Meg’s Thoughts

May 2013

by Meg Keene, APW Executive Editor

A Wedding Invitation Is Not A Media Pass

I knew something was changing when a few years ago, I got this question: A reader’s uncle had videotaped her vows on his iPhone, and the day after the wedding had uploaded them to his Facebook page and tagged her in the post. His message was that her vows were so lovely that he felt compelled to share them. Her message was that she felt like her privacy had been violated. She wondered if it would be tremendously rude to ask him to take the video down. “Of course it’s not rude,” I replied. “What was rude was to record one of the most personal moments of someone’s life, and to share it as if it belonged to you.”

Fast forward to 2013, and that exchange already feels dated. Mark Zuckerberg thinks that the amount that we share online and through social media will double every year. I don’t think that’s exactly true, since already we’re all shutting down feeds we can’t keep up with (for me, that’s Facebook—sorry Mark). But it’s true that the way people share has changed drastically in the last few years. It’s not just the ubiquity of social networking sites, it’s the way smart phones have put effortless power in our hands. If we can easily take a video, or snap a picture, we can just as thoughtlessly share those photos or videos. We’ve forgotten the person who records the moment (and makes it pretty) is not the person the moment belongs to. We’ve forgotten that privacy has value.

You Don’t Need A Reason

The other week, I was reading an advice column about a woman who didn’t want her children’s pictures shared on social media. Since I’m in a substantially similar position (I share my kid’s pictures in very limited and reasonably private ways), I related. But the advice columnist’s response threw me. They told the woman to tell people, “I know I’m paranoid, but I’d rather you didn’t share my kids picture online.” And thanks for playing, but no. I don’t ask people to not share pictures of my kid because I’m afraid of predators; I just think that he should get to choose how he lives on the internet. I don’t want to make that choice for him, and I definitely don’t want some random person making the call. I disagree with the advice columnist because I don’t think asking people not to share your private life online requires an excuse. I just think it requires a please and thank you.

If you’re asking people to not share your wedding pictures on social media, you might feel like you need a reason, or feel compelled to make an excuse. You might think, “I’m not comfortable having my pictures shared, but it’s not like I’m famous, so what right do I have to ask for that?” But the reason is simply that weddings are private. You invited your uncle, not your uncle and all of his Facebook friends. You’re collecting a community of people to witness a very personal commitment. By doing that, you have the right to request and expect privacy. Figuring out how to do that well is the key.

How Do You Want Your Wedding Shared?

As with all things wedding, this is a conversation best had with your partner first, and then clearly articulated to vendors as well as friends and family. Let’s walk through questions to ask yourself and others. Continue reading A Private Wedding

Posted in: Life, Manifestos, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 162 Comments »

May 2013

Reclaiming Wife: In Praise Of Daycare

This is our final Tradition Month post about the varieties of ways women shape their lives around children and work. We’ve discussed the Work-From-Home Mom, the Stay-At-Home Parent, and now daycare. While we’re wrapping up this discussion for the moment, we always want to hear more from you about shaping your life balance. Childless? Childfree? Daycare with a corporate job? Currently a single mom? Send it in, we want to discuss it all.

by Meg Keene

Babies and Writing Don’t Exactly Mix

When I first announced I was pregnant, and that APW wasn’t changing or shutting down, many people commented that they were “continually amazed by my energy and my ability to do it all.” My reaction to these comments was one of confusion. I mean, I assumed we’d all watched our share of babies (this has proved to be my first incorrect assumption), and knew that while babies are great, babies and writing don’t exactly mix. And secondly, I thought we all knew the answer to the question of how you do it all, right? Also incorrect.

The short answer, which seemed obvious to me at the time: help.

The long answer, which I’ve since realized is perhaps not that obvious: help. Or more specifically in our case: daycare.

But there is a reason that people were leaping to the wrong conclusion about what we’d do after the baby came: the ball is being hidden on childcare. The puzzling thing is, I don’t know why. Families that have two parents who work full time have help of some form or another. They just do. I don’t want to be the one to burst the bubble, but it’s a fact. More than that, families with two full time, working parents, assume you know they have help, because have you ever MET a baby? But the trends of entrepreneurship and telecommuting, mixed with the current cult of motherhood, have muddied the waters. We’ve taken to pretending that if you work full time from home, you can do it while bouncing a baby on your hip. We’re being asked to suspend our disbelief and pretend that women, particularly entrepreneurial women, are able to do it all. And by do it all, I mean literally Do It All, all of it, At The Same Time.

