And we didn’t have to wait very long. Around midnight that night, as I was getting ready for bed, I realized that the frequent Braxton-Hicks practice contractions I’d been having for weeks, plus the occasional menstrual-like cramp, had been joined by a new sensation: a dull, steady ache across my lower back.

Now I’m something of a connoisseur of back pain, having dealt three times with weak sacro-iliac joints giving way (including a bad bout during this second pregnancy) and with a herniated disk after Delphine was born. But this was different — not sharp, just vague.

I said to Caleb — already in bed, drowsy — “I wonder if this is back labor?” Back labor, after all, apparently runs in my family; my sister had it for days before finally heading to a hospital to have real labor induced, and my mom suffered from it mightily. Caleb murmured, “Do you think you’re in labor?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered, climbing into bed. “If this is early labor, I should at least be able to get a few hours’ sleep first.”

Two hours later, I quit trying to sleep and started trying to time the contractions instead. Every few minutes, for nearly a minute, my lower torso would clench up, circled by a ring of tightness wavering on the line between very uncomfortable and getting painful.

Our midwives had warned us that our baby’s position in utero — right occiput anterior, or ROA, for those of you interested in these things — often correlated with a fast, intense labor. These contractions were irregular, but they had taken over my body more swiftly than I’d anticipated. I tried to relax, and couldn’t; my body was so tense it was shaking, even in between contractions. The quaking woke Caleb up, and he got on the phone, calling in our support team of doulas, midwives, and babysitter.

More than 42 hours after getting into bed on Thursday night, baby Sibyl Emily was finally born. She came out the regular way, thus granting us our major goal of this second labor and delivery: avoiding a repeat C-section. In between, we got through an exhausting two days with the aid not just of medical interventions and hospital staff but of our support team and, above all, our doulas.

Frankly, I marvel now that some women manage to give birth alone and unaided. We needed someone to watch and entertain Delphine for more than three days; that duty was amply dispatched by the intrepid Danielle, Delphine’s longtime babysitter, and my parents, who drove down from Seattle late on Friday and relieved Danielle for the rest of the weekend. And we desperately needed our two doulas, Scarlett and Lena, who traded off doula duty for nearly two days and shepherded us through the entire process.

What did we learn during two days of labor? Well, one of the lessons of having a previous child was to expect the unexpected, and this certainly happened for us all over again. As first-time parents, we assumed, like many other newbie breeders, that we’d simply have an average, uncomplicated, straightforward labor and delivery. We didn’t, of course; Delphine turned out to be breech at full term, and we were pushed into having a scheduled C-section. But we also learned, in talking with other first-time parents, that nobody ever seemed to have the labor and delivery they’d quite expected.

So when it became clear that the two L&D possibilities deemed most likely for Sibyl — either a fast, intense trip, as predicted by the midwives, or a more typical, gradually progressing initial journey, as might occur for a woman who had never experienced labor before — weren’t going to happen, I wasn’t surprised. What did take me aback was the unusual nature of my labor: a long early labor (it took until late Friday afternoon for my cervix to dilate a mere three centimeters) that felt like active labor all day, with quantum leaps in intensity instead of slow ratchets on the pain-o-meter. (There was some discussion at the end of the afternoon on Friday as to whether the odd labor pattern and the back pain were caused by the baby’s rotating to a posterior position, but in the end, she came out in the same position she’d started out in, so who knows?)

If it hadn’t been for the doulas, I might’ve caved and gone to the hospital way too early. Before going into labor, I assumed that, since I’d already experienced lots of different kinds of physical pain, I should be able to handle labor and delivery. But I didn’t anticipate that, caught up in the new kind of pain that is labor, my body would rebel against my attempts to deal with it, and that I would need doulas to teach me, on the job, how to handle it.

Scarlett and Lena did three things: physical touch, practical instructions, and occasional verbal reminders that I was OK. Of the three techniques, I found the first two absolutely essential in helping me not only to relax and adjust to the pain as it jumped around, but in learning how to use my body in specific ways to make those adjustments happen.

After two days of various types of massage (gentle stroking of my lower back for the constant back labor, touching my face to release tension, serious hip squeezing to help open my pelvis) and a wide selection of laboring positions (kneeling in the shower, leaning my back against a wall while holding up my belly, draping myself over a yoga ball, sideways lunges, getting on all fours and having a shawl wrapped around my belly to help shimmy the baby into a better position, side lying with the upper leg angled forwards, and the very weird semi-side-lying position I eventually used to deliver Sibyl) my body was seriously sore, but in the good way you get after a strenuous hike.

And after several hours of unproductive pushing, it was the doulas who finally realized that the hospital midwives’ rather vague commands (the obvious but not especially instructive “Push!” and the admonitory and confusing “Don’t yell; use that energy to push your baby out instead”) weren’t making any sense to me, and stepped in with translation services: “OK, what you need to do is to take a big breath and hold it. That inflates your diaphragm, which pushes down on your uterus. Don’t let any of the air out; just push down as hard as you can, and use all that air to help press the baby out.” Oh, OK, now I get it.

Maybe I didn’t need the third technique so much because I was never fundamentally worried to begin with; I knew that anything could happen, and I wanted to be prepared, mentally, for that, but I also felt that, well, we’d gathered all these people together to help us, and we were going to get through it together.

To their credit, the midwives, nurses, and other hospital staff at Oregon Health and Science University never pushed anything on us while we were trying to birth a baby very, very slowly; instead, they seemed to trust us to know what we were doing, and to make our own decisions. Which, as Caleb later said, was the exact opposite of the attitude demonstrated by the midwives at Legacy Emanuel hospital, our initial prenatal provider — after all, one of those midwives had responded to one of our questions by sighing, “Well, you just have to trust us.” That dismissive attitude may be typical of most U.S. hospitals, to the detriment of most laboring moms, but we knew that we didn’t have to accept it.

We went to the hospital at the end of the first day of labor, mostly so I could get an epidural and take a break; the epidural also allowed my slow-moving body to progress to nearly full dilation. By the end of the second day, when the baby still hadn’t really decided to get moving, the midwives finally called in the maternity ward’s ob-gyns to check on me. The docs said the baby wasn’t far enough down for a vacuum extraction, and they made ominous noises about “coming back in an hour to talk about the possibility of a C-section.” I wasn’t happy to hear that, but still, at least what they said wasn’t, “We’ll be back in an hour to do a C-section,” but “We’ll talk about it then.” There were always options, which we appreciated.

