Exploiting My Baby

by Teresa Strasser

  Waking from his accidental slumber, he looks alarmed. His wife whispers something in his ear. “On demand,” he mumbles, unsure.

  “That’s right,” she announces, turning her voice up a couple of notches. “When do we nurse a baby? When the baby is hungry. The baby will let you know.”

  When it’s Q & A time, I sheepishly inquire as to how long one should nurse a baby for maximum benefit (subtext, What’s the least amount of time I can nurse a baby before I return to my life without everyone judging me?). Subtext is not something lactation lady misses. She runs her fingers through her expertly highlighted blond hair and sighs dramatically, clearly unhappy with my tone.

  “I don’t know your baby yet. All babies are different. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breast-feeding for six months exclusively and for the first year with solid foods, but you do what you can.” I can’t be sure, but from the way she stops looking in my direction for the rest of the class, I think she has dismissed me as someone not seriously dedicated to breast-feeding and already eyeing the finish line before I’ve even begun. What I’m really eyeing is the El Pollo Loco next door, hoping it will still be open when this shindig ends so I can get a burrito bowl for the road.

  I understand the almost religious fervor of these hard-core breast-feeding advocates. If I had to take a side, it would be theirs.

  There was a time when women were essentially forced to bottle-feed by doctors and hospitals and prevented from caring for their babies in a way that seems both best for the baby (even if only marginally) and righteous. Breast-feeding was once seen as low-class, while mothers of means chose the bottle and were proud to do so, because they could afford it and because the prevailing wisdom was that formula was more “hygienic.”

  There was a time when the hospital knocked moms out, yanked your baby away from you after birth and generally ignored what we now understand to be the importance of skin-to-skin contact, bonding, nursing right after birth, and so on. Betty Draper and her real-life counterparts got screwed, for sure. At this point, however, it seems the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, so that women for whom breast-feeding just doesn’t make sense or feel right, or for whom it’s physically impossible, are vilified as selfish, lazy, impatient baby haters. Intolerance stinks worse than a formula-fed baby’s poop. It stinks on both sides of the intolerance diaper.

  Look, I’m going to give breast-feeding a try, and I hope it works. But if it doesn’t happen, or if maybe I’m not the nurse-for-two-years kind of girl, I hope the milk of human kindness is also available in formula.

  twenty

  Sitting Stretch Mark Shiva

  I have a stretch mark.

  This is not a big deal. Or rather, I wish I were a person for whom this was not a big deal, but after spending two hours online in the middle of the night looking at pictures of stretch marks, I realize I do not subscribe to the Warrior Woman thing about “my trophy” and “all worth it” and “this was my baby’s home for nine months.” Fuck that.

  Did I mention I just have the one? Still, it’s red and loud like a blinking, broken arrow, an arrow pointing right to the place where my vanity lives, a tenant I expected to be evicted and replaced by groovy, maternal “Don’t care how I look because I’m so in love with motherhood” Lady. Whether depth and vanity can share a home without finishing off each other’s peanut butter or bogarting the laundry detergent, I have no idea.

  I just know I took a long look at the mark in the mirror in the middle of the night and had a racking, choking cry.

  The cute part of pregnancy is over. It came to a conclusive and crashing end when I bought a five-pack of extra-large underpants. It was over when I had to go to the mall jewelry store and have my wedding rings cut off my finger because my hands are so swollen that even dipping them in a mixture of dishwashing soap and Astroglide couldn’t coax the rings over my knuckles. Yeah, this stopped being divine when I hit up the discount shoe store for some emergency size tens to wear on The Dr. Phil Show (exploiting my baby in daytime) to do a segment about baby names. Size tens. I was shooting a “man-on-the-street” piece asking passersby what to name my baby, looking like a pregnant Minnie Mouse in an orange dress and giant flat shoes. When I see the segment on TV, I look like a traffic cone with jowls.

