Guest blogger Julie Geen discusses the book Project: Happily Ever After: Saving Your Marriage when the Fairytale Falters with author Alisa Bowman. Part memoir, part self-help book, Bowman spills every ugly detail of her marriage struggles, including secretly planning her perfectly healthy husband’s funeral (the wake included all of his favorite beers, butternut squash soup, and lamb on a stick). She gives a ten-step plan addressing everything from communication to sex, offering hope for “divorce daydreamers” everywhere.

Alisa Bowman

Alisa: Well, we were at our lowest point in the marriage. I don’t know if you can get any lower than finding all these unusual ways your husband can conveniently drop dead and planning the funeral. I was also planning our divorce, and thinking about which lawyer I would hire, and I think once you start walking through that door, it’s hard to go back. I went to my friend for advice, and she told me I hadn’t really tried everything to save my marriage, and I couldn’t give up until I tried. She was right. I’d tried screaming, crying and saying I was miserable, which really isn’t the same as trying.

Julie: For a long time, I didn’t know that crying wasn’t the same thing as trying.

Alisa: It’s got so many parallels to life. When your marriage is bad, you’re kind of waiting for a revelation or a divine moment….like waiting for a genie to pop out of a bottle and give you three wishes.

I’ve had that same sensation when I’ve had troubles elsewhere in life. Like even trying to get my book published. I really wanted that genie. I had to get over it. I have to make it happen myself. And I think the first place you have to go to improve your marriage is to say: my spouse isn’t going to have some wonderful turnaround and suddenly be the person I want to be married to. My problems aren’t going to magically go away. I ’m going to have to do something about it. That’s the first step to making things better.

Julie: The stories you tell about your husband are really painful.

[Examples:

-Bowman had a C-section. She was released from the hospital on her birthday. Her husband spent that evening at a party that she could not attend.

-Bowman and her husband got into one of their biggest fights when he lost his job and then proceeded to spend their Babymoon savings on a ski trip that he took without her.]

You do it in a beautiful, funny way, but nobody would have blamed you for divorcing him. That’s what gave me so much hope about my own marriage when I read your book.

Alisa: It’s interesting. Some of the feedback I’ve gotten from readers basically accused me of not having a bad marriage. But I’m pretty sure these people are in very abusive relationships. That’s a situation where I would say, “It’s doomed–get out.”

Julie: There’s a line, it’s true. Nobody would advocate staying in an abusive relationship. I think your book is still something to try, because you’re not going to know if your partner is able to change unless you step up and communicate.

Alisa: Exactly.

Julie: And then if your partner doesn’t reciprocate, or escalates the abusive behavior, then you know. Some of your solutions seemed to be very old-school, like compliment him, touch him, smile. They are the sort of things I’m incredibly resistant to. Did you have any battles with the feminist side of yourself?

Alisa: Oh, yeah. I had battles with the side of myself that just didn’t want to do it. Whether you call that “feminist” or you call that the part of yourself that says “This isn‘t fair…why should I be the one who works on the marriage, he should do it.” I still have those battles. But I had to talk myself through it. I’m married to this person that I’ve chosen and I wake up every day and chose to stay in the marriage. Do I want this to go on like this forever, or do I want to do something about it? And I can choose to be cold and withhold sex, and I can chose to be snippy and all of these negative things…or I can choose to be warm, and affectionate and complimentary and I can be polite. It’s really all choices.

It’s not the same thing as being a doormat. I think that’s why it isn’t against my idea of feminism. I think most people would describe me as being a very strong person and I know where my line is and what I’m willing to accept and what I’m not. I know what makes me happy. I think what goes on in marriage is that when things get so negative, everything starts getting on your nerves and it’s hard to chose your battles, so everything becomes a battle.

