Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

March 23, 2009

More women — and their physicians — are trending these days toward Caesarian Section. The father of the gentle birth movement — Dr. Frederick Leboyer — warns against this. His new book is called THE ART OF GIVING BIRTH: WITH CHANTING, BREATHING, AND MOVEMENT.

I put on the CD, a rolling pattern of tambura music, and read Dr Leboyer’s book. He decries Western methods. Don’t lie down on a bed, he says. No drugs. The baby’s first gaze should connect with the mother. The baby decides when to be born.

Ah! Now he’s got my attention. Both my sons arrived ten days late. I changed doctors and hospitals — choosing The Birth Home — to avoid having a C-Section. My first labor began on Tuesday, January 24th and ended Thursday, January 26th — 42-hours. I walked up hills and down — as Dr Leboyer advises — I sang, I danced, took a warm bath, I even had sex, to stimulate birth contractions. Finally, the midwife took me to the hospital. Pitocin gave me convulsions, and they raced to stop the drip. They gave me a local, and hooked up a mirror so I could watch my baby being born.

I watched the doctor slice open my belly and pull out my first son. My baby was furious! His first sounds were like an old man’s anger — and a few seconds later, the sound broke, and now he sounded like a baby. I didn’t get to gaze in my baby’s eyes, and begged to have him on my chest, before they whisked him away. He was blue. When he was returned to me, he had pinked up, and we got to know each other while nursing. I had adored being pregnant, and I was blue after the delivery. Athletic and fit though I was, and having desperately tried to change my premonition about the C-section, I couldn’t understand why he had to be born this way — mostly, I felt a loss of connection with him. I nursed him for eleven months, and I carried him around all the time despite my husband’s consternation, but we regained that closeness.

My second son was also ten days late. I was told that very few doctors would even entertain the notion of VBAC — vaginal birth after C-section. Fortunately, I had one of those doctors. There were 28-hours of labor — and again I walked and sang and bathed, got on all fours as Leboyer advises, and everything we could think of.

Finally, my doctor came in wearing his surgical gear, the gurney just behind him. I saw what was at stake, and I said “I want to try one more time.” The doctor agreed. I focused, bearing down, my feet bruising the upper chest of my midwife as I pressed into her. Drugless, I connected with the baby soul inside, telling him with my mind that he had to be born now. I felt a shift, and heard a whoosh — and he was born. His tiny chin had been caught on my pelvic bone, and at the last instant, the doctor said, he shifted. My baby and I gazed at each other. VBAC — a victory! He was nine pounds and a half ounce. And yellow — but then he pinked up, too.

In his book, Leboyer picks apart the birth stories told by women attempting his gentle births — with chanting, breathing, and movement. I don’t know what he would say about mine. I figure it was fate, the way my sons were born. I won’t speak of their life struggles — which is their business — only to say that I can see our birth struggles represented in our lives together.

And, I tell you this — if you are pregnant, and considering a C-Section, I would strongly advise you against it. The C-Section was a painful ripping apart for my first son and me. The natural birth unifies the mother and baby. Connecting in spirit with my second son, feeling the shift to freedom, and hearing the whoosh to his birth was one of the most exhilirating moments in my life.

March 22, 2009

Usually when I read, it is on the treadmill or rocking on the big blue ball I use as an office chair. It is difficult for me to not fidget — except for one instance. Tonight I chose the book MADE FOR EACH OTHER: THE BIOLOGY OF THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BOND. Convinced of Meg Daley Olmert’s writing — that petting animals increases oxytocin for the human and for the pet — I experimented by reading in a normal chair with my cats, one at a time, on my lap. I felt immediately calm. I did not fidget. And, I read just as fast as I do rocking or walking.

Olmert traces this unique bonding of animal and human to the very beginnings, when humans were few and clueless. Scientifically bolstered, the book charts this amazing passage. At first, humans began by watching animals and how they killed their prey. This altered the biology of humans, and their bodies were able to mimic what they saw. They began to notice that some animals — some wolves, to start — were tamer than others, so these wolves were allowed to gather the scraps of food humans rejected. The bones. The braver humans began petting the tamer — and well-fed — wolves, and this increased oxytocin in both, calming both the humans and the wolves. The oxytocin made a more permanent connection — between mothers and babies, humans and pets, lovers.

