If I had been born at home, surely it would have been into a family bed. As it was, my parents brought me home from the hospital, where I was promptly given a place aside my mother in the bed which slept us all: mom, dad, my brother and I. I nursed until I was nearly four, when the arrival of a younger sibling forced shared privileges. I was not, as a rule, thrilled with anything that wasn’t mine alone and so gave up the breast and my place between my parents for slightly more independence on the outskirts of our small country. I slept on the edge (had my parents been a bit more intuitive, they may have recognized this as foreshadowing, and thus been more fully prepared for the journey of parenting a true Sagittarian daughter).

By that time, the eldest Dotson child had moved on and now slept in a wood framed bunk bed hand crafted by our father. In a family of five, he was the only to sleep solo. This left me as the senior child in the family bed, a title that lent me a certain amount of privilege, and these are the days I remember most when I think back to the last time I slept in the same bed with someone under the age of two. --read more >>

They are down. I tiptoe past their doors barely breathing, listening for a sound. Please save your applause, my two boys (3 months old and 2 years old) are sound asleep AND at the same time, no less. With extra bounce, called glee, relief, freedom call it what you like, I fly down the stairs open the front door and place my note on the doorbell. "Please do not ring or knock, babies sleeping, thanks!" Really it says, you touch that f*&%$!g door or bell and I will mow you down. Do not disturb the sacred naptime. Don't you dare.

The high sets in and I am giddy with options, I could call my best friend, email, pay bills, spend an hour on the phone with the health insurance representative, work out on the Stairmaster, do sit ups, drink gallons of coffee and eat cookies, read, write, sleep, sit on the couch and stare out the window, laundry, watch DVDs, cry, pluck my eyebrows, paint my toes, pumice down the calluses on the bottom of my feet, clean every messy, disorganized drawer, shelf, and closet in my house that grates on my nerves, I could paint walls, caulk around the sink, and sweep the floor. I could clean toilets with a vengeance! I could do any of these things, but I don't. I plug my headset into my ears and turn up the iPod, really loud, so loud I can feel KT Tunstall pulsing in my chest and am assured I am killing the eardrums and bringing early on set of senior citizen deafness. My husband would say it's too late. "Huh, what did you say, honey?" " I feel like walking the world, you can tell she is a beautiful girl, beautiful girl…" "Suddenly I see, this is what I want to be, suddenly I see, suddenly I see, why the hell this means so much to me..." --read more >>

"You'll never guess what Jess' dad offered me." Through the phone, I heard the freeway rushing past Tracie's open car window, warbling the sound of her voice.

"What?" I asked, sitting on the edge of our bed, short of breath from rushing my seven-and-a-half-months pregnant self down the hall to answer the call.

"Tickets to the Prince concert."

"What?! No F-ing way."

My wife, Tracie, works with children with autism. Occasionally the grateful parents of one of her clients will bestow upon her an unexpected gift. Well, this time her client Jess had scored an appointment with an impossible-to-see specialist in Chicago on the same day that his parents had tickets to see Prince in Oakland. The little boy's dad called to see if Tracie would be interested in the tickets.--read more >>

First Ricky Lake made a movie, the Business of Being Born, inspired by her own homebirth and actor John C. McGinley (Scrubs) and his wife Nichole had a baby at home and People magazine wrote a nice blurb about it.

Then ACOG (the American College of Obs and Gyns) felt so threatened they issued a press release reiterating their "long-standing opposition to home births" in which they state:

"Childbirth decisions should not be dictated or influenced by what's fashionable, trendy, or the latest cause célèbre. Despite the rosy picture painted by home birth advocates, a seemingly normal labor and delivery can quickly become life threatening for both the mother and baby."

Apparently childbirth decisions should only be influenced by celebrities choosing planned cesareans, despite that being a much riskier option.--read more >>

Fallen leaves
Blow like small tornadoes.
Twisting and turning,
Picking up dust along the way.

Sunshine strong in
A cloudless sky
Distorts sight.
But deep in darkness
The eyes must turn
Inward.
Self-reflection difficult
No impossible.--read more >>

My mom says I was born tense. Tense and intense. When she tells the story of how I was born, amidst the drama and gesticulation, I feel a little sad to know that I am this child she speaks of. When she talks about the way she could hear me screaming day and night in the nursery just a few doors down, and of her helplessness in coming to my rescue, I feel the aftermath both of her helplessness and of my own. It's a feeling I can't seem to shake. When my incessant wailing finally subsided and my parents were able to hold me, as my mom goes on to tell the story, I still could not calm my nervous body; She speaks of the way I would never relax, how even in sleep she would watch me and my curled toes and clenched fists. And I have this vision of my young mother's eyes, peering in on her sleeping infant the way I imagine every parent does. The way I have watched my own daughter sleepily after midnight feedings when my eyes won't close again. And I think of the way my mother must have viewed me, that as she watched me sleep, she must have cried for so much love...--read more >>

1. Cross Hairs

The proof is there in the two blue lines. A baby blue plus sign confirms I don't have the flu like I'd hoped. I don't feel joy. I feel sick and not just from what I now know to be morning sickness. To me those faint blue lines look like cross hairs. I turn off the light in my bedroom, lay face down on my bed and wish it to go away. My husband walks in and asks me what I'm doing. No words come out as I hand over the white EPT stick.

"You are?"

"Yes." --read more >>

I consider my first marriage to be the friendship I have with Lori. We have been friends for over fifteen years, which is a lifetime in my transient world. We met while in college and immediately fell in love. We went out for margaritas one night and talked for hours. I came home to my boyfriend at the time and said, "Lori and I just fell in love under the full moon." This made him a bit nervous. --read more >>

My daughter strides through the doors of St. Something or Other, sits herself sideways in a seat at a low table, and starts to color. So begins her life as a school-aged child. Consequently, this moment also serves to kick the life out of my five year stint as her fulltime stay-at-home mom.

