I want to clarify that socioeconomics are not everything when it comes to PPD—all women from every walk of life are vulnerable. In 2012 I interviewed my beloved friend Gwyneth Paltrow on The Conversation, and we discussed how she’d suffered from PPD after the birth of her son, Moses, in 2006.
“I felt like a zombie,” she said. “I felt very detached . . . I just didn’t know what was wrong with me. I couldn’t figure it out. My husband actually said, ‘Something’s wrong. I think you have postnatal depression.’ I was mortified. ‘No, I don’t!’ And then I started researching what it was and the symptoms and I was like, ‘Oh, yes I do.’
“We think that it makes us bad mothers or we didn’t do it right, but we’re all in this together. I never understand why mothers judge other mothers. Can’t we all just be on each other’s side? It’s so hard anyway. Can’t we all help each other get through it?”
Makes complete sense to me, right?
It took me about five years to really get my head around the fact that I had twins. Until then I was just in survival mode. A big part of motherhood is about managing time, and with twins your workload is essentially tripled: there was my relationship with Ella, and my relationship with Silvan, and Ella and Silvan’s relationship with each other. Not to mention their elder sister, and then let me not forget my baby daddy. The logistics become mind-boggling. Most days it’s a coin toss whose needs get met first. She needs to go potty, but he spilled apple juice all over himself and the floor, and both need help now. By the way, that’s when I end up getting real close to losing it. When I feel that happening, I tell myself, “Put the baby down and walk away.” That’s another piece of advice that should come in the instruction manual.
It’s saved me many times.
Another fairy tale about being a new mother is this idea that your body is supposed to snap back like a rubber band the moment the baby comes out. This fantasy is perpetuated by—well, who ISN’T it perpetuated by?
I did a photo shoot with my newborn twins looking super put-together and manicured, with a fresh face of makeup. “The greatest thing you can do when you love somebody is to make another human being,” they quoted me saying on the cover. I meant what I said, but the airbrushed picture didn’t tell the whole story. What you didn’t see were my leaky boobs, my stretch-marked belly, and the ten stitches that were firmly placed inside my vagina to sew me back to a reasonable size. I was so pleased to see Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, the day after she gave birth, posing for pictures with her postbaby belly on display. Love her for that share.
Almost no one gets her prebaby body back within weeks. And by the way, what’s wrong with taking some time to let your body—which has just constructed an entire human being—just be? Every media outlet that perpetuates the notion that the only beautiful female form is the one that looks like it’s never given birth should be called out. All their insane coverage about new moms who look as if they found their infants on the doorstep instead of experiencing labor and delivery does nothing but reinforce the unacceptability of the postpartum female body, which can be bumpy, lumpy, leaky, and floppy.
We need to change the standard of what is socially acceptable postpartum. I love the movement on Instagram and Tumblr where new moms flaunt bodies that are not lipo’ed or dieted or retouched. This is what your body looks like after you’ve had a baby, and guess what, people—it’s a miracle and should be honored as one.
We need to give women a lot more room to be imperfect—and the permission to admit feelings that don’t necessarily fit with the perfect-mother ideal. New mothers need to be recognized as the superheroes and warriors they are and to be supported instead of scrutinized. Perhaps then they wouldn’t feel so alone.
Of course, there are many moments that make all the crazy beyond worthwhile, like when you’re breastfeeding in the middle of the night and you look down at this tiny, perfect person who’s looking at you, studying you, who already loves you regardless of how many times a day you’re crying, who doesn’t care that you haven’t brushed your hair or shaved your legs in forever. It’s like when you first fall in love with someone and you never want to stop looking at them.
Only better.
9.
How to Parent in the Time of Trump
Mom, what’s a pussy?”
“Umm, in what context do you mean?”
“My friend Noah says that Donald Trump grabs women by the pussy.”
This was a question posed to me by my ten-year-old son the day after the Trump Pussy Grabbing Tape went public.
“The word pussy, when used in the context that Donald Trump used it, is slang for a woman’s vagina,” I say. “However, that is not the worst part about what you told me. Any idea what I’m referring to?”
“That he grabs them by the you-know-what?”
“Yes, exactly. It’s never okay to grab anyone, especially by their vagina or penis.”
Fuck. I was really not ready for THIS one, but is there ever a best time to explain something like this to your kids? And then there was also the explanation of “Pussy Bites Back” when a mere forty-eight hours later, women and girls around the world, myself included, adopted that as our slogan in retaliation for Trump’s misogynistic rant.
I did not have this discussion on my parenting to-do list. The discussion did, however, open up a dialogue among many mothers I know about the challenges of raising kids in our current political climate.
I like to think we are the living example of a family that operates by a very specific code of conduct. We discuss race, gender, identity, stereotyping, bias, and equality in some capacity almost on a daily basis.
When one or more of these themes come up, we address it in the moment. Ask my friends who have my kids over for a meal—Ella and Silvan will point-blank call people out when they pick up bias of any kind, sometimes to the embarrassment of their host. A recent example is when my son had lunch with an extremely well-respected film director and asked him why he’d never cast a woman in a lead role in his massive film franchise.