If you can work on it and warm things up, and say “Thank your for unloading the dishwasher” and tell yourself “it’s okay if he never thanks me, I can thank him.” You get past all the little stuff. And then you can focus on the big things. There are definitely times where you want to stand up and say, “That’s not acceptable.” And there’s other times where you say, “I’m going to forgive that, or even if it’s not fair, I’m going to warm things up and that way we’ll both be happy.” It’s like sorting those things into categories.

To enter the giveaway of Project Happily Ever After, please leave a comment below–with your own Happily Ever After tip, or your own example of feeling very hopeless and frustrated…whatever resonates for you.

Coming this week: Parts 2 and 3

Julie Geen is a freelance writer, mother of two and still married, despite being published in Ask Me About My Divorce. Look for her in Tarnished: True Stories of Innocence Lost by Pinchback Press, to be published in spring of 2011, and on her new blog at www.juliegeen.com.

Lunapads is giving away FOUR sets of Heavy Pad + Wing Liner sets for postpartum mamas–and any mama who might need some extra support (I love these for overnights during my moon).

Here’s how you enter to win:

1. Leave a comment below. If you have time, answer the following question: “What green/natural lifestyle changes have you made as part of your pregnancy or birth experience?”

2. For an extra chance to win, click here to “like” Lunapads’ facebook page and then come back here and leave me a comment letting me know that you did.

And feel free to read the article by guest blogger Sarah Juliusson, below…I think it’s great.

Natural Tips for Postpartum Healing
by Sarah Juliusson

New motherhood…we envision the sweetness of a newborn, a baby’s fresh and pure gaze, blissful breastfeeding, and the joy of getting to know our child. Three days postpartum most new mothers dissolve into something resembling a puddle. Exhausted, emotional, overwhelmed…not to mention bleeding, soreness, swelling, and a belly that still looks about five months pregnant.
The first days and weeks after the birth of your baby are indeed a beautiful time, and there is much sweetness to celebrate. North American culture, however, is lacking in supportive postpartum traditions and rituals. The intensity of the postpartum period is neither discussed nor honoured, and too many women feel a sense of isolation when they should be feeling nourished and supported.
Without a strong set of cultural guidelines to go by, we have the opportunity to create something new. Here are some ideas to support a healthy unfolding into motherhood:

Weave the Cocoon

Envision postpartum as a time of being held, allowing the space and time a new mother needs to emerge into the wider world. Ample time for rest and bonding, limited visitors, no outside responsibilities… A retreat period of 1 – 4 weeks with a focus on rest, food and bonding will do wonders for a new mother’s health and energy when the time comes to emerge from the cocoon.

Allow for Help

New motherhood has a big learning curve – from diapers to breastfeeding. Add to that the routine of daily life (food, household, groceries, laundry) and overwhelm can quickly set in. Helpful ideas include meals from family and friends, a grocery delivery service, the gift of a month of maid service (best gift ever!), and postpartum doula care.

Support a Healthy Recovery

Many mothers are surprised by the swelling and soreness in the perineum as tissues heal. The initial few weeks of bleeding and discharge are a perfect time for Lunapads cloth pads, allowing for comfort and breathability. A pad soaked in water or herbs and frozen will do wonders for the swelling. A Lunablanket will serve you well to protect your linens from leaking, and lets face it – this funky pattern is a wonderful support to the spirit compared to those horrible blue plastic pads at the hospital.

Create Community

It takes a village to raise a child, and new motherhood is a wonderful time to discover a new community of support. Explore a whole new realm of what your neighborhood has to offer with drop-in mother & baby programs, library story times, postpartum yoga and fitness and more.

Together, these four elements represent foundation of a healthy recovery. You may be tired by now of well meaning friends, relatives and strangers warning you of how fast it all goes by – they’re right, it does. One of the best ways we know to savour the beauty of these first few weeks is to allow for the depth of support you need and deserve. Many blessings on your transition into motherhood!

Sarah Juliusson is the mother of two boys, and founder of Mama Renew, offering groups for new and seasoned mothers. To learn more or enjoy writings on motherhood, visit whttp://www.MamaRenew.ca. She also mentors Birthing From Within prenatal classes in Vancouver & Victoria, BC with Dancing Star Birth & Island Mother.

