Throughout our
home base in the Berkshires, we had a lot of friends to whom I could look for
advice on a scaled back life with baby, but as I started asking questions and
really observing what was happening in our circles, I realized that my
generation was practicing a perverse hybrid of locavorism and attachment
parenting that would pretty much guarantee that I never got to leave the house.
On demand breast-feeding.
Co-sleeping. Baby carrying to the extent that the baby never touched the
ground. Cloth diapers. Homemade baby clothing. Organic, homemade baby food made
from homegrown, heirloom vegetables. No pacifiers. No formula. Breast-feeding
for the first two years of baby’s life.
Let me tell you a bit about my life
here in this rural town. We live on a road so out of the way from anything
civilized, we have neither mail delivery nor trash-pick up. Our nearest
convenience store is twenty-three miles away, and because we’re located in the
middle of a microclimate in an already mountainous region, it’s common practice
for us to be buried under five feet of snow, the bulk of which Diego and I
spend countless mornings shoveling out of our steep driveway. In the winter, we
heat our house almost exclusively with a wood stove. In the summer, we don’t
have air conditioning. We didn’t have a washing machine until we hit our fifth
year here, and we got a washer/dryer on our sixth. We have one bathroom for
three bedrooms and a cat with big-breed heart problems that necessitates the twice-daily
administrations of pills and an inhaler.
None of this is to say that we have
a hard life, because we don’t. This is just to say that we weren’t looking to
make it any harder.
Ever since the age of ten, I’ve been
lugging around tote bags and eating root vegetables and drinking water out of
funky smelling Nalgeens and avoiding single-use items like the bubonic plague.
For decades, I’ve been as low impact as they come, letting it mellow when it’s
yellow, re-using the same cloth napkin for a week’s worth of meals, making a
chicken soup from the bones of every chicken we’ve ever roasted. So when it
comes to the initial raising of this child, I just feel like, enough. I’m giving nine months to this
unexpected project whose grand finale will push my body into the liminal state
between humanhood and animalia, at which point I’ll start dripping creamy fluid
out of my breasts like a cow.
Enough. Enough! I’m not going to be
washing cloth and Velcro diapers with my hands in a bucket like some busty
hireling from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I’m not going to be signing paperwork so
that some organ fairy can come down from the wilds of Northampton to
encapsulate my placenta, nor am I going to make 4 x 6 souvenir, placenta
prints. I’m not going to feel bad about getting liquid nutrients into my baby
via a bottle so that I can have a little freedom and I’m not going to treat the
last months of this pregnancy like an esoteric art project, leaving paper mâché
belly molds around the house.
What I’m finding as I move into my
final pregnant months is that my generations’ lust for all things small-batch
and difficult to come to mean that “easy” is no good, even in the realm of
parenting. As the intelligentsia must ride their single speed bikes to Brooklyn
to overpay for hand-crafted jars of mayonnaise for the sandwich they wanted
four hours ago, so too must new parents go a crazy distance to be “good.” Cloth
diapers, co-sleeping, home births, breast feeding for two years (or more!),
attachment parenting, getting the child accustomed to hearing yes, yes, yes,
(or at the very worst, “no thank you,”)—building this world where mommy and
daddy are always there to cheer and protect them, that’s just not the way it
works.
I still hold strong memories of my
mother tucking me in at night, the heady snap of her Joy perfume emanating from
her clavicle, the sound of her necklace shushing against her skin as she leaned
in to kiss me goodnight, a kiss that was frequently a goodbye before she headed
to some place with clanking cutlery and shared cigarettes and floral
arrangements, and I would dream about these places, and I didn’t cry.
My parents were wealthy, then. I get
that. They could afford a nanny and I can’t. But still. I don’t want
motherhood—my motherhood—to resemble some obscure travail like artisanal pencil
sharpening. I want it to be as fun as possible. As liberating as possible. I
want it to be good. And right now
that means taking the easy, low road all the way to a super pack of Huggies.
