Illo: David Saracino

Over the weekend, my friend told me about her 2-year-old son’s anal fissure. We were strolling through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, admiring the cherry blossoms as our kids scampered Frogger-style through three lanes of Bugaboos, when she confessed that he couldn’t poop without crying.

“Poor guy,” she sighed. “He won’t take baths, either.” Then she proceeded to describe the wound in detail, before adding, “It’s the kind of thing some people would put on Facebook.” I didn’t need to scroll through my news feed to prove her right. In the past week alone, I have seen photos of a grotesquely infected eye, a placental encapsulation and a “potty” full of urine. 

Posting cringe-inducingly intimate information for public consumption is nothing new (hell, Mandy Stadtmiller and Lena Dunham make careers out of it), but there’s something about the parental overshare that’s especially creepy, probably because in 99.9 percent of cases, it’s nonconsensual. It’s one thing to whore yourself out for media attention, mass retweets and blog page-views (I say this confidently, having reviewed a set of what can only be described as “vagina weights” for a website in 2011); it’s another thing to whore out your kids.

Take, for example, the idea of baby shaming, in which parents post photos of their (mostly) preverbal children holding signs outlining their various transgressions (“I hit Daddy in the face when he told me he loved me ... and then I laughed!”). Upon grazing the zeitgeist sometime last year, this practice quickly expanded to include older children; however, the sight of a teenager standing in a busy intersection wearing a sandwich board filled with shortcomings struck a slightly less hilarious note, perhaps due to the obvious emotional abuse.

Now, the Tumblr blog “Reasons My Son Is Crying,” in which a father pauses to take a photo every time his young child experiences existential anxiety, is the shame meme du jour, and I personally can’t wait until the titular son grows up to start his own blog, “Reasons My Dad and I No Longer Speak.”

Outrageously confessional personal essays are another popular method of ensuring future therapy sessions for your knee-high family members. “I love my son more than my daughter,” a mom blogger named Kate wrote breathlessly on the parenting site Babble. Her post instantly went viral, attracting commenters who came bearing both casseroles and pitchforks. But that was in 2011. Now Kate looks like a total wuss compared to the scores of parents who readily admit, in print, with a byline, to not loving any of their kids at all. In a culture that values page-views over scruples, no tirade can ever go too far. Mommie Dearest has a HuffPo login, and she’s not afraid to use it.

At this juncture, I feel I should own up to the fact that I am, as an individual at least, a huge oversharer. I recently took it upon myself to inform the Internet that my menstrual cycle had finally returned after an 18-month postpartum drought, and I once wrote a blog post comparing my pubic hair to Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, which all but guarantees a stage in the not-too-distant future during which my son will refuse to look me in the eye. I try to heed the example of breeder-mocking blogs like STFU, Parents and keep my kid out of my deep emotional need for online validation, but this very column—which will live forever in page caches even if you end up using the paper version to line your cat box—will ensure that Sam will someday have a Hansel-and-Gretel-like trail to the roots of his various neuroses.

It’s easy to become an oversharing parent, because as soon as the cord gets cut, your TMI meter essentially goes with it. Becoming a mother or father means bidding farewell to the days when the frequency of another person’s bowel movements could fairly be classified as “too much information.” Ditto the texture of their rashes, or their tendency to fondle their genitalia while bathing.

We gleefully report on the antics of our children as though they are not our own flesh and blood but tiny actors in the stage play of our lives, hired to entertain us—and, through our reporting, all of our friends—with their adorably naive bon mots. Something about the fact that it’s a child you’re talking about makes it seem okay to share things like “Have you seen Camden’s skin tag?” or “Tallulah stuck my toothbrush up her butt the other night.” It’s a tunnel-visioned affliction that assumes everyone else is as interested in the minutiae of your obsessions as you are, kind of like people who get an iPhone and suddenly cannot stop talking about their new apps.

The problem is that kids are real human beings who have every right to their personal privacy, even if they aren’t old enough to understand it just yet. And if the oversharing is extreme enough, their lives can be impacted in potentially serious ways. One mom blogger I read inadvertently got her 6-year-old kicked out of school for openly complaining about its administration on her website. Another was contacted by police when a (fully clothed) photo of her daughter was recovered from the computer of a pedophile. And then there are the online media ambulance-chasers who capitalize on big news stories by throwing their personal anecdotes into the mix.

Remember “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”? I’m surprised that no one released a “My Son Could Have Been a Boston Bomber” trend piece. And while I realize that these types of stories might help other parents feel better about their challenging or abnormal children, that’s simply not enough to justify exposing a teenager’s deep emotional issues to the world at large—a world that will someday include his or her future employers, co-workers, partners and children.

Who knows what my life would be like had my own mother had access to Facebook in 1980. My friend Salvador and I famously played a game we called “Look in Butt,” which would surely at least have merited a status update, if not also a tastefully censored photograph. And I’m not even going to touch the preteen years, during which I developed acne, struggled with insomnia that could only be cured by listening to cassette tapes of Garrison Keillor and lived through what I can only refer to as The Tampon Incident due to the residual shame. Becoming an adult is humiliating enough; there’s really no need to live-tweet it.

To that end, I set limits as to what I will and won’t share about my son. I won’t ever write out his full name online, to keep him from being Google-able before he’s able to control his own Internet identity, and I’ll never intentionally shame or humiliate him just for a laugh or a Facebook like. I don’t care as much if he’s embarrassed by what I write and share about myself, but I want him to feel like I protected him as much as I could.

But even the most protective mother would be hard-pressed to refrain from discussing any compromising details about her son in private, undocumented conversations—especially when she’s been drinking. Getting too anal retentive about this stuff never ends well. That’s how fissures form.

editorial@observer.com

Illustration by Luke McGarry

A childhood drawing of mine hangs above my son’s changing table. It’s a mostly unremarkable work, a giant, floating rectangular head with spiky Bart Simpson hair and a nose that resembles an electrical outlet, rendered in fading green marker on flan-colored paper. And yet it has one feature that distinguishes it from the average preschooler’s half-assed artistic endeavor. Emerging from the head is a speech bubble as round and buoyant as a cumulus cloud. And inside the bubble is one word: FUCK.

The story behind the drawing is disappointingly mundane—I was coloring on the floor of my dad’s office, overheard him drop an F-bomb, asked him how to spell it and rewarded his honesty with a Take Your Daughter to Work Day souvenir that only Louis CK’s refrigerator could love—but hindsight imbues it with profane meaning.

Because some 30 years later, I am still that snub-nosed potty mouth (albeit with a neck and a few more teeth), but now the matriarch of a household in which cursing—or “cussing,” if you live in a state that contains a Waffle House franchise—is wholeheartedly embraced.