Olmert tells a similar story about humans eventually riding the wild horses. The evolution was as magical. Think the horse whisperer — it’s in Olmert’s book, too, how a man listened to horses, and melded with them, training them.

As a kid, I wanted so much to have the experiences of two of my same-age neighbors. Amy and Debbie rode horses. They won blue ribbons and trophies for their riding. Mom said we didn’t have the money for me to ride horses, and what was I thinking anyway. There may have been a petting zoo or two along the way when I was put on a saddle, and the horse was trotted around by a trainer holding a three-foot long rope. When I was seventeen, though, I visited one of my classmates on her summer ranch in Wyoming. Nancy’s family had horses.

Finally, one day arrived and we decided to go riding. There were no bridles, no saddles, but the big man-horse I was given felt right for me. And, no, I have no idea how many “hands” he was. Just a lot bigger than I was. We circled the huge ranch, and I felt in unison with the horse. This felt magical, the loping of the horse matched how high I rose and how low I descended, without a bump or a bounce.

Then, the ranch house came into view, and the horse picked up his pace. I did, too. He shifted into a higher gear, and again my body instinctively made the match. Suddenly he was galloping at what felt like full throttle — his body was stretched out straight. I didn’t have much to hold onto, just his mane, and I found myself mimicking him again, flattening to be as horizontal as he was. As we charged in, Nancy’s father and big brother Marty came running out, swiftly grabbing the horse, and slowing him down. I was exhiliarated! This was the most fun I’d ever had to that point. I felt completely one with that horse. Olmert’s book explains it was the oxytocin levels raised. Nancy’s dad and her brother were worried as hell — the horse was used to Marty’s weight, they explained, and they figured he thought he was riderless, since at the time I weighed about 95-pounds.

But when I was on that horse, riding faster than the wind on that hot summer day in Wyoming, that horse not letting me fall off, I was completely in love. And I can’t even remember his name.

March 19, 2009

to see the world
in a grain of sand
and to see heaven in a wildflower

Poet William Blake’s words float in as I open Bryan Peterson’s UNDERSTANDING CLOSE-UP PHOTOGRAPHY. I smile as I turn the satiny pages — the wing of a dead blue fly, the pollen in the center of a yellow flower, the wavy shine on the hood of a car — all possessing magic when viewed in this way. Peterson tells about the types of lenses — and to be honest, it’s over my head. But over my head in the way that FTP’ing my audio files to AP Radio used to be over my head.

Peterson says to buy a 180-200 mm focal length range. It is the point of view that I love. He shoots a burnt match close up — and it looks like a skull. He talks wide-angle and reversing ring and extension tubes.

And, at last, the digital point and shoot — that’s what I’ve got! He says the depth of field at the smallest aperture of F-8 is actually like an F-32 on a 35mm camera. How cool is that! And, he recommends heading to the grocery store and shooting close-ups in the produce center. I did that in Barcelona — shot probably a dozen outdoor fruit and vegetable stands of brilliant red tomatoes and rows of other produce.

Enamored, I am, of these spectacular photos in his book — the purple starfish at Seal Rock, Oregon, the colorful New York skyline from beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the perfect cleavage of a pink rose.

What we focus on looms large. I notice the absence of my focus on being the subject, as I was during my childhood. Now I would call it the tyranny of the F-stop. My stepfather would pose me — often nude — and ask me to lie still until he found the correct F-stop. I got to where — sometime around age eight — I would close my eyes every time I anticipated the sound of the shutter. It was booming loud to me. I was frightened of the sound, and of the resultant flash. So I closed my eyes. I found some of the shots later — my chubby pink body curved as if I were a nude being painted by Ruben. Eyes wide open. I was five.

And then it took decades to undo the blinking. Years later, I voluntarily did “creative” shots with one photograper and another — a string of them — through my early twenties and on. Repeating fresh patterns to replace old fears.

