Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  In my case, the diaper bag also needed to have a nipple shield, just in case I forgot the bottle or the formula that I was supposed to have put in there, but inevitably, the day I forgot the bottle or the formula was also the day that I forgot the nipple shield, and it was also the day that Henry was getting his two-month shots, and it was also the day that his pediatrician was running over an hour late in the afternoon right around the time that Henry was starving. It’s the Murphy’s Law of diaper bags: The more urgent the situation, the more likely you are to have forgotten something absolutely crucial. (See also: baby having a huge poop blowout when you don’t have a change of clothes with you.)

  But even if you get the diaper bag sorted, and you want to actually leave the house, everything still has to be perfectly timed, because no one told you that when people say babies “sleep all the time,” what they really mean is that babies sleep in increments of anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes, you just don’t know which increment it’s going to be until they wake up.

  So as I got used to having Henry around, I regarded the photos of moms picnicking at the park with their babies with even more skepticism. Who were these moms who were able to magically engineer their babies to be awake when they needed them to be, make sure they didn’t poop everywhere, and keep their babies generally content?

  I had to wonder to what extent an influencer mom might feel like she needed to perform for her Instagram followers, to put on a show that she could still be the pretty, high-powered career woman balancing kids and an enviable social life. But maybe this particular photo was the only one she’d taken all day where the baby wasn’t screaming and the toddler wasn’t pouting. Maybe she had Facetuned her dark circles and her smile was fake. But none of that mattered, right? Because the end result projected I’ve got this, in a way that at that point, I most certainly did not. And while I looked at it and was slightly envious, I more just thought: Wow, that seems exhausting.

  I still didn’t feel like I had a mother’s instinct—just the instinct to second-guess myself. And besides, so far, I hadn’t found anything instinctual about motherhood. If anything, it felt more like a class that I was constantly behind in, and the professor never showed up to office hours—the professor being a twelve-pound person who still needed my help to burp. There was nothing instinctual about knowing how to put a baby to sleep, or how often he should sleep, or how much he should eat. More than once I wondered how the fuck the human race ever survived. Someone must have had some instincts very early on—a kind of cavewoman proto-Pinterest mom, who made the other cavewomen put bonnets made out of woolly mammoth fur on their babies so they wouldn’t get cold.

  * * *

  —

  ONE DAY, when Henry was around five weeks old, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, a long, stretchy piece of fabric wrapped around my waist and over my shoulders. It was the first time since the C-section that I’d felt like my body was ready to have a baby strapped to me. I placed Henry in the wrap carefully, pulling fabric up over his legs and torso. He squirmed a bit, and I rubbed his back and whispered, “Shhh, it’s okay,” and he quieted.

  I walked around the house, feeling the warmth of his body against mine, his little head turned to one side, resting on my chest. He felt so snug and safe. I was making him feel snug and safe. Soon he fell asleep.

  My year of yes had, with Henry’s birth, given way to my year of no thanks. And yet, I was starting to feel more at ease with myself, and comfortable in the choices I was making, than I ever had when I was spending so much time—with men, at work, with friends—trying to be the “cool” girl, worrying that I was missing out on something. Now, I was doing what was right for me, what was right for Henry, what was right for us as a family. If ever there was a moment when I felt like I had grown, this was it.

  Maybe the picnics and park hangs could wait, I thought. Maybe everything I needed was right here.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “How’s he doing?” I texted my mom around halfway through the flight.

  “Good,” she responded. “Just went down for a nap.”

  I was on a plane to Orlando, where Kate and I would be speaking at a podcast conference. It would be my first night away from Henry since he was born; he was three and a half months old. Since Matt and I don’t have family in Los Angeles—or anywhere nearby—we’d enlisted the help of my parents while I was gone, since Matt would have to work.

  I hadn’t ever really thought about the precariousness of our situation in L.A. until Henry came along. Suddenly, what had felt like an exciting adventure—moving across the country! marrying an amazing person! having a baby!—started to feel a little scary. Matt’s parents lived in Florida; mine lived in Boston. My brother was in Connecticut, my sister in Texas. I knew we were hardly the first people to have this issue; lots of my friends in L.A. were transplants. But I still hadn’t quite wrapped my head around feeling like a little island out here in California. My parents were thankfully still healthy, and as long as we were willing to pay for a plane ticket, they were happy to come out to L.A. to stay with Henry. But even though they were healthy, they were still getting older, and anyway, coming to L.A. regularly to babysit just wasn’t feasible. And, god forbid, if we had an emergency, no one was within driving distance. We had friends, sure, but there’s a difference between being friends with someone and feeling okay about leaving your extremely young child in their care for a few days, or longer.