I am a member of what Tom Wolfe might call the Fuck Patois generation, in which curses have become acceptable replacements for real words in the way that, say, leggings can pass for pants. I enjoy cursing as a noun (“He doesn’t give a fuck”), as a verb (“Oh, the ‘Fantasy Suite’ is just code for The Bachelor fucking the remaining contestants”), as a piece of adverbial flair (“I’ve been waiting fucking patiently!”) and most often as a sort of Hamburger Helper used to enhance otherwise plain adjectives (“These drunken noodles are fucking good”).

In addition to enhancing my vocabulary, curse words also give me an outlet for pent-up aggression that might otherwise be directed at my fellow man. “Nice one, jackass,” I’ll tell the cracked dish drainer as it deposits suds onto my feet. “Why are you being such a dick?” I’ll shout at my computer as it struggles to find my wifi network. If someone were to film me during an afternoon spent home alone, it would resemble a very dark episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

I can’t blame my parents for this. I mean, yes, it is definitely their fault, if you’re the type of killjoy who prefers to express your discontent by saying things like “Fiddlesticks!” or “Oh, poop.” I’ve always considered my natural-born blasphemy a delightful quirk, on a par with prominent freckles or elbows that can turn inside-out. My family is not athletically inclined in the traditional sense, but cursing has always been a sport I could take to with gusto.

Until now, that is. Now I have a toddler constantly underfoot and within earshot, a toddler whose capacity for understanding the English language is expanding by the minute. Right now his vocabulary is limited to “dis,” “dat,” “ball,” “apple” and “baby,” but it’s only a matter of time until he catches on. I know that if I don’t rein in my language, soon I’m going to be fielding requests for “dis shitty apple,” or “dat fucking ball.” And as much as I want my son to cuss with abandon—if he so chooses—when he’s older, I’d like to keep his tongue G-rated for as long as possible. I’ve already caved when it comes to vices like processed sugar and screen time, so I feel like it’s the least I can do to prevent his playground patter from sounding too much like a Mamet play.

Not that it’s going to be easy, especially since I’m not just policing my own language.

“Where is my butt-fucking phone?” my husband, Jeff, wondered aloud the other day as Sam and I watched Blue’s Clues while clapping and slowly being drained of our will to live, respectively.

“Futt-bucking,” I hissed through my teeth. “Don’t you mean, where is your futt-bucking phone?”

“That is what I meant, you cupid stitch!” Jeff said brightly.

Turning expletives into pig latin-esque gibberish is funny for a while, but it’s not a long-term solution, unless I want to raise Sam to believe that “Ouchebag Day” is some kind of national celebration. So the only option, aside from not cursing at all, which isn’t realistically on the table, is to come up with alternative words that will convey dismay without raising any flags at Child Services. The Internet, naturally, has a number of ideas, most of which sound like something a toothless hillbilly might exclaim upon crawling out from under a rock in a Geico commercial: “Dadgummit! Son of a bucket! Judas Priest!”

Everyone’s favorite adorable diet curse seems to be “fudge,” but I can’t bring myself to use it when only the real thing will do. Fudge is the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter of obscenities, and tastes just as synthetic on the lips.

So what’s a hopeless vulgarian to do? My only strategy, I think, is to hide in plain sight. Much like my drinking, nudity and late-night Netflix abuse, I will have to reserve four-letter fulminations for times when my child is absent or unconscious and thus shielded from my Tourette’s-like outbursts. My neighbors might wonder why I gleefully sing a string of swear words to the tune of “Hava Nagila” while vacuuming, but that’s better than the alternative, right?

By day is another story. Just this weekend, I ran into trouble when I attempted to carry the stroller up a steep set of subway stairs, every elbow jab from unsympathetic passersby sending me into paroxysms of silent profanity.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I grunted. “People are just—” ignorant fucknuts! “—in a hurry. And the stroller is being—” a fucking asshole! “—a little finicky.” I reached the top of the stairs and smiled down at him beatifically, wanting to throw my hat up in the air Mary Tyler Moore-style.

“Ah-hole,” he cooed.

Uh-oh.

“Mama, ah-hole.”

Oh, God. I thought. He’s right. I am an asshole. I’ve already corrupted him at 18 months. I’ll just have to start fresh with the next kid, because this one is ruined. Shit. Shitshitshit!

And then ... I remembered the Granny Smith he’d been gnawing on the train.

“Is this what you want?” I asked hopefully, brandishing his snack.

“AH-HOLE!” he cried happily.

Oh, thank goodness! His innocence is still intact.

What a rucking felief.

editorial@observer.com

Illustration by Kyle Smart.

One day not long after giving birth to my son, I looked down and noticed that my ass was gone. It had just cut and run—didn’t say goodbye, didn’t even leave a note. (Evidence suggested that my breasts had started to give chase but tired by the time they reached my lower ribs.)

“BUTT DISAPPEARED!” I frantically typed into my Google search bar, which has recently suffered through such wide-ranging queries as “celebrities eating” and “what is dry cleaning?” Alas, the Internet offered me no solace, only a variety of links to weight-loss message boards. And yes, I have lost weight: 30 pounds of baby weight plus seven extra pounds of constant breast-feeding, acute postpartum anxiety and a diet that consists almost exclusively of infant tears and orange Fanta. But still, it seems unfair. I have a belly that’s as soft and pliable as fresh pizza dough and which merrily jiggles when my kid climbs into my lap for story time. Why couldn’t that have magically melted away? Why should my butt have to pay for what my uterus has wrought? 

When I was 12, my mother gave me the classic book What’s Happening to My Body?, which I remember because it was exactly then that my corporeal form began to betray me. That summer, for example, I grew breast. That’s right: breast. Singular. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that was also the summer I spent at a Quaker sleepaway camp with communal showers. And making matters worse, I was hairless but for my legs, which had somehow sprouted twin sea-otter-like pelts—seemingly overnight—and for my forehead, where I was cultivating a unibrow that would make Anthony Davis do a spit-take.

I had become suddenly, visibly, painfully pubescent, and the book helped reassure me that I was normal, even if my only previous exposure to illustrated genitals was the R. Crumb anthology I’d paged through as a 4-year-old, mistaking it for a children’s book. But even mentioning R. Crumb just makes me feel worse about my butt, so let’s move on.

As I struggle with my loss, I’ve come to wonder why the What’s Happening franchise—the book series, I mean, not the ’70s television show about urban black life in Los Angeles (although I most definitely would watch What’s Happening!! to My Body, especially if Rerun danced)—deals only with puberty. Because while adolescence may be the first time our bodies play tricks on us, it’s certainly not the last. What of the postpartum period? Perimenopause? Hospice? Herewith, a summary of my findings thus far, both from personal experience and observation:

Hair: No matter where you fall on the color spectrum, from Nick Cave to Nicki Minaj, chances are that by your mid-40s you will find enough shades of gray to create, if not a bestselling trilogy of erotic novels, then at least a gross scrapbook. (Note: They’re not all on your head, these gray hairs. Get excited!)

