Patience rewarded

It’s been so cold lately that all there really is left to do is bake. Today we made blueberry muffins and little A. “helped,” which is sort of code for him standing at the counter with an apron on while I try to keep him from dumping an entire box of baking soda into the mixing bowl.

When the muffins came out of the oven and had cooled a bit, A. carried a couple to the table. I told him I was going to go make some tea and that I’d get him a glass of milk while I was at it. While I headed into the kitchen to put the water on, clean a few dishes, and eat an entire bag of potato chips, my 2-year-old sat at the table, staring at his blueberry muffin. It occurred to me, as I stood shaking chip crumbs into my mouth while my son carefully touched the muffin wrapper with one finger, not even daring to peel it back, that I needed to work on patience.

2-year-olds get some pretty bad press, and ours has earned his stripes in the predictable categories of tantrums and whining sessions, but in that half-sweet, half-humiliating moment where I realized my self-control had been trumped by a toddler’s, I started thinking about some of the other things my son does better than I do. Here are just a few:

1. Spontaneity. Hey. I feel like eating one of those soft pretzels from the bakery. Let’s go down and get one! Now I want to kick a soccer ball. That’s good too. Hey mom, can we sing “Jimmy Crack Corn” for 20 minutes straight? Of course. Because really…why not?

2. Enjoying work. Washing dishes and vacuuming: mundane tasks, or hobbies? Hobbies, definitely hobbies. Soapy water on the floor and socks caught in the vacuum suction are small prices to pay.

3. Finding fun. My kid is so imaginative. For up to an hour at a time he’ll stand at the windowsill with a couple of lego cars and some dolls, creating elaborate skateboarding, ice skating, and diving board scenarios. He’ll crawl in and out of a cardboard box  or sit at the bottom of my closet rearranging my shoe pile. Sometimes I think it’s funny how many toys are marketed to toddlers when it doesn’t actually appear they need many.

4. Skateboarding. People raise their eyebrows when they see him toting his skateboard around, but seriously, this kid is talented.

I love that boy!

Our Toyota Matrix in the good old days (cars are also great for teaching toddler safety).

I should be writing about how great it is that I live in a place where the city neighborhoods are so well-planned and the public transportation so reliable that I really don’t need a car. But my husband’s out of town this weekend and I’ve been schlepping two kids and a dog around by myself all day, so I’m feeling petty enough to whine about this shameful first-world problem. It’s sort of like how most of the time I care about eating fresh, local food, but then other times I shove entire boxes of Pocky sticks into my mouth.

I miss my car because:

1) It lets me make my own schedule. I’m always either running to make a bus or killing time until one arrives.  And you should see me when I just miss a bus that would have kept everyone on the right nap schedule. Sometimes I just wish I could go when I feel like it.

2) It’s basically an extra closet. Have you ever thought about how much stuff you can just keep in a car? All the stuff that makes my diaper bag weigh 20 pounds and then some. Changes of clothes, soccer balls, blankets, books, Goldfish crackers, tire irons, and who knows what else. I always have to weigh a particular item’s possible function against the weight it will bore into my shoulder, but a car does all the heavy lifting for you.

3) It’s weatherproof. Today was the kind of day where it couldn’t seem to decide whether to rain or snow, so it did both, in abundance. I have a plastic cover for the stroller and that kept my kids dry, but it didn’t do much for me, and I can’t hold an umbrella while walking a German Shepherd, pushing a double stroller, and toting a diaper bag. Therefore, I became intimately acquainted with the gross weather in a way I could have easily avoided with a car.

4) It’s a world unto itself. I can put on a CD and sing loudly and obnoxiously with my kids. I can eat whatever I want. Nobody will glare at me or shush me. If I’m feeling grumpy, I can sit and stew without needing to be polite. I have plenty of room for just me and my stuff. No need to stand in a car!

Admittedly, the reasons I miss my car are the reasons I shouldn’t. It allows me to accumulate clutter, isolate myself, avoid the outdoors, and not plan ahead…an ecological, sociological nightmare! And OK, most days, I’m really thankful to be reducing my carbon footprint, avoiding traffic jams and near-accidents, and not paying for gas.

But just for today, I miss my car.

