Confessions of a Domestic Failure

by Bunmi Laditan

  “Which kids would love those? Human ones?” I said to Aubrey, as if she could understand anything I said. She blinked.

  Emily held up a book. “Don’t forget to pick up Alicia Winter’s new wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, fat-free dessert cookbook! It’s in stores now!”

  “I’ll get right on that,” I said sarcastically to Aubrey, who was now happily chewing on a runaway strand of my hair. I really needed to get some friends. Surely they’d appreciate my witty commentary more than an eight-month-old could.

  Truth be told, I’d love to be the kind of mom who showed up to playdates with a tray of delicious, homemade treats: baby carrots cut up to look like snakes, baskets of muffins made with beet puree, and hand-churned yogurt in mini glass mason jars topped with fruit I preserved myself. The other moms would watch in astonishment as their children devoured my domestic creations. But so far I’ve been invited to exactly zero playdates. Even if I were asked, I’d probably bring a few bags of drive-through fries. Fries are a vegetable, right? They’re also vegan.

  I stole another sip of my coffee and turned up the volume.

  Emily was now sitting on her trademark pink EW-logoed interviewer couch, having what she called a Mama Heart to Mama Heart. It’s how she ended every episode of her show—with a few words of her own brand of wisdom.

  “My mission for The Emily Walker Show has always been to inspire mothers.” The camera zoomed in tight. “I see you there, mama. You’re tired, frumpy, exhausted...”

  I looked down at my stained purple sweatshirt and holey pants and glanced around the room. Were there cameras in here?

  Emily narrowed her eyes dramatically. “Every day I get hundreds of emails and letters asking me how I raise my five beautiful children while running my empire, and I’m thrilled to announce that my book, Motherhood Better, comes out today. In it you will find the keys to my success and your own. Are you ready to be the mom you’ve always known you can be? Are you ready to truly enjoy motherhood?”

  I found myself staring at the camera, hypnotized. She was saying all of the right things. It’s true. I had always wondered how Emily’s social media accounts were constantly full of gorgeous meals and perfectly groomed children, and boasted of her latest ventures, when the only thing I’d accomplished last week was moving my laundry pile from the bedroom floor to the recliner. I’d also figured out that a spoon half full of Nutella and half full of peanut butter dipped in powdered sugar tastes like a Reese’s cup.

  “My new book, Motherhood Better, will take you from frumpy to fabulous, struggling to spectacular. It’s time to become the mother you’ve always known you could be.”

  This was exactly what I needed. With that realization, I practically flew off the couch, startling Aubrey, and grabbed my computer from the dining room table. Within minutes I’d purchased the book from BookSpot, a local store downtown and opted for same day pickup. This was an emergency, after all.

  I was almost shaking with excitement. This was my moment. This is exactly what I’d been waiting for. That, and I was running out of places to hide laundry.

  I opened my email and was excited to see a confirmation message waiting for me.

  You purchased Motherhood Better by Emily Walker.

  I looked at my phone. Only four hours until the store opened. Today I will become a mother, better. A better mother? Anyway—I’ll get the book today is what I’m saying.

  2 P.M.

  I’d finally gotten Aubrey down for a nap and was lounging on my bed, trying not to let the two sinks full of dishes distract me from my well-deserved break. The day had been one for the record books. Everything that could have gone wrong had, and I learned some important lessons.

  Lesson #1: If you forget the diaper bag at home and your baby needs changing at a bookstore, remember that you CANNOT, in fact, craft a diaper out of an old ziplock freezer bag that you found in the trunk of your car and a pair of emergency period panties from your glove compartment.

  Lesson #2: When you arrive at home and see that your mother-in-law, Gloria, has popped in for a surprise visit with one of her classic six-cheese casseroles because she thinks (knows) you can’t cook and doesn’t want her David “starving to death,” don’t forget about your ziplock bag/period-panty diaper monstrosity and hand the baby to her.

  Lesson #3: When your mother-in-law gasps and recoils in horror upon changing the baby and seeing your ziplock bag/period-panty diaper debacle (complete with a stained merlot mosaic of periods past), think of something clever and blasé to say rather than just standing there with your mouth open. Don’t manically yell “Yolo!” She’ll just ask what “yolo” means and you’ll sound like an idiot explaining it. Also, don’t try to cover your tracks and say that yolo is an ancient Tibetan prayer, because even though your mother-in-law doesn’t know how to call before she visits, she does know how to Google.

  Lesson #4: Be more prepared. Keep the diaper bag by the door. You should be better at this by now.

  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 breast-fed 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 breast-fed 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.

  It’s not that I don’t want to run to the store for groceries when Aubrey wakes up, it’s just that leaving the house feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

  If I could ask the entire world one question, it would be: Why does it seem like people hate moms so much? Before anyone could accuse me of overreacting, I’d point out my first piece of evidence: the size of parking spots. Last time I was at the grocery store, as I squeezed my eight-months-postpartum body between millimeters of steel like a human panini, I had to wonder whether whoever paints those lines either...

  Has never seen a human family before.

  —or—

  Despises mothers with the heat of a thousand diaper rashes.