Please tell me what you think of this idea. In the course of reading comments I have been very touched by hearing from women who want to cloth diaper but are really low on funds and can’t afford to get that stash together.

If you have some cloth diapers that your baby has grown out of, would you be interested in being matched up with a cloth diapering-wannabe mama who is in need of receiving some? I’d be willing to put you in touch with each other. Let me know.

UPDATE: What a great response! So far I’ve matched up 27 mamas in need with awesomely generous cloth diaper donors! I still need cloth diapers, though, if you have any to donate.

I am still trying to help moms find the following:

-a mama with an 8-month old who has only six diapers
-cloth diapers for a petite 17-month girl baby
-pocket diapers for a 10 month old who is 20 lbs. (I was able to connect her with a donation of 2 diapers but would like to send her more)
-medium or 1-size for a 20-lb girl
-cloth diapers for a 2-year-old girl
- diapers for an 11 month old, could also use a wet bag : )
-18 month old who is 23 months
-6 month-old boy who is 13-15 lbs.
-8-month-old boy
-and several expecting mamas

There are some more mamas that I have to put on my “needing” list but I’ve connected all of the new donor mamas with mamas in need. So please donate if you have cloth diapers to give. Email me at candacew@mothering.com or leave a comment with a description of the cloth diapers you have available.

I tend toward being one of those people. I miss the absolute magic of believing in Santa Claus. I miss feeling abundantly blissed out by the gifts that appeared under the tree. I miss believing it was Santa when my dad went downstairs to “catch Santa on his way up the chimney,” and not my dad saying “ho, ho, ho.”

But. I realized yesterday that I do like the holiday season–as a season, not a high-speed log flume ride that dumps us right into an explosion of THE HOLIDAY CLIMAX. Of course that feels overwhelming, and then anticlimactic.

This year, I’m doing the 12 days of Christmas with the kids. Each morning, they get something to play with–usually something they share. It has been so low-key, lovely and delightful. It’s even been nice to wake up at 5:30am (when they pop out of bed)–because we have more time to enjoy the morning.

It even worked that way when we decided to decorate the tree. Instead of it being a micromanaged, overly pressured/precious event, we took out the tree, started to set it up, and then went to a birthday party. We came back, and I had a bad stomach flu that lasted for a good 16 hours, so I let the kids put ornaments on themselves. Um, yeah. They LOVED it. And I was flat on my back in bed, the weight of the sickness smothering my gross Martha Stewart overly-controlling Christmas-tree-decorating shadow side. I noticed that it was a relief to let go of that. Big time.

So, decorating the tree took about four or five days. It was slow, and thoughtful, and had this great organic energy–Nathaniel decided to put the soccer-playing Santa near another ornament who seemed prime to receive his pass, and made other relationships between the ornaments, too. Overhearing his spoken thought process while he did this was priceless.

I’m dreaming of a non-neurotic Christmas…sans mantles of old baggage, acquired expectations, and general bah humbuggery. Amen to things shifting…even when we only have a mustard-seed’s sized amount of optimism and hope that they will. That’s all it takes.

Over the past few years I’ve become keenly aware of the social fragmentation in our society. What began as a personal experience of feeling somewhat isolated as a parent trying to make my way quickly evolved into a full time examination of family, community and social structures in our society.

As a psychotherapist in private practice, I also noticed that an increasingly high percentage of my clients were having similar struggles. In many families both parents had to work, which meant that they had little time left for grocery shopping and preparing family dinners, or carpooling their kids after school to soccer practice or ballet, or reviewing homework at night, or getting that house project completed. Most of the parents I talked to felt overwhelmed by their responsibilities, and didn’t know how to improve their situation. They had to work long hours to make ends meet, and they often had no family nearby to help with the kids. I recognized these to be modern challenges that needed new solutions.