And I finally got myself back. I notice the mental torture has vanished. It slipped away — for good, I think — this past week during EMDR, Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. There was a trio of observations I made this week while I was doing really stupid things. The first occurred when I was with a good friend at the movies, and we had fifteen minutes until the film started. I said to him, “May I go to the ladies’ room?” Followed immediately by “I can’t believe I just said that.” He was sweet about it. Second, I realized that I felt paralyzed to eat food out of my own refrigerator. And, third, even if the seat in my car was ramrod straight, and I knew I’d feel better with it curved to my back, I was afraid to change the setting. In every one of these cases, I was trained by violence throughout my childhood. I had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, to not eat anything out of the frig lest my mother or father need it, to not move the seat because it might hurt his long legs, because if I did not ask, I was at high risk. Violent. Violated.

During EMDR, I brought these strange bits of deference into my mind, and I re-experienced many scenes — you will not want to hear them. But one was a very clear, loud voice inside my mind to my stepfather, “Get out of my head!” And, he is gone, and the deference is gone. And now I can read a book about photography and F-stops, and feel an absence of fear while I surrender to the beauty. Pure beauty.

March 18, 2009

Just today I looked at the silver bracelet on my left wrist — which I haven’t taken off in three years — and thought “It’s time to replace it with another sentiment.” The bracelet says FEARLESS, and I believe I no longer need the reminder. With any sense of fear, there comes — swiftly on its heels — awareness, then a deep breath, surrender, and I am fearless. It takes an instant.

Today I read THIS IS NOT THE LIFE I ORDERED: 50 WAYS TO KEEP YOUR HEAD ABOVE WATER WHEN LIFE KEEPS DRAGGING YOU DOWN, and halfway through the book I find this: “Wear a courage bracelet.” Yes, that is the next step. The thing is, it is difficult to embrace, let alone hear, when someone tells me I am courageous. I want to run and hide. The four authors of THIS IS NOT THE LIFE I ORDERED say that reaction is actually fairly common among women. The book is peppered with quotations, and I am delighted to see on that very page advocating wearing the courage bracelet, the words of Anais Nin that catapulted me out of my own smallness nearly a decade ago. “And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

The four women who wrote this book began it as an “excuse” for getting together once a week around the kitchen table about a decade ago. They’d been shot at and survived, widowed and divorced, financially devastated and wealthy, had kids, lost kids, got more kids. They all have courage — and the courage to nurture each other. Once again the UCLA study pops up in this book that shows stress provokes more than “fight or flight” — for women, there is also an impulse to nurture each other. And that is healing.

Deborah Collins Stephens, Jackie Speier, Jan Yanehiro, and Michealene Cristini Risley have repackaged ancient wisdom that is inspiring — with a new twist. They urge you to share your life with a girlfriend — or two, or three, or four. One thing my girlfriends have been telling me to do — is to nurture myself. Except for rotating dancing with writing with producing podcasts and interviewing…all of which I think are great fun…I haven’t figured out what “nurture myself” looks like.

And so today, in the middle of a storm of work, a calm came over me — and I ran a hot bubble bath in my bathroom at five in the afternoon, and turned on the jacuzzi jets, and I soaked up the heat for about a half hour, emerging wrinkly and deeply calm. I would never have admitted such a thing before, but I posted the fact on Facebook. And one of my friends, who is also a doctor, commented “Atta girl.”

Girlfriends. That’s wisdom. One more quote from Emile Zola which, for me, says everything:
“If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live my life out loud.”

March 17, 2009

Biology is rough on those of us who cling to the notion of romantic love. And for those who believe in love at first sight, as I do? The biology may be chemical, all right, but it’s all about smell!

Andrew Trees’ quippy biology book DECODING LOVE: WHY IT TAKES TWELVE FROGS TO FIND A PRINCE, AND OTHER REVELATIONS FROM THE SCIENCE OF ATTRACTION is, at first, mildly depressing for a single woman past forty — unless I’m angling for a wealthy octogenarian. In fact, midway through reading DECODING LOVE, I selected a small square of dark chocolate to boost my cheeriness, which had sunk to a new low.