  How hard would it be to paint the white lines two inches farther apart? Would these mom-hater paint despots rather we go around scraping their BMW two-seaters with our minivan doors?

  Is it deliberate fat shaming? Yes, I’ve only lost seven pounds of baby weight (which is weird, because the baby weighed eight pounds, two ounces), but we can’t all be celebrity moms who go straight from hospital gowns to string bikinis.

  And unlike those magical Hollywood moms, I didn’t have a personal chef on call to make me macrobiotic, paleo, organic, fat-free, sugar-free, carb-free (taste-free?) meals every day.

  It probably doesn’t help that the closest thing I get to doing sit-ups is lying on the living room floor lifting my head for sips of Shiraz, but a girl’s gotta live a little. And there’s no way I could quit gluten. Do they know how many carbs it takes to stay awake when you have a baby who sleeps about fourteen minutes a night? A lot. Cutting carbs would make me a bad mother and I have to put my child first.

  I got up and made my way into the kitchen, savoring the silence of nap time. I browsed the pantry for a few seconds before grabbing a jar of chunky peanut butter. After selecting a spoon from the dishwasher, I helped myself to a heaping mountain of peanut-buttery delight.

  “I really should exercise,” I said to no one in particular, my mouth full of sticky goodness.

  Last week Emily had a celebrity trainer on her show. She showed the audience how to lie on their backs and bench press their babies while wearing a hot pink sports bra and matching designer leggings. I was tempted to get on my living room carpet and give it a shot, but I had a premonition of Aubrey puking partially digested milk into my hair. I smelled bad enough without being doused in baby vinaigrette.

  I took another spoonful of peanut butter. Peanuts have protein, right? Protein is important.

  Back to the ridiculous parking spaces. Every time I parked and had to squeeze my jiggly post-baby stomach between vehicles it was just another reminder that I’m not where I should be, body-wise. It’s hard enough getting out of the house with an eight-month-old who only poops when we’re in stores.

  Which led me to...

  Piece of Evidence That The World Hates Moms #2: Public Changing Tables.

  Nobody’s asking for a Four Seasons-inspired changing room with baby bidets and Egyptian cotton, rosewater-scented wipes individually handed to me by a gloved bathroom attendant, but three days ago I almost gagged changing Aubrey on a sticky, crusty monstrosity with broken straps, soiled with what I HOPED was dried prune baby food. I did my best to clean the biohazard with wipes and hand sanitizer, but really?

  Sometimes it feels like moms are supposed to be invisible in society. Seen but not heard. We’re supposed to quietly and quickly go about our task of raising perfectly mannered, groomed Gap babies who speak four languages before they’re six without distracting the rest of the world from their important work.

  I took one more heaping spoonful of peanut butter before replacing the lid and closing the pantry door. How nice would it be to live in a world that actually considers mothers? In Sweden, everyone takes care of everyone else’s babies. Seriously. I read somewhere that when parents go to cafés or restaurants, they just leave their strollers outside by the door on the sidewalk, knowing that if the baby cries or needs help, passersby will jump right in and breastfeed or whatever. That sure beats feeling like every peep your baby makes in public is a capital crime.

  I’ve watched way too many episodes of Law & Justice to put my faith in a stranger on the street, but
it kind of sounds like paradise. The last (and only) time we took Aubrey out to eat, I ended up standing outside the restaurant bouncing her around while she screamed and tried to buck out of my arms like a wild pony. I ended up eating my cold eggplant parm out of a Styrofoam box in the kitchen at midnight. Good times.

  My train of thought was interrupted by a baby yell. Was that Aubrey? I listened again. Nothing. Lately, I’d been experiencing phantom cries—thinking I heard Aubrey make noise when she hadn’t. David thinks I’m losing it. He’s not wrong.

  Oh, wait, there was that sound again. Definitely Aubrey. I guess the dishes will have to wait.

  9:30 P.M.

  I was lying in bed next to David, who was sleeping soundly. Instead of joining him in dreamland, I had Emily’s book propped open with one hand, and my phone’s flashlight in the other, illuminating the page.

  So far, the book was everything I expected. It only took half a chapter to make me feel like crap. Inspired crap, but crap.

  Motherhood can be a joyful experience if you allow it to be. Too many moms spend their days in tense anger or regret, which is then energetically transmitted to their children.

  Good to know. I’ve been frying Aubrey’s heart via my toxic gamma rays.

  As a mother, you are the gatekeeper of your child’s health. It’s up to you whether their bodies are filled with preservatives and chemicals, or nourished with homemade broths and fresh-from-the-oven grain-free breads.

  I ran downstairs, flipped on the light and grabbed the Funny O’s that Aubrey gobbles up from her high chair every morning. I turned the box around to read the label.

  Whole grain oats. That’s good. Oats grow in fields under sunlight and in the fresh air.

  Modified corn starch. Okay, well corn is a vegetable. Modified. I tried not to picture Aubrey growing an extra hand out of her forehead.

  Sugar. Salt.

  Are babies supposed to eat this? I vowed to myself to spend the extra dollar on the organic ones next time. I guess the book was working. Sitting down on the couch I continued reading.