Beyond the economic difficulties of social fragmentation, I was concerned about child development. I worried that many children were not getting what they needed from their parents or our society. They needed their parents to be consistently present to form secure attachments from an early age, and to feel that they belonged to something meaningful. Whereas being present with our children used to be the norm, it now seemed like a luxury, reserved for those with enough income to fund a nanny, gardener, and perhaps a home chef or trainer. Parents with these luxuries were certainly not your average Americans trying to raise a family.

I continued to read and write about the topic of social fragmentation, and out of it came a manuscript, a workshop, and Alloparent.org, a social networking website for parents that provides a forum for parents to exchange services and support. The idea behind Alloparent.org is ancient: the idea that communities help each other raise their children. As humans we are wired to parent together as a result of millions of years of evolution. But the industrial revolution, among other events, left the modern family isolated—left to fend for itself in an increasing expensive and fragmented culture.

With Alloparent.org, parents can create a group in their city, or a sub-group on their street. They can also create groups for specific needs, such as childcare or carpools or meal exchanges or gardening. And it’s free. Some parents will be interested in forming on-going groups, and others will choose the a la carte option, where they initiate an exchange on a one-time basis. Alloparent.org is there to help serve the individual needs of each parent and family.

More than anything else, I think Alloparent.org represents a mind-set and an awareness that parents need more support in our society. When people join Alloparent.org, they feel that coming together as a community and wanting to collaborate as parents and families is acceptable. They are not embarrassed as they might otherwise be, because the culture of Alloparent.org supports and advocates for community collaboration.

Lisa Nave is a psychotherapist in private practice in Mill Valley, CA. She is also a writer, speaker, and the mother of two boys.

In a previous post, I discussed the art of creating a ‘stillness game’ with our young one to help him learn to relax down to sleep. While there are a plethora of CDs, books, and MP3s (I know, I’ve made one too) out there to help you, sometimes, it’s best for your child to hear your voice in helping them to relax down to sleep.

I’ve found that the keys to relaxation with children are voice and music. There are a variety of methods out there from Transcendental Meditation to using mantras to relax. I’ve found the simple methods of focusing on your breathing or following a step-by-step muscle relaxation work the best for the majority of the adults and children I’ve worked with.

Most children find their parent’s voices soothing when we’re trying to help quiet down a pain or discomfort. Sometimes, they fight you on sheer principle. You’ll need to test this process for a few days to see if you’re going to be able to use your own voice, recruit a family member, or find something or someone else out there to help. Please, test it out for at least a week before moving on to another solution. I’d really recommend trying it for a month so they have some consistency and a chance to succeed with it. But, if you’re still feeling frustrated, move on to something else to see if it will help.

We want both you and your child to have a relaxing evening.

Our focus here is to teach you how to use your voice to help your child relax down to sleep. (You’ll learn to, this can and will help with temper tantrums and general screaming fits.) With your voice, you need to work on cadence and levels. You need to slow your regular speech pattern down so that almost every word comes across on a single slow and steady breath.

To record yourself, you can use such products as GarageBand on the Mac and Magix for the PC. I switch back and forth between both. Make sure you use a headset to help cancel out any background noise. And, if you or your spouse is a musician, all the better! As for music, you want to select something with less than 60 beats a minute. Any of the meditation CDs you find at Target or in iTunes will work just fine for your personal recording. I’ve steered away from things such as nature sounds or thunderstorms, as these make our son agitated in his sleep. Instead, I selected a soft ocean theme with some light harp and flute music in the background. Your music selection will depend on your child. I know one who loves bagpipes!

The script below should last at least five minutes. I start with about 20 seconds of music before I start the script below, giving them a little bit to adjust to the fact it’s bedtime. The music lays just below the voice for the first part, the first five minutes. You want the voice to be loud enough for them to focus on it. When I’m done recording the main session (the first five minutes), I add in enough music to last about 25-30 minutes and then layer in the voice recording just below the music 2-3 more times (you don’t want to be able to consciously hear the voice, on mine, I can hear it at certain parts, but my musician husband can’t, go figure) and then let the rest just run as music.

