Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
one - When It Comes to Conception, Porn Is Good and The Secret Is Bad
two - (You’re) Having My Baby, or Anka Management
three - Inner Child, Meet New Baby, Please Don’t Smother It
four - Pregatory
five - I’ll Miss You, Toxins
six - CVS: Order Now and Enjoy Six Months (Worry) Free!
seven - Bad Move: Calling Nancy O’Dell a Stupid C-Word
eight - Why I’m Finally Psyched to Be Having a Boy
nine - How Freaky and Paranoid Is Your Google History?
ten - Logan’s Running
eleven - The Ten Worst Moms in History
twelve - A Million Little Reese’s Pieces
thirteen - Dragging My Names Through the Mud
fourteen - Babies ’R’ Ripping Us Off
fifteen - Pregnancy Sex Doesn’t Suck, but Maybe You Should
sixteen - Hey, Other Pregnant Ladies: Look My Way
seventeen - A Cut Above (the Anus)
eighteen - Babymoon in Vegas: Bet on a Crisis
nineteen - Are Breast-Feeding Classes for Boobs?
twenty - Sitting Stretch Mark Shiva
twenty-one - Frank Swoops in to Save My Vagina
twenty-two - Seinfeld Curbs My Enthusiasm
twenty-three - An Even Worse C-Word
twenty-four - Four Days in the Hole
twenty-five - Day One: The Infinite Pint
twenty-six - My Mother, the Rabbi and a Bag of Crap
twenty-seven - I Said a Lot of Things
Acknowledgements
Praise for EXPLOITING MY BABY
“Exploiting her baby, perhaps, but most certainly rewarding her readers, Teresa Strasser trudges, nay, romps with us down the road from the anxiety of no baby to guilt of not deserving a precious child. All the while she reminds us that the echoes of our families of origin, although carried along with us like so much muck in a riverbed, need not choke our ability to flourish and find joy as parents.”
—Dr. Drew Pinsky
“If Woody Allen was a woman with big giant ovaries and wrote a book about his pregnancy, it still wouldn’t have been this funny, warm, brassy, and insightful.”
—Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, bestselling author of
Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay
“If this is what it’s really like to have a baby, I should have been a lot nicer to my lovely wife. Also, she should have made me laugh this much. So we’re even.....If you think you worry too much about being a parent, Teresa Strasser will inform you of all the things you forgot to freak out about.”
—Joel Stein
“I loved this book. Teresa Strasser has blessed us all with an amazing, inspired work. I laughed, I cried, I learned lessons about marriage and love and pregnancy and motherhood that will last a lifetime. Teresa knows how to speak directly to every one of us, and offers us the inside story every pregnant woman wishes someone out there would finally share. Her very personal, hysterical, and moving story is universal. I can’t wait to buy this book for all my pregnant friends.”
—Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of Hope Will Find You and
To Begin Again
“Teresa is the mom you want to invite to your playgroup.”
—Heather McDonald, New York Times bestselling author of
You’ll Never Blueball in This Town Again
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Strasser, Teresa.
Exploiting my baby: because it’s exploiting me: a memoir of pregnancy & childbirth/Teresa Strasser. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47825-7
1. Mothers—Biography. 2. Motherhood. 3. Pregnancy. 4. Childbirth. I. Title.
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For my husband and baby.
Thanks for letting me exploit you.
About This Book
Why Exploiting My Baby Seems Like a Good Idea
Like it’s so special having a baby. Britney Spears did it twice, so there you go.
Yet we’ve all seen these spooky, obsessed smother mothers with their sippy cups full of self-absorption and their nonstop, mind-numbing prattle about the relative merits of different brands of organic baby food. These are the souls who update their Facebook status to reflect little Jackson’s latest bowel movement. This is not okay. This is chilling.
There are so many nerve-racking things about being pregnant for the first time. Just when you think you can handle nausea, ravenous hunger, precipitous weight gain, and of course the abject fear about your baby’s health, you come into contact with one of these mothers and you think, “Not that I’m so great, but I hope I don’t become her.”
Frankly, before I got pregnant, I was never actually all that comfortable being me, but it was all I knew. Would I now become an uptight asshole who would insist you douse yourself in Purell before touching my offspring, lest you pass on some grubby infection to my precious baby Jesus child? Would I find myself driving a minivan to Tot Shabbat—glassy-eyed and resentful—wearing a crumb-covered An
n Taylor knit and blasting Raffi?
