Blacklisted from the PTA (2 page)

I
AM A LITTLE ADDICTED TO MY SOCIAL NETWORKS
,
ESPE
CIALLY
Facebook. I’m not alone. I love these updates so much it almost makes me wish I could have another baby.

I like to think I’d exercise restraint if I were having a baby in this social media-saturated world, but who am I kidding? I’d be so much worse than a few Facebook updates. I would Twitter the whole thing.

OMG! Just started timing contractions. Totally on schedule. This is going to be soooo great. Can’t wait to start breathing exercises!

I <3 #childbirth! Contractions R starting to hurt. Husband wants 2 go 2 the hospital but I’m calling the doula. No drugs! #naturalchildbirth

Wow this hurts! Breathing exercises not providing much relief. Contractions are WAY worse than in pictures.

Threw up on the way to hospital. Husband totally freaking out. #natural childbirth ?

Trying to Tweet in the tub w/o wrecking phone. #pain

Laboring in water = overrated. Tub now freezing but it hurts too bad to get out. WTF? Who thought of this?

Way better now. Drugs will do that. Something with ‘cain’ in the name took the edge off. LOL Waiting for my #epidural!

Dr. Feelgood just asked if I was in the middle of a contraction! ROTFLMAO! I’ll show him a contraction!

Epidurals=NOT overrated!!

9.5? WTF is 9.5? When is this monster going 2 get out of me? Seriously, suck this thing out NOW!”

Totally should have gotten that one final pedicure. #vanity

I give up. They’re shaving me now. Getting this kid out one way or another. K, the other way… #cesarean

Does anyone speak anesthesiologist? What part of ‘Yes, I can feel that’ does he not understand?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I know I would have been unceremoniously separated from my phone before the actual moment of birth, but it would have been worth it. I mean, just think of how many new followers I’d get.

I
WAS PREGNANT IN
S
EATTLE
,
WHERE
I
SHOPPED AT
T
RADER
J
OE
’
S
, grew herbs on my condo lanai, and reused the protective sleeves on my piping hot lattes. I tried to be an Earth Mama, I really did. Before my son was born I was determined to attempt cloth diapers. Yes,
attempt
. Not exactly committed to the cause, but taking credit for the effort.

I might have been stronger in my conviction for green diapering had I not been privy to the memory of my mother hunched over a putrid white bucket, rinsing a thick septic mess of my brother’s nappies. However, we’d come a long way since the stinking 70s. In my 1998 urban existence I had access to something my mother never could have imagined or afforded from the secluded farmhouse of my childhood: diaper service. With support I could be a Good Mother, an Earth Mama even.

I could try, anyway.

It might have gone down differently if not for the circumcision. Like most of my contemporaries, I had my baby boy snipped shortly after his birth. On the West Coast, this—along with not eating the placenta, or at least planting it in the yard under a Very Special Tree—put a serious pall on my potential for environmentally friendly mothering. I would have to pick a lot of blackberries in the park, do hours of yoga, and eat buckets full of granola to make up for this crime.

At the nurses’ suggestion—to avoid diaper rash on his extra-Extra-EXTRA sensitive parts—we used disposable diapers for the first week at home. Throwaway Velcro was my friend, as was the space age mock-cotton that held about a gallon of “liquid.” Eager to prove my nature-loving worthiness, I circled the two-week mark on the calendar and called the service to schedule my initial delivery. On the big day I received a ten-foot stack of new diapers and a contraption for storing the soiled ones. The next week they would swap out the used for fresh.

I quickly got to work trying out the new diapers. My son humored me, lying calmly through my struggles with the intricate diaper origami. Ten years ago you needed an engineering degree to maneuver a cloth diaper. My son and I blew through four outfits that afternoon, in part because of the gaping diaperto-skin issues, and partially because my dear progeny refused to pace himself.

Still, I was determined. Right up until it came time to pack for a weekend trip away. I calculated the number of diapers I’d need for the two-day trip and piled them on the bed. Turns out you go through a lot more cloth diapers than disposable because, in contrast to their Earth-ravaging counterparts, reusable diapers hold approximately a quarter teaspoon of pee. I filled an entire suitcase with the mountain of diapers. I sighed, crossed my arms, squinted, huffed. Then I took the diapers out of the suitcase, loaded them back into the sack in which they had arrived, and called the service.

“This just isn’t working out.”

“Ma’am, don’t you at least want to give it until the end of the day?”

“It’s been six hours. I get it.”

It was not the first time in my brief tenure as Mother that I realized things would not always proceed as planned. But the pacifier incident is another story.

One-fourth of a day. Not bad for an herb-growing, lattesipping, ozone-destroying Earth Mama Wannabe.

D
ESPITE THE EVER
-
INCREASING RESPONSIBILITIES
,
THERE ARE NO
promotions in motherhood. You’ll never get an annual review followed by a fat bonus and a healthy raise. There’s a once-a-year day of gratitude, but the rest of the time we take our props where we can. It is not enough that we (almost) singlehandedly grew an entire human being inside our bodies and then managed to keep the little sucker (literally) alive in the face of deadly car seats and crib bars. We value what we can quantify as credit for a job well done.