Our balcony...small, but we still managed to grow things this summer!

We did the opposite of what most people expecting a second child would do: we downsized. Our first apartment in Germany was about 1,000 square feet–the size of our home in the United States (minus a garage, basement, and large yard, of course), so it seemed reasonable to us at first. After all, our house in Michigan was smaller than anybody else’s we knew. Yet we quickly learned that we were paying dearly for what many Germans would view as an extravagant amount of space (“Space is a luxury, and you pay for it,” my neighbor said when I told her we were moving). Wanting to save more money, we relocated over the summer into a 730 square foot apartment. We have never regretted it.

The new, smaller apartment has served us quite well; it’s well-built and comfortable, with a nice balcony (pretty standard here in Germany) and wood floors. But this weekend, my husband and I had to re-strategize. Our baby daughter is almost five months old, the age our son was when we moved him to his own room. Like our son, our daughter has started showing signs of needing her own space– for several weeks she has been sleeping worse than ever at night, and I just have the “feeling”, like I did with my son at this age, that we’d all have better nights if she had a room of her own.

The problem? She can’t have a room of her own. We don’t have one. Nevertheless, we had to talk about how to help her sleep in the space we do have. We knew friends who had managed this, and assumed it would only take some careful thought. We discussed whether or not to move the baby into our son’s room, which would require quite a bit of furniture rearranging, but we ended up deciding for now to move our son’s bed into our room and put our daughter’s crib in his room. Our son sleeps in a converted crib that wedges perfectly against our back wall, provided I move my desk into the living room where my husband’s is (a good move anyway– I never use the desk in our room, since somebody’s always sleeping there!). Our son has been a great sleeper on a predictable routine for close to two years, so we thought sleeping in our room might be less disturbing for him than waking up with the baby as she adjusts to her new space. We figure we’ll see how it goes– eventually, when the baby has settled in, we assume we’ll move our son back into that room. After an afternoon spent rearranging and testing out naps in the new spots– they worked just fine– we feel comfortable and content with our choice.

I don’t want to over-romanticize living in a small space with four people and a German Shepherd. I miss my garden. I really wish we had a guest room and a second bathroom to make life easier for visitors. I know my husband misses his garage, which back in Michigan was crammed full of tools, boats, the occasional deer carcass. It’s hard having too many people over for dinner. Sometimes I just want to go into a room by myself and shut the door, but I basically never can.

But here are the advantages:

1) We pay attention to stuff. We can’t afford to just accumulate. Every item in our apartment has to have to be there. If we’re not using it now, we have to think carefully about whether we’ll really need it in the future. If we won’t, we sell it or give it away. If we will, we store it in the small closet allotted us in the basement of the apartment building. I welcome the freedom from extra stuff.

2) We’re not isolated from one another. We’re a family, and believe me, in this space, we never forget it. Our son plays with his soccer ball in the same room where my husband works on his graduate program and I set the table for dinner. We don’t avoid each other…we can’t! That’s probably a good thing.

3) We have a small footprint. The National Association of Homebuilders states that “the average home size in the United States was 2,700 square feet in 2009, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970.” The BBC reports average floor space in U.S. homes to be over twice that of most European countries. Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, Americans’ energy use per capita was nearly twice that of Germans’ in 2009. Hmmm. Is there a connection? The small house movement gaining ground in the United States seems to think so.

4) Cleaning is a snap. Even when I’m about to pull my hair out because the apartment looks like a tornado ripped through, it never really takes more than 45 minutes for me to get it completely tidy and mostly clean.

5) Everything’s right there. Our apartment has only one level–no stairs–and with two kids under the age of three, I’ve been grateful for that many times over. Having our washer and dryer in the bathroom is one of the greatest conveniences I’ve enjoyed yet, and if I hear a mysterious crash in one room, I never have to run too far to investigate it.

I don’t know if I want to live in a space this small forever. But for now, this is my life, and I’m learning from it, and I’m thankful.

A new routine for someone in the family

We have a porta-potty. It’s sleek and red and made by Baby Bjorn and fits my son’s little butt just perfectly. He’s been using it a lot lately, and I, giddy at the thought of never buying Size 5 diapers again, have found myself doing things I really couldn’t have imagined BK (before kids): dutifully moving this glorified chamber pot from room to room, clapping and cheering when it’s full, even packing it into our stroller when we head out (it travels well).

