I'll Be Right Back, a parenting newsletter, issue 9
Welcome to I’ll Be Right Back, a new parenting newsletter that combines the fear-mongering of BabyCenter with the practical tips of a vegan model’s parenting blog. This is issue 5, published May 13, 2016.
Some nice people have asked how they can share this stuff via social media. I'm posting all the main essays to Medium, which should give you nice tweetable/Facebookable links. Also, the newsletter's archives are here.
From the time that I was 13 until the time that I was 19, my breasts were a problem: They were too big. Clothes didn’t fit, bras were ugly, it was all off and out of proportion. I got a breast reduction and it was wonderful and for the next 10 years my breasts were perfect. Then when I was 29 I had my daughter and my breasts became a problem again.
I’d known I probably wouldn’t be able to breastfeed, at least not exclusively, but “knowing” it and really getting it are two different things and, like everyone, I went into my pregnancy with some very firm beliefs about how this baby thing would go. It’s barely worth listing them here because you know exactly how this story is going to end, but briefly: Unmedicated birth, cloth diapers, exclusive breastfeeding, I believe I firmly told my mother at some point that I would “not give the baby snacks in the stroller,” which now makes me curl my lip with disgust at my own former self. The items on the attachment parent-y list coincided with a separate “cool parent” list that included early sleep training and somehow “teaching” my child to be really chill and self-sufficient while my husband and I hung out with childless friends, and basically my vision was that my kid would be some sort of mystical creature who breastfed one time before I went to work and one time when I got home from work and lived off air and a healthy Bringing Up Bebe lunch (prepared by whom?) in the meantime, washed its own diapers, and basked with a stack of books in the corner of a bar while regular life continued.
One C-section, countless disposable diapers, endless snacks and ruined plans later, it all seems ridiculous and unnecessary except for two items. There’s the sleep training, the best, only thing we ever stuck to our guns about (but still, it almost worked by accident; we happened to have a pretty good sleeper anyway.) And there’s the breastfeeding, which barely happened and which has yet, still, consumed an inordinate amount of my brain power over the last two and a half years — so much brain power, in fact, that I’m devoting a couple weeks of newsletters to it.
Breastfeeding stories are sort of like birth stories: Immensely individual, boringly universal, still ridiculously powerful. There just aren’t all that many possible outcomes, but each mother’s experience settles in her brain and her bones and may actually change the way she thinks about parenting forever. I didn’t have the birth I planned, I didn’t feed my daughter the way I’d planned to, and after a lifetime of superficially believing it was not okay to judge others while actually judging others constantly, those two experiences brought me closer to not judging others than I’d ever been previously.
Because, okay, you can never really know what somebody else’s life is like: But after you try to breastfeed and it doesn’t work, after you talk to other moms who’ve been through the same thing, or in fact to moms who’ve had an opposite experience and breastfed successfully, it actually does become a lot easier to imagine what their lives are like, because at least you know that, whatever else they’ve done, they’ve sunk into the same moments of despair that you have; they’ve thought about it too much, it’s popped out of their mouths as the first thing they said to a stranger, they’ve felt the need to explain, they’ve watched a clock with dread, they’ve just...panicked, and they’ve suddenly not recognized themselves as themselves, and they’ve wondered how things got to this point, and most of all they’ve known how irrational it was and yet they haven’t been able to shake it out of their heads and they’ve wondered if they were crazy.
And once you’ve been through it you start to pick up on the tiny signals all over the place and you realize how many people have been shaken by it. There was a woman I met at a work party, with her three-month-old strapped into a sling on her chest. I commented on how smiley he was. “Yes,” she said, “I think this is his first day in his life that he hasn’t been a little hungry.” And then she talked more and I realized that they’d been to the pediatrician that day and this was the first day she’d ever given him formula, and I thought about the weight checks and the previous three months and what that first bottle must have felt like for her, and how through this whole party there was probably something entirely different occupying her entire brain, and if what I said was “It’s so hard” what I wanted to do was scream I KNOW I KNOW DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT? LET’S GO UPSTAIRS AND DASH OFF A FEW LETTERS TO THE GOVERNMENT!
And then a few weeks ago I took in our car to get serviced. The technician at Boch Toyota Norwood was going over the paperwork with me after, and he congratulated me on my pregnancy and then suddenly he was talking about his wife, and about what it was like to support three children when he was only in his early twenties. “All of our money was going toward diapers and the formula,” he said. “Because my wife had trouble breastfeeding, and it was very hard for her.” He was now a grandfather, so he was telling me about something that had taken place thirty-plus years ago, but talking to a pregnant woman seemed to bring it right back.
A few days after the service appointment, Boch Toyota sent me an email survey to fill out about my experience. I gave this service technician five stars in all the categories. I would have done this anyway, to be honest. Asked for additional comments, I didn’t type any in. It would have seemed so strange. But I’ll write them here.
“Five stars for grace, five stars for empathy, don’t you see how much this has fucked with all of us?”
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