Nevertheless, the threat of a C-section was a huge motivator to Get That Baby Out Already. Sure, I was exhausted at the end of the first day, and exhausted again at the end of the second day — but not so exhausted that I wasn’t willing to do my damnedest to avoid surgery. Scarlett and Caleb (the third doula, doing everything the doulas were doing, learning on the job as well) squeezed and helped me sway and talked to me and fed me sips of water and, soon enough, the baby was finally on the move. And before the doctors could come back, she was born. We were done.

No, it wasn’t the blissful idealized perfectly natural unmedicated birth that some moms dream of having. But that was never our goal. Instead, we were just immensely grateful that, given a long, strange, intense labor and delivery, we had good people on hand to help us through it, to help us decide what to do and when, to choose the right interventions at the right times, and to have everyone come through it just fine.

We were no longer the naïve couple that had casually strolled through the expected (and unexpectedly narrow) doorways of pregnancy and childbearing the first time around. We wanted to do things differently this time, to take charge — and to avoid making the same mistakes all over again.

In late spring, we had briefly checked in with our regular family-care doctor, just to confirm the second pregnancy and let her know that another baby was on the way. She took care of the initial pregnancy blood tests, but all of us had agreed that she wouldn’t be handling the care and delivery of this second child.

Why not? Well, our doctor has plenty of experience doing VBACs (vaginal births after Caesarean sections), but her hospital won’t currently allow her to perform them, because she’s not an ob-gyn and can’t do obstetric surgery. And we didn’t want to simply sign up for a repeat surgery, and we didn’t want the hassle of finding an ob-gyn willing to tackle a VBAC in a hospital setting that had only recently changed its policies to allow VBAC attempts — and on a case-by-case basis only, at that.

Plus, one of the many naïve assumptions that had vanished in the haze of delivering Delphine was the quaint idea that your doctor is your most important caretaker. In fact, the nursing staff at a hospital do the bulk of patient care, which means you rely entirely on them, not your doctor, to get you through things. The idea of trying to have a VBAC at a hospital where the nursing staff wasn’t accustomed to doing VBACs was the single strongest argument in favor of ditching the hospital where Delphine was born.

So in May, at our family doc’s suggestion, I interviewed a midwife at each of the two hospital-based midwife clinics here in Portland, at Legacy Emanuel and Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). Both clinics seemed fairly similar in their VBAC protocols and success rates, so, for lack of any other obvious differences, I picked the Legacy clinic simply because it was closer to our house.

Over the summer, however, it became uncomfortably clear that this choice wasn’t going to work out, either. As we met with several of the Legacy midwives, a new naïveté became apparent: the assumption that midwives, by definition, would serve as a protective buffer between pregnant women and interventionist hospital culture.

These midwives, of course, were already part of their hospital’s culture, which meant a number of things: excessive paperwork, bureaucratic confusion, and brief, 20-minute appointments that routinely started an hour after the scheduled time. It also meant a waiting area stripped clean of toys (those disgusting vectors of infection, you know) and tiny exam rooms where toddlers were literally underfoot and in the way.

All these usual institutional frustrations could have been overlooked had we not found it nearly impossible to communicate with the Legacy Emanuel midwives. By the time of our sixth or seventh clinic visit — each time with a different midwife — the communication breakdowns had become almost amusing in their predictability.

Here’s how communication works (or, rather, doesn’t) at this particular clinic: The patient asks a question. The midwife responds. The patient nods and mulls over the response, and then realizes that actually the question wasn’t answered at all. But by then things have moved on, and time’s up, time to go!

At what turned out to be my last appointment, in August, I decided to try a direct approach, and asked the midwife (incidentally, the very midwife I had originally interviewed in May) about this problem.

“You know, I’ve become very concerned that when I come to an appointment and I have questions to ask, the answers I get don’t really relate to the questions I’m asking,” I said. “I feel like communication isn’t really happening here, and that makes me concerned that communication will be very difficult during labor and delivery.”

The midwife listened and nodded, and replied, “Well, all I can say is, we’ve had many, many women come here as patients, and by and large they’ve been very satisfied with the care they’ve received here.”

I listened and nodded, and watched big black letters scroll silently across my mind’s field of vision: WE’RE DONE HERE. THESE WOMEN ARE IDIOTS.

I suppose there’s something laughably meta about the clinic’s total inability to answer even a direct question about communication. (After all, the logical response to my comment would’ve been something like, “I’m sorry you feel like you aren’t getting your questions answered. What can we do to fix that?”) More disconcerting, though, was the midwife’s implication that peer pressure was OK. Because what her response really stated was, “I don’t know why you are complaining about the care you’re receiving here. Lots of people come here, and they love us, so what’s your problem?’

My problem is that I’ve been pushed around by other care providers, and I’m not willing to just accept the status quo. Patients deserve courtesy, and explanations, and truly informed consent, and the right to say yes or no to treatment. Too often, they get none of the above. I knew this might happen in a hospital setting, but I had hoped that it wouldn’t exist in the midwifery clinic.

So in disgust, Caleb and I went to visit a local birthing center called Alma Midwifery. This, as Caleb said, was essentially a fancy bed-and-breakfast for having babies, featuring large suites equipped with big beds, bathrooms, and jetted tubs for laboring and delivering, and decorated with earth-mother-inspired art, ranging from soft-focus photography of pregnant bellies and newborn babies to primitivist tile depictions of nurturing plants.

The entire place was the opposite of the sterile, cramped midwives clinic at Legacy; everyone was very welcoming and acceptingly mellow. But after hanging around for a couple of hours, it became clear that Alma was perhaps a little too mellow; anything was fine, everything was cool, birthing babies is bliss, man. We didn’t get the impression that the staff were especially medical, or that they were vigilant about monitoring higher-risk deliveries such as VBACs.

And as we talked to Alma’s receptionist for some 30 minutes, trying to figure out the center’s complicated billing system (which boiled down to overbilling insurance companies on purpose — no joke), we realized that the prospect of driving across town while in labor to a hippie hotel, and then probably having to drive again to a hospital to fix whatever went wrong at the birthing center, was not our cup of pregnancy tea.