Face: Imagine a flip-book of John McCain’s cheeks as he shoots through a wind tunnel. Beginning at age 35, each page represents one year of your life.

Eyes: During your 20s, you can call them “bright.” If you can manage to say anything bitchy or insightful on a semi-regular basis, your 30s and 40s can coast on the sassy adjective “gimlet,” no matter the depth of your crow’s feet. After that, it may be best just to keep them closed.

Nose: Never stops growing, regardless of truthfulness. Some individuals attempt to camouflage this ever-enlarging protuberance with a garden of colorful gin blossoms, which are permanent and aggressive perennials.

Décolletage: Derived from French word decolleter, meaning “to be forced to wear crew neck sweaters due to the fact that the sun spots on your chest have joined to form one giant leather patch, sort of like the trash heap floating in the Pacific Ocean that can be seen from space.”

Hands: Evolution has taught us that primates are our closest mammalian relatives. But considering the slow transformation of once-youthful fingers into brittle, gnarled claws, I say: remember the bird.

Breasts/pectorals: As you age, most parts of the body look better lying down, because the excess skin recedes into the blankets, revealing your original shape. Not so with the chest. It is only at this point in life that the true purpose of armpits is fully revealed: supine breast rests.

Abdomen: The media encourages us to strive for “six-pack” abs, and while that dream is deferred for most of us as we pursue loftier goals like incubating humans or mile-high nachos, it can be helpful to think of the torso as a six-pack of beer. With each decade, beginning at birth, take away one beer, until they are gone and you are left with a warped, stretched-out set of rings.

Elbows/Knees: Begin winking. This is less delightfully coy than one might hope.

And those are just my external findings. I haven’t even mentioned the decrease in serotonin that can lead to the unironic purchase of cross-stitch patterns or Isotoner clogs, or the inexplicable popping noises that sound off whenever you squat to retrieve a contact that has slipped from the rheumy embrace of your slack eyelids.

No one tells you these things. Nora Ephron tried to, but her report was too specialized. What we need is a textbook, something with a quick-reference index for things like “wattle” and “thuttocks” (the unfortunate result of a vanishing border between upper thigh and lower cheek). Because as it stands—or falls, since that’s much more likely to be the case—it’s a shock to the system. If you’re anything like me, one minute you’re trying to pick out the right size super ball to even out your training bra, and the next you wake up to find that some part of your body has gone inexplicably missing—and you just can’t find it anywhere. Not even in your armpits.

editorial@observer.com

Illustration by David Saracino.

Every morning, after getting up, emptying his bowels and painstakingly bestowing at least four spoonfuls of yogurt onto the living-room carpet, my 15-month-old son turns and jabs a stubby finger in the general direction of our television.

“Dis!” he cries insistently. “DIS.”

As a TV addict myself—someone so far gone that she actually paid for an iTunes season pass to Denise Richards: It’s Complicated—I can’t help but feel a pang of pride. But then I am reminded of the newspaper clippings my mother sends me, thin columns of sanctimonious Times Cheltenham type that decry “screen time,” especially before age 2, as a developmental kryptonite on a par with exposure to secondhand smoke, or being shot out of a cannon. (Incidentally, my mother also likes to remind me that she was born before television, when bored children had to clip out judgmental newspaper articles for fun.)

And so I hedge, offering Sam more yogurt, or crayons, or any of his approximately 5,000 educational toys. Sometimes, though I’m not proud of it, I’ll even use my breasts to distract him. Anything to avoid opening Pandora’s cable box.

In a world where cigarillo-smoking toddlers become Internet memes and 7-year-olds are hitting puberty thanks to some combination of phthalates and Big Macs, shielding kids from the lethargic delights of television and the brain-numbing pursuits of the iPhone and the iPad appears to be the last bastion of hope for preserving some semblance of the classic Rockwellian American childhood.

But it’s not just nostalgia driving the charge to unplug; the increasingly fast editing of modern entertainment supposedly short-circuits their little brains, making attention-span issues and learning disorders more likely, and prohibiting healthier pursuits like exercise and human interaction. As recently as November, the lead author of an American Academy of Pediatrics study about the effects of media on children took to NPR to rattle off the risks: obesity, aggression, impaired socialization. And that’s just from SpongeBob. Imagine if someone let them watch Bravo.

To combat this first-world problem, some parents adopt trendy, third-world-inspired lives of modified asceticism, chucking their electronics, defecting from popular culture and engaging their children in hours of play with the sorts of all-natural, unpainted wooden toys that might have turned up in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stocking on a particularly lean Christmas. I know not one but two separate moms who have made their own Play-Doh just to avoid letting their little ones handle unnatural dyes.

But I’m more of a realist, and not just about my inability to ferment my own kefir. Now that adults live most of their lives online, keeping kids in the digital dark is close to impossible. There’s nothing I can do to stop the frightening evolution of technology, and Sam’s going to have to keep up if he wants to get a job developing DIY caesarean section smartphone apps or whatever the latest craze turns out to be in 2033, after we’ve finished downloading college into his brain stem. Also, I literally cannot move my TV, having bolted it to the table in a fit of babyproofing. So rather than shelter him entirely, I try to temper my hypocrisy with some compromise.

I have a fondness for the Sesame Street of my youth (possibly enhanced by some irresponsible drug-fueled YouTubing in my 20s), so when I was pregnant, my husband and I ordered a set of “old-school” DVDs from Amazon, reasoning that if our son had to watch the idiot box, at least we could expose him to the slower pace and wholesome values of a simpler time, when no one asked questions if Gordon found a stray child on the corner and led her back to his brownstone for some soup. Or, on alternate mornings, I let Sam watch a 10-year-old copy of Baby Einstein I borrowed from my sister-in-law, which is basically an infant version of the rehabilitation inflicted on Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. As images of lemon slices, sock puppets and perpetual-motion toys flash on-screen, one wonders how, exactly, a lava lamp relates to the space-time continuum.

To combat the passivity of the viewing experience, I have resorted to loudly narrating the events on-screen in order to make it “interactive.”

“THAT’S BOB,” I yell into Sam’s tiny ear. “HE’S MAKING A CALL FROM A PAY PHONE, WHICH IS SOMETHING PEOPLE IN OLDEN TIMES USED FOR TELECOMMUNICATION AND SUBWAY URINALS!” Or, “THIS NEVER-ENDING CLIP OF A PIPE CLEANER AFFIXED TO A METRONOME IS SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU SMARTER. IS IT WORKING?”

“Dis,” he affirms, not breaking his staring contest with the flatscreen. Sam most enjoys watching television from a distance of approximately one inch while standing and resting his chin on the entertainment center. If I want to lure him back to the couch, I need to leave trails of snacks, not unlike the witch from Hansel and Gretel.