Ok, time to lay back and relax. Find your spot. Get all nice and comfy. Take a deep breath. And a big yawn. (You will actually yawn.) Letting your body relax. Eyes closed now. Feeling your head relax. Getting all nice and comfy.
Feeling your face relax. Warm, soft, secure. Letting your neck and shoulders get nice and warm. Soft and relaxed. Letting your chest relax. Warm and comfy. All safe and secure.

Just letting go now. All warm and loved. Knowing that you’re very good and we love you very much. That’s right. Safe and secure.

If you would like to hear a short sample, click here.

Your important items in the script are (and ones you should make sure show up in your own version):
1) getting your child to find their spot
2) repetition
Working with them on “finding their spot” allows them to choose where they’re going to relax and gives them a verbal cue to do so. You are giving them a choice, giving them the power rather than initiating a power struggle. And, if you think about it, don’t you fall asleep in the same position night after night? I know I do. I curl up on my stomach, tuck the pillow under my head and sling my arm over another pillow. I’m out. I watch our son, he curls up on his side, throws an arm over a stuffed animal and once he gets still (i.e., stops kicking his feet) he’s out. As for repetition, this is key in relaxation or guided meditation. Using the same words over and over again helps the brain naturally slow down and focus. Use whatever words you normally use when trying to calm them down, and no, not the ones you use when frustrated, the soft soothing ones.

Practice the script a few times without them around. Find your natural rhythm with it. Use it as a guide to write down your own, adding in your own phrases and terminology. I kept the body parts generic so that even very young children can respond to the process. I’ve seen success with kids as young as two.

A couple of great resources I’ve found and actually used in our efforts, because sometimes, he’s just tired of hearing mommy’s voice, are:

• Bubble Riding: A Relaxation Story, Designed to Help Children Increase Creativity While Lowering Stress and Anxiety Levels. (Book) (Indigo Ocean Dreams) – beautifully illustrated, slightly too repetitive and can cause a school aged child to ask you if it’s “going to keep doing that”, but it does help them relax down. He still asks for it sometimes before bed.

• Turtle Island: A Bedtime Story (CD) by Monroe Products – you’re supposed to use it with a special device, but it works just as well for them on your standard iPod. He doesn’t ask for this one as much. He prefers the next one.

• Softly to Sleep (MP3) by myself – the one I recorded that seems to work the best for our son using the exact methods as I have written about here. I can play it on a road trip, and he’s out. We always take our iPods and a player on vacation, and it seems to help being in a new environment.
Whatever method you choose to use, the books, your own recording, or someone else’s recorded voice, know that you can get them to stop the battles and really give you back your evening sanity. It just takes a little ingenuity and some soft, quiet guidance, and you’ll have your little one sleeping softly through the night.

Stacia D. Kelly, PhD, MHt is a writer and Holistic Health Coach living
with her husband, son and three cats just outside of Washington DC.
She takes a whole mind-body-spirit approach to health and well-being
and teaches her clients to do the same. Blog:
http://www.mindbodyspiritworks.com

When you’re seeing a guy or gal who your closest friends suspect isn’t good for you, there will be one tough-love friend who will pull you aside and say, “It’s a toxic relationship, and you need to move on.”

It’s a little different when we’re talking about toxic parents and family.

For six years I’ve been trying to sort out the meaning of that one word family, and how it relates to me and my decisions to estrange myself from those who are my flesh and blood: the mother who carried me in her womb, the father who rocked me in his arms as a baby.

Recently, I ran across an article in the New York Times by Richard A. Friedman, M.D., When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate.

One sentence stopped my breath. He writes: “The assumption that parents are predisposed to love their children unconditionally and protect them from harm is not universally true.”

This is the hardest concept for many of us to grasp.