Sometimes I wonder how we’re going to get to the next stage–like, when will he start actually going to the bathroom rather than letting the bathroom come to him?–but then I remember that, like all of the other phases, this one will come just in time for me to forget there ever was a previous one.

Often, when I mention a change in my children’s behavior, people say something along the lines of: “You know kids. As soon as you’re used to one phase, they move on to the next one.” Indeed, though Little A.  (age 2.5 years) has been sleeping on a predictable schedule for almost two years now, other changes have come so quickly I find myself racing to catch up with them while simultaneously reaching back to remember the earlier stages in hopes that some recollection will help me guide his little sister (age 4.5 months). On both accounts, I’m only marginally successful. I like routines, and we have good ones in our home, but I’ve also found that:

A) Ironically, routines have to shift more than I thought they would based on my kids’ development and

B) My own routines fall by the wayside as I work to create meaningful routines for my ever-changing kids.

For example, I had just arrived at the point when I had figured out how to regularly pursue two favorite hobbies–running and writing–with one child when, to my delight of course, along came Baby #2, and all of a sudden, two months go by without a blog post and I barely notice because I’m busy watching her roll over and giggle when she rubs her fingers against her papa’s scratchy beard. I would like to post more frequently, and certainly plan to in 2012. But it could be worse.

Routine. It’s great, but so is flexibility. My son has decided he likes his underpants so much that he wants to wear multiple pairs at a time. Yesterday, he actually pulled on about 15 pairs of underpants and begged for my help when, due to the fact that said underpants were layered up and down his legs, he was having trouble wedging his feet into Pair #16. I solemnly helped him into that last pair. He also insists on wearing them backwards. I’d push the point, but why bother? This phase won’t last long. When I ask if he wants my help to put the underpants on the right way, and he says, “No. Because it’s OK for me to wear my underpants backwards,” I have to agree. Because really, he’s right. And if correctly positioned underpants and blog posts must wait, so be it.

St. Martin, sharing his cloak (Photo Credit: jimforest on Flickr)

“It’s not St. Martin’s Day until someone sets their lantern on fire.” So said my wise friend just after we set our son’s lantern on fire. I suppose after combining a paper lantern, burning candle, and two-year-old on a pitch-black night, we had it coming. It wasn’t serious– the charred hole in the lantern had a certain charm, and the parade went on.

I really like St. Martin’s Day. It conflicts with Veteran’s Day in the U.S. which might be why I didn’t know much about it prior to living in Germany. One of the drawbacks of living overseas– missing familiar holiday celebrations from home– has a positive flip side: you get to experience new holidays. On St. Martin’s Day, children will make paper lanterns illuminated from the inside, and walk in a procession, singing songs about lanterns (which A. and I tend to sing all year round, now that we know them). If they’re lucky, there will be a man dressed as St. Martin himself, leading the procession on horseback. Families might also eat a celebratory dinner; the timing of the holiday is supposed to coincide with the final harvest.

We attended two St. Martin’s processions this year. I loved the first because the man playing St. Martin had a stunning black horse and, when it was over, rode off into the forest like a ghost. But the second had its charm too. It began with a short church service that featured children acting out St. Martin’s story– according to legend, he cut his own cloak in half on a bitter cold night and gave it to a poor man. Later, he dreamed that Jesus was wearing the other half of his cloak. To close the service, some children led a prayer asking God to always help them recognize when they could be of service to those less fortunate.

A.’s little friend from up the street must have been listening; she gave us one of her lanterns from the previous year to use during the procession. It had a battery-operated light inside– I can’t imagine why.

Ike, loyal friend and renegade pee-er. He has no idea what a generalization is.

“That is not a toilet for dogs,” the woman said, shaking her head at me as she peered over her fence at my dog, who was peeing on a tree planted in a scrubby patch of ground sandwiched between the sidewalk and street in our neighborhood.

