After Birth Read Online Free PDF Page A

to consider. There was early intervention for absolutely anything.
    Imagine: I had dared to imagine that we would talk to one another, that the boring specifics of child rearing would be incidental.
    I mean, let’s pause to acknowledge that it’s possible to be a good mother while doing other things. You know: multitasking. Scouting the horizon for tigers. Gathering herbs. Stirring the pot. Reading a fucking newspaper.
    Even the laid-back granola DIY homestead types were anal shrews about their laid-back-ness. Over email a fight broke out. A sippy-cup brand disagreement devolved into a fight in which one predicted a life of crime for the other’s child. Tireless. Just take care of business, ladies. Don’t make a fucking hobby out of it. Feed the kid, bathe the kid, help the kid to sleep, hug and kiss and smile and hug and kiss some more until they’re too old for that; then just try to model the best behavior you possibly can for the rest of your life, and do it again tomorrow; it’s not fucking science. Find some other things to think about.
    I’m not going to pretend my kid is special, like other kids who starve and freeze and get raped and beaten and have to work in factories and get cancer from the fumes, too bad, so sad, but my kid is going to be warm and organic and toxin-free and safe and have everything he wants when he wants it and go to a good college and all is right with the world! Fuck that myopic bullshit. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to get mauled by some force I can’t pretend I can predict. We all live in the same fucked-up world.
    Then there were stories about how this or that one just couldn’t breastfeed, her sister gave it up after two months or six months or a year because it hurt or she just didn’t have any milk or come on, enough was enough, or hey, isn’t there all sorts of unfair pressure on women to nurse and shouldn’t it be, like, a choice? Yes, ladies. Congratulations: you have choices.
    A chore, trying to talk to these women. You saw them calcifying. You saw them race to this endpoint, then come to a stop and calcify, never to move again.
    I practiced my blank stare. How noble of you to plug your kid with some processed milk-derivative shit marketed by the same people who brought the world Oreos, how very feminist of you, yes, every woman makes her choices, absolutely, what glorious freedom we enjoy. Way to stick it to the man. How empowered you are, subverting a basic function of your body. May I shake your hand? You show that body of yours who’s boss! You get on with your bad self. What shipshape shiny master’s tools you’ve got there. How’s the dismantling of the master’s house working out?
     
    A Friday. My shift at the co-op. Box and bag groceries, sort recycled plastic, align merchandise on the shelves. (This last is called, amusingly, “fronting.”)
    Naomi is my boss. Twenty-three, dropped out of SUNY sophomore year, lives in an abandoned nineteenth-century savings bank in Troy with three art students and fourteen stray cats. They throw massive dance parties that start at midnight on the last Friday of every month.
    She is forever handing out flyers.
    Coming Friday? She’s adorable, and makes me feel old.
    Gonna try , I always lie.
     
    My second friend was Jenny Jacobson, of the alliterative name and showbiz aspirations. She had an agent, went on constant auditions for commercials, eventually booked an ad for cereal, real big deal. She was a powerful force in the sixth grade, respected and feared in equal measure. Everything turned to shit for her by eighth grade (bulimia, Bellevue), but she was still in her prime when I knew her.
    Jenny’s parents were getting a divorce. She had been prepped for the apocalypse with books about little girls whose parents were getting divorced, and with her very own shrink, Henri. They lived in a glass-and-steel penthouse on lower Park Avenue, and her father had this interesting way of staring at me but then looking away