I’m Calling Housewife

The Feminine Mystique, the feminist classic about the destructive myth of the perfect middle class housewife, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary earlier this year. I read it early in my pregnancy, expecting a fascinating feminist period piece, and was gripped (and troubled) by its immediacy. Because the new feminine mystique is of the “whole mother.” The one who keeps her kids in her own care, makes organic pureed baby food, has a small urban farm in her back yard, runs a full-time business, and keeps an impeccably decorated house. Now, all of those things are pursuits I happen to personally enjoy. I love me some business running and baby wrangling, have a recently planted garden, think my house is pretty cute, and might even (ask my husband to) puree some baby food. But I don’t do all of these things at the same time. I work on making the garden and the house awesome on weekends, I wrangle a baby morning and night, and I work during the day. While my kid is at daycare.

I can’t count the number of articles I’ve read about professional bloggers, women I’m friends with, that just flat out get the assumptive facts wrong. There is the “Better Homes & Bloggers” post, “The Feminist Housewife“ article, the recent “Mommy Business Trip“ travesty, and the Mormon Housewife piece. (Which is possibly the most offensive?) While I’m interested in questioning the feminist implications of the “new domesticity,” there is danger in confusing cultural trends with actual people. The women discussed in these articles happen to run businesses focused on motherhood or women’s lifestyle—in some cases, awesome feminists businesses focused on motherhood or women’s lifestyle. Unluckily for them, that means that while I’m a small business owner, they’re housewives—even though we do exactly the same job. The articles always start with the premise that these women are living some sort of vaunted June Cleaver existence, living and documenting their perfect domestic lives, while staying at home to raise their children. And you guys? They’re not. Many if not most are professional women whose businesses happen to focus on motherhood. They sometimes do crafts for the same reason I sometimes do crafts: it’s in the job description. They by and large have full-time childcare and run a business that supports their families (often as the primary breadwinner, at that). But here is the weird part: they’re forthright about having childcare, yet the world somehow wants to assume that they don’t have help.

Last week, at Mom 2.0, I heard Rebecca Woolf speak. Rebecca was one of the women misrepresented in “The Feminist Housewife” article, presented as a mommy to her husband’s professional. She talked about how she recently wrote a (beautiful, must-read) post about having help, because even though she’d mentioned having a full time nanny over and over again on her site, people somehow missed it (or, to personally editorialize, perhaps they didn’t want to see it). They thought she had some secret that they didn’t—and that would be a serious secret, since Rebecca has four kids and a full-time writing job.

And the way we think about mothers and work is truly fucked. We’ve constructed a no-win paradigm—a jail for mothers. Women who stay at home with their children are deemed ”privileged,” and then roundly dismissed as unimportant. (Even though caring for children is hard and important work, whether it’s done by a parent in the home, or a childcare provider.) When women work, and their partners are deemed able to support the family, their work is deemed a “luxury.” (Somehow it’s never the partner’s work that’s a luxury.) And for women who work because they have to work, to feed and house their children? Well, our worst judgment is reserved for them—the women not properly providing their children with “options.”

And while mothers are damned before they even begin, they’re doubly damned by the pervasive myth of the woman who does it all. It hurts everyone: in the public eye, out of the public eye, writing about motherhood, or working at lawyering. It puts the onus of childcare on women and their careers, while letting men totally off the hook. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: In Praise Of Daycare

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 200 Comments »

May 2013

Letter From The Editor: Tradition

Dear APW,

It’s been an interesting experiment, exploring monthly themed content on APW. When we’re in the weeds of editing, the theme doesn’t often seem that apparent. If something is good content, like Elisabeth’s post What If It’s Not Forever?, we run it, theme be damned. But looking back at a month, you can see the arc of the conversation in the way we couldn’t as day-to-day editors. Last month, Rachel led the conversation by talking about how women are attacked online whenever the seem to have it too good, and how excusing that behavior is just another way of objectifying women and keeping them in their place (this time, enforced by other women). At the end of the month I talked about the goodness that the internet has brought into my life, but how the internet is a fog layer on the real world, and I need unplug from time to time to make sure I dig into that real world goodness. Maddie brought it home with her personal essay about how reading about the good can bring up jealousy and anger, and how she can choose to feed that dark part of herself, or drag it into the light and acknowledge it as human, but damaging.