Trees sites study after study in which men want younger attractive women — and the older the guy gets, the younger his choice for a woman gets. Women are attracted to a man’s sturdiness, his successfulness, and his ability to supply the best possible genes for offspring. It’s all about procreation. An ovulating women gets the guys. And, Trees warns numerous times, no sex on the first date for the ladies if you’re interested in the guy as a long-term partner. He suggests the old double-down — if you usually go to bed with a guy after four dates, make it eight. This has to do with the cheapness of sperm — plenty of the little fellas — and the preciousness of the egg — we girls only get so many.

After the biology lesson, Trees talks online dating, and the more factors involved in choosing, the less likely you’ll find any match. In fact, whether online or in, say a bar, the more choices you have, the less likely you’ll choose. Oh, unless it’s getting near time for the bar to close.

I perk up when I see Tree mentioning a writer who had no matches on eHarmony, which, in several memberships, half a year apart, has happened to me. eHarmony apparently told her she is too exceptional, and that eHarmony did a better job of matching average people. Reminds me of when one of my guy friends told me I shouldn’t date “average Joes.” And one of my girlfriends said I’d have better luck finding a partner in NY — my hometown — than in Portland, where I’ve lived nearly half my life.

The book fairly screams at women to dumb it down, or they’ll miss out on men, but that guys should be feminists because women like that. I won’t ask my hairstylist tomorrow to dye my hair blonde — she has told me before she won’t do it, I wouldn’t make a good blonde. But, I might try Trees’ flirting tricks toward the end of the book. It comes down to flirting and batting your eyes, girls, yes it does.

March 16, 2009

Want to know the magic elixir? It is gratitude. Pollyanna was right — and the reward was that her grateful attitude was transformative to everyone around her. She was infectious.

A friend of mine responded via private email to my blog Saturday about Organizing Your Life. It got him thinking about disappointments in his early life, and how grateful he is that the resentfulness and anger have fallen away, freeing him to love in a new way. He was right — the blog was not about organizing, but about gratitude.

I bring this up because today I was graced with the beautiful tenth anniversary edition of MJ Ryan’s ATTITUDES OF GRATITUDE. When MJ wrote the first edition, she says here, it was accompanied on bookstore shelves only by religious books. And now the science is overwhelming — Martin Seligman found that after counting their blessings every day for a week, 92-percent of those who were happy were even happier, and 94-percent of the people who said they were depressed, were less so. Keep a weekly gratitude journal, and you’re more likely to be healthier and exercise more and eat better. And MJ sites another convincing study on the brains of Buddhist monks — positive thoughts activate the left pre-frontal cortex and flood the body with endorphins. What’s not to like?

MJ doesn’t want you to gulp down her book in one sitting. Oops. Too tempting to not.

She writes that it’s wonderful to be grateful even for the difficult lessons. I wrote to my friend that I had hesitated before responding, having just read the front page Oregonian story about Adrianna, the four year old Oregon girl sent to Mexico who was so abused, she died. I didn’t have those kind of beatings. My stepfather was careful to never leave a mark. But he did. Like every abuser, the marks are left on the psyche.

I put these stories out here in my daily BookBlog and — much like it is in radio for me — I don’t imagine anyone reading them or hearing them (that’s a remnant of my early learnings — be invisible). But I do want to move those who were traumatized to step out of that cycle and thrive. I feel like this is my destiny — and my gift is to lead others who were raped or otherwise abused to find the light and follow it out of the darkness.
Sometimes I imagine what my life would have been like if my real dad had stayed, if my mother wasn’t brilliantly mentally-ill. And, as I reach for the NY-based talent GMA/Today Show ideal, I realize, no, I would not have had the compassion, and the deep knowing, to offer. I would not have gone to books, then to seek out amazing teachers. I would not be giving famous authors that comforting space to tell me things they never tell anyone else. I would have been ordinary. I am grateful.

MJ Ryan quotes Ardath Rodale suggesting that we count the number of ThankYou’s in a day. I believe I’ll run out of fingers and toes.