So if we couldn’t see our regular doctor, and the in-hospital midwives clinic was full of bureaucrats, and the hippie midwives clinic was too flaky, what options remained to us?

There was always home birth, of course; plenty of small, private midwifery practices in Portland are willing to attempt VBACs in the home setting. But I realized that, disgruntled as I was with established medicine, I wasn’t really comfortable with trying to give birth at home. If I’ve learned anything about having babies as a collective female experience, it’s that nobody ever has the average textbook labor and delivery. Something unexpected always happens, and I didn’t want to be blindsided again.

But then a friend suggested that I talk to the midwifery practice she had used for her two births — both attempted home births that wound up as hospital deliveries. The midwives at Vivante Midwifery do home births, she said, but because one of their midwives also works at the midwives clinic at OHSU, it makes things easier if you have to transfer to the hospital during labor. They’re practical, and cautious, and they might have some good suggestions for you.

And they did. Initially, they thought I wanted to attempt a VBAC home birth, which they don’t do; instead, they referred me back to home-birthing centers like Alma. Annoyed, I chewed them out a bit; over email, I demanded, “Where are the reasonable folks willing to do low-risk VBACs in a medical setting without the medical prejudices?”

Surprisingly, instead of ignoring me, they wrote back promptly and said that not only did they understand my frustrations, but that they might have a solution for me: prenatal and postpartum care through their private practice, with labor and delivery at the OHSU in-hospital midwives clinic. (Yes, the other in-hospital midwives clinic in town — the one I’d interviewed and rejected as being too far away.)

At last, here was somebody willing to think outside the prenatal box! If they were willing to take a chance on me, I was willing to take a chance on them.

Over the course of the fall, as I met with Vivante’s midwives, it became clear that this fourth provider — after Providence Portland, Legacy Emanuel, and Alma — was like the porridge in the Goldilocks tale: just right. Not too officious or stringent, and not too earth-mothery or vague; rather, they were both grounded and caring, broad in thinking and profound in care.

Paperwork was minimal, logical, and carefully explained. Appointments were always at least an hour long, and not usually delayed more than 15 minutes. The waiting area was full of toys, and instead of ignoring or getting irritated by Delphine, the midwives actively encouraged her to “help out” by pretending to take my blood pressure, listen to the baby’s heartbeat with a stethoscope, and the like.

Best of all, though, was the emphasis on real back-and-forth communication — not just in those long visits, where they asked me as many questions as I asked them, but in prompt, careful responses to phone calls and emails. (Emails, for pete’s sake! I can’t even imagine our regular doctor taking, much less answering, an email from us.) And the questions and answers were solid. Herbal tea during pregnancy? Sure, we’re happy to tell you what has traditionally been recommended, but we’re also going to make sure you know that very little science has been done on their efficacy or safety, and because of that, we don’t just automatically recommend herbs.

My favorite treatment, however, was the Group B strep setup. Towards the end of my first pregnancy, I was told, “OK, this week is the week we test you for Group B strep, and if you’re positive, you’ll have to take antibiotics during labor and delivery.” I was negative, so it never became an issue. But the Vivante midwives took this routine procedure a step further, reminding me about it several weeks before the test needed to be done and suggesting that I take a lactobacillus supplement for two months beforehand, to encourage a negative test result. Hey, now there’s a concept: evidence-based preventive medicine! (For the record, I took the supplement, and tested negative.)

All of the care has followed this model: courtesy, explanations, and truly informed consent. Plus actively encouraging the pregnant mama to manage her own care and make her own decisions, instead of simply bossing her around.

What’s next, of course, is the grand finale: the actual labor and delivery and recovery, in a hospital setting. We’ll be bringing a doula with us, to help us navigate the experience and provide continuity of care. But our medical-care providers will be OHSU’s nurses and (unless we happen to have the one midwife from Vivante who also works at OHSU) midwives, both of whom we’ll be meeting for the first time.

It’s the great unknown. But by now, we’re comfortable — we think! — with what we know and what we don’t know. We can’t control the entire process; we’ve simply tried to control the process of finding care providers we trust.

Wish us luck!

My sister was born when I was two. I don’t remember it, of course, but I’m sure I was less than thrilled. My parents still have a flashed-out snapshot of me holding my newborn sister in a contorted pose for the camera; on the back of the print, my mother’s brother scribbled, “One snap of the wrist and I’ll be queen again!” Which pretty much sums up the devastating devolution from Pampered Only Child to Mere Oldest Sibling.

I do remember being four or five years old and still resentful of my younger sister for, well, being the baby — for whining for what she wanted and actually getting it, for insisting on riding in the stroller instead of walking, for still being small enough to ride on our dad’s shoulders and watch what was happening in parades while I was stuck on the ground, too short to see.

I also remember my parents gently pushing me — the relatively easygoing, well-behaved kid — into the role of Responsible Older Child, encouraging me to give in to my sister. “She’s younger, she doesn’t understand” was code for “You’re supposed to be mature, but your sister isn’t.”

At some point, of course, the younger siblings do become mature enough to understand and to be responsible — and the older siblings aren’t always wise and patient simply by dint of being slightly older. So as parents, we hope to treat our children as the individuals they are, instead of lumping them into age-based categories. I’m sure we’ll fail at this, as most parents fail sometimes at nearly everything they attempt. But kids aren’t just who their birth order says they might be.

Even less are siblings destined to be best friends or buddies or even close. Most of the new-sibling advice books we’ve come across at the library include a reassuring conclusion along the lines of, “Despite all the times your kids try to claw each other’s eyes out, they do truly love each other and will end up good friends.” Sorry, but that simply ain’t true — and I suspect that the parents nervously reading these books about sibling relations already know it. Yes, it would be great if our children grew up liking each other and remained friends as adults. But we decided to have two children because we liked the idea of two children, not because we idealized siblinghood.

In the remaining few weeks before our second child — whom Caleb refers to as Baby XX — is born, I’ve tried to focus less on the next child and more on the last days of Just Delphine. We have a nice rhythm, she and I; quiet days of meals and naps and errands and trips to the park. I know I won’t be able to give her this level of attention again for a long time; especially at first, I’ll be too tired and too distracted and too dang busy spending eight hours a day breastfeeding. But I hope I’ll be able to find some time every day to be with Delphine alone.

It took me a long, long time to get used to being a parent, to having to take care of a baby all day. Presumably it won’t take me quite so long to get over the shock with baby number two — but then, the shocks will be all new, because now it’s all about how to care for two individuals instead of just one.