This month we’re tackling tradition, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I have no idea where the conversation is going to take us. To be frank, figuring what I was going to write for this month was a little tricky. All of my best stuff on weddings and tradition is in my book, and those are hands down the bits I’m most proud of. (Chapter Three, for those of you following along at home. I mean, it has a both a brief history of American weddings, and a section called “What Is Etiquette Anyway, and Is It Stuffy?”) Those of you who’ve read the book (or APW for a long time) will know that I’m something of a progressive traditionalist. I think that traditions give our lives meaning and power but are ours to claim and shape. My favorite quote in the book on the subject is from Wedding Graduate and theologian Clare Adama, who says, “The Latin origin of tradition, traditio, means not only to hand on but to hand over, and the meanings of practices such as those within weddings are not rigid, but given on to us to value and interpret in our own contexts.” Or as I say in the same section, “We do ourselves a great disservice when we allow tradition to encompass only the things we are sold, instead of the things that have meaning in our hearts.” In short: you can make it yours, while still making it meaningful (for you, and for your granny).

Which brings me to my love of the nuance of etiquette. How when properly done, etiquette allows us to take care of each other, without reinventing the wheel every damn time. I’m sure we’ll also discuss Miss Manners, because contrary to what you might have been lead to believe, she’s one of the smartest and funniest writers currently at work, and nothing at all like Emily Post. (For the uninitiated, go snap up your copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children” target=”_blank”>Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children.) We’ll also talk about people sharing your vows on Facebook without your consent. (Though I’ll try not to imagine the fire Miss Manners would rather rightly breathe over that, because it’s terrifying.) And then there are your weddings, traditional, non-traditional, and tradition reclaimed.

At a party this weekend, a longtime APW sponsor photographer (and friend), pulled out his phone to read me a direct quote from his clients, which he’d written down for my appreciation. Their Rabbi said, “It’s not your day. Just do what everyone else wants.” David immediately started laughing so hard he looked like he was going to choke. That guy loves him some bluntness (and some Rabbis). This is the dead opposite of what the wedding industry will tell you, but in some nuanced ways, it’s kind of right (and so relaxing). If you have a good relationship with your parents, and they’ve spent the last thirty years thinking about you every single day…maybe just let your mom use that goddamn florist she wants to use. Etiquette and tradition can rather handily act as a speed bump on the way to self-absorbed wedding hell. Because yes, it’s your wedding, but it’s everyone who loves you’s day (elopements excluded!), and sometimes you just have to pick your battles. Or as I like to think about it: Etiquette. That thing that lets me just follow the rules now and then, not worry about it, and then take a nap (while my mom is calling her beloved florist).

As we turned our lens of tradition to Reclaiming Wife content for this month, I was surprised to realize that the same rules apply there as apply to weddings. This month we’re hosting a multi-part discussion on stay-at-home parenting, work-from-home parenting, and the glories of daycare. As I looked at these essays, I realized that just like with weddings, what’s sold as traditional in motherhood is often anything but. And in exactly the same way, that willful misconstruing of history to fit the cultural narrative causes no end of problems (not to mention bad decisions made out of guilt).

Suffice to say, I’m pretty excited about May. Who knows where the discussion will lead us, but since we’re starting with one of my favorite ideas, I’m pretty sure it’s going to take us somewhere good.

Meg

Posted in: Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 67 Comments »

Apr 2013

Don’t Pin It—Do It

By Meg Keene

I want you. I need you. Oh baby, oh baby.

We’ve always had rules in our household about technology use. Bedrooms are technology free zones. No checking email from bed, no watching TV when you go to sleep. The table is the same way. Meals are unfettered by technology, please and thank you. But the truth is, we have a problem. More specifically, I have a problem.