I can tell there’s no going back. I can certainly impose stricter time limits or switch up the content, but now that he’s had a taste, there’s no way I’ll be able to avoid it entirely until he turns 2. In my weaker moments I let myself wonder ... what if screen time is actually good for small children?

A quick Google search basically reveals an Internet facepalm in response to this theory, but the pendulum always swings back and forth on these things ... after all, Baby Einstein wouldn’t even exist for us to mock if not for a huge group of people who honestly believed watching a set of shockingly low-production-value videos would make babies more intelligent. I’m not arguing that TV makes anyone smarter, per se, but what if it makes them, like, really good at happy hour quiz nights and less likely to get skin cancer? Unsurprisingly, there is no scientific study to back me up on this, so I’ll have to fall back on two pieces of anecdotal evidence.

1982: After watching Ben and Me, a Walt Disney cartoon about Benjamin Franklin, I am able to quote the Declaration of Independence from memory.

1984: I am not allowed to watch TV while in the care of my 30-something male babysitter. Instead, I page through R. Crumb comics that feature a naked man crawling inside a giant woman’s vagina. (Are you happy, mom and dad? I bet a half hour of Diff’rent Strokes is looking pretty good right about now.)

Perhaps I’m protesting too much because television serves my specific circumstances quite well. Since I write from home in sporadic bursts, the brief periods of child-hypnosis TV offers allow me to do things like shower, finish a cup of coffee and tweet about how strangely attracted I am to Luis, Sesame Street’s 1970s-era handyman. The more time I have to write, the more money I’ll be able to save for the IV drip of Adderall that I’m sure will be de rigueur by the time Sam reaches grade school. Right? Or maybe I’m just a lazy, weak-willed mom who needs to take up woodworking instead of spending so much time trying to illegally download season seven of Dexter.

Like Denise Richards taught me, it’s complicated.

Illustration by Brian Taylor.

A few years ago, my friend Kabir raked in an amazing Christmas haul at work. “I got a cashmere sweater, really expensive wine, a super nice pen, a Le Creuset pan, a free dinner at Craft, opera tickets to the Met and a $150 watch,” he remembered. “Plus gift cards to everything from Dean & DeLuca to Banana Republic. I never got cash, but the gift cards added up to over a thousand bucks!”

Kabir is not a hedge fund manager, a high-end male escort, or—despite the fitting first letter of his name—a backup Kardashian. In fact, at the time of this unbelievable bounty, he was a 25-year-old assistant kindergarten teacher at the Grace Church School. 

When the holidays roll around, there are plenty of handy guides to tell you how much to give your mail carrier, your doorman or your dog walker. But what to get the beleaguered liberal arts grad marinating in Yellow Tail Shiraz and student loans who molds the mind of your child?

I’m referring, of course, to teachers, the most vexing of all gift recipients. They provide a service, sure, but educating your flesh and blood isn’t exactly on par with touching up your roots. Then again, you’re probably a lot closer to your stylist than to the person you entrust with your children every day. Their gift shouldn’t be a nominal tip, but it’s impossible (even bordering on inappropriate) to make it personal. And, perhaps most important of all, it should send the right message, whether you intend it as a token of appreciation, a status symbol, or even a cleverly disguised bribe.

I find myself already agonizing over a future of gift-giving. As a freelance writer, I may never make much more than a teacher’s salary, so will they understand if I eschew Bergdorf Goodman in favor of a pan of gingerbread? (What if it has Guinness stout in it, does that sweeten the deal?) Will the value of an iTunes gift card mean the difference between a fun, gossipy parent-teacher conference and one in which the teacher gives me the side-eye and pointedly calls me “ma’am”?

Teachers themselves attest that their haul this time of year ranges from a tower of home-made snickerdoodles to a necklace hand-picked from David Yurman’s private collection. “Gift certificates are probably the best,” one told me, “Because cash can be awkward.” But off the record, the consensus is that the higher the price tag, the better the gift—after all, there’s always resale value on eBay.

The city’s public schools are bastions of construction-paper cards, and well, worse. Susie, a teacher in Jackson Heights, gets “lots of Russell Stover chocolates, regifted jewelry and the like,” she said, adding that arroz con leche is a real treat in comparison. One wonders whatever prompted her to relocate to Queens from the Upper West Side, where a former private school colleague of hers was given $600 in cash one year. (“Any sort of thank-you means a lot,” she insisted.)

The thing is, public schools have tried to ban gifts outright. (I hear that Mayor Bloomberg also sends a yearly memo asking teachers not to accept presents of monetary value, which is summarily ignored.)

So what usually happens now is that a volunteer will collect money from everyone for a class gift, through a series of emails that some parents disregard altogether.“I don’t know what everyone’s situation is,” said a class parent in charge of just such duties. “But there are always people who give nothing and people who give a lot more than average, and am I going to think the people who ignore my emails are assholes? Yeah.”

Private schools have cheapskates too. One class parent recalls a “crazy rich” father who took issue with the $30 minimum donation she requested from each parent toward the teacher’s holiday gift. “You’re spending $30,000 a year to send your kid to school and you’re richer than God,” she said. “And you’re taking issue with spending $30 on your teachers?”

That’s chump change to Kelly, whose kids attend a private school where parents typically pony up $250 for teacher gifts. “Some give one really showy thing, like a bottle of nice Barolo, and others make a gift basket with a lot of smaller things that give the impression of being more extravagant,” she said.

This, naturally, incites panic. “You don’t want to be the only one giving a bag full of Clinique samples or whatever when everyone else is going big,” she said. “So right now, in early December, you get a lot more chatting during drop-off, with people finding out what everyone else is doing. You wonder, is this enough? Am I getting them less than everyone else?”

A few years ago, it was much worse. “All I remember is that one year I was buying little boxes of Godiva truffles, and the next year I was seriously considering getting my youngest daughter’s third grade teacher a Chanel wallet,” said Joyce, a mother of three daughters who attended an elite all-girls private school.

One teacher, who has been at her school for nine years and who refused to allow even her extremely common first name into print for fear of being fired, says that she once received a class gift (funded collectively by over 25 parents) with a retail value of almost $7,000.

To curb competition, some schools have started collecting money anonymously to divide equally among teachers, not unlike tips at a dive bar (although presumably more lucrative). Meanwhile, Brooklyn Friends, Brearley and Collegiate, among others, have a homemade gifts-only policy to avoid any haggling over money, but the results have been mixed. While some parents “buy cookies from a bakery and just stick them in a Tupperware,” according to one former teacher, other school parents interpret “homemade” to mean much more than cupcakes.

“A well-known photographer once offered to take my head shots,” said the former teacher. “And I rationalized it, because it was technically something he made. It was just something that should have cost me tens of thousands of dollars.” (Incidentally, a note to my son’s future educators: I would be happy to write a column about you for no charge.)