As her parents, we are her therapy managers. During the initial evaluation process in May and June of 2010, it quickly became apparent that no one — from our family-care doctor to Delphine’s pediatric-development specialist to her private therapy nonprofit — was willing to take the lead on managing her care. Everyone clucked their tongues and said, yes, she’s behind by several months, she needs assessment and therapy — but no one, apparently, was expert enough to manage her care. So we do. And since, ultimately, the responsibility for our child resides with us, we’re fine with this.

In some 14 months of varied therapy services, we have learned a number of crucial points:

1) Therapists are working with the parents, not just the child, but few of them seem to realize this. As a result, they need to be asked, over and over again, to speak in ordinary English, to demonstrate therapies instead of just describing them, and to write their tips down.

2) If you don’t start a massive electronic spreadsheet tracking all of your child’s various doctors, specialists, therapists, and their advice, you will a) forget most of what they tell you and b) get buried under a snowdrift of handwritten, impossible-to-read “tip sheets.” (Oh, well. Too late now.)

3) Therapists and specialists are excellent at offering tips, but dismal at offering world views. In other words, they generally have a zillion little ideas for things to try, but no Big Idea about how to think about your child’s needs. And, frankly, a Big Idea — an attitude, a strategy, that vision thing — is what sticks best in the brain, not a scattered, scribbled, handwritten list of seemingly random tips.

4) So parents need to develop the Vision Thing on their own. Over the course of the past year, Caleb and I have come up with a number of working approaches to helping Delphine with her speech and physical and cognitive skills.

Sometimes it’s best for us to try to remember that all these skills blend together — that, for example, asking Delphine to hand over a block, and waiting until she makes eye contact to show that she understands the request, and then helping her balance her body while she reaches for the block and picks it up, and applauding her efforts and successful completion of the task, is a hodgepodge of mental and physical and verbal skills, all working together.

At other times, it’s easier to break the skills down by type — speech, physical, cognitive.

For her speech, my chief strategy is to vary the types of questions that I ask her: simple yes-and-no questions (“Delphine, did you go to the park today?”), either-or option questions (“Would you like broccoli, or cookies?”), and more open-ended questions (“What color is the couch?”).

Sometimes Delphine answers, sometimes not. Sometimes she imitates us, sometimes not. And sometimes, when she’s not sure of an answer but wants to reciprocate, she’ll say, “Ummmmm . . .” as if she’s thinking really, really hard about it.

This strategy, however, means that I’m directing the interaction. Caleb tends to follow Delphine’s lead instead, providing narrative commentary about her play or responding verbally to her actions.

For her physical skills, Caleb and I flip roles; my overall goal is to help her just enough, so that she can help herself, while he tends to force her to do things, such as rolling on a yoga ball or putting her on his shoulders so they can dance around the house together.

My strategy works best for physical skills Delphine can mostly do by herself already, such as picking herself up after a fall or walking up and down stairs. It’s trickier for things she longs to do, such as climbing ladders, but really can’t figure out how to do more than get started.

Caleb’s strategy works best for the unconscious physical strength that Delphine needs to develop in her core muscles; the balancing and strength skills she learns from his more strenuous games aren’t skills she necessarily needs to concentrate on with her conscious mind.

As for the cognitive skills, that’s still a fuzzy area. Delphine seems to understand, for example, that her mother is pregnant, that there’s a baby in Mama’s tummy. Sometimes she even asks about it, pulling up Mama’s shirt to take a look. But the idea of a sibling? Of a permanent baby resident showing up in her home? Despite the sibling-propaganda books Caleb drags home from the library, I doubt that Delphine grasps the very abstract concept of siblinghood.

Teaching all of these skills is a daily struggle for us, as we’re not natural teachers. Most parents aren’t; after all, most parents never have to think about their children’s language acquisition or motor development, since their kids seemingly learn them by osmosis.

“Oh, it all goes by so fast!” most parents lament. “They grow up so quickly!” Well, not if your child struggles to learn a skill that comes naturally and easily to other kids. Delphine is growing, yes, and developing. But we don’t find ourselves wishing she would slow down.

We are trying to strike a balance between our child and ourselves, between what she wants and what she needs, between following her lead to see what captures her interest and pushing her to try new things. As Caleb summed it up the other night, “I don’t want us to expect less of her because she’s behind.”

Our child may never “catch up,” as the experts say. But that doesn’t mean we should leave her behind.

Whenever a bad mom day happens — not so frequently as Caleb fears, but more often than I’d like — it’s usually the result of the mom and the offspring spiraling downwards together. Friday, for instance, started out well. But then Delphine wasn’t excited by a half-hour trip to the supermarket (and really, who can blame her?), and not thrilled by a loud, crowded storytime at the library, and finally unenthused about taking a nap or eating lunch but too tired and too hungry to do anything but whine. And at that point, her mom quit.

Instead, the mom ignored her child and did boring mom things, like eating lunch and folding laundry and sorting papers, while the child complained, understandably, about being ignored.

Naptime, when it finally took place, didn’t improve the kid’s mood. Going out to a park didn’t help, although the reluctant consumption of some snacks provided a mild blood-sugar boost. Even the appearance of Daddy at the end of the day — usually a guaranteed pick-me-up — didn’t do much on the happiness front.

Basically, the day was a write-off.

Mom, of course, felt bad for giving up halfway through the day. Sure, it was Delphine who was having the bad day, but when Mom couldn’t fix things, the day died for Mom, too.

Is it unrealistic for our culture to expect parents to be patient and creative and understanding nearly all the time? Most days, I feel that I just don’t measure up, that my own parenting attempts are pathetically incompetent. I was never one of those people who “liked kids” or was “good with kids,” and I usually feel that my efforts so far at learning on the job have shown pitifully small improvement over nearly three years.

But then, I’m not other parents, so how would I know? Maybe the Average American Parent is much, much worse than I am. Or maybe much, much better. There’s just no real way to know, which is both reassuring and depressing.

Now that we’re expecting our second daughter, there are moments during which the mom, all by herself, panics about the decision to add another child to the family. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, is having a second child an act of self-delusion, the triumph of hope over experience? On bad mom days, the choice to give Delphine a sibling feels downright daunting.