Well then. What now?--read more >>

2003

Sometimes when I get an idea for a story I do this thing called clustering. I write down my main topic in the center of a yellow legal pad and go from there. Today's word is CRACK. I am lying in my bed, head propped up on several small pillows. I shake my pen epileptically so the blue ink will continue to flow. One by one, I squiggle lines that extend from the center circle outward, then write a word or set of words and circle it. These extensions resemble sperm trying to escape of the edges of the paper into some unknowing sea. In the center of these balloons - How Life Was, The First Hit, Money, Dealers, Laptop, Diamond Rings, Watch, Treatment Center, Sex, Self Care, House, Friends, Jeff, Kids, School, Writing, Car, Bills. I daydream, wondering if crack addicts ever quit looking at white specks on the ground thinking it is some dope that they dropped. I went to my son's 7th grade conference yesterday and I saw white specks on the ground in the middle school parking lot. To me, they looked like crack. Who would be dropping crack in the middle school parking lot? No, it couldn't be crack. The rain and snow would have washed it away. --read more >>

"I don’t know how you do it," my neighbor’s girlfriend commented. My five-year-old daughter Siu Loong was at her father’s house and I had taken advantage of my free night to attend and photograph a march against police brutality, then stayed out till midnight developing the film I had shot.

"I dunno. I just do," I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

But that’s not entirely true. To simply say that leaves out the resources and community I’ve gained from years of being engaged in social justice work.--read more >>

My take on pregnancy and birth (home birth advocate) may have been the beginning to my feeling of alienation from the world of mommies. "Mommies" were always the other women I saw at the park, grocery store or at the zoo, I was just an imposter. Maybe it is because I don’t have all of the gear to make my mommy image complete or maybe it is because I seem to miss what other parents consider to be big issues.--read more >>

I don’t fit in again.

I am standing in the middle of the book fair at my 8 year old’s school. He has seated himself on the floor and is engrossed in a book based on the TV series "Dexter’s Laboratory". I am looking over the books designated as "for the parents". There are a multitude of cookbooks, Chick Soups for the various souls, and a large, coffee-table book extolling the gloriousness of the Reagan years.

I groan audibly.--read more >>

When I first laid eyes on my positive pregnancy test, I was (and am still, in spirit) a reprobate caffeine addict. Coffee had played a major role in my life, and I can honestly say that I would be a very different person without it. In spite of a naturally sleepy disposition, my several coffees a day have fueled the accomplishment of a molecular biology Ph.D., a rich side life as a semi-professional musician, and a lively avocation in amateur bellydance.--read more >>

Is acknowledging the biological divide key to achieving equality between the sexes?

When I went to college in the 1980s, I hadn’t yet figured out where I stood on the issue of abortion. I’d led a sheltered life as a high school student and didn’t know of any friends who had terminated a pregnancy. The issue was very abstract for me.

Then, as a freshman, I attended a pro-life film featuring young women who spoke about boyfriends or older family members who had pressured them to have their abortions. Later, these women found themselves filled with sadness and remorse, emotions that led them to join the pro-life movement. After watching the testimony of these girls, I returned to my dormitory and asked the boy I was dating what he would do if I became pregnant and chose not to abort. Without any hesitation, he said that he would leave me. --read more >>

"You're just like Britney Spears!"

I froze. I tried not to let the polite smile dissolve into an expression of disgust. My face felt hot, and my teeth clenched. I feigned a chuckle as the teenage carousel attendant stood before me, clearly unaware that she had offended me, strapped my two kids onto the carousel horses. As she walked away, her words echoed in my head. Britney Spears?!

As a petite Indian woman, I couldn't understand at first how I stacked up to Britney. Was it my caked on makeup? Nope, no makeup today. My quickie marriage to my rapper/dancer boyfriend? Oh, wait, that was the trashie magazine I read yesterday. My inappropriately tight clothing? My protruding pooch and love handles? Ok, it's been a while since I went to the gym. But, then I knew, the teenager referred to me having two kids about one year apart in age. --read more >>

My daughter is 20 months old, and I have recently recovered from a breast infection. The clinical term is mastitis, but I tend to shy away from calling it that. Growing up on a farm, I have heard the term mastitis applied all to often to members of the bovine species. Maybe I'm a bit neurotic, but I cannot rid myself of the cow/mastitis connection. If I were to find myself uttering the words, "I have mastitis," I would feel like I was calling myself a cow! No matter what you call it, though, a breast infection, for lack of better word, sucks.--read more >>

Last year, when my 13 year-old son, Sam, staked his claim in adolescence and announced he wasn’t going to attend summer camp anymore, I panicked. As a single mom living in New York City, I couldn’t afford to send him to sleep away camp, nor could I leave my job as an administrator in one of the local colleges, pack the SUV (even if we had one), and head for Maine or Cape Cod for a month. Sam was too old for day camp and too young to work. What kind of TV addled X-box blurry-eyed puddle of sludge would I come home to find if I left him in the apartment all day?

Then I had an idea. Although Sam had put the kibosh on summer camp, why not take the opportunity to do something I’d always dreamed of doing myself: enroll us in a Spanish language immersion program, somewhere far away from the hot and sticky city? I’d always wanted to improve my embarrassing tourist Spanish, and Sam was already studying Spanish in middle school. What could be better than giving him a leg up before 9th grade? --read more >>