You know everything you need to know.
She began to whisper it to herself like a lullaby to soothe herself when nothing she did seemed to soothe her baby.
Miraculously, by the next appointment with the pediatrician, June had gained weight. The incessant feeding and pumping and fenugreek tea had worked. Gwen had never felt so fulfilled. The rush of dopamine that came with this accomplishment was unlike anything she’d ever felt in her high-achieving life. With just her body, she had corrected their course. June was on her way to thriving, which meant that Gwen was thriving too.
Until she wasn’t. Again.
It started with June developing daily diarrhea that had a greenish tint to it. Per Dr. Goodall’s instructions, Gwen scooped some of the poop from June’s diaper into a Ziploc baggie and brought the sample to the doctor’s office.
“You’re eating something that doesn’t agree with her,” Dr. Goodall said.
Because of course it was Gwen’s fault. Again.
“Do you drink coffee?” she asked.
Did she drink coffee?Who did this doctor think Gwen was?
“Um, no,” Gwen said.
“Good. That’s the issue for some moms. The caffeine, the acidity, it doesn’t agree with the baby.”
No shit, Sherlock,Gwen wanted to say, but instead: “Yeah, I know.”
Dr. Goodall gave her a paper that had clearly been xeroxed about a billion times, with the title “Elimination Diet for Breastfeeding Mothers” at the top. The idea was to eliminate one common food culprit at a time, wait awhile to see if symptoms improved, then eliminate another food. This could go on for weeks until the offending food was identified.
“You can start with dairy. For most people, it’s dairy.”
Gwen thought of all the pizza she’d been consuming. Jeff had been ordering delivery regularly, multiple boxes, so they’d have leftovers for days. She thought of how she’d been starting every day with anorganic yogurt smoothie that she’d mistakenly thought was healthy and nourishing. All that protein, all that calcium, all those probiotics. At night, as the sun set and she braced herself for sleepless dark, she dipped her spoon into a carton of ice cream as a sort of salve. It was a reminder that she was capable of experiencing pleasure. Dr. Goodall was reminding her that she was a mother now; pleasure was not a priority.
“Can’t I just remove several things at one time instead of doing this drawn-out thing?” Gwen asked.
“You can. You have to consider how limited your diet would be. I know you want to keep breastfeeding, which demands a lot of calories. You have to think about your own health, not just your baby’s.”
She was using that same tone as when she’d saidMom, maybe we need to talk about how you’re doing.
“I’m savvy with nutritional stuff. I can figure it out,” Gwen said.
“I’m not just talking about physical health.”
Gwen felt the rage simmering inside again.
“Thank you for your concern,” she said.
She was not thankful at all, but she’d already learned that she had to be calm and smiley for Dr. Goodall, or Dr. Goodall would team up with Jeff to question every single thing she was doing as a mother.
That night, another night of half-hour stretches of sleep, Gwen googled recipes while feeding June. She’d decided she’d start by removing dairy, soy, and eggs. “It can’t be that hard,” she’d told Jeff, who looked skeptical. She used the Notes app in her phone to prepare a grocery list to give him the next day. When she was satisfied with her list, she tapped over to Instagram for her daily visit to the Mother Nurture page and saw that Angeni Luna had posted her birth story. There was an all-capsTrigger Warningat the top of the caption with an explanation that saidIf natural births disturb you in any way, shape, or form, I encourage you to skip this post and protect your emotional state.
Gwen did not think she qualified as someone who would be disturbed by a natural birth, so she swiped away the “sensitive content” warning and watched the video. She had watched plenty of natural birth videos during her pregnancy, studying them with the same intensity she’d used to pass the bar exam on the first try.
The video was beautifully edited, nothing like those amateur iPhone videos on YouTube. Angeni Luna described it as “real and raw,” but it was only two minutes long, representing just about 0.1 percent of the actual labor (Angeni Luna said it had been about twenty hours from first contraction to delivery). Still, it was enthralling—the close-ups of the pain on Angeni Luna’s face, her eyes closed, her skin covered in a sheen of sweat, as she crouched on all fours in her giant birthing tub, her head resting on its edge. Her husband was behind her in the tub, his arms wrapped around her middle, his face contorted in a pain that mirrored hers. They cut to her still in the tub but squatting, her husband still behind her, his palms pressing into her thighs. Her breasts and her vulva were blurred in accordance with social media policies. After the next cut, she was there with the baby in her arms at some undefined period of time later. Angeni and the baby were both clean and calm, looking as if they had not been through any kind of trauma at all.
Gwen didn’t realize that she was crying until she heard a voice, seemingly from another dimension: “You okay?”
Jeff was standing in the doorway, in his suit, which was extremely confusing until Gwen realized that it was no longer the middle of the night but the early morning. June was asleep on her chest, undisturbed by her mother’s sobbing. Gwen was starting to realize that this was motherhood—giving every part of yourself to your child while they were completely oblivious to your sacrifice.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and sat up straighter in bed, only then noticing that she had been in an awkward position all these hours, her back hunched, neck cricked.
“Where are you going?” she asked him, trying her very best to sound sane.
