What kind of people “just pop by” anyway? Perhaps my dear husband casually let his mom in on the not-so-secret secret that I’m not taking to motherhood as naturally as I thought I would. In my defense, Aubrey is only eight months old. Eight months into any job isn’t really enough time to become an expert.*
* Not that I’m calling motherhood a job. It’s a blessing. Really, it is. Such a blessing. I’m blessed. Truly. #soblessed
Despite my sweet mother-in-law going on and on about how motherhood is an instinct, I can’t be the only newish mom having a bit of a time finding her groove.
To be fair, I had very little preparation for this whole motherhood thing. Before Aubrey, the only newborns I’d ever held were my sister Joy’s kids, the last of whom, my niece, was born just a month before I joined #TeamMom. That’s a day I’ll never forget, and not just because my niece was so adorable. Joy had just dropped the enormous bomb that she was giving her baby girl the name we’d both loved, I mean LOVED, as in we’d named every doll and teddy bear Ella since we were four and seven. When we found out that we were both pregnant, we even met at a coffee shop and decided that neither of us would take the name. So when the nurse said, “Isn’t Ella darling?” I almost hit the ground.
“Don’t be childish, Ashley,” was Joy’s response as she lay looking like a freaking goddess in her hospital bed. She was probably the first woman there to give birth in a $200 custom nursing gown. It was gorgeous. Pink apple print with cute little yellow blossoms.
It wasn’t just the gown. Joy always looked fantastic. Her hair was even prettily tousled like she’d been boating all day rather than pushing six pounds and seven ounces of person out of her vagina.
When I told her I wasn’t being childish and brought up the conversation in the café, Mom chimed in to defend her like she always does.
“Stop it, Ashley. Your sister just had a baby, for goodness sake. And she really does look like an Ella.”
I had Aubrey one month later.
I love Ella and, of course, her brother, my three-year-old nephew, George, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting a little every time I hear her name.
“Aubrey is a gorgeous name,” Joy gushed when she came to visit me in the birthing center. Joy and Mom were dead against my giving birth to my first outside of a hospital. In our typical Easton style, they never actually told me this. They just sent me every birthing center/natural-birth-gone-wrong horror story ever published while I was pregnant.
So maybe I did feel a little smug when Aubrey was born all warm and perfect in my hippie den aka birthing center. That is, until Joy spoke.
“You really are brave, Ashley. I never could have rolled the dice with my baby.”
Once again, Mom backed her up. “Yes, Ashley, you’re very lucky.”
Lucky? They acted like I’d run blindfolded across six lanes of traffic while balancing my baby on my head rather than just given birth in the #1 birthing center in the nation, directly across the street from a top-rated, fully equipped hospital.
Before Aubrey was born I’d decided that I’d be one of those all-natural moms who made their own peanut butter, wore their baby 24/7 in one of those slings and breastfed well into toddlerhood. Giving birth to Aubrey in a birthing center was just what I needed to catapult me into my new, organic lifestyle.
But my earth-mother adrenaline rush lasted until about four days after Aubrey was born, when my milk didn’t come in. After Aubrey lost two pounds, even my “fight the man” midwife had to admit that something was very wrong.
“You might just be one of those women,” she said to me in a hushed whisper, as if we were undercover spies trading government secrets. “One of those women who don’t make milk.”
“BUT YOU SAID THEY WERE ONE IN FIVE MILLION!” I cried, pushing my raw nipple into Aubrey’s screaming mouth. “I HAD A NATURAL BIRTH!”
Two lactation consultants, bloodwork, a dozen delicious but ineffective lactation cookies, two boxes of lactation tea and a rented breast pump later, I gave in and bought my first tin of failure powder. That’s what a mom from my online breastfeeding forum calls formula. Failure powder. For failures like me. Did I mention that Emily Walker made so much breast milk for her last baby, Sage, that she donated gallons to her local milk bank?
Joy was as helpful as she always is. “I’d totally pump for Aubrey, but I’m making just enough for Ella as it is. Sorry.” I could tell she really was sorry, but it didn’t help with the feeling of crushing disappointment. The studies that go around Facebook every fifteen minutes about how babies who aren’t breastfed grow up with dragon scales covering their entire bodies didn’t help.
Eight months later I still hate myself just a little every time I scoop that white powder into the bottle. Formula. I’m a formula mom. This wasn’t how I saw it all happening. It’s not that I think formula is evil; I just always pictured myself breastfeeding under a willow at the park, its leaves gently swaying in the warm breeze, onlookers stealing admiring glances at me. Ask me how many admiring glances I get whipping out a nine-ounce bottle at Starbucks. ZERO. One mom even asked—with tears in her eyes, no less—if she could breastfeed my baby for me. As if Aubrey is some malnourished third-world baby on television with flies buzzing around her emaciated body. I may have lied and said that she’s allergic to human milk.
Oh, and we stopped using the million-dollar-a-can organic formula blend when Aubrey was three months old. Now she’s on the cheap brand stuff. She’s the only eight-month-old I know with zero teeth—probably from all of the trace minerals she’s missing from my malfunctioning mammary glands. Formula. When she drops out of community college, we’ll all know why.
Yesterday, Emily Walker posted a photo of herself breastfeeding her eighteen-month-old in front of the Eiffel Tower. She’s doing her show live from Paris for her Motherhood Better book tour, and I’m sitting in funky pajamas trying to remember the last time I shaved my armpits.
Back to the lessons I learned today. So in all of the “confusion” (shorthand for poopy-diaper-ziplock-bag-period-panty-replacement among us moms) I left my copy of Motherhood Better in the bookstore bathroom. I called and they said my copy had been thrown away (an employee complained that its proximity to the baby changing area was unhygienic) but they’re giving me another one free of charge. David is picking it up on his way home from work. I asked him to pick up dinner, too. I’m exhausted from a day thinking about all the ways I’m screwing up his child, and the fridge is practically empty other than chardonnay, string cheese and almost-rotten produce.