If pregnant or breastfeeding

Everything was going quite swimmingly until I came down with what turned out to be a massive, huge sinus infection. It got so bad it infected one eye, making me look like a disfigured pregnant ogre constantly leaking mucus. In the midst of it all, my husband took a look at one of the teas I was drinking and told me I had to stop drinking it because it said not to during pregnancy.

What it actually said was: "If pregnant or breastfeeding, consult a doctor before use."

Turns out though that everything remotely medicinal says this. A package of pectin cough drops contains this phrase. Even my prenatal vitamins contain this phrase. Probably other ingestible items should contain this phrase, such as peanut butter, milk, butter, ice cream, pancakes...anything that could be found, in ten or fifteen or a hundred years, to cause warts or hair discoloration in the children of the mothers who ingested the items.

Because whenever we can, we should always blame our mothers for everything.

At work we are having stress management sessions with a woman who comes in every few weeks to deliver such wisdoms as sleeping and eating healthily will reduce stress. On her very first day she told us she herself was an anxious person because, and I quote, her mother "was very anxious and stressed while I was in utero." Apparently all those stress hormones took permanent residence in the resulting child.

Yeah. Right.

While it may be comforting for some people to assume that whatever their overriding problem is is not fundamentally their own fault, it doesn't make much sense to lay it on the very person who decided to bring you into this world. If you have faults of your own, imagine yourself for just one moment in your mother's shoes. She, just as much as you, is a human being with ups, downs, and faults. Her faults may or may not have been present in a very real way for you at times, but you as your own person chose to either absorb them as your own or bypass them. They were not inflicted on you. They were just there, plain as day, making up the person who happens to be your mother. Deal with it. Yeah, she raised you. But she didn't make you who you are. You did. Your mother is not you, and you are not your mother. You never were.

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."

Kabril Gibran