Salon.com > Lisa Moricoli Latham

Lurch and destroy

Fri, 12 Apr 2002 19:34:00 +0000

The study on college drinking released this week by the National Institute of Health's National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is a killer. More specifically, it is about killers. And rapists and bullies. It is about kids who binge on alcohol -- the 44 percent who drink 70 percent of all alcohol consumed by students -- and the people they become when they are drunk.

According to the report, entitled "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges," four college students die in accidents related to alcohol each day; more than 1,000 sustain injuries tied to alcohol use; and approximately 192 are sexually assaulted, or raped -- usually by dates -- after drinking. Included in the study was the observation that "students who drink the most include: First-year students (during the first weeks of arrival), Males, Whites, Members of fraternities and sororities, [and] athletes."

This comes as no surprise to me. Nor does the revelation that most college students drink moderately or not at all. In my experience as a student at an Ivy League university, the horror of binge drinking as well as the civility of moderate tippling were familiar -- and accepted with little fear or fanfare.

What are we fighting for?

Wed, 05 Sep 2001 19:30:00 +0000

The beginning of human life is under scrutiny as never before. Late-reproducing baby boomers have pushed reproductive science toward more and more intensely technological end runs around ever more minute problems on the way toward the holy grail of fertilization (with the result that fertility specialists measure their success rates in positive pregnancies, not healthy babies). At the same time, even us Gen-Xers who can still try to make babies the old-fashioned way are testing earlier and earlier for pregnancy, becoming more and more invested in life beginning as soon as we see two pink lines on those plastic sticks.

Small wonder then, that the rhetoric of the stem cell debate is a far cry from the pro-choice "viability" arguments we grew up on -- and small wonder that the stem cell debate presents the dilemma of whether the earliest result of a sperm and an egg united inside the womb is more or less a "person" than those united in a petri dish.

Having just scrutinized a pregnancy that ended at the point when most stem cells are collected, I've decided to push away the microscope to look at the problem as a mother. I might have assumed that losing a very early pregnancy would have made me an opponent of stem cell research. Surprisingly, it had the opposite effect.

Breast-feeding in the fast lane

Wed, 20 Jun 2001 19:30:00 +0000

If a baby is the fashion accessory of 2001, the breast pump is bound to be the personal electronic device of 2002. Even the best-dressed mommies (perhaps especially the best-dressed mommies) have got to work.

But where, oh where, to pump? Private offices are a thing of the past and few businesses offer even a cubicle where a woman can pump in peace. It is this dilemma that has forced many of us into the only semi-private sphere where a working woman can have some control: the car.

It is not uncommon for nursing working mothers to make a mad lunchtime dash for a car, plug into the cigarette lighter and pump away in the parking lot.

But not me. I pump on the road.

Sure, I could wait to pump until I get home, but that would mean getting so engorged that my breasts might explode all over the windshield, and that is not safe. And yes, I could pull over; but then I'd arrive home 20 to 40 minutes later, and that is time I prefer to spend with my baby, or, truth be known, asleep.

My son the biter

Tue, 27 Mar 2001 20:49:00 +0000

You'd think any mother would be delighted when her son toddles toward her, arms and grin open wide. Not me: I cringe.

My baby bites. My muffin munches. My son bites me when he's angry, he nips me when I wake up too slowly -- at this point there aren't many times he won't bite me.

It goes against common sense and survival tactics, but my baby hardly bites anyone but me, his mother, the one person upon whom he depends for not only love and attention but a fair percentage of his nutrition. He literally bites the hand that feeds him.

Luckily, he doesn't bite the nipple that feeds him. While I had problems with my son's oral tenacity early on, compared with his habit of biting the rest of me, extinguishing his efforts to bite my breast were a cinch -- a few loud yelps and a good smoosh into the breast, and he never bit the booby again.