  My boobs are leaking a little, I haven’t seen my vagina in weeks and getting around the back to wipe my own ass has become a geometry problem of sorts. I would need a protractor and a better grasp of math to explain it, but trust me, the angles don’t add up to wiping with ease. There’s only so fast I can dash out of a room to create some distance between myself and the gas that I can no longer control, but I try, because I don’t have or want the kind of relationship that involves “Dutch ovens” or any other form of gas humor. As far as I’m concerned, there should be no shared experience of gas in our marriage. I don’t even want him to read this chapter later. So, let’s just say outrunning my own gas has replaced the treadmill as my new form of cardio.

  My doctor says most women get a rush of stretch marks in the last weeks before childbirth, and I think I see several more appearing on the left side of my stomach, crouching, lying in wait to ambush my collagen and my confidence. My twice-daily stretch mark prevention protocol is beginning to involve more and more steps. There’s the natural oil from the health food store, sealed in with the expensive Crème de la Mer body cream my pregnant friend Cassandra recommended, finished off with a third layer of stretch mark cream that was suggested online and is so goopy you have to warm it up by rubbing your palms together before you can even try spreading it across your belly. I smell like a combination of high-priced call girl and Whole Foods cashier. Most of my clothes now feature both sweat and oil stains, like a good mechanic’s.

  My goddamn dermis, like everything else in my body, is out of my hands, no matter how much goop is in my hands.

  If you search long enough, you can find anything online, like sites that encourage moms to post pictures of their bellies, with or without stretch marks, and tell their stories. It is very disturbing, these women who look like they’ve been clawed across the abdomen by a giant, angry bear and their own genetics. I want to find them valiant but just see my own mother, practically disfigured by groups of chunky, textured, silvery marks. It never seemed to bother her much, which made it bother me more, and maybe the entire process of looking in the mirror and seeing my mother triggers a deep Freudian crisis. How am I supposed to keep repressing the idea that I’ll become her emotionally when I’m slowly becoming her physically, staring at the empirical evidence etched across my abdomen? If there is no meaningful link between how she took to motherhood and how I will, why am I wearing it?

  I also find photos of women who escaped pregnancy unscathed, not a mark on their bellies. Well, goooooood for you, says my mind in the quiet calm of the night, goooood for you.

  Of course, I still worry about big things, too.

  I worry all the time about the baby being born deaf or blind or not making it at all. I worry that I have tempted fate with my Diaper Champ and my hand-me-down crib and my drawers full of onesies, as if to say to the universe that I take it for granted I will get a real, live baby.

  Old-fashioned superstition has been preventing me from having a baby shower, but at the last minute, I cave. I need things, and one of those things may just be the sense that I can do normal mom activities, like have a shower. My girlfriend Lynette throws it for me, and it’s coed, just friends meeting for drinks, really. The only “tell” that it’s a baby shower at all is a tower of blue frosted cupcakes decorated with rattles and stuffed bears. I have half a glass of wine and come away with things moms tell me I’ll need: a tiny blue plastic tub, a play mat, diaper bags and the like.

  A few times a day, I’m scared to have those things, and I still hold out on buying diapers, as if it’s some sort of unilateral negotiation with the Big Guy not to screw me over. See, I don’t really take it for granted that I will have a healthy baby, o
r I would have a closet full of Pampers. I know it’s twisted, but no one can accuse me of only worrying about superficial things like stretch marks. As a Jew, I have enough room in my kishkes for all levels of anxiety. The shelves are stocked with sizes from XS to XXL. I’m ready for this to be over, not just so I can stem the rising tide of worries and wounds, but so I can escape the restlessness.

  I just want this kid out so I can sleep on my back without suffocating, roll over in bed without sounding like Fred Sanford, not be congested anymore, smoke a couple cigarettes on a Friday night or when I’m writing and need to feel like Norman Mailer. I want to drink a freezing cold martini, fit into my old shoes, schedule toxic beauty treatments. Most of all, I want to be done wondering if Buster is all right, if he’ll survive his passage out of my body, if I did a good enough job carrying him for all these months, if he got all his omega fatty acids and protein and folic acid and fat and brain stimulation. Like probably everyone who is pregnant for the first time and close to the end, I just want to hold my baby.

