idea- or at least that it wouldn't be a bad idea. We all know that vitamin D is essential for strong bones (this is because we can't absorb calcium without it), but one of the other things that vitamin D is supposed to help is your immune function.

I submit that "improves immune function" will be irresistable to just about any parent with a child in day care. And indeed, after we started giving Pumpkin vitamin D, I noticed a drop in the number of illnesses in our family (most of our illnesses come home from day care, and Pumpkin is the first one to get sick). However, she had also been at day care for awhile, and presumably built up some immunity to various things, so I considered this suggestive, but nothing more.

This week, I cam across a recent article in Nature Immunology by von Essen, et al, which adds support to the idea that vitamin D is essential for proper immune function. (You can read the abstract of the original paper without a subscription. Here is a write up of the paper, too.)

The paper looksat the function of one type of immune cells, called T cells. T cells are far more responsive to antigen after they have been "primed"- i.e., exposed to antigen once. The current model to explain this involves the fact that T cell activation can occur via two different signaling pathways. The first pathway dominates in "naive" T cells (T cells that have never been exposed to antigen), while the second dominates in T cells that have previously been exposed to antigen. The second pathway is far more efficient than the first, which explains why primed T cells are more responsive than naive ones.

But how do the primed T cells switch to the second pathway? That is where the new paper comes in. The researchers show that the expression of one key protein in the second pathway, phospholipase C gamma1, is increased by the combination of vitamin D and its receptor (cleverly called "vitamin D receptor", or VDR). The expression of VDR, in turn, is increased by the activity of the first pathway. So, the T cells turn on the second, more active pathway using the same pathway that they use to respond to antigen the first time they "see" it- but only if there is sufficient vitamin D around. The researchers even showed that T cells isolated from people with low serum levels of vitamin D were less responsive to antigen than T cells from controls with normal levels of vitamin D.

Maybe it is because my background is in biochemistry and biophysics, but this is the sort of study I like to see when I'm trying to evaluate the benefits of a supplement. Correlative population studies are all well and good, but I'm always a little suspicious of them. Human beings aren't lab animals- it is very hard to control for all of the confounding variables in how we live our lives. A population study indicating a correlation between levels of some vitamin and a certain outcome is a nice story, but it is only the outline of the story. A biochemical mechanism adds some satisfying detail to the story.

And here is the ironic twist to this story- as I write this, my nose is blocked with the second or third consecutive cold I've had this season, which just goes to show that no supplement can guarantee you perfect health.

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I am not a medical doctor. This post should not be construed as medical advice. I read the entire paper, but as an interested scientist, not as a careful reviewer. If you're wondering about whether or not you or your children should take vitamin D supplements, all I can really tell you is to talk to your doctor and/or do your own research.

High Stakes

A very sad couple of stories have been dominating the news over the last couple of weeks here in my home town. A 17 year old girl was attacked and killed while out jogging. She was missing for a couple of days before her body was found. They have arrested a 30 year old man who has previously served time for attacking a young teenage girl. And now, they have found the skeletal remains of a 14 year old girl who went missing on her way to school just over a year ago. The same man is a "person of interest" in that investigation.

These stories hit harder now that I am a parent. I look at my two beautiful little daughters and can barely comprehend the pain that the parents of those two young women are feeling.

But I find that I spend a lot of time thinking about the other parents in this story- the parents of the little boy who grew up to be a rapist. I think they must be feeling a lot of pain right now, too. I do not in anyway blame them for these attacks. Their son is a grown man now, and surely, at some point, we have to be responsible for our own actions, regardless of what mistakes our parents make. To say otherwise would be an affront to the many people who go on to lead perfectly normal lives despite bad childhoods.

I am also not saying that this man's parents necessarily did something wrong. There are surely people out there who had idyllic childhoods and still go on to commit crimes.

But clearly something went wrong here. And clearly we, as a society, have an interest in figuring out what goes wrong in cases like this and determining how we can prevent these things from happening.

There are many people in my community calling for the death penalty, or saying that after this man's first offense he should have been locked up for life. I don't think either of these things provides an answer. Yes, executing this man will ensure that this one man never commits a crime like this again- but there will be other men who do, and I think the evidence is pretty clear that they won't be deterred by the thought of the death penalty. And yes, a longer prison sentence would have prevented these crimes- but it would not have prevented the first crime.

So I come back again to the parenting. It seems to me that the only way to stop these crimes is to prevent little boys from turning into men who could commit such an act. This man's parents will never know if there was something they could have done differently that would have changed the outcome for their son. From what has come out about his background, it does not seem that there was any obvious warning sign, any clear point at which his parents should have intervened. There was just an average boy, perhaps a little more troubled than most, trying to find his place in the world. If there was anything his parents could have done differently, it is buried in the mundane details of raising him- in how he was disciplined and how he was praised, how he was taught to respond to disappointments and what he was taught to expect from the world. In short, it is in the sum of all the everyday decisions that parents make, while they are also trying to keep food on the table and hold their own lives together.

And that is what has me stuck thinking about this story, reading every new little update that comes out. It is a reminder that parenting is such a high stakes game, and one with very delayed feedback. We muddle through as best we can, but won't really know the outcome for at least 20 years.

For such a high stakes game, we play it with very little support from society. We are presented with unrealistic images of what parenthood will be like, and society frowns on frank discussions of things like the fact that some children are harder to parent than others. We isolate new parents by creating a fiction that the tight knit nuclear family should be able to handle it all, and show images of the joy of parenthood without fully acknowledging the frustrations. How easy it is to think that you're doing it all wrong. How easy it is for new mothers to slip into depression (which studies show can lead to an increase in aggression in the child) and how poorly prepared we are to catch it. I had prenatal appointments every week by the end of my pregnancy- but my first post-partum appointment was six weeks later. A lot can happen in those first six weeks, and a lot can happen after that one post-partum appointment is past. Why does it fall to pediatricians to try to catch the signs of post-partum depression? Why don't we follow up with the women directly, rather than via the proxy of their babies?

And then there are the pressures on working families. Women get a guilt-trip regardless of what choice they make about whether to go back to work or not- and many women don't really have a choice, anyway. But any attempt to require more family-friendly workplaces is met with cries of how it will destroy jobs, or of how unfair it is to the people who do not have children. I think cases like these show that policies that degrade our ability to parent are risky for all of society, not just painful for the families in question.

I look around my community, and I see a patchwork of programs and organizations trying to plug these, and the countless other holes in our support network for families. They are constantly underfunded, and usually overlooked. It must be difficult work. I suspect their success stories are not always easy to recognize, because you're looking for an absence- an absence of depression, an absence of abuse, and absence of troubled children- and how do you know that the program caused that absence? In some ways, this work is like the work of parenting. Its difficulty is underappreciated, and its importance is hard to pinpoint because it is so all-encompassing.

I don't know what to do to try to fix this mess. So I give a little money to the programs I think are trying to address the problems, I try to reach out to other parents where I can, and I hug my little girls a little tighter, and I hope for the best for all of our kids.