Unfortunately, that's about the only part of my anatomy my son avoids. He bites my clavicle, my neck, my arms, my fingers, my toes and my ankles. Once, as I knelt to retrieve a toy from beneath the sofa, he bit me on the ass.

Tough titties

Mon, 19 Jun 2000 19:33:00 +0000

It starts in pregnancy. Experienced mothers tell you so many weird stories about their breasts when you're pregnant that a first-time mother wonders if it's not all part of a secret hazing ritual. I imagined covens of knowing crones gathered in my wake at the supermarket, snickering and high-fiving over the latest scary breast factoid they'd made me believe. And believe me, they made me believe.

In India for my first trimester, I was rubbed with exotic ayurvedic oils and told that ghee (clarified butter) worked wonders on itchy belly skin as well as "the other parts that hurt after you have a baby." Since Indians are frequently so poor they can't afford either cosmetics or analgesics, I filed this under "quaint" and moved on, determined to pack as much travel as possible into the few childless months I had left.

In Italy during my second trimester, an older lady friend told me to get a natural-bristle nailbrush ($4) and to firmly scrub my nipples and areolae each morning. Since I'd heard that the initial weeks of nursing typically bring cracked, chapped nipples, I gamely soaped one up one morning but then balked when I noticed how uninviting it felt just to scrub the palm of my hand.

O no!

Thu, 25 May 2000 17:39:00 +0000

Hot off the presses, a slick full of soul, O magazine is the Oprah empire's
latest golden egg. With its much-heralded publication, the march to Oprah
omnipresence picks up the pace and we ask, "Can she do no wrong?" (The petty
among us inquire about her weight.)

I picked up O in an obedient trance, with high expectations. Could a million
Oprah Winfrey fans
(her syndicated show's average daily viewership) be wrong?

Well, yes and no. It seems that in the estimation of O itself, they are not
so much wrong as they are deeply flawed. The important thing, we learn, is
that they -- we -- are not irredeemable. The way of salvation is
conveniently arranged in the magazine's table of contents, where one finds
no fewer than 17 self-improvement articles designed to lift readers -- pry
them, if necessary -- out of the dumps, out of debt, out of ignorance and
out of whatever rut has waylaid them from their goals.

Southern governors declare war on divorce

Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"Deee Ayye Veee Ohhaarrrh Ceyee Eee." Who knew that the twang in Tammy Wynette's lament was so darned prophetic? Her ode to marital woe topped the charts in 1968; a few decades later, the Bible Belt states are topping the national charts in divorce.

In fact, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, four of the five states with the highest resident divorce rates in the country are in the Deep South, where families pray together but, apparently, can't stay together.

Metropolitan states like Massachusetts and New York, supposed havens of marital dysfunction, actually have comparatively low divorce rates. Instead, marriage is failing in what should be its natural habitat, the land of fire, brimstone and the sky-blue tuxedo.

At the top of the Big D list, with the highest resident divorce rates in the U.S., are Arkansas and Oklahoma. The governors of both, mortified by the unholy distinction, have vowed to tackle the problem head-on. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has declared "a marital emergency," pledging to cut his state's divorce rate in half within 10 years. His neighbor to the west, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, has created the "Oklahoma Marriage Policy" with the goal to cut his state's rate by a third in the same period.

Cult of the cloth

Mon, 22 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

To most mothers, the Diaper Genie is a modern miracle: a diaper pail
that twists used disposable diapers into plastic sleeves to contain the
smell. When I see one, all I can think of are hermetically sealed poop
sausages. Long before my son was born, the question of diapering him
was opened by a generous friend who offered me her Genie. Without
thinking, I declined. But why? Did I want to experience baby poop's
full perfume?

Somehow I'd made an unconscious decision to use cloth diapers. This was
fortunate, because if I had been conscious, I'd have had my friend hit
me on the head with the Genie for even considering it. As another pal
and mother of three put it, "How could you use cloth when disposables
have all those wonderful perfumes and dyes?! Don't you realize that
disposable diapers are only a problem for the next generation?"