But the unrestricted, above-board free-for-all continues at plenty of places. And I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school to say that in the end, that is the policy that some teachers love best, if not parents. “The guilt that very rich parents feel at having their children educated and raised by young people making $29,000 a year is a strange thing,” Kabir—now out of the educational sector and resigned to his gift card-less existence—observes. “But, being young and broke, it was fucking awesome.”

Illustration by Kyle Webster

As Hurricane Sandy was ravaging the East Coast last week, an Atlanta mommy blogger named Jenny took to her keyboard to opine that the storm—which had as of press time killed at least 110 people—might just be a consequence of biblical negligence. “Some of the most liberal and [God]-mocking areas of the nation are threatened by Sandy,” she wrote on her blog, Toddlers, Teens and In-Betweens, making sure to note that a number of states that had legalized same-sex marriage were in harm’s way. After receiving a slew of what she called “rude and obnoxious” comments, Jenny fought back, insisting that she didn’t care if she offended people. Then she deleted the original post.

Despite my tendency to run from the Chabad-Lubavitch Mitzvah Mobile, I don’t identify as a self-hating Jew. I’m not even a self-hating reality TV aficionado anymore, having fully embraced my unironic love for The Bachelor’s moribund matchmaking. But it’s time I admitted that I’m a self-hating mommy blogger.

Now, to be clear, unlike Jenny and her homosexual-smiting floodlust, the vast majority of mommy bloggers are far from incendiary or offensive. And those whom I’ve met online or in person have been perfectly lovely, smart women who genuinely support one another. But the M-word carries a certain stigma. When I was pregnant, I gazed down at my inside-out navel and wondered aloud on my blog whether having a baby was a one-way ticket to Mommy Blogland. Readers begged me to fight it, but ultimately I succumbed, mostly for selfish reasons.

More than anything, I wanted to belong. Mommy bloggers are forces to be reckoned with online. They can bend their Twitter armies to their every whim, making or breaking the success of an individual or brand. Heather B. Armstrong, a k a Dooce, the most successful mommy blogger of all time, who blogged her way into the 1 percent with a rumored seven-figure income and a profile in Forbes, once experienced unhelpful customer service at Maytag and urged her million-plus followers not to buy their products. With a few tweets, she brought the brand to its knees. That’s power. Getting blog-famous became my new American Online Dream, and my uterus was my golden ticket.

But Dooce is the blogger equivalent of Halley’s Comet; there probably won’t be another one in our lifetimes. Most mommy bloggers are more like me, enjoying a small readership of a few hundred or a few thousand. McDonald’s doesn’t come courting, but I will jump at the chance to taste-test a Jimmy Dean frozen breakfast for $50. It’s hard not to entertain the fantasy, however unlikely, that blogging can make you rich. Success stories like Dooce, Jenny Lawson (also known as The Bloggess) and Ree Drummond—whose food-centric blog, The Pioneer Woman, has led to a Food Network show, have led countless women to register a URL and slap on a kicky moniker: Pretty Mommy, Scary Mommy, Smart Mommy, Dumb Mommy, Mommy Wants Vodka, Mommy Wants Freebies. My online handle, The Sassy Curmudgeon, conjures the image of Don Rickles doing a ’90s-style finger snap, which is a branding decision I’ve come to regret (I started it in 2006, but had I waited until procreating, I might well be The Mommy Curmudgeon).

There are scatological blog names (PoopPeePuke, anyone?) and pretentious blog names (see also The Art of Making a Baby, which sounds like soft-core Lifetime porn). Mommy bloggers are chronic oversharers; they post photos of baby poop in the bathtub when they’re not writing graphically about their periods, their perineums and their husbands’ vasectomies. Having written a post called “What Childbirth Feels Like and Other Burning (Pun Intended) Questions Answered,” I realize that not only am I throwing stones from inside a glass house, but I am choosing to do so naked.

Which leads me to my main problem with the mommy blog genre. There’s a lot out there that’s worth reading, but I just don’t like the culture of mommy blogging, which seems more and more to prize ass-kissing over dialogue, and which can sometimes feel—for lack of a more anatomically-appropriate term—like one big circle jerk. There’s a class system online just as there is “IRL” (in real life), and it causes unrest.

There are a select few “big” mommy bloggers—whose names wouldn’t mean anything to the average person but who have legions of e-sycophants swooning over their every keystroke, most of them wannabes of various echelons. The big bloggers are invariably either best friends or engaging in secret feuds. The way moms show loyalty in Blogland is to promote each other’s posts, usually hoping for the same in return, and so those with a handful of mom bloggers in their social network are likely to encounter, on any given day, half a dozen links with intros like “So powerful!” or, simply and emphatically, “THIS.”

The more powerful bloggers include their friends on lists with names like 50 Best Mom Bloggers, or Top 25 NYC Moms. Page-views are emotional currency, and get traded back and forth like summer camp friendship bracelets.

No bloggers would let me use their names when I asked their opinions for this article, largely out of fear of backlash from the leaders of the community, who have the social media prowess and follower armies to make or break you with a few simple clicks. Ironically, the more followers someone has, and the more well-connected she is in the community, the less her actual content seems to matter. As in a kindergarten art class, every effort, no matter how unoriginal, is met with effusive praise. Kid said “shit” in front of your neighbor? A chorus of LOLs!! Finally confronted your sister-in-law about her overdone salmon? YOU’RE SO BRAVE!!!!

Bloggers spoiled by preaching to a rapt choir can lose sight of what’s important. The most stomach-turning example in recent memory came after a popular mom blogger complained about her morning sickness—when a reader who had suffered a stillbirth gently suggested that the blogger’s main concern should be the health of the baby, she was not only shouted down but actually mocked. (The proles have their soapboxes, too, though; that spurned commenter vented her frustration on Get Off My Internets, a website for blog-bashing that tags its mom-blogger forum with the line, “Yes, we know, you’re the first mommy ever.”)

I suspect that I’m not alone in my love of hating my very own Sisterhood of the Traveling Rants. Maybe, like that old Groucho Marx joke, I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member. I wonder if this column will serve as my pink slip. Maybe I want it to.

Schadenfreude should do wonders for my blog traffic.

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster

The other day at playgroup, my son, Sam, hit another baby in the face. He didn’t mean to hurt him—it was more like a wave gone awry—but still, it was open-hand, at point-blank range, like the first blow in the kind of slap fight you might see break out on Maury Povich. The other baby winced, and I swooped in from my crouch approximately two feet away to break it up. And then, from across the room, I heard the other child’s mother start to ... laugh.