The problem is that the lure of connectedness is following me wherever I go, and not allowing technology at the dinner table isn’t helping the situation. Not anymore.

The problem, of course, is dopamine. A recent Life Hacker article on why technology is so addictive explains, ”We can develop a dopamine release from many kinds of addictive behavior. Checking email is one in particular. You may not like spending long amounts of time in your inbox, but you probably think about checking it pretty often. When you hear that ding (or vibrate), you know there’s something waiting for you.” An article from The New York Times series Your Brain on Computers explained it this way: “The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming email can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.” In short, I’m increasingly feeling like I’m missing parts of my day-to-day life because I can’t hear it over the hum of technology addiction.

I’ve had something of a slow slide into technology use. I grew up without a single screen in my house, which is a fancy way of saying we didn’t have a TV (personal computers were years away). We weren’t a Waldorf family, we were just something of a lazy, slightly hippy family. My parents didn’t want to have to bother monitoring our TV intake, so they didn’t get a TV. We got a (actually kind of usable) personal computer somewhere around 1994, along with dial up internet. In 1996, I moved beyond AOL chat rooms, to the beginnings of my more modern relationship with internet, in the form of Ani DiFranco fan sites. (The internet has always functioned a bit as portable counterculture for me). My graduation gift in 1998 was my own (huge) computer to take to college, which I mostly used to write my papers, and check email once or twice a day. And then, in about 2003, I got a laptop. That, of course, was the beginning of the end. With a laptop, I checked my email…whenever I was home. I resisted iPhones for quite awhile (much to David’s dismay). I’d tell him, “The last thing I need is more internet. Internet on the bus? No thank you.” But in 2010, I gave in. Since then, things have moved pretty quickly downhill.

My parents, of course, were right. The problem with technology is that when you have it, you have to limit it. And limiting it is really really hard.

Last month I was in the car, listening to an NPR story about the national day of unplugging, digital shabbat, and the slow tech movement. I kept thinking that I really needed a space for a tech Shabbat in my life, but was unsure if we could pull off unplugging for a day. That, frankly, was embarrassing.

But that isn’t what made me snap. A few weeks later, I was downstairs in our garden on a mid-day break, and had that feeling of seeing double that too much screen time brings. I looked around and had the crushing realization that I had what I wanted, and I was missing it. I had the superficial wish listy things that I’d wanted since I was a little girl: wood floors, vegetable garden, and one recently acquired hammock. But beyond those physical things, I had an awesome partner, a job I loved, a great community of friends, and one hilarious and amazing tiny baby. It had been a long road, and life was still glorious in its imperfections, but I had so much goodness around me.

And I was still pinning things to my Pinterest boards.

Pining and Pinning

I have a great Pinterest board for our garden. It has hammocks and Adirondack chairs and bougainvillea on it. I also now have hammocks and Adirondack chairs and bougainvillea in our garden. But instead of being out there every single sunny moment that we could, far too often I was inside, pinning new ideas. When I was playing with the baby, I was also instagramming with my phone. (He’s really cute, you guys. Such things must be documented.) I was missing out, and I was increasingly aware of it.

The problem, of course, is that so much of our lives are now tied to the computer. There is the mundane stuff: looking up where a restaurant is, emailing for an appointment, shopping for…hammocks. But there is the good stuff too. As I sit and write this, I’m looking at a screen, doing a job I love. My life is filled with real-life friends I’ve made through the internet. The blog-o-sphere has enriched my life for a decade, and I’m so honored to get to give back to it. Tamera of Verhext has called the internet “The fog layer on the real world,” and that’s it. The internet can be an amazing place, but it’s not, in fact, the real 3D physical world. Continue reading Don’t Pin It—Do It

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 186 Comments »

Apr 2013

Marriage And Early Motherhood Part II

Last week we gave you part one of Marriage and Early Motherhood, a two-part interview series where I get to pepper Meg with questions about her thoughts on choosing to have kids, being pregnant, and her perspective on the past few months of being a new mom. While the idea for this feature might have been ours (well, mine. I possibly harassed Meg into talking more about motherhood in one post than she probably plans to for the rest of time), the content is decidedly yours. The questions we’re asking were sourced from the almost five hundred comments you left in our open thread on the same subject back in March. And man are they good ones. If I’m being honest, part two is my favorite half of the interview, because today we get at some of the more taboo topics in motherhood—the stuff we aren’t talking about in a lot of other places: bodies, support systems, and the pressure for motherhood to be an all-consuming force. So if you missed part one, go check it out and come back. If you’re here for round two, let’s dig in.