Sometimes I wish I came from a family background in which the promise of breeding had been fulfilled — you know, the sort of family in which the kids grow up to be good, independent adults who like their fellow adult siblings. If this fantasia had been true of me and my siblings, I might be more optimistic today about my own children’s prospects for satisfying lives, and less terrified of breeding itself.

On the other hand, I don’t waste time deluding myself that my own parenting skills (or lack thereof) are the be-all and end-all of my children’s lives. They are going to be who they’re going to be, and all we can do as parents is try to help them, whether they succeed spectacularly or fail miserably. Is this reassuring, or depressing, or both? Depends on whether I’m having a bad mom day or not.

As my father tells the story, I watched this boy pile up the blocks for a while, and then I intervened. I took apart his castle and rearranged the blocks so that they lined up in perfect alphabetical order. “See?” I told him. “This is how they’re supposed to go.”

My father always tells this story with pride: Look at my precocious daughter, who knew the alphabet at age two! (And wasn’t shy about bossing around an older boy.) But I usually wince a little when I hear the story, because these days I think of the tale as exemplary: Look at that poor little girl, who thought alphabet blocks were only for arranging into the alphabet!

I was always the kind of kid who did what was expected of her, who colored inside the lines every time, who figured out the adult system and learned to do relatively well within it. That’s fine for getting good grades, but maybe not so useful for becoming a successful person.

Now that I’m a parent, I find myself constantly struggling to think outside the box — sandbox, cardboard box, toy box, whatever — to come up with creative ideas for engaging Delphine. It doesn’t come to me naturally. And now that we’re expecting a second child, I’ve been trying to push myself outside the labor-and delivery box. Both are slow processes.

When I was pregnant with Delphine, I took — as I often do — the path of least resistance. We had a family-care doc we adored and trusted, who delivered babies regularly. So we didn’t shop around; we were happy to have her deliver our baby in her clinic’s main hospital. When, at 40-plus weeks, an ultrasound revealed that Delphine was very firmly breech, she told us that the hospital policy for breech babies was an automatic C-section. We tried to talk our way out of this by asking if the docs could do an external version, manipulating my belly to get Delphine to turn the right way round, but were told it was too late for that. So, sighing, we agreed to the C-section.

For a long time, I thought we had made the best choice in a bad situation. But gradually I realized that the option presented to us (a scheduled C-section) and the option we requested (a version) weren’t the only two options. There are, of course, other hospitals and birthing centers in Portland, and just because we had gone nine months with one particular provider didn’t mean we couldn’t go somewhere else.

This third option never occurred to us, in part because, like many first-time parents, we blithely assumed that things would go just swimmingly for us. Yes, we had taken a childbirth class, and we knew, in theory, about some of the many things that could go wrong. But, you know, bad things always happen to other people, right? Not to us. So we weren’t ready to be creative.

We knew very little about breech babies. I was one myself, but I didn’t learn much about my own delivery until after I’d had a baby of my own, when my parents dug up their old baby journals and shared them with me. The journals document their different takes on a hospital process that featured a difficult labor, a full-body X-ray on my mom (shocking, given the fact that ultrasound was available in those days and the dangers of X-rays well known), an emergency cesarean (my doctor dad, unlike Caleb and most dads today, wasn’t allowed to attend the surgery) and an old-fashioned nursery setup, in which my parents had to wave at me through glass while a nurse held me up for viewing.

We did know that very few doctors delivered breech babies vaginally anymore, preferring the certain risks of surgery to the uncertain risks of vaginal delivery. And we weren’t surprised when we were told that the hospital where Delphine was born had a blanket policy banning VBACs, or vaginal births after cesarean. Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.

At least, that was the tale we were told two years ago. As I learned after Delphine was born, official medical opinion on obstetrical methods fluctuates fairly regularly. VBACs, for example, were discouraged in the 1970s, encouraged in the late 1980s and 1990s, discouraged again in the new millennium, and are now coming back into favor. A year after Delphine was born, the National Institutes of Health recommended encouraging VBACs, both for the mother’s and the baby’s health; the short version of the recommendation is that the certain risks of repeat surgery are, simply, more dangerous than the uncertain risks of a vaginal birth. In the past year, Delphine’s hospital quietly erased its VBAC ban and now allows them, on a case-by-case, OB-by-OB basis. This summer, Oregon Health and Science University promoted its new policy encouraging vaginal deliveries of full-term breech babies, aiming “to reduce the hospital’s cesarean section rate.”

So what does all this mean for us, trying to figure out where to have baby number two after a maybe-unnecessary initial C-section? Our chief priority, we decided, was to find the place that offered the path of least resistance. This time around, however, we redefined what we meant by “resistance.”

Plenty of women in similar situations (and with the C-section rate in the U.S. at more than a third of all births, there are plenty of women in similar situations) would simply sign up for a scheduled repeat C-section, assuming that that’s the path of least resistance. But having done this routine once — the drugs, the pain, the psychological confusion, the lactation difficulties, the blur of inconsistent nursing care — we figured this was already a path with plenty of resistance. Giving birth is hard enough already, and we didn’t want to have to fight our caregivers all the way through as well.

Our family-care doc (yes, we still see her, and we still love her) suggested that we try Portland’s two in-hospital midwifery clinics. In theory, these clinics are a good way to go for VBAC patients: you can attempt to have an ordinary birth, with a hospital on hand if you need it. This concept is emphasized in the book Natural Hospital Birth, which promises “The Best of Both Worlds.” In practice, however, the setup feels more like the worst of both worlds, with inflexible hospital policies (continuous fetal monitoring, for example, a controversial practice that has been shown to lead to more, not less, C-sections) alongside flimsy folk wisdom (one midwife told us that the reliable “home remedy” for nighttime leg cramps was to sleep with a bar of soap in the bed).

C’mon, people. This is Oregon, for frick’s sake — a state where midwifery has been legal for a long time, and alternative wellness accepted even in hospitals. Why, when it comes to having babies, are women still being pushed to either go all medical or all woo-woo, or into an awkward marriage of both? Why isn’t there a happy medium of evidence-based, scientifically sound birthing focused on simplicity, not questionable interventions or annoying aromatherapy?

Probably because most American moms are just like me: never thinking outside the boxes we’re already familiar with, be that box medical or hippy-dippy. The majority of us regularly acquiesce to the medical status quo, agreeing to C-sections for such scientifically dubious reasons as “the baby’s head is too big” and “your labor isn’t progressing fast enough” and then willingly sign up for repeat C-sections, believing them to be safer when they’re not.