  Still, I was grateful for my parents’ help. Everyone had told me that my relationship with them would change after I had a baby—I just wasn’t sure in what way. Some people found themselves disappointed by their parents’ lack of involvement in their grandchildren’s lives; others found their parents to be overbearing. But I had found myself growing closer to my parents after I had Henry. I had certainly developed more empathy for their experience as parents—they had had three children, and when she had me, my mom had been fifteen years younger than I was now. We don’t become completely different people once we become parents, and I realized that I needed to understand them as people, too—not just as my parents.

  I thought about this as the plane touched down in Orlando. I was relieved that they were able to watch Henry, which had allowed me to be able to join Kate at this conference. But I was also apprehensive about leaving him, in part because I was still nursing him three or four times a day, plus pumping. Still, my crazed nervous energy of the first few weeks of his life had given way to a somewhat less anxious state of being. Things had settled into a routine, more or less: sleeping, eating, playing, napping, pooping (lots of pooping). I was starting to get to know Henry’s moods and what made him laugh. Right now, he was struggling to roll over from his back to his tummy, getting on his side like a little crescent roll and then getting stuck. He had a giraffe lovey that he was fascinated by. I still liked to put him in his baby carrier, snuggling him close and going for a walk.

  As I checked into the hotel, I thought of something. “Do the rooms have freezers?” I asked the woman checking me in.

  “No,” she said. “There are refrigerators, but not freezers.”

  I frowned. “Is there anywhere I could store a small cooler?” I said, fishing it out of my bag. “It needs to stay frozen so I can store my breast milk.” I was planning on pumping and then taking the milk back home.

  “Oh!” she said brightly. “Sure. I can store it in a freezer in the kitchen, no problem.” She took the cooler from me and I went up to my room. I was relieved that she hadn’t given me a hard time about storing the cooler, but I was also slightly annoyed that the rooms didn’t have freezers. Pumping—and transporting milk—had opened my eyes to a whole world of logistics that I had never had to remotely think about, starting with: Where do you pump? The co-working space where I did work sometimes had a room for pumping, which I appreciated, but I usually lugged my own pump from home because the one time
I’d tried to use their pump, parts were missing. And not pumping when you need to pump is not optional. You can actually feel your boobs filling up and tingling, as though the milk is just preparing itself to squirt out of your nipple, and if you wait too long, the tingling turns into a rock-hard clog, and if you’re really lucky, maybe you’ll even start leaking through your clothes! But then once you’re done pumping, you need to figure out where to store the milk so it doesn’t go bad. The co-working space had a fridge, but if I was on the go, I usually brought a small cooler where I could store bags of milk. It was a whole other layer of things to think about.

  And I often felt like my brain wasn’t totally up for thinking about all the things I needed to think about. I was forgetful where before I had always been so on top of everything. I got easily overwhelmed; it was hard to focus. If I tried to work on something non-Henry related, his little face would materialize in front of me. Had I forgotten to feed him? Change him? Was he sad? Did he miss me?

  The internet told me that this was evolutionary, that I was supposed to be consumed by Henry in the first weeks and months of his life in order to keep him alive. But it was hard not to feel like this was going to be my permanent state of being from now on.

  When I got up to my hotel room, I had to laugh: It looked like it had last been renovated in approximately 1985, with vaguely colonial furniture and heavy drapes. My one night away from home wasn’t exactly going to be a spa vacation, but I didn’t care. I flopped down on the bed and turned on the TV. I didn’t have to worry about getting woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming baby, or stumbling out of bed at six thirty to nurse. But I did have to pump. I’d finally invested in a hands-free pump—it consisted of two pods that went over your breasts, one on each side of your bra, and then suctioned the milk out; a slightly creepy but cool feature was that it communicated with an app on my phone via Bluetooth to tell me how much milk I’d pumped—so I popped it into my bra and turned it on. I sat back, propped up on pillows, and listened to the whoosh-whoosh of the pump as I flipped the channels.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, Kate and I were on a panel about “the monetization of women’s lifestyle content,” where we talked about how advertisers were interested in paying to reach our audience. As the panel ended, I saw I had a text from my mom. “Where’s Henry’s formula?” she asked. We had a machine, kind of like a Keurig for baby formula, that we’d received as a gift from one of Matt’s former After Trek co-workers. You pressed a button, and a bottle of formula appeared. It was magical.

  Before I could respond, I saw she had texted me again. “Never mind—found it,” she wrote.

  “Which one did you use?” I wrote back.

  “The one in the can next to the machine,” she wrote.

  I called her. “That’s the wrong formula!” I said. “He uses the one in the box. The machine is calibrated for that specific formula, not the other formula.”

  “Well, it looked fine,” she said.

  “You have to take it out of the machine,” I said, getting increasingly agitated. “He could get sick! I can’t believe you didn’t wait for me to respond!”

  “I already gave him the bottle,” she said. “He was hungry.”

  I was almost in tears. In that moment, I felt wholly inadequate as a mother: I’d left my tiny baby to fly across the country just to be on a panel? And now he was going to starve because I didn’t produce enough breastmilk to have a stash of frozen milk, so I’d had to leave him with formula, and I hadn’t told my mom exactly where to find the correct formula so she’d used the wrong one.

