is a gorgeous name,” Joy gushed when she came to visit me in the birthing center. Joy and Mom were dead against my giving birth to my first outside of a hospital. In our typical Easton style, they never actually told me this. They just sent me every birthing center/natural-birth-gone-wrong horror story ever published while I was pregnant.
So maybe I did feel a little smug when Aubrey was born all warm and perfect in my hippie den aka birthing center. That is, until Joy spoke.
“You really are brave, Ashley. I never could have rolled the dice with my baby.”
Once again, Mom backed her up. “Yes, Ashley, you’re very lucky.”
Lucky? They acted like I’d run blindfolded across six lanes of traffic while balancing my baby on my head rather than just given birth in the #1 birthing center in the nation, directly across the street from a top-rated, fully equipped hospital.
Before Aubrey was born I’d decided that I’d be one of those all-natural moms who made their own peanut butter, wore their baby 24/7 in one of those slings and breast-fed well into toddlerhood. Giving birth to Aubrey in a birthing center was just what I needed to catapult me into my new, organic lifestyle.
But my earth-mother adrenaline rush lasted until about four days after Aubrey was born, when my milk didn’t come in. After Aubrey lost two pounds, even my “fight the man” midwife had to admit that something was very wrong.
“You might just be one of those women,” she said to me in a hushed whisper, as if we were undercover spies trading government secrets. “One of those women who don’t make milk.”
“BUT YOU SAID THEY WERE ONE IN FIVE MILLION!” I cried, pushing my raw nipple into Aubrey’s screaming mouth. “I HAD A NATURAL BIRTH!”
Two lactation consultants, bloodwork, a dozen delicious but ineffective lactation cookies, two boxes of lactation tea and a rented breast pump later, I gave in and bought my first tin of failure powder. That’s what a mom from my online breastfeeding forum calls formula. Failure powder. For failures like me. Did I mention that Emily Walker made so much breast milk for her last baby, Sage, that she donated gallons to her local milk bank?
Joy was as helpful as she always is. “I’d totally pump for Aubrey, but I’m making just enough for Ella as it is. Sorry.” I could tell she really was sorry, but it didn’t help with the feeling of crushing disappointment. The studies that go around Facebook every fifteen minutes about how babies who aren’t breast-fed grow up with dragon scales covering their entire bodies didn’t help.
Eight months later I still hate myself just a little every time I scoop that white powder into the bottle. Formula. I’m a formula mom. This wasn’t how I saw it all happening. It’s not that I think formula is evil; I just always pictured myself breastfeeding under a willow at the park, its leaves gently swaying in the warm breeze, onlookers stealing admiring glances at me. Ask me how many admiring glances I get whipping out a nine-ounce bottle at Starbucks. ZERO. One mom even asked—with tears in her eyes, no less—if she could breastfeed my baby for me. As if Aubrey is some malnourished third-world baby on television with flies buzzing around her emaciated body. I may have lied and said that she’s allergic to human milk.
Oh, and we stopped using the million-dollar-a-can organic formula blend when Aubrey was three months old. Now she’s on the cheap brand stuff. She’s the only eight-month-old I know with zero teeth—probably from all of the trace minerals she’s missing from my malfunctioning mammary glands. Formula. When she drops out of community college, we’ll all know why.
Yesterday, Emily Walker posted a photo of herself breastfeeding her eighteen-month-old in front of the Eiffel Tower. She’s doing her show live from Paris for her Motherhood Better book tour, and I’m sitting in funky pajamas trying to remember the last time I shaved my armpits.
Back to the lessons I learned today. So in all of the “confusion” (shorthand for poopy-diaper-ziplock-bag-period-panty-replacement among us moms) I left my copy of Motherhood Better in the bookstore bathroom. I called and they said my copy had been thrown away (an employee complained that its proximity to the baby changing area was unhygienic) but they’re giving me another one free of charge. David is picking it up on his way home from work. I asked him to pick up dinner, too. I’m exhausted from a day thinking about all the ways I’m screwing up his child, and the fridge is practically empty other than chardonnay, string cheese and almost-rotten produce.
It’s not that I don’t want to run to the store for groceries when Aubrey wakes up, it’s just that leaving the house feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
If I could ask the entire world one question, it would be: Why does it seem like people hate moms so much? Before anyone could accuse me of overreacting, I’d point out my first piece of evidence: the size of parking spots. Last time I was at the grocery store, as I squeezed my eight-months-postpartum body between millimeters of steel like a human panini, I had to wonder whether whoever paints those lines either...
Has never seen a human family before.
—or—
Despises mothers with the heat of a thousand diaper rashes.
How hard would it be to paint the white lines two inches farther apart? Would these mom-hater paint despots rather we go around scraping their BMW two-seaters with our minivan doors?
Is it deliberate fat shaming? Yes, I’ve only lost seven pounds of baby weight (which is weird, because the baby weighed eight pounds, two ounces), but we can’t all be celebrity moms who go straight from hospital gowns to string bikinis.
And unlike those magical Hollywood moms, I didn’t have a personal chef on call to make me macrobiotic, paleo, organic, fat-free, sugar-free, carb-free (taste-free?) meals every day.
It probably doesn’t help that the closest thing I get to doing sit-ups is lying on the living room floor lifting my head for sips of Shiraz, but a girl’s gotta live a little. And there’s no way I could quit gluten. Do they know how many carbs it takes to stay awake when you have a baby who sleeps about fourteen minutes a night? A lot. Cutting carbs would make me a bad mother and I have to put my child first.
I got up and made my way into the kitchen, savoring the silence of nap time. I browsed the pantry for a few seconds before grabbing a jar of chunky peanut butter. After selecting a spoon from the dishwasher, I helped myself to a heaping mountain of peanut-buttery delight.
“I really should exercise,” I said to no one in particular, my mouth full of sticky goodness.
Last week Emily had a celebrity trainer on her show. She showed the audience how to lie on their backs and bench press their babies while wearing a hot pink sports bra and matching designer leggings. I was tempted to get on my living room carpet and give it a shot, but I had a premonition of Aubrey puking partially digested milk into my hair. I smelled bad enough without being doused in baby vinaigrette.
I took another spoonful of peanut butter. Peanuts have protein, right? Protein is important.
Back to the ridiculous parking spaces. Every time I parked and had to squeeze my jiggly post-baby stomach between vehicles it was just another reminder that I’m not where I should be, body-wise. It’s hard enough getting out of the house with an eight-month-old who only poops when we’re in stores.
Which led me to...
Piece of Evidence That The World Hates Moms #2: Public Changing Tables.
Nobody’s