“Awesome,” she said, not making the slightest move to get up from her laid-back lean against the wall. I stared at her. Was she drunk? (Unlikely; it was noon.) Did she just not give a shit? Again, no; I’d seen her kissing her son and feeding him orange slices just moments before. As her baby shrugged off the attack and crawled over to investigate a nearby wall outlet, I had to accept the truth: in the world of helicopter parenting, she was the equivalent of a T-bird on blocks. And I was a military Black Hawk.

I only have a single child, who just turned 1 last month, so I’m still figuring out my parenting style. It feels a little bit like the first semester of college, only instead of “finding myself” in plastic handles of vodka and pilfered Marlboros, I’m navel-gazing through pastel sippy cups, my new identity as a mother being built block by phthalate-free block.

I’m finding out new and upsetting things about my maternal instincts every day. What would I do if the baby rolled off the bed? (Answer: scream.) What would I do if my baby crawled away from me? (Answer: hover like I’m in a gas station bathroom.) What would I do if my baby vomited into my cleavage? (Answer: tweet it.) I too mocked Alicia Silverstone for pre-masticating her child’s food only to sneak into the kitchen to furiously chew and spit out chunks of meatball (hey, it was quicker than the baby-food grinder).

I crawl around after Sam on the floor of our apartment, shoving my body in between him and any surface sharper than a beanbag (although I guard him from those, too, due to the suffocation risks). We have so many baby gates that I could medal in the 400-meter hurdles. I seize with anxiety when I stroll around Park Slope and note that compared to the tank-like Bugaboos most moms are pushing, my “lightweight” stroller looks like a rickshaw, dangerously open to the elements.

IF RECENT OP-ED ARTICLES are any indication, the majority of American parents are stifling their children’s independence by monitoring their every move and wringing their hands over every possible harm that could befall them. Babies and children are on tighter leashes—sometimes literally—than ever. Entire industries have cropped up around an absurd level of baby-proofing that vilifies pillows, crib bumpers and unpeeled grapes and promotes things like baby knee pads, “Thudguard” safety helmets and an endless parade of tiny, intricate plastic pieces that prevent every appliance in your house from being properly operated by children, adults or even David Blaine.

The uptick in our collective neurosis has resulted in a number of scientific studies, which have found helicoptered kids to be more anxious, less self-sufficient, less physically active (read: more obese) and more likely to take antidepressants than peers with more relaxed parents.

To be fair, the negative connotation of “helicopter” generally refers to parents who are still micromanaging their elementary and high school-age kids; few would argue that it’s unwise to follow a toddler around the playground. Well, maybe some would. In a review of multiple parenting books that recently appeared in The New Yorker, author Elizabeth Kolbert mentions that tribes in the Peruvian Amazon trust 3-year-olds to use machetes. Meanwhile, I recently confiscated a blueberry that I deemed too firm for my son’s tender esophagus. When they’re soft enough to pass muster, I generally smush until they surrender their solid state.

Those who favor a more laissez-faire mode of child-rearing are part of a growing backlash to both the hypersensitive attachment parenting made famous by Dr. William Sears and the pitiless, results-oriented strategy endorsed by Amy Chua, a k a the dreaded Tiger Mother. By contrast, this new breed could be called the Tigger mothers: exuberantly adventurous and not afraid to have people think they’re at least mildly insane.

TAKE FOR EXAMPLE LENORE SKENAZY, an impassioned advocate of “free range” parenting (a phrase she coined in her self-help book, Free Range Kids). She argues that parents should relax, and that children should be encouraged to explore and play on their own—especially since city crime statistics (horrific exceptions like Leiby Kletzky notwithstanding) make it safer than it’s been in decades for kids to roam unchaperoned.

Ms. Skenazy currently offers an eight-week class series for $350. For this fee—although scholarships are available—she will have a latte at a coffee shop while your child plays nearby in Central Park. Of course, if paying for negligence doesn’t sit right with you, I am personally willing to offer you this service for free. In fact, I’m not watching your kid right now. You are welcome. I accept tips.

If you suspect that I’m secretly kind of jealous of Ms. Skenazy and her Zen sisterhood, you’re right. “Free range” sounds so nice and mellow, doesn’t it, like a ’70s key party with an open bar? I probably wouldn’t have to wear a bra. Plus, consider the alternative: if an animal’s not free range, it’s probably caged.

To find out if it was possible to shut off my inner helicopter, I conducted a short series of experiments. Lacking a yard, or even a child who can walk upright, I decided to first test out the range at home, in our 900-square-foot apartment in Prospect Heights which is only dangerous insofar as it hasn’t been renovated since sometime during the Ford administration.

I put my feet up on the coffee table and cracked open a magazine as Sam crawled past me into the foyer. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him pick up a piece of dried leaf that had been tracked in from the sidewalk. He glanced in my direction and, seeing my lack of attention, promptly ate it. It’s fiber, I told myself as I tried to concentrate on a feature story about the monkey from The Hangover.

He disappeared around a corner and I braced myself for disaster: a head bump, the sound of gagging on loose change, maybe a cartoon anvil descending from on high. After a few minutes of suspicious silence, I followed and found the baby chest-deep in a nest of toilet paper, which he was happily shredding into bite-sized pieces. I normally regard our bathroom as a Saw-like deathtrap of bone-crushing porcelain and stray razor blades, but he survived.

Next, I took my son to Prospect Park, where I lay down, closed my eyes and let him lurch off into the Long Meadow in his weird crab-crawl that looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings crossed with a three-legged Corgi. When I finally looked over to see if the other mothers were judging me, I saw Sam prostrate in the dirt, as if performing sajdah. I worried that he had died of abandonment-induced ennui until I saw his butt moving, the universal sign for life.

I concede that these experiments are tame. I’m not yet willing to abandon all of my nervous parenting ways—although I can see myself branching out down the line. But just like grapes grown on the fire escape of a Lower East Side tenement yield a different standard of wine than those grown in the lush vineyards of Napa Valley, the concept of “free range” has to be modified for the urban setting. Crime may be down, but if I can’t even navigate the weekend subway after living here my whole life, what hope is there for a child? Riding the subway a few stops through Murray Hill armed with a map and an emergency $20 is one thing; roving the five boroughs like Holden Caulfield on a speedball is another. I’m all for fostering independence in my son, but I have to set boundaries. Only time will tell exactly where they land.

Until then, I will watch my pint-sized progeny attempt to tongue kiss a mylar balloon from a safe, if watchful, distance, and I will try my very best to think, simply: Awesome.

Illo by Thomas Pitilli.

Sleeping through the night doesn’t seem like such a hard task. Not to brag, but I used to do it all the time. One minute I would be struggling to decode a Will Shortz pun, the next minute: Sunlight! Garbage trucks! Some asshole honking! A new day dawned.

My son, Sam, however, does not seem to have gotten the memo. Not only does he not sleep through the night, he is almost no help at all with the Times crossword. Unless the clue is “One who can’t be pacified,” say.

It’s funny how much sleep obsesses new parents.