—Maddie

Cage Match: My Thighs vs. Awesome Baby

Maddie: Ok, I just want to throw a few words out there and have you respond to them. I want to hear you talk about vanity. Because I feel like there is a lot that goes into, just, body stuff.

Meg: I think people are kind of ashamed to say that they have issues around vanity. And I mean, I think humans do. I don’t even think that’s something just women do. I gained more than forty percent of my body weight during pregnancy, and I was not made to feel awesome about that by the medical establishment. I did not do anything funny; that’s just what my body wanted to put on. I then turned around and it is almost all gone, I have a four-month-old, and I have not spent an inordinate amount of time at the gym. In fact, I could not go to the gym until week twelve because of medical stuff. So, my point there is not that you should be required to lose all of your pregnancy weight. If you can’t breastfeed, for example, it’s just going to take a long time. My point is the human body is way more resilient than we’re led to believe.

That said, there are parts of your body that will never be the same. There are things that’ll never be the same, but I hear people talking about it like that’s a reason to stop themselves from having kids if they otherwise want to. My problem with that is not the vanity, because you’re allowed the vanity. My problem with that is that shit’s going to happen anyway because you’re going to get older. So if you want to have kids, the idea that you would, like, worry that your boobs aren’t gonna look as awesome? Newsflash, your boobs are not going to look as awesome. That train has already left the station. So, there are parts of your body that will never look the same, though for me it hasn’t been terrifically extreme. I don’t want to say this in a minimizing your fears kind of way, but it literally is like, I look at my thighs and think, “I have a lot of stretch marks,” and then I look at my baby and think, “There is a new human being who lives here who is awesome.” I’m not saying I don’t have huge amounts of vanity like everybody else, but you can’t even compare. I’m like, “My thighs vs. awesome baby? Whatever, I’m going to buy a different swimsuit this year. Moving on.”

Everything Will Change…Right?

Maddie: Okay, so the other word. Motherhood and identity and all that goes with it. Motherhood and identity. I feel like you have a lot to say about motherhood, so I’m not even going to ask you a question.

Meg: Not everyone shares my opinion on this, but I do not feel like I have a new identity. At all. Period. The interesting thing about this is there are a lot of very smart women in my life who I’m very close to and respect a ton who have really felt like motherhood sort of internally rebuilt them. And I do not feel like that. I feel like I am exactly the person I was before I had the baby. I just now have a baby and in a lot of ways—and I don’t mean this in an everyone should have a baby sort of way at all—but the change for me is that I feel like I have a richer and deeper interior life than I did. I would say that I’m happier than I was, but you know, my interests are not any different. And my identity is not any different. And if I can say that now, when I am still deeply in the thrall of hormones, then that is a pretty radical thing to say. Because I think often your identity really shifts when you’re in the thrall of the hormones, and then by the time you’re the parent of a twelve-year-old, you’re not—I have friends who are parents of twelve-year-olds because, again, people we know got pregnant right after high school—by the time you kid is thirteen, you’re not like, “My identity revolves around my teenager.” But I didn’t even really experience that in the short term. Your mileage may vary, however.

Maddie: What about the flipside? Maybe it’s because, I dunno, I’m a couple years behind, or because of where I lived, or whatever, but on the flip side, I feel this extreme pressure to, if we do have a kid one day, to make it sort of no big deal. I did the same thing with my marriage where I was like, “Just married, no big deal. I think I like this guy, he’s okay,” kind of thing. And I’m afraid that I will be…

Meg: Why is that?

Maddie: I think it’s a rejection of the cultural narrative that it’s this huge, life altering…

Meg: …everything will change.

Maddie: Yes, exactly. So I feel like I need to say, “Nope, all the same here. Fine and dandy.” And I don’t know if that’s something that will change, or if I’m shooting myself in the foot with that.