  “Are you okay?” Kate asked as I met up with her outside the room where the panel had been held. I told her what had happened.

  “Ugh, that’s annoying,” she said. “I mean, he’s probably fine—is that okay for me to say?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “You know, ‘they’ ”—I inserted air quotes—“make you so nervous about formula feeding in the first place, like you’re somehow failing your baby. And, like, I’ve pumped and we’ve supplemented with formula from practically day one, so it’s not like I have a problem with formula.” I paused. “I guess I know, on a rational level, that he’s almost definitely going to be fine, but I can’t help but have these doubts. And I took it out on my mom.”

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. “Really. I would tell you if I thought you needed to worry, and I don’t think you need to worry.”

  I nodded. I knew she was right. Everything about Henry took on outsized importance anyway, but even more so now that I was away from home. Then I felt the telltale tingling in my chest. It was time, once again, to pump.

  * * *

  —

  A MONTH AFTER Orlando, at another podcast conference in L.A., I sat in the green room before my panel, desperately trying to clear my right breast of an extremely stubborn clog that just wouldn’t go away. I was using a hand pump, pressing it into my breast with one hand and pumping with the other.

  Then the door opened, and a confused-looking guy poked his head in and saw me partially disrobed on the couch. Apparently, the door did not lock. “Um, yeah, I’m just trying to pump in here, thanks!” I said. He scurried out. My boob was still clogged. “Fuck this,” I muttered.

  Before Henry was born, when I had envisioned what breastfeeding would be like, I’d pictured a bucolic image of Henry suckling greedily at my abundant breasts, the milk flowing easily into his mouth. Of course, we never had that breastfeeding relationship: The milk never flowed easily; most of the time he seemed like he’d rather be somewhere else. It was hard to stop, though—I kept going partly because I thought maybe this would be the time that we turned the proverbial breastfeeding corner. Maybe all the anguish and the pain and discomfort would one day magically disappear, and even if we didn’t have the Instagram-perfect breastfeeding relationship of my dreams, it would still be a calm, bonding moment between us.

  It never happened, and when he was around six months old, Henry started screaming every time I tried to nurse him, flinging himself dramatically off my lap to try to escape, and it was exhausting and demoralizing. I stopped breastfeeding and pumping a few weeks later. I had never felt so free.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “My wife loves your podcast,” the male voice on the other end of the call said. “I’ve listened to some of it, too, and it’s great!”

  Kate and I rolled our eyes at each other. We were on the phone with someone in business development at one of the major podcast networks that was trying to sign Forever35.

  “We think you have a great opportunity to have ads on your show,” he continued.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We do actually already have ads, so yes, I would agree. So what is it about our show that makes you interested in representing it?”

  “Well, you’re really hitting a demographic that is underserved in the podcast space,” he said. I muted him and said, “Tell me something I don’t know” to Kate. Back on the call, I said, “Right, but what about our show?”

  He couldn’t really answer the question. We’d been having these conversations for the last few weeks, and most of the time we were talking to men, like this one, who had never even bothered to listen to an episode of our show before they tried to hop into business with us.

  I’d been selling ads on my own for the show for the last year or so. There was something exciting about it—it turned out, I loved making deals, and I loved telling advertisers what I thought we were worth, take it or leave it. They almost always took it. But we figured that someone who specialized in it could do even better. Hence these conversations.

  But these phone calls were starting to get me down. They reminded me of everything in media that I had been trying to get away from—mediocre men who didn’t prepare for the meeting, who expected to be able to coast on their entitlement, who thought that we should be grat
eful to just be in the room or on the call with them. For the past year, I’d been able to mostly avoid these guys, as Kate and I created the podcast we wanted to create, for the audience we wanted. If we wanted guests who came from a range of backgrounds, we could do that; if we wanted to take a stand and emphasize to our listeners that we were progressive, we were going to do that, even if we got angry emails from women who identified as conservative who thought we had abandoned them.

  I felt lucky that I was able to have this kind of work environment, and I didn’t take it for granted. That’s probably one important difference between starting your own company in your twenties versus starting your own company at forty, or older: We don’t have time for your bullshit, and we’ve seen a lot in the workplace that we don’t want to replicate. We’ve been passed over for promotions, gaslighted and criticized, made to feel guilty for taking time off. But now we had the opportunity to create something different.

  In the end, we signed with a company that had women in senior positions who loved Forever35 and had actual thoughts about how to grow the show. We didn’t sign with them because they were women, but it was eye-opening—to say the least—to see just how better prepared, on the whole, these women were, and how genuinely excited they were about bringing us on board.

  As we were having these conversations, I thought about the life—the dream career—I’d left behind in journalism, the one that I had thought I was working toward my whole professional career. Now I would never be the editor in chief of a magazine or a website, but I’d found something better—something that, I was sure, made more of an impact on other people’s lives, and on my own.