In Delphine’s playgroup of a dozen kids, more than a third of the moms had C-sections for their initial pregnancies, and several signed up for (or ending up having) repeat surgeries for their second children. Nobody’s thrilled about having surgery, but nobody complains about it; it’s accepted. This is what our trusted doctors tell us we need to do, so we do it. We are modern American parenting writ small.

Those outlier American moms who choose home births instead of hospital births — including several of our friends — are often viewed skeptically. (Most of our friends who have attempted home births, in fact, have wound up at hospitals for their deliveries, but none have suffered dire consequences as a result of trying to have a baby the truly old-fashioned way.) And in many states, midwife-assisted home births are, weirdly enough, illegal.

Around the time of Delphine’s delivery, I read a number of the popular books on either side of the pro-medical and pro-woo-woo divide — chiefly the perennial bestseller What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the former camp, and the hippie classic Spiritual Midwifery for the latter. Neither really spoke to me; the former was too nuts-and-bolts (checklists, summaries, and the like), and the latter too ethereal (guilt trips about how labor is only painful if you aren’t in the right spiritual place for it). I’ve since found books that speak to the balanced middle, and offer both solid data and thoughtful insight. Naturally, these books tend to be by journalists, and include Jennifer Block’s well-written Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care and Jessica Mitford’s older, more politically polemical The American Way of Birth. Also in the middle are those books, such as the natural-hospital-birth book, that aim to serve as handbooks for struggling parents.

One of these books is The Doula Advantage, a guide for parents considering using doulas to assist with labor and delivery. Toward the end of the book, author Rachel Gurevich notes that many health-insurance companies don’t cover doula services. The women who hire doulas — typically well-educated, well-off women — usually just pay the doula fees out of pocket, writing off the $1,000 or so as part of the cost of having a baby in the upper middle class. But, Gurevich points out, if those same women started writing letters to their insurance companies — accompanied, perhaps, by letters of support from their doctors — documenting just how much a relatively cheap doula saved the company in medical fees, then doulas might start getting reimbursed by insurers. And insurers, and the rest of society, might then start taking doulas seriously as part of the medical profession.

That little economic argument alone woke me up. I had checked The Doula Advantage out of the library because I wanted to hire a doula this time around. I wanted to do everything differently this time around; I wanted midwives, I wanted to avoid surgery, I wanted a less fraught experience. But I was still thinking like all those other American moms, expecting to pay a doula out of pocket and not questioning the system.

For Delphine, I recall, our insurer covered 80 percent of the fees for a doctor and a hospital, but only 40 percent of the (much cheaper) fees for a midwife. At the time, I thought, “Well, we’d better go with what the insurance company will pay for.” Now, of course — after paying some $3,000 out of pocket for our 80-percent-covered hospital experience — I’m prepared to send letters, file complaints, and the like to support our efforts to do things differently.

At my initial prenatal appointment this spring, the nurse did a blood draw. I remembered her doing the same thing at the start of my first pregnancy. This time around, however, I thought to ask, “What do you check for with this test?” I assumed she would answer something along the lines of, “Oh, to see whether you’re anemic.” Nope; the test screens the mom not for general health but for HIV, STDs, and drug addiction.

I was taken aback; in general, a blood test for such serious conditions is explained beforehand and the patient has to sign an informed consent agreeing to the test. It’s one of those medical-privacy things that Americans have come to take for granted. When I asked about this, the nurse said, “Well, we used to tell moms, but then they wouldn’t agree to the test, so now we don’t tell them.”

And chances are, very few of them bother to ask in the first place.

For years, our in-house joke about WWeek has been the paper’s unrelenting dissatisfaction with the fact that Portland (and, well, the Pacific Northwest in general) is just so very white. Sure, the African-American population here is minuscule, for a variety of historical reasons. But hello, there are black people here, along with a wide variety of other non-white folks. Somehow the paper has decided that African-Americans (not, say, the city’s population of East African refugees) are what make a place culturally bona fide, and if Portland only had more of them, the city would truly be cool. (Of course, do any of those young white WWeek staffers actually have, you know, black friends? Probably not.)

These days, our gripe with the paper is its casual assumption that kids are annoying and should be banned from getting in the way of the hipster lifestyle. From the latest issue of Finder, the weekly’s annual guide to life in the city, comes this description of Jamison Square:

Walk by the Pearl District’s Jamison Square on a January day and you might not even notice the fountain. Come back on a warm summer day, and the square is transformed into a veritable water park for children and families alike. The fountain simulates a shallow mountain pool, with cascades of water falling from the rock slabs that surround it. If you can ignore the children’s screams, and find a place in your heart to forgive their trespasses, the fountain is a beautiful juxtaposition of water against the Pearl’s urban heart.

Oh, kids. They just always ruin the view, don’t they?

From the current issue of the weekly, in its Dr. Know column, comes this Q&A:

Q. I often see kids swimming in the Keller Fountain, which makes me nervous for their safety. I confess that it’s also annoying to deal with screaming kids on my lunch break. Is it legal for people to swim in the city’s fountains?

A. Personally, I’m in favor of letting kids swim where they want. Of course, I’m also in favor of letting them smear their bodies with raw liver while lying down in the lions’ enclosure at the zoo. I guess I’m just one of those guys who likes a good laugh.

Ho, ho, ho.

What’s confusing about this unquestioning dismissal of anyone under teenagerhood is the fact that the paper sometimes pays lip service to the pro-kids crowd. In the same issue as the snarky Dr. Know column, the cover story profiles area business owners and their reactions to Groupon, the national coupon company. One local entrepreneur who runs a kiddie coffee shop (and is famous for chewing out Groupon online) is quoted thus: “Everyone loves you when you’re pregnant, but they hate you when you have kids.”

Including, apparently, the newspaper quoting her.

Willamette Week is best known for its award-winning work uncovering the Neil Goldschmidt scandal, in which a beloved former Oregon governor was revealed to have sexually abused a teenager decades ago. But of course, the paper probably thinks of this as classic political muckraking work, not as socially progressive journalism advocating for kids’ rights and gender equality.

Maybe when all those hip young Willamette Week staffers have kids of their own, their perspective will change, too. But by then, in all likelihood, they won’t be working for WWeek anymore.

