David Minerva Clover

Breastfeeding brought me back. It kept me in my body, forced me to hold my son’s body, and helped me stay connected to the physical reality of everything. What I remember are flashes of joy in the darkness, his tiny hands clenched in determined fists. His feet curled against my soft stomach. The release of the milk starting to flow. My arms wrapped up around him.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

Once upon a time, the only thing to consider was “Does your kid watch too much TV?” But now it seems like nearly everyone can agree that kids these days spend far too much time looking at screens of all sorts.

Although the hunt for the perfect outfit at the thrift store was a thrill when I was thin, as a fat person, the hunt was just downright depressing.

My kid, who turned three the day after Mary the duckling died, wasn’t old enough to get any of it. Yet talking to toddlers about death is part of life.

The whole concept of salaries for stay-at-home moms reveals both the classism in parenting culture and what we really think about poor people.

[CN: PTSD, pregnancy, birth] Something snapped inside me and I was transported backwards in time.

I think “It can be difficult” probably qualifies for the understatement of the century. There is just nothing in a phrase so casual and noncommittal that conveys anything like the reality of this labor of love. I’m not saying that we need to be all doom and gloom about parenting all the time — there are plenty of joys in parenting, and plenty of space to talk about those joys — but I do think that when we’re trying to talk about the hard parts, we should, you know, actually talk about the hard parts.

I learned binge-watching Mister Rogers that he wasn’t just being comforting, he was rephrasing many of the things I was hearing in therapy.

But what I did write, and write constantly, were diaries and journals. I kept notebooks and three-ring binders filled with observations about my life that I thought were interesting. Sometimes I worried that these personal stories were too naval-gazing, but I still held on to them, hoping that someday someone would want them.