Meg: I think you have to allow for the fact that things change. My identity has not shifted, but that doesn’t mean that all kinds of things haven’t changed. You know, there’s a whole new person in our lives. So, I think it’s a little bit of a balance. I also think that I’m in a weird situation in terms of identity, because super weirdly to me—because friends of ours had kids twelve and thirteen years ago—but super weirdly to me we are young within our friends circle to have kids, young within the greater Bay Area professional scene to have kids. In David’s office, the people who have kids the same age as ours are partners in their early forties. So, I’ve been in this weird situation where I roll up to daycare and I’m wearing some—David always mocks me that I’m wearing some trendy crap. I’m wearing like, Hunter wellies and patterned tights and a jean skirt and a striped shirt. And everyone else is noticeably older and wearing office clothes. There really can be this sort of mismatch, I feel like I look like the babysitter. Which is ridiculous because I’m thirty-two. So it can be sort of interesting the ways your identity maybe doesn’t shift, and then how you relate to other parents. I haven’t figured that part out yet. At all.

How We Stay Sane

Maddie: One thing I want to talk about is this idea of support. Because I feel like there is this myth of you and your partner, and that’s it, and you just do this. And I’ve noticed just by spending time with you—you have a pretty big support system.

Meg: Maddie knows that because she had my baby at her farm all day on Saturday. And she couldn’t do it alone at her farm.

Maddie: I couldn’t!

Meg: She had a husband and a roommate and a box of Chicken in a Bisket. And a dog.

Maddie: So true.

Meg: I think support is the most key thing to talk about. Continue reading Marriage And Early Motherhood Part II

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Gender & Feminism, Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 190 Comments »

Apr 2013

Marriage And Early Motherhood, Part I

When I first approached Meg to do an interview with me about early motherhood, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to get out of it exactly. It’s not so much that Michael and I are even in a place where we want kids yet, but I’m definitely in a place where I want to be able to talk about wanting kids without having to spiral down into hyperbole. So much of what’s available for conversations about parenting is either fear-mongering, or condescending, or prescriptive, and none of it allows for me to safely express my anxieties about having children in a space where I feel like I’m being given platform for honest discussion (both online and off). And if the 500 plus comments from our open thread on the subject are any indication, I’m willing to bet that the same goes for a lot of you.

Over the past few years APW has played the role for me of best friend’s big sister, who will tell it like it is. So, I thought maybe an old fashioned sleepover-type confessional could be the answer. As some of you might know from Meg’s pregnancy announcement last year, Meg and David are choosing to keep their family life pretty private, so this might be the most I ever get out of her on the subject. Meg will be the first to tell you that she’s no expert on child-rearing (her words were “I’ve been at this for exactly four and a half months. You can call me in for expert advice when I’ve had ten kids.”) Which means that this interview is not meant to be in any way prescriptive, nor is it meant to represent the experience of all new mothers everywhere. Rather, in the same way that I once found solace in these pages hearing that marriage wouldn’t fundamentally change who I am if I didn’t let it, and that a career move isn’t a prison sentence, this interview gave me the reassurance that having children doesn’t mean getting on a roller coaster ride and enduring it until it’s time to get off. When Meg and I first started talking about this interview, she told me, “I don’t want to offer any advice on motherhood, other than the magic that is overnight diapers. The rest is just thoughts from the trenches. Your mileage may vary.” I think that just about sums it up. So here is part one of Marriage And Early Motherhood (part two to follow next week). May it spark a non-terrifying conversation that makes you feel a little better too.

—Maddie

That Gut Feeling

Meg: Are you going to set the scene? Wisteria. A lime popsicle. The sun. Chicken enchiladas, cooked by Meg’s husband.

Maddie: [Laughing] Yes. The enchiladas were really good. Ok, so one of the first questions people asked in the comments of our open thread was about the issue of confidence with the decision to have kids. Because I think a lot of people are concerned that if you aren’t 100% certain that you want, want, WANT a baby, that you have no business having one. And I’m curious what your take is on that?