But a throwaway bit of fluff in the New York Times earlier this summer kept bugging me, so I decided to be an old-fashioned citizen and Write a Letter to the Editor. Or, in this case, send an email directly to the reporter.

Here’s the original fluffery, from the “Social Q’s” Q&A etiquette column that appears in the Sunday Styles section:

Time for a Change
By PHILIP GALANES
Published: June 24, 2011

We were sitting at a communal table at the Sonoma Farmers Market when the couple next to us laid their baby on the table and changed his diaper. They also gave a loud play-by-play for delighted family members in the vicinity. A week before, a father across the aisle from me on an international flight changed his baby’s diaper on the food tray. I lost my temper on the plane, but said nothing at the farmers market. What should I have said? 
— Ricky S., San Francisco

How about: “Gag reflex, don’t fail me now!”

Advice columns can be terrific, letting folks like Ricky vent a little, and giving the rest of us a chance to consider how we’d respond. (Join the club at Social Q’s on Facebook.) But when the underlying behavior is egregious, as in the Case of the Nasty Nappies, the trick is figuring out how to demand relief, without making us (or them) so angry (or defensive) that someone is forced to flee the farmers market — or use miles to upgrade to first class.

On the evidence, Ricky has not yet hit his mark: suffering in silence, then exploding. Why not just ask, “Would you mind taking that to the restroom, please?”

I know it should be obvious not to change dirty diapers on dining surfaces — at least to anyone who is not besotted with his own baby or so sleep-deprived that good sense has gone the way of eight hours. But in a funny twist, these are precisely the folks who are changing diapers.

So state the obvious (in a falsely calm tone). It’s not going to kill you. And maybe folks will be gentle with us, in return, when they wander into our blind spots. But don’t count on it.

Sure, I understand why Ricky S. was steamed. And the mellow advice he got in return seemed unobjectionable.

But as a parent, I found myself thinking, “Oh, so these are the folks who make being in public with children so hard.”

Fellow parents, you know who these people are: the folks whose faces fall when you trundle into a restaurant with your kid in tow, or the clerks who sigh when they see you approaching their checkout line.

Not to get all righteous about it, but you know, as a society we long ago learned that it just wasn’t OK to give these kinds of looks or dole out this kind of behavior in public, at least not to non-parenting adults.

Consider: If you saw a white waitress give a black man a nasty look as he entered her restaurant, then tell him he’d have to sit outside if he wanted to be served, would you be surprised if she got fired? Would you even take her side?

But here in the New York Times were two men — non-parents, from the sound of it — unconsciously doling out the same treatment to parents. (I did check before emailing the columnist, and inferred from his personal website that he was not himself a parent. Ricky S. I didn’t even bother trying to track down.) So, fed up with being fed up about it, I composed and sent my email:

Dear Mr. Galanes:

In your June 24 Social Q’s column, you agreed with Ricky S. that parents changing their children’s diapers in public was repellent, and suggested that Ricky S. should ask offending parents to haul their dirty offspring to a restroom.

Your response is understandable. But I can only assume that neither you nor Ricky S. is, or has ever been, a parent. If you were, you’d know that changing tables in public restrooms are few and far between, and that, quite frankly, changing a child on a picnic table or park bench is often by far the best option available.

The two locations Ricky S. complained about were a farmers’ market and an airplane. At the former, restrooms seldom exist at all; patrons generally are forced to duck into nearby coffee shops and spring for a latte they don’t want or need in order to use the facilities. (Some markets provide porta-potties, but in case you hadn’t noticed, these don’t come with changing tables.) On the latter, an in-flight toilet with a changing table is a rarity; some planes don’t have them at all, while others allot one changing table per plane. (Good luck to the parent with a redolent child trying to figure out which restroom has the magic table.) Without a fold-down changing table, there’s simply not enough flat surface space in any airplane restroom to change a child’s diaper.

Ricky S. didn’t mention it, but most diaper bags and diaper-changing kits come with waterproof, washable mats that parents typically place under their children for diaper changes. The mats protect the child from the none-too-clean surface they’re lying on, and in turn protect the table, bench, ground, or even (shudder) public-restroom floor in question from being soiled by the child.

Short of banning children from all public transportation and locations, most parents are going to continue changing their kids’ diapers in the best (albeit ad-hoc) way they can figure out in their moment of need.

The bigger question, of course, is why doesn’t our society support clean, private diaper-changing in every public restroom? But that’s probably too big an issue for the Social Q’s column to resolve.

Mr. Galanes actually wrote back in less than a week. (Who says New York Times writers don’t earn their keep? Judging by the comment moderation they have to do on their online articles and blogs, they must be up all night just maintaining their work.) Here’s his response:

Thanks for writing such a thoughtful email, Caroline — and for keeping up with the column, too.  You make a number of EXCELLENT points. 

But knowing what little I know of you (just from your brief email), I am 100% certain that if I were eating a chicken sandwich at a picnic table, you would not change your baby’s diaper, right next to me, while I was eating, right?

But I’m with you on your bigger point:  it’s a shame that we don’t provide parents and families with clean, private facilities.

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

All best.

Philip

Nope, I wouldn’t plonk my child down next to a stranger at a picnic table who was eating lunch and proceed to do a diaper change. But it all depends on the circumstances. If I were desperate and the only dry place available was that picnic table? If said stranger and I were trapped together on an airplane and my child was dripping? I’d apologize profusely and be as discreet as possible, but I’d probably still barge ahead.

Us parents and kiddos don’t get out enough as it is, despite what the anti-parent crowd thinks. We do the best we can when we’re in public, but it ain’t always just a walk in the park.

For the friend, part of the realization that parenting isn’t really under our control happened at a recent party filled with toddlers and young children. When those kids were babies, the parents were all busy anxiously comparing each developmental stage: Is he rolling over yet? How many words can he say? Now that the offspring are slightly older, the parents are much more laid-back about it all. Each kid is unique, and the adults, in the course of getting to know their children, have become less concerned about “meeting benchmarks” and “appropriate developmental targets” and all that upper-middle-class parenting angst.

With Delphine, when it became clear within her first year that she wasn’t going to meet too many of those “developmental benchmarks,” we stopped comparing almost instantly. Those toddler books that tell newbie parents what your kid should be doing during each month of life? Tossed onto a shelf, dragged out only for the genuinely useful tidbits on, say, evaluating a fever or assessing food poisoning.