My kids see feminism in action every day, and leading by imperfect example is how I’m raising them.
If there was anyone primed to raise their kids feminist, it was me. My parents treated me no differently from my brother. I was raised to believe I was capable of doing anything I set my mind to. Despite the gender stereotypes in the ’80s, my race car driving dad taught me that I could do whatever my brother could. My dad showed me how to ride a motorcycle when I was six and said I would never need to be a passenger on some drunk guy’s bike, that I could put the drunk guy on the back and ride that motorcycle to safety if need be.
I don’t raise my daughter differently from her twin brother, to the point where she only wanted to wear his clothes—sweatpants, baggy T-shirts, and high-tops—for a year straight. She claims it’s because she needs to be “comfortable and functional,” and who can blame her? I would wear a tracksuit seven out of seven days if I could.
No question there are more opportunities for women than ever before to create a life that is authentically their own. And yet at the same time, the patriarchy is working hard to make sure we stay stuck in the same old gender roles, even if there is a lot of confusion about those roles right now. Women’s roles within the family and workplace have changed so drastically over the last few decades, which is huge progress—but this has also left both men and women uncertain at times about who is doing what.
It wasn’t all that long ago we were being burned as witches, viewed legally as property, and sent off to mental asylums if we disagreed with our husbands. So it’s no wonder that we’re still trying to carve out a place for ourselves in the modern world.
My daughter is a prolific writer, and not long ago she wrote a paper for her school called “Sexism: It Is Everywhere,” a persuasive essay about how Hillary Clinton, as the first female president, would make it her priority to combat sexism. She then went on to give some very accurate examples of gender stereotypes and
the ways in which girls are sexualized in everyday life, citing a trip we took to Target and how disgusted she was to discover that all the girls’ superheroes outfits are basically pink crop tops and underwear.
My son is obsessed with sports, but unlike a lot of his peers, he’s also very female sensitive. At bedtime recently he was reading a book and said, “Mom, you’ll like this book because the girl, who’s the main character, and the boy are friends and it’s not like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend.” I was ecstatic that he remembered my opinion that the sole purpose of girls in narrative should not be simply to provide the boy with a love interest.
The reality is that parenting has always been complicated, but given the political landscape today, it feels trickier than ever. The Parenting 101 handbook needs a major update on a list of things, like how to navigate the pros, cons, and many perils of appropriate internet usage. Any child who knows how to work an iPad, which is most of them, can with a tap and swipe see our pop culture icons in various forms of undress. It used to be that only the girls with no talent had to rely on being half-naked to get noticed, but now even the ones who are already a huge success have adopted this approach.
This makes it all the more challenging to raise a daughter to believe that using her brain and working hard to become successful are not mutually exclusive. It’s close to impossible when almost all the messages delivered to her say the opposite. So what DO you do and say?
First, I want to acknowledge that I was the queen of the barely there outfits, and boy did they have the desired effect. Especially at age fourteen, hitting up some club with whatever cute band boy of the moment, wearing a fishnet catsuit with denim hot pants. YESSSS! This worked like a charm every time, and continued to do so for years to come. So, I get it. I really do. And maybe because I came to realize that my own urge to wear less was an attempt to disguise my monumental desire for attention and love, I have a preconceived idea and projection about why every other talented girl is also half-naked.
Are Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, and RiRi often emulating strippers onstage because they’re celebrating their slammin’ bodies? Which would be fair enough. Or do they all possess some deep need to be desired by everyone who lays eyes on them? Is there an unspoken competitiveness with other women? Forget being the fairest of them all, today it seems like it’s about being the most fuckable of them all, and if you made me pick one, I would have to say RiRi does it for me.
Anyway, here’s how I address this issue with my kids when we see one of the aforementioned half-naked singers.
Sometimes I make light of the whole thing and joke, “I’m so distracted by RiRi’s boobs I can’t focus on her incredible voice!” I draw attention to it so as not to normalize it. Occasionally—and this is when co-parenting gets tricky—Nick will chime in with “I think RiRi looks GREAT in her underwear, what’s wrong with that? She’s just performing.” He’s not wrong, but I always want to go on record as pointing out that being almost naked should not be a necessary component of being a successful female performer. And in fairness to RiRi, she often wears a dude-like suit onstage, so at least she’s mixing it up.
My kids also educate me. I’m aware we’re living in an extremely PC culture, where it’s easy to offend people without meaning to. Part of that updated Parenting 101 handbook should include making sure our kids understand that there are dozens of gender identities. When a boy shows up to school wearing a dress or big hoop earrings, Ella and Silvan don’t give a crap. Their attitude is just “Oh, Rafi wears dresses, Mom. That’s his style.”
Occasionally my son will ask me, “Why should I let Ella go first? Or why should I hold the door open for Ella—if we’re all equal why shouldn’t she hold the door open for me?”
He has a good point.
Are traditional manners like a guy holding the door open for a female, or taking her coat just some shit from the ’50s? Can’t a woman open the door herself and hang up her own coat?
