Exploiting My Baby by Teresa Strasser Read Free Book Online Page A

mother and now I phone in being a daughter, which is to say I don’t phone her at all. Oddly enough, she would love me to call her every day, like my brother does; fill her in. I think this is because she is bored and the comings and goings of our lives as adults are interesting, in stark contrast to the misshapen ceramic ashtrays and poopy diapers of our childhoods. I get it. Now that I can wipe my own ass and don’t require full-time un-fun care, I’m a real hoot. But I’m also a resentful, grudge-holding hoot with “Cat’s in the Cradle” playing in my head on a loop.
    Before going ahead with the baby making, I ran all of this by my therapist, who did the best thing a therapist has ever done, and I’ve had a lot of them. She offered me $1 million if I have a baby and don’t love it. She’s that positive I’m going to be okay.
    She helps me make a plan to get some help for the first few weeks after the baby so I don’t get too sleep-deprived, hire a night nurse to do what some more capable mothers do for their daughters, help out with the bathing and swaddling and midnight comforting, model nurturing behavior, tell me everything is going to be okay.
    The rest is just faith.
    I am working on this chapter at a diner when a baby starts wailing and chucking Cheerios from a paper bowl. It’s not a beautiful sound to me, but I force myself to question whether it’s the worst, or whether an even more festering sound is my mother’s voice in my head; not reading great literature, but her own flawed script about motherhood.

four
    Pregatory
     
     
     
    I f purgatory is a temporary state of suffering, pregatory is a three-month no-man’s-land during which your soul lurks between being an expectant mom and being who you were before.
    They say you can’t be “a little bit pregnant,” but that’s exactly what you are at first, when you don’t feel or look any different. You’re the same, but you’re utterly changed.
    You aren’t supposed to say anything to anyone about your baby, because for weeks and weeks what may or may not be your child is just a sac of yolk without so much as a heartbeat.
    Partially, keeping your mouth shut is pragmatic, because whom-ever you tell, you will have to un-tell if the pregnancy doesn’t stick. And partially, it’s just being superstitious. I knock wood so many times my knuckles bleed.
    Here’s how it sounds when I talk to my husband:
    We can send the baby to the school around the corner, I mean, you know, knock on wood, if everything is okay. I hope the baby has blue eyes even though I have brown eyes, you know, knock wood, if the baby has eyes. We should probably be trying to find a pediatrician for the baby, if, knock wood, we actually have the baby. Let’s try to get a secondhand crib; the baby won’t know the difference. I mean, knock wood, if we have one (followed by the weird addition of knocking on my forehead in case the surface is not actually wood but some sort of IKEA-based wood product that would not have the persuasive powers of actual wood).
    I’m feeling very self-conscious about all my OCD wood knocking until I read that a couple of psychologists came up with the concept of “availability bias,” a brain quirk that makes us inclined to wildly overestimate the probability of events associated with memorable occurrences.
    Even if an event is rare, if it’s memorable, it becomes more available in our minds and thus seems more common, like plane crashes and child abductions.
    The minute I read about this theory, it immediately explains not only my sense that the entire population has fertility problems, but also my feeling that all women lose at least three pregnancies in the first trimester. Vivid tales of miscarriages are so available in my mind, it’s as though no pregnancy has ever gone the distance. This one’s sister-in-law had four miscarriages and that one’s cousin started bleeding at the grocery store and lost her baby, and this one has a