I briefly considered apologizing, but I was genuinely confused. This couldn’t be the woman’s private garden; she was behind her fence and I was across the sidewalk. Moreover, I had recently seen a sign posted on the tree, I presumed posted by the city or a nearby business, advising dog owners to clean up after their dogs. If the sign asks you to clean up, aren’t you allowed to be there? And you don’t have to clean up pee, right?

I mentioned the sign to the woman (it wasn’t there anymore) and pointed out that the dog had only peed. She shook her head. “This is not a toilet for dogs,” she repeated. At that point, realizing my explanations were not appreciated, I walked away.

But I walked away in a huff. And in my huff, I made a few silent sweeping generalizations about elderly ladies in Germany. Now, it’s true that I’ve received more unsolicited criticism here in Germany than I did in the United States, and it’s true that for whatever reason that criticism, whether centered on my choice not to put mittens on my child or on the alleged fact that the mown path I’m walking on shouldn’t be walked on, has come from elderly ladies here.

However, the difference between “fact” and “generalization” is fairly significant. “Fact” allows me to appreciate both the benefits and drawbacks of people’s heightened sense of social responsibility and obligation to address others who might be “out of line.” “Generalization” only leaves room for resentment.

You would think I’ve lived in enough places to learn that generalization is pointless and narrow-minded. But unfortunately, I think it’s a human tendency we continually fight against. Even when I lived back in the United States, I knew it was dangerously easy to generalize about different groups–political, religious, regional, you name it. It’s much harder to appreciate human complexity and nuance.

My kids and I continued down the path and eventually to a field where we tossed the ball for our dog and he peed again, this time without controversy. As we headed back, we heard a car approaching behind us and I turned to look. The silver-haired woman waving vigorously and smiling out her window at me was Iris, who regularly admired my son’s curls, cooed over my daughter sleeping in the stroller, and scratched my dog behind his ears whenever she ran into us on our walks. I waved back. As we headed into our apartment building, a tiny elderly woman stopped on the sidewalk and beamed at the kids and me, then at our dog.

“What a handsome guy,” she said admiringly.

“Would you like to pet him?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” she replied, and stroked his head. We chatted briefly about how nice it was to have dogs, then wished one another a good day and went our separate ways.

“Two against one,” I had to think to myself as I headed up the stairs. If not a little cosmic slap on my wrist for making snap judgments in the first place, this was at least a good reminder that every stereotype is just as quickly refuted as it is defined. I decided to revise my generalization. Elderly German ladies? They’re actually really sweet.

I dare you to cross!

I love the signs posted at crosswalks at the beginning of the school year here in Stuttgart. I remember them from last year, and this year they appeared again, in early September.

Talk about a healthy dose of social responsibility…or guilt…or both!

The sign translates as follows: “Wait at the red light. Be a good example for children.”

No pressure though!

The German forest-- good place to look for wild garlic, bad place to park a stroller!

This is the story of how a walk in the woods ended with two German police officers confiscating my stroller!

I’ve already written about how wonderfully Germany has planned its cities to include plenty of green space; within walking distance of both of the apartments we’ve occupied in Stuttgart we’ve found farm fields, orchards, and forests all equipped with extensive paths to satisfy our nature cravings.

On this particular morning, A. and I headed to one of the aforementioned forests to attend his first nature class. We had met the teacher and other students at a playground in the center of the forest, then ventured out among the trees to collect acorns and moss and build little huts for woodland animals. Because we would be heading off the path at points, the teacher recommended I leave my stroller at the playground rather than lugging it along (nobody else in the class had one because they came by car), so I parked it and took everything important out of my diaper bag, just in case, before setting off for our hike.

When we got back to the playground at the end of the hour and a half course, I was shocked to see a giant police van– with my stroller sitting in it– and two grim-looking police officers, arms crossed, staring us down as we walked the path. I tried to imagine what in the world could have caused police to become so interested in my stroller. Had someone planted a bomb or drugs in my diaper bag? I briefly wondered before dismissing the idea. Stuttgart is one of Germany’s safest cities, second only to Munich, and the only people I’d encountered yet in the woods were runners, senior citizens, and school groups.