All we ever want to know is who’s getting it, how often, and how deep. How long does it last, we ask breathlessly over cocktails. Twenty minutes? Three hours? Six? Sleep has become to our 30s what sex was to our 20s: We still talk about it much more often than we do it, and our roommates present a considerable obstacle.

The first question my husband and I had to answer as new parents was: Where will the baby sleep? We got something called an Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper, which is like a mini-crib designed to attach to the side of an adult bed. But our baby did not like the co-sleeper, perhaps because its “mattress” was essentially a sheet of corrugated cardboard (for safety reasons, babies are only allowed to sleep on surfaces that cannot possibly suffocate them, such as parquet flooring and chain-link fences). The average prison cot is cozier than a crib mattress, but babies must endure, swaddled in their cute little straightjackets meant to approximate the uterine wall’s viselike embrace.

When the co-sleeper didn’t work, we started putting our son in a cheerful yellow bassinet that we dragged with us from room to room. But he didn’t like that either, and getting him to doze in it required first rocking him to sleep on our bodies and then transferring him into the new vessel, a task we approached with the anxious care of two people playing Jenga with sticks of dynamite.

Now he sleeps in our bed most of the time. Even if you’re not a hippie, “family bed” sounds cozy, right? Big Love by way of Sesame Street? Wrong. I get kicked in the face, my husband sleeps at the foot of the bed like a Labrador, and Sam’s hair bears the unmistakable scent of armpit. It smells like defeat.

People kept telling us he would sleep better at six weeks. Or 10 pounds. Whichever came first. When he started eating solids, or sleeping on his stomach. People told us to follow the “Five S’s,” a mnemonic made famous by Harvey Karp, a bestselling author and Dr. Phil staple known as “the baby whisperer.” But I still can’t remember what the S’s stand for, as in our house they devolved quickly into “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” Our baby would not sleep—at least, not well. Night after night, I imagined what Sisyphus must have felt like, had he been pushing a Bugaboo instead of a boulder. Or if the boulder had been screaming. Or if his punishment had included listening to Led Zeppelin songs played on the glockenspiel.

“Oh, getting him to sleep is really simple,” our pediatrician told us when we saw her for Sam’s three-month visit. We leaned in like junkies eager for a fix. “You just put him in the crib, close the door, and don’t go in until the next morning.” Readers who are parents will notice that there’s a crucial ellipsis hidden in her advice. Let’s revisit: You just put him in the crib (seems easy enough), close the door (hand-eye coordination challenge, but O.K.) ... baby cries for forty-fucking-five minutes while you weep into your vodka (there’s the rub!) ... and don’t go in until the next morning. Full disclosure: I only know about this ellipsis through the experience of friends. I was unwilling to let him cry. The one time we tried it, just for a few minutes, he gagged on his own wracking sobs and projectile-vomited. Back to the wakeful family bed we went.

There are countless books and patented methods out there promising to get babies to sleep through the night, but most people opt for one of two: some variation on the “cry-it-out” approach (see above re: tears and booze) or total denial and avoidance, and the hope that the baby will start sleeping like a second-semester college senior without parental intervention.

Cry-it-out, of course, like all parenting choices these days, is divisive. Lots of people swear by it, trading a few nights of misery for a lifetime of peaceful slumber, but attachment parents demonize it as emotionally harmful to children, citing articles by psychologists who argue that babies stop crying and fall into deep sleep not because they learn to self-soothe but because they become despondent and apathetic, convinced that they’ve been abandoned. These studies always claim that babies left to cry carry emotional problems with them throughout their lives.

On the flip side, a lot of people assume that by letting Sam sleep next to me and comforting him whenever he stirs will turn him into some kind of cross between Oedipus and Norman Bates. But I don’t buy any of it, just like I can’t really accept astrology’s dubious claim that all people born under the one sign can be described with the same set of adjectives. (Then again, I’m an Aries.)

We’ve had our victories, however small, like the two instances during which Sam slept for eight hours in his own crib immediately after we watched Ryan Gosling movies on Netflix. It seemed like a harbinger of happy slumber, but then Blue Valentine broke our streak. I think he found it too depressing. Maybe we’ll have better luck with The Notebook.

editorial@observer.com

Can you have it all?

I don’t think anyone would mistake me for Marissa Mayer—the newly-appointed 37-year-old CEO of Yahoo who’s raising hackles all over town with her very public promise to return to work two weeks after delivering her first baby. For one thing, I am not a blonde (it wouldn’t be a good look for me, seeing as I am the approximate color of tracing paper and hirsute enough that old Russian women speak to me on the subway in their native tongue). Also, no one has ever wanted to make me the CEO of anything, ever. I think it has something to do with the fact that when you run my credit score, instead of a number, you get a slot machine tableau in which three skulls-and-crossbones roll into a line and then start laughing hysterically. But I digress.

I’m also unlike Mayer in that I didn’t publicly vow to return to work after two weeks. Or six weeks. Or even three months. Instead, once I’d used up most of my maternity leave, I asked for more time to stay home with my baby, and I got it. And then my editor and I decided that it would be mutually beneficial for me to start this column instead of returning to my former post as managing editor. The truth is, I didn’t want to go back to a full-time job. I wanted to freelance and stay home—to be, in the acronymic shorthand of mommy bloggers, a WAHM, or work-at-home mom. It may sound like a dyslexic George Michael cover band, but it’s my choice, and so far I’m happy with it.

The question of whether to return to the office after having babies—another cultural Seussian Butter Battle that rages on with no détente in sight—has been around as long as women have been in the work force, and it’s come to the fore again lately, with Mayer’s public vow to continue to work through her (very short) maternity leave arriving on the spiked heels of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s controversial Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” If Slaughter’s thesis—that a high-powered career can only come with at least some cost to your children’s emotional needs—seemed depressing, Mayer’s appointment should have been an uplifting, knocked-up Cinderella story of a retort. After all, look! It’s a pregnant woman—fecund and famished and and chock full of crazy hormones—running a Fortune 500 company! She can have her baby and leave it with a nanny, too! If she doesn’t have it all, then who does?

Mayer’s hiring is unquestionably good news for women looking to climb the corporate ladder. But her eschewing anything approaching a reasonable maternity leave doesn’t set a great precedent. It seems to suggest that recovering from childbirth is some sort of vacation—an indulgent postpartum Shangri-La of beatific repose and the triumphant consumption of alcohol, sushi and other luxury items on the pregnancy prohibition list—that ambitious women really should be able to go without. I wish we lived in a society where it was as acceptable for a high-powered career woman to take a full three-month maternity leave without apology as it is for a high-powered career man to spend the entire month of August on golf courses in the Hamptons.