Would all of my concerns in life revolve around what kind of crib mattress was optimum or how best to pack a diaper bag so I could spend the day pushing a stroller through an indoor mall like the other zombie moms, stopping only occasionally to bust out some watermelon cubes from a worn Tupperware container? Would I get gory stretch marks and an eighteen-year-long case of postpartum depression like my mother? Would I feel suffocated and fake a seizure just for some “alone time”?
While I hemorrhaged money on Baby Einstein mobiles and brain-enhancing music classes for the little one, would my own mind atrophy?
In essence: Would both my ass and my mind wear mom jeans?
I had no idea about any of this.
Maybe everything had already been said about the experience of pregnancy, but it was new to me and I found myself not only wanting to write about it but also consuming any information I could, from Nancy O’Dell’s book (beautiful lady, but her memoir about extra-glowing pregnancy skin and lack of any unpleasant symptoms can suck it) to Jenny McCarthy (you want to dismiss her but you can’t, because Jenny is charming and likeable and has touched Oprah with her own hands. Still, her style makes you want to say, “I get it. You’re edgy. Even though you’re hot, you talk about poops and farts. Goooooood for you”).
I sought out books and blogs that would level with me, and I don’t mean syrupy pseudo-disclosures like, “I haven’t washed my hair in weeks, but it’s all worth it because of the majesty of motherhood.” I wanted precise details about both the trip and the destination. What exactly was going to happen to my digestive system, cervix, weight, delicate internal anxiety management system, boobs, mind, sex life, sense of personal freedom, bladder, marriage, anus, appetite, mood, body image, overall ability to accept changing identity, deeply rooted and unrelenting mommy issues, chronic insomnia, beloved but moderate use of toxins, oil glands, abdomen, shoe size? Who was I going to be on the other side, and how painful would it be crossing over?
As long as there are pregnant girls up in the middle of the night wondering if it’s a cramp or gas or a disaster, as long as there are new-comers to this world as confused and terrified as I was, this pregnancy thing is always going to be fresh and relevant.
There is no precedent for us first-timers. I didn’t understand any of the sensations happening in my body, which all seemed like they must mean imminent miscarriage, a phrase I Googled no fewer than 137 times.
I didn’t have any idea what nipple salve or nasal aspirators do. I didn’t know what a doula was, except maybe something you might find on a platter of Mediterranean food. I didn’t know anything about babies, except that I was having one. Moreover, I didn’t know how to write about any of this without conjuring images of poor, kicked-around Kathie Lee Gifford, who seems like an all right gal but who took so much shit for trotting out little Cody and little what’s-her-face just to make America love her.
I guess it seemed like she was just exploiting her babies.
Maybe she was, and maybe it was obnoxious for Kathie Lee to use her children to present a sweet, homey version of herself no one was buying. Maybe she truly was a baby-exploiting phony who deserved all the vitriol she got. But when I thought about it, I wasn’t totally innocent of my own brand of creative exploitation.
As a writer, I guess I’ve “exploited” all of my subjects: my stepparents, my boyfriends, my beat-up cars, my jacked-up apartments, my land-lords, my Hebrew school teachers, my grandfather, my girlfriends, the dude at the dry cleaner’s, my therapist(s), my dermatologist, the hot guy I met at that silent Buddhist retreat in San Diego, everyone. From breakups to breakdowns, I’ve always just written about whatever was going on in my life, but because this was a fetus, it suddenly seemed tacky, Kathie Lee tacky.
Sometimes, when you’re scared about how something is going to be perceived, you have to look the bogeyman right in the face, which is why at two months pregnant I invested $10 and bought the domain name ExploitingMyBaby.com.
And after all, the kid was exploiting me. One day, I thought, “Kid, I just made you a spleen and some eyebrows. The least you can do is get mommy a book deal.”
Out in the world of mom-to-be books, I found a gaping hole, a no-man’s-land between treacly tales that would make unicorns yak and clinical descriptions of symptoms that are useful, but about as emotionally satisfying as a dental supplies catalogue. I also found a trove of bitter “motherhood sucks” volumes that depressed me when I needed to be feeling okay about the biggest “no backsies” decision of my life.
My goal was to trudge the road from conception to delivery, taking good notes as I went and hopefully sharing insights beyond “I pooped on the delivery table.” Although, I do have a poop story that I hope will be the number-one story you will ever hear about number two.