Our teacher immediately strode over to the police officers and began arguing with them, saying it was ridiculous for them to have my stroller and that in her years of teaching the nature class people had often parked their strollers at the playground with no problem. The police argued back with her. Voices rose. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, I will say that I’ve frequently seen this in Germany; people defend themselves pretty confidently and don’t seem to shy away from verbal confrontation. I’ve heard Germans say as much too; once, while walking the dog, I ran into a man I’d often seen on the trails, and as we stopped to chat his dog started barking at Ike. The man laughed it off: “Er ist Deutsch; er muss schimpfen,” he said (“He’s German; he has to complain”). I’m not necessarily criticizing the approach. At least it’s not passive aggressive!

Eventually the police said they refused to talk further with the teacher and wanted to speak to me instead. They explained that a teacher with one of the school groups had seen my stroller at the playground and found it suspicious– why would a mother leave her stroller somewhere? The teacher thought I might be lost or kidnapped or worse, and after an hour had passed, he called the police. Apparently I’d also left my International Teacher’s ID in the diaper bag (I’d removed my wallet and everything I thought was important, but hadn’t seen the ID), so the police had promptly called the school to warn my husband that his wife and child were missing in the woods. Ack!

I simply apologized, explained that the teacher had advised me to park the stroller where I did, and asked what I should do in the future, as taking the stroller on our nature walks was not an option and, lacking a car, I had to bring the stroller to our meeting point. “Make a sign to put on your stroller that says where you are and when you will be back,” one of the policemen suggested. I’m not sure why they were so much nicer to me than they were to the teacher– perhaps because I spoke German with an accent, or had a baby strapped to my chest, or decided to adopt a contrite rather than an indignant tone.

I couldn’t exactly decide how to feel. On the one hand, it seemed ridiculous for me to leave a sign at a public playground informing perfect strangers exactly when I intended to come back for my stroller. On the other hand, what if I had been the victim of some crime? I certainly would have been grateful that someone cared enough to get involved.

This isn’t the first time a stranger has intervened in “my business,” and since I speak German, I always understand when people offer me advice (whether I want it or not). People have approached me at the bus stop to tell me my child isn’t dressed warmly enough. They’ve told me I shouldn’t make my dog wear his harness. Once, after A. had run out of the bakery three times as I was trying to buy bread, I finally perched him on my hip to complete my errand, even though he was crying. A woman who had just walked into the store tapped me on the shoulder and told me I should let my child run around so he would be happier. I carry our new baby in an Ergo everywhere I go, and in the past three weeks at least three people I’ve passed on the street have stopped me to ask if my baby is getting enough air in the carrier. For the most part, though I’m always polite, these unsolicited comments drive me crazy. And though part of me found this recent run-in with the cops equally ridiculous, the more I thought about it the more I appreciated the stranger’s involvement. I even made a tenuous connection between what I’d seen of Germans’ sense of social responsibility and their phenomenal health care; are people here better able to see the value of ensuring everyone’s well-being instead of just their own? And is it precisely this kind of concern, though at some points seemingly excessive, that actually makes Germany so safe? After all,  as of 2005, while the United States saw a murder rate of 17,000 among its just under 300 million people, Germany had 794 murders and 82 million people. Even after adjusting for population size, it’s easy to see where you’re more likely to be murdered!

As I packed up and headed up the path leading out of the woods, a man who had been sitting at a cluster of picnic tables with a bunch of teenagers stopped me and asked if he could briefly speak with me. He told me he was the one who had called the police, and that he just wanted to explain that he was trying to look out for me because he didn’t think it was “normal” for a stroller to sit at a playground for so long. “I’m a teacher too,” he added, as if to explain his interest. Talking with him, I started to feel less and less annoyed and more and more apologetic.

“Only in Germany!” our nature class teacher had muttered after I finished talking to the police. “This would never happen in France.” I don’t know about France, but I can’t really see it happening in the other places I’ve lived. When I first moved overseas, I tended to view every cultural quirk through a black-and-white lens. Either it was superior to what I was used to back home, or it was inferior. Good or bad. Now that I’ve lived in several different countries, I’m more likely to see the shades of gray. Yes, I want to be able to leave my stroller where I darn well please without having to answer to the police. But at the same time, it’s nice to know that if a stranger sees something he disagrees with or finds suspicious, he won’t turn the other way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a sign to make!