  Maybe, as I spit blood from my swollen gums every time I brush my teeth (pregnancy gingivitis) and stare at my pudgy, terrified face in the mirror and wake in the night to stare at my belly by the dim light of a floor lamp, it’s easier to focus on one single stretch mark. There’s only so far it can rip you apart.

  This facile psychological interpretation not only buys me a one-way ticket to obvious-ville, it makes me look so much better than a woman who hyperventilates over a stretch mark.

  Or maybe a stretch mark breakdown is simply that. The fact is, these suckers are truly irreversible. Maybe I just need a second to let it register.

  They can send a man to the moon, transplant a human face, smash an atom with a linear accelerator, air-condition a condo in Phoenix, make sure you always know exactly where you are in space with a $200 GPS the size of a wallet. Yet they can’t really do much about the scars of motherhood.

  I don’t want this one stretch mark. I don’t want more. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life self-consciously tugging down T-shirts so there’s no flesh-exposing gap between the bottom of my shirt and the waist of my jeans. I don’t want to wear matronly swimsuits. Just thinking this makes me feel like a baby, and the fact is, I can’t be a baby anymore because I’m going to have to care for one. This is the rub that comes with no lotion: I have to wear my big-girl pants now, and they can’t be low-rise.

  Every transition involves a loss; even if you are blessed enough to find yourself pregnant and on the eve of motherhood and the luckiest darn thirty-nine-year-old alive, there is still something left behind, and even if that something is just a silly image of yourself looking halfway decent in a bikini, one thing is giving way to another and it can’t hurt to stop and wave good-bye.

  In my own way, I have to sit shiva, grieve a bit for what was and allow myself to be fully and fairly alarmed and inspired by what’s coming.

  That or just get some self-tanner.

  People I Want to Punch: People Who Won’t Tell Me What to Do

  It’s a recurring theme, me wanting answers from the outside, resisting a dip in Lake Teresa, where I can never seem to tell if it’s too cold or too hot or just plain polluted. When people tell me that only I know what’s right for me, I want to punch them until they tell me what they think is right for me.

  Now I’ve got to figure out where to live, a decision I have been putting off ever since I found out I was pregnant.

  Stay put, or move? As you can imagine, no matter how many people I poll about my housing options, I get the same infuriating response: “Depends.” Next time someone says that word, they better be referring to the brand of adult diapers they are going to wear after I administer a beating so brutal they’ll think twice before saying the “right” thing instead of attempting to run my life for me. Man, I really do want to punch people who I suspect know what I should do but refuse to tell me.

  So, what do you think I should do?

  When I was single, I bought a cheap, drafty Craftsman-style house in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, a ninety-seven-year-old “fixer-upper” with three bedrooms and one bathroom. The plumbing was jacked up, the roof was on its last tarry legs, the exterior paint was peeling and chipping like a bad manicure, but it was mine, transforming me from renter to owner. In the winter, it was so cold I pulled a space heater right up to my bed, slept in my bathrobe and Uggs with two cats and still woke up with purple hands and frozen feet. In the summer, I slept with three fans and a mobile air-conditioning unit that eventually imploded.

  Over time, I made improvements, stripping layers of lime green paint from the wooden beams and staining them a deep brown, ripping out the decayed kitchen linoleum and laying in cork floors, replacing the drooping rosewood slat ceilings with drywall.

  Still, there wasn’t much I could do about the neighborhood, which in some ways was a step down from my old haunt in East Hollywood, the Village of the Damned.

  My little section of K-town features several halfway houses and a massive single-room-occupancy building for formerly homeless ex-cons trying to reenter society. There are always mattresses on the sidewalk and guys going through trash for bottles and cans to add to their overfilled shopping carts. Basically, it’s District 9. To give you a sense of how dodgy it is, not one restaurant will even deliver food to my block.