I earned a gold star for my daughter’s birth weight. Despite a carefully constructed birth plan, an ancient Korean midwife’s fetal turning technique, and my doula’s soothing-sounds-ofthe-snow-owl CD, my second child, a precious flannel bundle, had to be pried out of me under anesthesia—with a big knife. She was born gray with an Apgar score of one, and nearly killed us both.

Why? She was a ten-pound baby, that’s why. Ten.

Okay, 9 pounds 14 1/2 ounces. I embellished, but when you have a baby that big you’re allowed to round up. An ounce and a half isn’t an exaggeration; it’s a shot of tequila. (Which may have taken the edge off the cheese-grater-on-nipple sensation of breastfeeding.) I’m just saying, it wasn’t a big fib. From Day One, my daughter was a 10-pound baby. For the last decade, all my kick-ass-ness as a mother has been implicit when I casually mention, “That one? Ten pounds.”

Okay, just under ten pounds. Who’s counting?

I would have perpetuated the legend indefinitely, but on her tenth birthday my daughter asked to look at her baby book. This couldn’t go well. Surely she’d notice her book consisted of a few good pages, followed by a few more of random baby items, and then two-dozen blanks. I figured as long as we didn’t break out the meticulous record of Big Brother’s first year for a sideby-side comparison, she might never know that she was conceived primarily as a playmate for our favorite child.

I shouldn’t have worried. All she wanted to see was her birth certificate. My husband and I beamed over her shoulder as she flipped through the handful of pages devoted to her first days. Then the trouble started. There on the first page of the sub-standard baby book was her birth announcement, the one I had created with my own breast milk-stained fingers.

“Do you see what I see?” I asked my husband. “What?”

“Eight pounds fourteen ounces? What is that?”

“What?”

“She weighed ten pounds! Ten! Well, you know, nine fourteen.”

Like all smart husbands faced with an unwinnable situation, he shrugged.

How could I have made such a mistake? As I paged through the official documentation, a ten-pound knot formed in my stomach. The hospital record of birth, her crib identification card, and the doula’s notes all confirmed her actual birth weight: 8 pounds 14 1/2 ounces.

She wasn’t just under ten pounds at all. She was just under
nine
pounds. Nine. This fact would not reconcile with my myth. I was a five-foot-one She-Ra, a warrior among women, a tenpound babymaker!

Now what was I? Just over average? Big deal. And it wasn’t just about me. My daughter had bought into my heavy white lie, too. The thought of her infant self as bigger than the rest had built up her self-image as a tough girl, maybe even helped her become the best defenseman on her ice hockey team. The facts presented in that stupid baby book shattered all that. “You mean I wasn’t ten pounds?”

S
HORTLY AFTER MY HUSBAND
’
S EMPLOYER MOVED OUR FAMILY TO
a small Texas town, we decided our eighteen-month old daughter needed saving, as in baptism. We visited several congregations and settled on a quaint Episcopal church. After a respectable period of near-weekly attendance, we asked the rector to christen our youngest. He agreed, but not without a price: Father Bob wanted to talk to us—at our house.

If letting kids overdose on TV was the original sin of parenting, DVDs have pushed us to a new level of depravity. Despite my strict limits on video games, sugary cereal and television, when I needed to buy time for a worthy task—like chatting up the priest—I relied on kid-friendly movies. So on a frosty December evening my husband popped in
Shrek
and joined me in the living room with Father Bob.

Bob was a forty-something ex-computer guy from Silicon Valley with a lawyer wife and three long-haired sons. I expected him to be cool like the martini-sipping-tai-chi-doing priest who’d baptized our son in Seattle. I also expected small talk. I was wrong on both counts.

“Baptism is permanent,” Father Bob began. “It symbolizes our union with Christ.”

From the next room the soundtrack roared:
“Look at me! I’m a flyin’ donkey!”

Giggles exploded, but Father Bob ignored the interruption. “In baptism your daughter will be washed clean of sin.”

My husband said we should wait until after college. Father Bob shifted in his seat. He then spoke of water and oil for what seemed like eternity. “She will be sealed in the mystical Body of Christ.”

I emptied my eggnog. “We were hoping for sometime in January?”

“Spring perhaps,” said Father Bob.

While he continued to speak of holy things, I counted to ten inside. It’s not like we hadn’t done this before. We knew the drill: pray-sprinkle-pray-eat-done. Pencil in a date already! After another twenty minutes of reverence I was about to reach for his calendar myself. I heard
Shrek’s
blaring guidance:

Nothing fazed Father Bob. He resumed the deep thoughts, but my husband and I had no more energy to mm-hmm and ahha. At this rate my daughter would never join the community of the church—or whatever he said. We tried to listen respectfully until an especially ill-timed moment of silence sealed her fate. In Dolby Stereo, our hero, Shrek, proclaimed his noble intention to rescue Donkey:

Tight, closed-mouth smiles circled the room. Our daughter’s mortal soul was clearly in danger and only Father Bob could help.

“Next Sunday?” he asked.

And just like that, the gates of paradise opened, despite our many, many sins. With happy, occupied children, I refilled my eggnog and said goodbye to Father Bob, who had our name on his calendar—in ink.