My daughter and I, minutes after my VBAC

Seven months after my son had been delivered via C-section, long after I thought I’d recovered from the birth, I read an article in our local newspaper that brought back all of the pain and difficulty surrounding my surgery. In an article featuring the first area baby born in 2010, the new mother, who had evidently had a vaginal birth,  was quoted as saying, “Natural childbirth is not nearly as hard as it seems. It takes focus and dedication and the end result is well worth it.”

Focus and dedication. I was in labor– and by that I mean strong, regular contractions– for nineteen hours prior to my C-section. In those nineteen hours, I never dilated past five centimeters (you must reach ten in order to deliver a baby vaginally) and my son never dropped into the birth canal. After performing the operation, my doctor noted that my son was in an “asynclitic posterior” position, meaning he faced my front instead of my back and his head was cocked to the side, making it basically impossible for him to descend. A midwife friend referred to it as a “perfect storm” of circumstances working against a vaginal birth. Everyone agreed the C-section was necessary and I had reached a point where gratitude for medical technology had trumped disappointment. But on some level, the woman’s comment still stung.

“Next time I will try to be a bit more ‘dedicated’ to having my baby,” I wrote bitterly in an e-mail to a friend. What I really meant, of course, was that it isn’t always about dedication. If it were, then surely those nineteen hours of hard labor, preceded by birth classes and prenatal yoga then accompanied by a caring husband and wonderful doula, wouldn’t have resulted in surgery. But they did.

When I became pregnant with our daughter, I knew I wanted to attempt a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Ceasarean).  There are some risks associated with VBAC, but they are relatively rare (the risk of uterine rupture, for example, is just over 1%), and repeated  C-sections can also be risky– arguably moreso. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends VBAC as “a safe and appropriate choice for most women who have had a prior cesarean delivery.” Yet had I continued receiving care at the same Michigan hospital where I gave birth to my son, I would not have been allowed to attempt a VBAC. Though many U.S. hospitals do permit VBACs, restrictions against such births are fairly common as well; my German midwife said that most of her American patients who had C-sections would not have been allowed to try a vaginal delivery at their home hospitals either.

Germany’s C-section rate is actually just a tad lower at 27.6% than the United States’ 30% (both figures are nearly twice the rate recommended by the World Health Organization; to the WHO’s concern, developed nations as a whole have seen recent spikes in C-section rates), but I did see several OB doctors here and found the attitude toward VBAC very positive; in Germany, the medical “norm” is to attempt a VBAC.

My midwife and OB were very committed to helping me towards a successful VBAC; as I’d experienced complications with my placenta in the third trimester, my OB performed frequent tests to ensure that my risks of rupture or other complications hadn’t increased as a result (they hadn’t). When I still hadn’t gone into labor several days past my due date, my OB said he wanted to wait longer before inducing– “your body doesn’t seem to be ready for labor yet,” he said after doing the regular checks, “and if we try to induce you before your body is ready, we run a higher risk of C-section.” Nine days after my due date, when I finally was induced under more favorable physiological circumstances, it was not with a Pitocin IV but rather what my OB and midwife called a “cocktail”– a sort of smoothie consisting of apricot juice, verbena extract, ground almonds, castor oil, and vodka (contractions started within an hour after I drank it).

Throughout labor, my midwife, who knew my history and the result of my previous labor, provided excellent guidance. Five hours in, when I still hadn’t dilated past 4 centimeters, she recommended an epidural. I’d already had two days of painful but irregular contractions prior to the induction and during my previous labor, dilation had been destructively slow. “We want a vaginal birth,” she said. She then knelt down to look me in the eye (I was in the tub at the time), and said, “You don’t need to be a hero. The epidural is here if you want it.”

I took the epidural, dilated to 10 cm within two hours, and delivered a healthy baby eight hours after contractions started. The differences between my two birth experiences are so vast they are difficult to articulate. During the C-section, I felt disconnected from my body and even from the baby at first; after he came out, they wrapped him in a towel and simply showed him to me; I actually had to ask if I could at least touch him. Though my doula eventually brought him to me to nurse, I don’t remember it.  As soon as a final push brought my daughter into the world, the midwife swept her up to my chest, where she nursed almost immediately. After the C-section, I was trembling uncontrollably from anesthetic–so much that I couldn’t really hold my baby– and experienced incredible pain that I couldn’t relieve because I had to lie flat on my back until it wore off. After the VBAC, I felt energetic and elated. It took me a week to feel like I could really walk normally again after my C-section; I walked without difficulty the night of my VBAC.

