Exploiting My Baby by Teresa Strasser Read Free Book Online

if I had to explain to a friend why there was a giant (literally) starving artist snapping his fingers and rhyming in our driveway.
    I wished every single day that he would leave, didn’t care about his huge following in Europe, just wanted to have a freak-free childhood for a while. If I could say one positive thing about Max’s long stay, it is only in retrospect. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but our garage poet was a manifestation of my mother’s abiding sense that art was valuable, something to be supported and cultivated.
    Even though parenthood seemed a dismal experience, I knew nothing made my mother happier than when I was artistic. Okay, I was a terrible visual artist, and when I brought home a lopsided ceramic ashtray or drippy watercolor painting, she would pretty much mock me and toss them or shove them in a dresser drawer with a pile of old scarves. But however much she disdained my crappy crafts, she paid for those ballet lessons for years without complaint and she always encouraged me to write, something she probably regrets right about now.
    I knew she meant it when she said she liked some essay or book report I brought home, because she was incapable of sugarcoating. Although when I think about it, sugarcoating is sort of what moms are for, and I could have used some of that. But I got what I got and sometimes I’m at peace with that and other times I’m sad for what I missed.
    I married a man whose mother is appropriate, dresses well, says the right things and has personalized stationery. This is no accident.
    Of course, like everyone who tries to correct the things their parents got wrong, I will endeavor never to humiliate my child ( knock wood, if I am lucky enough to actually have one ) by being super weird or saying tactless things, but there is a strong chance I will fail at least some of the time.
    My prime screw-up-the-kid years are far off, though; it’s really the baby thing that concerns me now, the looming possibility that tending to an infant will be at best thankless and boring, at worst a stifling slow death, a suffocation by talc-scented swaddle. If I am truly my mother’s daughter, there is the possibility that before I make my child miserable in ways he will recall, he will make me miserable, just by existing, just by being a tiny bundle of needs.
    My therapist says I am at “high risk” for postpartum depression, because of all of what went down with my own mother. She calls in my husband for a joint session, lets him know he will have to look for warning signs and be prepared to toss some Prozac down my gullet if I get all withdrawn and affectless. If this happens, I’m assured that it will pass quickly. As we sit there on her couch holding hands, I like the way we must look to her: happy, respectful of each other, in love, and we aren’t faking it for her sake. It isn’t often I feel like a show-off for anything to do with my sanity, but the best thing I could do for a child, choose a father who is warm and stable and solid, I have already done. And I want my fucking gold star. And I think I see it glinting in my therapist’s eyes. My man is good daddy material, and she knows it.
    (Hopefully, it’s not too Woody Allen that I write about my therapist. When you’re as mental as I am, having struggled with everything from paralyzing stage fright to various existential career crises and bouts of crippling loneliness, therapists are important in your life.)
    At the moment, I don’t communicate with my mother at all, haven’t spoken to her in about a year. It’s not uncommon for me to take mom breaks when she gets to be too much, because while you might feel too guilty to cut your mom off, I don’t have that problem.
    I don’t owe her anything.
    She kept me alive for eighteen years, and while I appreciate that, she did it with such a minimum of effort and aptitude that it sometimes feels like our exchange in this lifetime is complete. She mostly phoned in being a