  I was no stranger to ghettos, but the place was big and scary for a single girl, so when I could afford it, I bought a small condo in Los Feliz, a much nicer neighborhood, and rented out the old place in Koreatown. The new digs dazzled me with things I had never had before in my life: a dishwasher, central heat and air, windows without bars.

  When I got married, Daniel moved in with me, and though it was cramped, we pimped it out with a flat-screen television mounted on the bedroom wall, and now we never stop uttering the same annoying phrase: “We can park on a Friday and not get back in our cars until Monday morning. This neighborhood has everything.”

  Still, with the two of us barely fitting in the space, we wonder where we would put the baby. The second bedroom, which we had turned into an office, shares a wall with the master bedroom. Will nine hundred square feet be enough for the three of us? Can we even fit a crib into that office without getting rid of the desk? How are we supposed to know what life will be like with a baby? We know absolutely nothing about babies, nurseries, how much room baby gear takes up, how loud they cry, or how much they alienate crotchety neighbors.

  Of course, I run this dilemma by everyone I know: Stay in our nice condo and be on top of each other, or move back into the ’hood, install a climate control system, and have enough space for a nursery (and plenty of empty, abandoned lots nearby where the phrase “Megan’s Law” gets the locals scurrying for cover)?

  “It’s up to you,” everyone answers, along with some variation on, “You just have to decide if you prefer living where you can safely walk around or if you want the extra room.”

  With every answer Socratically pointing the question right back at me, I want to thrust my fist toward the person’s jaw and just yell, “Tell me what to do or I’ll smash your face in! Just tell me!”

  This goes on for months. I ask parents of small children, I ask crystal balls, I ask my therapist and relatives, but as my due date gets closer, all I do is walk around the quaint streets of Los Feliz and go over and over the intricacies of the decision with Daniel, weighing everything from mortgage costs to moving costs. We get estimates on heat and air, which are all over the place and can make your head explode like my old a/c unit.

  Finally, we figure it out. And that’s how I end up moving back to the old place, almost nine months pregnant, on a hundred-degree day.

  I’m working at this point, so Daniel and the movers handle everything until I get there in the late afternoon. He begs me to stay away, check into a hotel or something, but as anyone who has moved knows, no matter how much help you get, there are still things that only you can do.

  The process of movin
g, of handling every single thing you own and deciding whether it’s relevant to your current lifestyle while reminiscing about how you acquired it, not only makes you sweat your balls off (I have balls now; they are just inside me and belong to Buster), it also causes a kind of existential crisis. Who am I? you ask yourself with every object packed or discarded. Am I a person who needs a collection of ceramic cow-girls and more than one pepper grinder? Do I hold on to yellowing clips of stories I wrote for newspapers ten years ago, or let them go? How many pairs of tall brown boots will serve the person I’m going to be from here on out? Do I keep the novelty key chain with a picture of my ex-boyfriend and me, or should I just go ahead and store the memory in my brain and not the key chain in an old cigar box?

  We have taken to watching a cable show about hoarders, which leads to our favorite new catchphrase, “That’s something a hoarder would do.” When I pack a half-empty package of paper plates, my husband points out, “That’s something a hoarder would do.” When he eyeballs a threadbare Phillies bath towel before folding it and sticking it in a box, I stop him before it lands with a pointed, “That’s something a hoarder would do.”

  As I sit on a pile of cardboard boxes that must all be unpacked, perspiring through my bright yellow sleeveless maternity dress, I announce that this is the worst day of my life and start crying.

  The movers go about their business, only slightly fazed by the giant pregnant lady perched on a box, moaning. My husband reassures me this will just be one bad day, after which we’ll be grateful for the extra room. He has hired a guy to install central heat and air, so there is sawing and hammering, dust particles flying through the soon-to-be-cooled air.

  We never should have waited until the last second. I know this, and I blame myself. Well, I blame myself and punch myself emotionally, but I also idiotically blame all those who didn’t tell me to move sooner. If I ask your advice and you have a hunch about what I should do, just hit me with it. If not, I’ll want to hit you.