Considering these benefits, of course I’m thankful for my VBAC. What might sound strange is that I’m also thankful for my C-section. I wouldn’t go back and turn that into a vaginal birth if I could. And I don’t like referring to my VBAC as the “natural” birth– what does this make my C-section? Unnatural? I carried a baby in my womb for nine months and he emerged, alive and well. Would it have been more “natural” for us both to have died, as we might have if I’d been laboring in the 1800′s instead of in 2009? As significant an experience as birth is, what matters much more than how the baby came out is, of course, the baby itself, and I have been doubly blessed with my two children.

Still, experiencing both births has made me empathetic to women with all kinds of birth stories and has taught me a lot about how much control we actually have over the mysteries of birth. We can plan obsessively and do everything we think is right and end up with an experience we never expected. So in place of resentment we must find room for acceptance, for learning. What better preparation for parenting– a task that demands earnest preparation but also total spontaneity and constant adjustment? Khalil Gibran wrote: “Your children are not your children… / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”  And just like my children, my C-section and my VBAC, though definitively mine, were not entirely predictable nor within my control. Certainly it was helpful to have an experienced OB and midwife who were dedicated to VBACs, but I don’t necessarily think that my first birth would have been a vaginal one even if it had happened in Germany. After all, on the day of my VBAC, my midwife was helping another woman through labor but ended up assisting during her emergency C-section (the baby had gone into distress). At one point in my pregnancy, as I discussed my fears about labor with my midwife, she sympathized: “Sometimes it just happens that a C-section is needed, even when we never expected it. And that’s frustrating for everybody.”

I don’t suppose the self-assured woman in the newspaper would understand this. Come to think of it, since I had an epidural, she might not even consider my VBAC “natural childbirth.” She might have thought I just needed a little more focus.

But I know better.

The view from a balcony at the hospital in Stuttgart, Germany where I gave birth to my daughter. My stay came without a bill.

I’m not interested in using my blog to fan political fires, so I’ll keep this post personal. Here’s the premise: I’m a healthy, fit, relatively young woman who’s experienced two very different health care systems, one in the U.S., one in Germany. I’ve been pregnant, given birth, stayed in the hospital, and taken my children to doctors in both countries. I’ve earned salaries in both countries and seen portions of those salaries leave my hands to pay for health care.  In this context, I can confidently say I prefer Germany’s system.

Let’s rewind. Two years ago, my husband and I were employed at a small charter school in Michigan. The school, like any small business, worked tirelessly to find the best health insurance rates for its employees, a task that became more and more difficult each year. When we were first hired there in 2007, one of the perks was a 15% bonus, designed to pay for health care, added onto our gross salaries.  Though it had once covered the cost of health care with plenty left over to contribute to retirement, rising insurance costs meant that eventually we spent the entire 15% then dipped further into our monthly paycheck to pay for care. The year we left, our business manager sent an e-mail informing the staff that, to his displeasure, rates had once again increased, this time by 17%; “Let me know if you have any great ideas,” he wrote.

We had decent insurance there– not the cushy kind provided by the union-affiliated public schools, but certainly not terrible by U.S. standards. We had predictable, if somewhat convoluted, out-of-pocket maxes, co-insurance percentages, co-pays, and a prescribed network of doctors we could use. We never had dental or vision insurance though, and costs were relatively high– when my son was born in 2009, we carefully budgeted $3,000 to pay for his birth (and were glad we had nine months to save up for it). We ran across the occasional surprise too; my primary care physician once ordered an ultrasound and I ended up with an inexplicable $900 bill; the insurance company said my ultrasound was processed through a lab whose services they didn’t cover. My husband and I struggled to write that check– we had just purchased our first home and were on a tight budget.