Yes, of course, we have dragged Delphine to numerous evaluations over the past year, and she still sees therapists today for her “global developmental delays.” And Delphine being “different” has meant a total overhaul of our parenting expectations and assumptions, from the practical (looking for babysitters and preschools with special-needs skills, for example) to the psychological (not taking much for granted about ourselves or our child).

On the one hand, it’s been a hard, frustrating, depressing year. On the other hand, there’s something terrifically freeing about being able to shun those bossy books — not just the development books but the sleep-training books and the perfect-parent-perfect-child books and all the if-you-don’t-do-this-your-kid-will-never-succeed! books.

Our child is sweet and funny and cute and clever. She prefers to veg out in front of Elmo to doing something challenging, like going up and down stairs, but if you take her away from the media sources, she will happily play with her books, blocks, trains, or new dollhouse. Of course, when she gets tired of those, she will come up with elaborate methods for convincing us to turn the Elmo back on, starting with handing us the remote, followed by the DVD she has chosen, and then simply turning on the TV, all accompanied by vigorous head nodding.

Do we see ourselves in Delphine? People usually always say that Delphine looks like her father, which is fine, if perhaps a little insulting to her mother. But I generally think that Delphine simply looks like herself. I don’t spend time thinking, “Gee, I’m glad she likes books; she must get that from us.” Nor, unlike some non-parenting friends of ours, do I assume that offspring automatically acquire their parents’ skills and interests, such as a preternatural awareness of world geography or precocious ice-skating talent.

Parents who have “typical” children (in the jargon of the pediatric-therapy world) have, from our perspective, a narrower world view. Sure, having “normal” kids is easier in every way than having a child with special needs. But then, these parents’ sense of what to expect is so very constricted. All children are supposed to be able to run and jump and chatter in long sentences by age two, aren’t they? Oh, your kid doesn’t? Weird.

The kids who are exactly like their parents aren’t really doing their parents any favors. They’re just making it easier for the parents to assume that their kids will breeze through life or, worse, that their lives will be ruined if, say, they don’t get into Harvard. When real challenges crop up — and they inevitably will — how will those parents handle them?

All of us know that we’re not carbon copies of our parents, or even that similar to our siblings. But we tend to forget this when we have kids of our own, in our understandable hopes that our children will exhibit both our best traits and transcend our own lives. We tend to forget that genetics doesn’t work this way; that, yes, some bits of family resemblance in looks and character and behavior will carry through, but far more bits will come from the children themselves.

Perhaps we’ve just learned that lesson much sooner than other parents. So the whole controversy over the ferociously striving Tiger Mother simply struck us as sad. Here was a mother who had proudly wasted her life fretting that her kids weren’t good enough, forcing them into her chosen molds. As for us? We’re plenty busy just trying to enjoy our child as she is, not as how we wish she were.

Yes, it’s true. I am turning into my mom.

For years in my parents’ home, 9 to 10 on Sunday nights was Sacred Masterpiece Theatre Hour. Whatever was on — be it a good show or a bad — my mom would be there, the week’s laundry strewn about the family room, sorting and folding. The mussed piles in the hampers would dwindle and the tidy piles on the sofa and chairs would mount. Even if you weren’t watching the show, you could tell whether my mom liked it by her rate of folding. Fast meant not so good; slow meant engrossing.

Not that Elmo is necessarily a compelling show — there are only so many times, after all, that you can watch Mr. Noodle, entertaining though he is — but the rhythms are the same. The TV distracts, and the arms go slack.

Since having a baby, I have slowly come to realize that, yes, it’s true what Oscar Wilde once wrote: every woman becomes like her mother.

Given my great love and respect for my mom, this is not a bad thing. But the unintentional imitations are more amusing than profound.

Much of it is due to practicalities. I make sure to keep my hair short, so my child can’t pull on it (the same reason my mom chopped off her long dark Joan Baez locks after I was born). I have to remind myself to wear earrings, just to keep my earholes open; I find myself envying my mom, who has never had pierced earlobes and therefore never had children tugging at her earrings.

I ditched every low-cut shirt and pair of pants I still had clinging to my closet racks; when you spend your days bending over and picking up toddlers, you don’t need to be showing off your bra and underwear to all oglers. And nearly every pair of high heels that I owned pre-baby got the Goodwill boot about a year ago. With a bad back and 30 pounds of kid to carry around, who’s gonna wear slip-on kitten heels? Not this mama.

When I was about eight or nine, my mom tried, for the last time, to get me to wear hot pink. I think I threw some sort of sulky fit at the shopping mall, and my mom gave in. Thus I embarked on many years of dark, muted colors.

In my 20s, I began to embrace brighter colors again — chiefly red — and, now that I have a little girl whose wardrobe of hand-me-downs is dominated by bright primary and pastel colors, I, too, have a rather vivid closet.

Stylish women without children in tow have actually come up to me and admired my collection of garish corduroy pants — mossy green, rosy pink, glowing yellow, and pale blue — so it’s perhaps not as bad as it sounds. I am usually too ashamed to admit, however, that since having a child I have become the kind of woman who not only shops online (who has time to go try on clothes in a store?) but the kind of woman who buys her clothes from such frumpy corporations as L.L. Bean (egad!).

I mean, my mom’s entire wardrobe, pretty much, comes from either L.L. Bean or Lands End. (Frankly, I can’t tell the two apart.) And after decades of deriding such dull, traditionalist companies, I, too, now buy T-shirts and pants from them.

But the really embarrassing thing about how perky my clothes have become is how easy it is to match my child. It’s never intentional — there’s no flowery Laura Ashley mother-daughter thing going on.

Nope, nothing so conscious. On an ordinary morning, say, I get up and think to myself, “Today I will wear a blue t-shirt and those pink corduroy pants.” And then an hour or so later, after Delphine has trashed her pajamas with breakfast and needs some regular clothes to wear, I pull out of her drawers something that’s, well, blue on the top and pink on the bottom. Or vice-versa: pink on the top and blue on the bottom.

By the time I’ve realized that we’re either twins or harlequins, it’s usually too late — we have to dash to an appointment, or a library storytime, or the grocery store, or whatnot.

Fortunately nobody has ever commented about our ridiculous appearance in public. Yet.