These notes and blog posts turned into kind of a memoir, which I hope starts a fruitful lifetime of exploitation. On a less glib front, if you are reading this, you are probably pregnant or planning to be, and I hope I can be a gestational companion. I desperately needed pregnant friends, and I hope to be one of yours, or at least give you something to do at night when you can’t sleep and are sick of reading what food item your fetus most resembles (Your baby is now the size of a poppy seed! A blueberry! A prune! A kiwi! An avocado! A grapefruit! An eggplant! A squash! A watermelon!).
The more I posted, the more women responded, the more I realized I wasn’t alone in my neuroses. I knew I was doing the right thing.
So, let the exploitation begin.
Introduction
How No Baby Meant No Job on The View
On New Year’s Eve, my husband, Daniel, and I stayed home, ordered Thai food and watched a documentary on Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany. I guess you could say we partied like it was 1939. By my calculations, that’s when our baby was conceived.
I immediately started worrying about everything from birth defects to vaginal tearing. I agonized about my lack of ability to make decisions about birth plans, stroller brands or preschools. I had nightmarish visions of morphing into my own cold, reluctant and baby-disdaining mother. About the only thing I didn’t worry much about was the prospect of being a working mother in show business. For that, I thank Barbara Walters.
In fact, a few years ago, not having a kid may have actually cost me my dream job, filling the chair left by Lisa Ling on The View.
I sat in for a couple of episodes, had some wholesome, well-lit laughs with Barbara Walters, trotted out onstage arm in arm with new BFF Meredith Vieira and felt an almost narcotic sense of belonging. Despite a career characterized mainly by paralyzing self-doubt and bad, impetuous decisions to quit jobs, I began to think: I could do this. I was about to link elbows with destiny, as I had with Meredith, who, when you get close to her, smells like a combination of baby powder, lilacs and poise.
As my cab sped toward JFK to fly home to Los Angeles after taping my second episode of the popular morning chat show, producers called my agent to say I was one of their top choices. Before I’d even checked my bags curbside, we’d agreed on contractual terms.
I spent that flight envisioning my move from Los Angeles to a furnished apartment on the Upper West Side. I fantasized about the breezy rapport and private jokes I would have with the full-time driver they promised, the unpretentious but clearly expensive collection of Burberry trench coats I would acquire, and of course, the nonstop cold splash of “I told you so” my new post would throw in the faces of anyone who had doubted me. It would be hard to keep up my persona of self-deprecation with near toxic levels of smug coursing through my veins, but I would manage.
By the time I landed at LAX, I was out of the running.
The producers said not only did they want a conservative, but also, they really needed someone who was likely to get pregnant by the coming season. In the parlance of street fighters, or middle managers trying to rally their sales force after a bad quarter: It was go time. Or more specif
ically, it was gonad time.
Too bad mine were not likely to be in use anytime soon.
Just like that, I was plunged back into an obscurity so profound it made Debbie Matenopoulos look like Gwyneth Paltrow. I cried like the babies Elisabeth Hasselbeck would eventually have, endearing her not only to her bosses at The View but to the stay-at-home moms of America.
Sure, I can’t complain. I got jobs in deep cable, on local news and in radio, and frankly any work that doesn’t involve taking over my dad’s automotive repair business is a blessing. But I couldn’t help thinking that if I could just procreate, I would have ascended to the next level, and my gonads and I would have enjoyed the chauffeur-driven ride all the way to the middle.
It’s just that, on The View and elsewhere, being a mommy seems to be good for business.
Babies are transformative. Yeah, they make you more loving and patient, blah blah blah, but I’m not talking about that kind of change. I’m talking about the magical baby dust that converts, say, Brooke Burke from an icy and unapproachable swimsuit model to the champion and cohost of the popularity contest Dancing with the Stars. Sprinkle some magic mommy dust on Angelina Jolie and she goes from knife-wielding, blood-vial-wearing, scary force of sexual energy to earth mother/goddess breast-feeding on the cover of W magazine.
So effective is this magic dust that it has the power to make you reconsider loathing Nancy Grace.
A Google search for the term “baby bump” yields nearly two million hits, with most of the top ten devoted to celebrity pregnancy. Think about the following babies and ask yourself how many times you’ve seen their lovable mugs: Ryder, Shiloh, Apple, Seraphina, Suri, Zuma, Brooklyn, and Sparrow. I used to think this was a brand-new phenomenon, that because women have increasing power and earning potential it’s somehow comforting to know that we are still partially just baby-making machines. The threat we pose is mitigated by the hours we’ll spend pregnant, nursing, changing diapers or otherwise tending to kiddies.
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