I grew accustomed to the co-pays– $20-$30 every time anybody in the family, including my infant son, needed to see a doctor. But we thought twice before scheduling any appointments, and medical costs were penciled into our monthly budget with big question marks; we always sensed we were one freak accident or emergency away from financial misery. We knew people who were still paying for heart attacks, pregnancy complications, and hospital stays they’d experienced years before.

When my husband and I moved to Germany in 2010, we became part of a health care system we could not have imagined back home. Yes, we had to help pay for our health care here too (all German workers are required to pay a portion of their salary towards health care– in 2008 the figure was about 8%, and the employer contributes the same amount), but suddenly there were no more question marks in the budget. We had to pay a 10-Euro ($14) co-pay four times per year in order to see doctors as often as we wished, and our son’s health care– checkups, emergency room visits, and prescriptions alike– cost nothing. Pregnant women also receive free care. I was seen regularly by both an OB and a midwife throughout my pregnancy, at no additional cost. When a complication in my third trimester landed me in the hospital for five days, I called my health insurance company, anxious about the unpredictable bill I felt certain would arrive. “There won’t be a bill,” the woman on the other end of the line repeated several times before I finally believed her. The hospital doctors sent me home on modified bed rest, but not before they brought a social worker to my room; she was in charge of helping to organize my “Haushaltshilfe,” or domestic help, which involved the insurance company paying for someone to come to my home and do the kinds of chores I wasn’t allowed to do for as long as the doctors felt I should be taking it easy. My slack-jawed disbelief must have baffled the social worker, because she finally said, with bemused patience, “Don’t you realize that it’s much cheaper to pay for domestic help for a week or two than to care for a premature baby?” Perhaps without knowing it, she had just articulated the purpose of preventative care.

My husband and I have yet to experience the dreaded long waits and inadequate care so many Americans associate with socialized health systems. When my husband tore his ACL, he had an appointment for surgery within 3 weeks; his sister, who suffered the same injury in Colorado, waited four months for hers, while my father in Michigan waited six weeks for a prostate cancer operation.

Yes, Germany requires everybody to pay for health care. You aren’t allowed not to have health care. This concept doesn’t tend to sit well in the U.S., where compulsory anything is viewed with skepticism. But we must acknowledge that Americans don’t always know what to do with their own freedom when it comes to health; a 2009 WebMD article asserts that “despite health recommendations, most [Americans] still aren’t making smart lifestyle choices.” According to the World Health Organization, 16% of the U.S. GNP is spent on health care (in comparison to Germany’s 10.4%) and the cost per capita is twice as high, yet life expectancy is lower while rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, and non-communicable diseases are higher. Something doesn’t add up. Why is American health care so expensive…and so ineffective? Perhaps the latter contributes to the former– the sicker people become, the more everyone’s costs skyrocket.

Every now and then students in my English class at the international school would ask me about the health care debate in the U.S. My European students genuinely struggled to grasp the fact that many Americans do not have health insurance at all. They were horrified when they found out how much I had to pay to have a baby in the U.S. (and how much I would have had to pay if I hadn’t been insured at all).  They understood that President Obama was trying to institute a form of nationalized health care and could not believe how many people were opposed to it. “But Mrs. Baughman,” one ninth-grade German boy said, “don’t Americans understand that if everyone has access to health care, the whole country will be healthier and better off?”

That ninth grader’s question has echoed on a global scale. According to a March 2010 TIME Magazine article on the European response to U.S. Health Care Reform, “the fundamental difference between Europe and the U.S., Europeans believe, is that Americans regard public services as a bonus rather than a basic right. For some, this is evidence that the American system is deeply flawed. ‘It was a scandal that the world’s richest country for so long offered its citizens such pitiful protection against illness or injury,’ wrote Gregor Peter Schmitz, Washington correspondent for Der Spiegel…”

A 2008 NPR report on the success of Germany’s health care system asserts that “Germans really hate any hint of unfairness in health care. The fundamental idea is that everybody must be covered and, preferably, everybody should get equal treatment…But it’s unthinkable that 48 million people wouldn’t have health insurance at all — the situation in America.”

It is perhaps normal to fear what’s unknown; in that case, I wish more Americans could personally experience the benefits of German health care. We Americans value our freedom. But would we rather be free to choose whether or not we actually have health care, or free to be healthier ourselves under a system that ensures some form of health care for all?