Meg: Yeah, I think that’s bullshit. There’s this Elizabeth Gilbert quote in Committed where someone says to her something like, “Having a baby is like having a tattoo on your face. If you’re not sure about it, you shouldn’t get it.” And I just don’t think that’s true. There are very few decisions in life that you’re that sure about, period. Right? And I think that probably anyone who is 100% sure about having kids and never has any questions about it, that is where I might question whether or not you knew what you were getting into. Because you’re committing to a very big life change, and the scary thing about having kids is that it’s the one of the few things in your life you can’t get out of. The dirty secret about marriage is that if it doesn’t work you get a divorce. Yeah, it sucks, and it’s going to fuck up your life but you move on. The scary part about having a kid is that it’s irrevocable. So if there isn’t some part of you that’s like, “Uh, is this a good idea?” I just worry that you haven’t applied your analytical self to it.

Maddie: I feel like there’s this thing that’s happening, where there’s celebrity pregnancies are really oddly sexualized, and then in educated, urban communities there is this glorification of pregnancy and motherhood. I’m curious how you anticipated, and also dealt with that. Because that’s something I’m scared of… having to explain why I’m either bottle feeding or not using cloth diapers, or on the flipside having to explain doing all those things… I guess, it’s the whole mainstream versus indie thing.

Meg: Right. In some ways we were protected because we’re so early in our friends circle having kids.

Maddie: Which is hilarious also.

Meg: Right? Because I’m, what? 32? But we have a couple of friends who have kids… our friends who have kids have kids who are either five or thirteen (we have a lot of friends that got pregnant right after high school, or are a little older than us, or who just don’t have kids at all.) There was no one that was contemporaneously having children. So we were able to do things the way we thought were logical, which has led to some interesting social moments later, when we were around parents, because we, like, didn’t know that everyone got an infant car seat and it just didn’t seem logical to us, so we didn’t get an infant car seat. We got a convertible car seat, and then we didn’t have an infant carrier to carry the baby around with and I totally looked like I was making a political statement when I was out with other mothers. But that sort of protected me in some ways. I did feel a lot of pressure around the, what I call the Cult of Whole Motherhood: give birth at home, don’t have an epidural, don’t ever bottle feed, etc. Though ultimately a lot of that stuff worked itself out. I sort of fundamentally (no surprise here, the whole site is built around this) am just not a dogmatic person. So I went into labor being like, you know it might be nice not to get an epidural, but we’ll see, I had a pretty precipitous labor so—our doula actually said it was the most intense labor she’d ever witnessed—so I got an epidural. I had milk supply issues right away, so I supplemented with formula. Because it seemed like the baby was going to starve if we didn’t. And now, he’s 95% breast fed. So I sort of worked it out by doing what was logical. But there does have to be a certain amount of just tuning out what different people want you to do.

Do Your Hormones Eat Your Rational Brain?

Maddie: Shifting to post-baby, one of the questions that really struck me in the comments of the open thread was whether or not you can avoid your own hormones? And this idea that there’s a lot of inevitability built into having a kid, in that you can say you’re not going to want to do X, or you can think you don’t want do Y, but once the baby’s there and your hormones kick in, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Meg: Sort of yes, sort of no. I think the way the narrative is built is really damaging. You’re not going to become a new person unless on some level you want to become a new person or are secretly hoping you’ll become a new person or are just really embracing that. So this whole idea that “You just don’t now, you just don’t know”—I think in the big picture I don’t know that that’s actually true. I knew I wanted to keep working, and people said “Oh you just don’t know, you just don’t know,” and, well, no. I know who I am, right, so I do want to keep working.

However, you don’t know what your hormones are going to do. But the idea that your hormones take over your rational brain is not true. I was not aware the I was physically going to go through withdrawal having the baby in daycare, I was going to be physically shaky at first because my hormones were at conflict with my rational mind. My rational mind wanted to be at work, but also my baby was happier in daycare, I was happier with him in daycare, but my hormones were telling me something else. So yes. In some ways you can’t avoid your hormones and they are super powerful, and they’re going to do what they are going to do, but your rational mind is still as much in play as ever.

Maddie: When it comes to a lot of the other stuff that I think people try to caution you about: the lack of sleep, how much attention they need, how many physical needs they have, I know a lot of people expressed concern over just being able to function as they know themselves in those early days and whether or not they could physically survive it. Continue reading Marriage And Early Motherhood, Part I

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