She sure as hell can, but it’s nice to have someone who is courteous, and I’m still teaching Silvan the fine line between chivalry and insulting an empowered woman.
I want to raise kids who are curious and engaged with the world around them, and who are aware that the privilege they were born into is not the typical experience for most kids, that they should not take it for granted and should always look for opportunities to use the advantages they’ve been given to help other people.
I guess the proof is in the pudding—we’ll have to wait until they’re grown-ups to find out what effect we’ve had on them. In the meantime, I try not to worry that every little misstep will permanently ruin my kids. There will be plenty of opportunities to set things right and just as many opportunities to fuck things up again. And I’ve come to accept, that’s just parenting.
10.
Be a Girl’s Girl Every Day and All the Way
I’ve always been what would be considered a girl’s girl, and if you’re reading this book, chances are you’re one, too. I live and die at the altar of female friendships. Too much emphasis in our culture is placed on finding romantic love, but I’ve always believed that it’s the platonic love of our girlfriends that is crucial to long-term sanity and success. That’s certainly been the case for me. After lovers have consistently disappointed you, and your family has yet again proved to be impossible or unreliable, your girlfriends are there to hear you out, support you, advise you without judgment until death do you part. My BFFs are as much my soul mates as my lovers have been. Even without the sex part, the connection and love is just as deep and should be honored and valued as such.
For as long as I can remember I’ve always had intense, complex connections with my girlfriends. My first best friend—and first kiss, as well—was another little girl called Amanda. We were nine. She was American, and her family had moved to London for her father’s work. We were inseparable, like Bonnie and Clyde, if Bonnie and Clyde were two little badass tomboys. Amanda had a thick New York accent and the latest American swag. She introduced me to scratch-and-sniff stickers and Hello Kitty everything, which I still have a penchant for all these years later. She saw me and I saw her for exactly who each of us were, in the way that tween girls often do.
I became completely obsessed with Amanda, the first of many codependent relationships I would have. Kiss chase was a popular playground game during the height of our mutual obsession, the UK version of traditional tag. It was challenging when Amanda and I both played because if anyone tried to kiss her or me it caused a problem in our relationship. One of us would always end up feeling upset and rejected, and an afternoon of attempting to “make up” would ensue. This became a dynamic that would play out in all my subsequent relationships, so there must be something about that tension that I enjoy.
Have you ever asked yourself, what is the measure of a true friend? Is it someone who will buy you a box of tampons on the way over to visit? Someone who will bail you out in a crisis (sometimes literally)? Someone who will proudly stand next to you at an important event, even though you haven’t shaved your legs or armpits in an obscene amount of time and unquestionably have some major body odor? Sometimes it happens when you use all-natural antiperspirant. A small price to pay for breast health, I think. Yes, all of the above, as my friends have done for me, and I have also done for them.
I cannot tell you how many times my girlfriends have figuratively talked me off the ledge. They have filled the well of unwantedness at the center of my being in a way that romantic relationships never have, and helped heal my fractured heart in a very special way. At every stage of life, my ladies have held me up when I was going under.
When I was shipped off to a boarding school called Benenden at age eleven, the only thing that saved me was the extraordinary sisterhood of my schoolmates. Many of the girls I bonded with came from the kind of so-called privileged backgrounds that commonly meant a lot of money and not a lot of love.
Contrary to reports in the media that Courtney Love and I were lovers
, I’ve only kissed two women (both times when I was seriously inebriated), but at boarding school it was the norm to have innocent “crushes” on other girls. I formed very intense friendships at school. It was not unusual to share your bed or bathe with your best girlfriend. It was comforting to lie next to someone else, to feel another heartbeat, to not be alone. Being sent away to boarding school when your parents are in the middle of a heated divorce is comparable to suffering a massive loss. Or at least that’s how it felt to me, the eleven-year-old girl who just wanted to be at home, play with her hamster, and read Enid Blyton books about magic forests. I still think that loss of any kind is one of the hardest things to navigate in life, but the support of your best girlfriends makes it a bit easier to endure.
I was twenty-one when I met Victoria Mahoney in a friend’s kitchen at a random get-together. Today, twenty-three years later, she is still one of the most significant women in my life. She’s been my emergency contact for more than two decades—that right there tells you how serious and committed our friendship is.
For many years people naturally assumed that Victoria and I were a couple. “Oh, those kids have two moms,” we often heard. Or maybe they thought that Nick had two wives. The truth is a lot less scintillating: it really does take a village to raise kids, and Aunt Vicky is a crucial part of our family’s DNA.
Victoria was the prototype for the first healthy relationship I ever had. She taught me about authenticity and honesty, about allowing another person to see who you are, about being vulnerable, and acknowledging your faults when you fuck up, about how to let someone love you even when you feel like you’re not worth loving. Without going through the learning curve with her, and trust me when I say there was a major learning curve, I wouldn’t have known how to have other friendships and/or romantic relationships that were healthy. I didn’t know what healthy love looked like until I met her.
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