When I make new acquaintances and the topic of family finally arises, and I tell them I’m estranged from my parents, the response never varies. First shock, then pity. Usually I must assert, “No, I’m happy. I’m healthier without them.”

Running into the same person later, I might hear, “Have you talked to your parents?”

As a society, we need to believe in certain moral imperatives to survive the darker sides of human nature. For example, most of us want to embrace the idea that a parent and a child should maintain a close relationship for the rest of their lives. At the very least we want to hope that this new parent will love their child no matter what and nurture it with love and compassion.

Friedman writes about a patient who he advised to forgo a parental relationship when this patient came to him severely depressed over being disowned by his religious parents for coming out as a gay man.

“Though terribly hurt and angry, this young man still hoped he could get his parents to accept his sexuality and asked me to meet with the three of them.
The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his “lifestyle” was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was.”

My greatest sin was going to a liberal arts school, and not marrying in the faith.

When I blew out my wrist in college, ending my dreams of becoming a concert pianist, my mother said, “God took away your music because you weren’t serving him.” My injury was supposed to draw me closer to them, and this God of theirs.

But it didn’t.

I finally cut them off, after struggling with anorexia and trying to take my own life, events that illuminated my revelation that I was actually a better, healthier and happier person without their negativity and hostility in my life.

Less than a year later, I became pregnant, as they call it, “out of wedlock.”
They did not know of my pregnancy until my daughter was one week old – they have never met her.

Giving birth healed pieces of my soul. If anything, becoming a mother has made me ever more unflinching in my resolve that there is no excuse for ever abusing a child.

When I hold my daughter close, and I see the love, security and stability she has, I want to weep for what I lost to two people who were not stable enough to be parents.

My daughter is three, and traveling along this path alone without a family hasn’t been easy. Fortunately, my partner is an invaluable parent, and he believes as do I that our daughter’s happiness and security are our most imperative priority.

So many friends assured me that having my daughter would change things. They believed I would reconcile with my parents and that we would create a new relationship—that my status as a mother would give us a new and healthy way to connect.

I never saw it that way, because that is exactly where my parents let me down: in parenting itself.

How would I sit down with my mother and talk about raising my daughter? What advice would I even begin to accept from the woman who had physically and verbally abused me? What parenting skills would I learn from her?

If I took her parenting advice, I would tell my daughter about an angry God, and I’d fill her mind with stories of demons and the devil. A family member gave me a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas when I was five, and it was taken away because it was considered “heathen.” My parents did not allow me to attend school past kindergarten, I was forced to wear long dresses that covered me up every day, and I had to attend church several times a week. They told me that any career other than being a wife and mother was a sin.

My parents forced me to learn Bible verses and squelched my beautiful creative soul with a steady diet of “no”s and spankings. Would I make my own daughter kneel on her little knees and ask God to forgive her for her sins, at the age of 4 and then have her baptized before she understands what “sins” were?

No, I would not.

Though I believe that the instinct for mothering and parenting a child with love is strong at birth, I think it can be overridden by environment (and in my family’s case, religious dogmatism). A toxic relationship, whether with a father, mother, or lover, makes us weaker, not stronger. For one’s health alone, letting those relationships go may be the very best chance any of us have for blossoming into the beautiful souls we were created to be.

I’d like to say I’ve sorted out what the word family means to me, but to be honest, the word still conjures more questions than answers. In the last few months, my daughter has picked up what a family is from her books and stories; recently, she grabbed my hand and her father’s hand as we sat together and looked up at us, brown eyes filled with love, and said, “We’re a family.” And perhaps that is my answer.

Family is a concept defined by what you create, and as corny as it sounds, where your heart belongs. My heart did not belong to the people who conceived me, but it has found its home.

Rebekah L. Cowell is a freelance writer for local newspapers and national publications based in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Prior to motherhood and taking the writing path, she was contemplating law school (what else do you do with a Philosophy degree?) and/or living aboard a sailboat.