Most women I know—who are of course not nearly as high-profile as Mayer—already feel pressure to bounce back, as if they’d had all that time “off” to simply rest and recuperate. But anyone who’s had a baby knows that time spent with a newborn is not time off. It’s not like say, getting a gallbladder or appendix removed (I’ve never had either surgery, but from my understanding, neither organ is capable of screaming in the night, demanding to be fed, once it leaves the body). Instead, it’s a sink-or-swim period of training in which you are forced to be “on” all the time—a 24-hour nanny, personal chef, chauffeur, maid, court jester, teacher, tour guide, body guard, punching bag and feedlot to a miniature boss who, if left to his own devices, would surely perish, or at least urinate unwittingly on his own face.

That’s maternity leave in practice. In theory, it should serve the dual purpose of allowing a mother to heal after the decidedly taxing exercise of labor, while also giving her time to bond with her baby and catch up on her DVR queue while she waits for her nipples to stop leaking. The catch is that no one knows exactly how much time should be allotted for these activities, so governments decide ... and as with erectile dysfunction medication, results may vary.

In Austria, to use an extreme example, new parents receive a collective two years of paid parental leave. In America, the Family Medical Leave Act entitles new parents to up to 12 weeks without fear of losing their jobs, but none of that time is legally required to be compensated. Some companies offer the option for longer leaves—a woman I know who’s a junior associate at a major law firm got six months—but most don’t. (In the interest of full disclosure, I took unpaid FMLA leave from The Observer, and when I didn’t return after 12 weeks, my medical benefits automatically expired.)

I’m inclined to doubt that Yahoo’s official benefits package includes a clause ordering new mothers to fire up their BlackBerrys while waiting for the afterbirth to pass, so Mayer’s decision is probably a personal one, meant to reassure shareholders that she will only take her hands off the wheel for the half day or so it takes her to extrude another human being from her body. More power to her if this is what she truly wants. But I can’t know. Neither will she, until she pops that kid out. That’s why parental leaves are so important—they allow time to adjust to a completely different life, one in which, while  your day job may still be waiting in the wings, you’re busy learning the ropes to a frightening and powerful new position you are probably (mentally, if not biologically) totally unqualified for.

Hell, I’m 10 months in and I still don’t know anything. Except that I wish I lived in Austria. If not for the healthcare, then at least for the pastries.

editorial@observer.com

The general consensus was that no one was having much sex, and no one wanted to, either. Many of the mothers said they could count the number of times they’d had sex postpartum on one hand, and some had 8- and 9-month-old babies. When I came home and reported these stats to my husband, he was elated. We manage to have sex about once a week, which is the new-parent equivalent of constantly.
Not that it’s been easy. No one tells you this, but babies are the world’s biggest cockblock.

The first few times we attempted to rekindle the romance, our son—perhaps sensing the potential biological threat of additional offspring—refused to cooperate. Time after time, we attempted to put him down in his bassinet, only to hear him squeal moments later as we prepared to doff our spit-up-stained sweatpants. Once we finally succeeded, it was a hurried affair, and not as enjoyable for me as I would have liked—not because of any failure on the part of my husband, but because it was impossible for me not to worry that my equipment had been ... well, compromised.

The problem is, once you’ve pushed a baby through an orifice you once reserved for recreational purposes, it’s hard to go back, psychologically speaking. That’s not always a bad thing—I recently needed encouragement to finish a stressful project on deadline, and a friend put her hand on mine and told me, with some very meaningful eye contact, “You gave birth. You can do anything”—but when you’re in the throes of passion and suddenly you find yourself thinking, “A head came out of there!” it kind of puts a damper on the proceedings. I remember my 10th-grade health teacher, Ms. Drvostep, gravely informing the class during a discussion of human sexuality that, at least biologically, the anus was designed as an “out hole.” Maybe that’s my problem. My vagina was an in hole, then it was (briefly, but memorably) an out hole, and now it’s supposed to be an in hole again. It’s having an identity crisis, and it doesn’t help that sometimes, when I’m drying off after a shower, my husband will point at my crotch and exclaim gleefully to our child, “There’s your old house!”

There is also the uncomfortable (double entendre intended) truth that it’s hard to go back, physiologically speaking, even if your doctor gives you the go-ahead after six weeks, which is the standard abstinence period gratefully celebrated by the new mom and ascetically endured by the new dad (the wait time is even longer following caesarean sections). No matter how many kegels—pelvic exercises akin to vaginal bicep curls, for the uninitiated—you do, the fact remains that a fully formed human being weighing around eight pounds came out of an opening previously accustomed to visitors of a smaller girth.

An old Lenny Bruce routine once compared a large penis to a baby’s arm, but add a second arm, two legs, a torso and a head that feels, from the inside, like a bowling ball set on fire, and you have something not at all like a penis. So naturally there is going to be some fallout (no pun intended! none!) from the stretching. No one wants to talk about it, of course. I mean, I’m always seeing tabloid covers crowing about some celebrity or other’s post-baby body, which they presumably achieve through a combination of colonic therapy, macrobiotic diet and virgin sacrifice. But I never see an article about, say, Jessica Alba’s post-baby vagina. And if hers isn’t ready for the pages of Us Weekly, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope even under the best of circumstances, and I’m not speaking literally, as anyone who’s experienced the drying effects of plummeting postpartum estrogen can attest. Even if you do get over the libido-robbing hormone fiesta and the colicky coitus interuptus and manage to retain enviable nether regional muscle tone and semi-regular bedpost-notching, there’s one thing that no amount of personal grooming or mood music can change, and that’s the realization that you’re now somebody’s mother. As such, society now gives you two exciting choices, a special procreative variation on the traditional madonna/whore: either succumb to the high-waisted jeans, sensible earlobe-length haircut, and soccer-friendly SUV of the asexual martyr who lives in a Tide commercial, or get a gym membership, hop on the treadmill, and run like hell for MILF Island. (To be clear, not a real place, although I hear East Hampton is getting close.)

The term MILF itself points up the problem. I’ve always disliked it, and not just because it’s icky and sophomoric, but because it suggests that a mother who’s considered sexually desirable is an endangered species on a par with the Tasmanian Devil or the Giant Panda. I like to think I am at least as sexy as a regular-size panda, on days I’ve managed to shower.

Despite all of the awkwardness and body dysmorphia outlined above, however, I’m happy to report that I still very much enjoy sex when conditions are ideal (baby, asleep; me, awake), and that despite what my sense memory occasionally tells me, no part of my anatomy resembles the Holland Tunnel, even in passing. Post-baby sex can even feel sometimes like the carefree sex of my youth, except that it’s faster and more exhausted—not to be confused with exhaustive—and we can’t make any noise for fear of scarring our sleeping child for life. And we never even consider not using protection in the heat of the moment, because, seriously, look where that got us.

But otherwise, it’s good. Plus there’s the added bonus that I might find a stray Cheerio in my bra. Kinky.
editorial@observer.com