Part I

A clogged duct is what returning to work after 12 weeks of maternity leave feels like.

To avoid another sleepless night thinking about work, I decided to use my pump time to respond to emails. Twenty minutes in, I hadn’t noticed the plastic cone slid off center. The unpumped pores clogged into a hard tender traffic jam.

“Breast is best” “Sleep when the baby sleeps” “You got this Mama!” This toxic messaging is meant to encourage new moms to push through an impossible situation on their own. It also comes at you as you bring your leaky, spongy body back to work and remind your colleagues you are still a worthy worker.

Walking through the business college hallways to clean my pump parts in the community sink, I never felt more disconnected to the college students passing by. Their casual conversations about last night’s party were a stark contrast to the all-nighter I pulled with my gassy baby.

One commonality I had with the students was being sleep deprived and having to take a math exam I hadn’t studied enough for. Figuring out the equation of how much your baby ate at daycare, how much they had to throw out when she didn’t finish a bottle, should be put on the college math exams. Except you know, if you get it wrong, your baby goes hungry.

The logistics of breastfeeding alone would never be understood by the dean team: hauling the pump and the cleaning kit across campus along with the insulated bag to store the milk in. Remembering to bring enough storage bags and extra snacks to maintain the calorie intake you need to produce milk. Giving in to buying a $40 pumping bra or two that are comfortable enough to wear to work and strong enough that they don’t break halfway through a pump session like the Walmart one did on the first day back. Making it through a task before that animalistic hunger takes over your brain. My husband and I still laugh about me chewing a scone at 2 am like Gollum saying, “Don’t look at me!” after a feed session left me famished.

These milk tits had no respect for the work calendar. Mid-conversation with my boss, they’d remind me it was time to pump by leaking through my shirt. Interrupting a male coworker that you had to go pump lands about the same as announcing you needed to change your tampon. Which by the way, we never do because we don’t want to deal with the awkwardness that follows men being uncomfortable with our bodies.

The other discomfort that the boys club does not want to think about because, giggle, boobs is that pump breaks aren’t free time. The law gives you the break. By the way, the first Pump Act is less than 16 years old. Sigh... anyway, the law gives you the break but it’s vague. It doesn’t demand that your work should give you 1 hour less of tasks to finish. So most new moms try to work while they pump, because the alternative is stealing those precious few hours left with their baby.

So, the math worked like this. I worked while I pumped = The stress cut my milk supply (-) and increased (+) my post-partum anxiety.

The intricacies of breastfeeding come at such an exhausting moment of becoming a new parent, that our brains block it when it’s over. When I visited my postpartum sister a year after I’d stopped breastfeeding, I picked up her newly expressed milk to put it in the fridge and poured it straight into the bottle with the older milk. A second too late, she generously corrected, the new milk must be the same temperature first, or bacteria. I had completely blocked that milk math.

There’s a four-hour window for leaving milk out. Four days in the fridge before it goes bad, six months in the freezer, and up to twelve months if you invest in a deep freeze. When you take it out of a cooler source, you have one hour to feed your baby before it is no longer usable for food and becomes bath milk for rashes. Each window needs a label with date and time. All managed by someone getting two hours of sleep at a time, running calculations that have tough consequences if they get it wrong. Even when we get it right, newborns are constantly struggling with gas. Getting it wrong isn’t an option.

We got a deep freeze to maximize how long we could store the milk. My sister showed me early how to catch excess milk from one boob, while my baby fed off of the other. Months of excess milk were carefully labeled and stacked in bricks. Pablo Escobar would be proud of my organized bricks of white gold.

After 5 months of feeling like a dairy cow, I decided to try to feel human again by going to a cabin with some girlfriends. Upon my return, I came back to a husband who looked like he had just run over a kitten. “Okay, let me explain” he said hesitantly. Our daughter would cry, he’d thaw frozen milk for 10 minutes. By the time it was ready, she’d fallen back asleep. “The hour would pass, so I had to dump it.”

“How much did you dump?” I asked unsuccessfully trying to keep my tone steady. He put his head down. Months of excess milk were poured down the drain. We had 2 4 oz bags left.

The expression, don’t cry over spilt milk, obviously came from a well-meaning husband who had no clue as to the mental and physical preparation and lonely night feeds it took to get that milk from our bodies into the bottle.

After my husband had a Boston Tea Party in our kitchen sink, the pressure that every ounce of milk mattered began. We hadn’t introduced her to formula, so we couldn’t just switch. Her little tummy needed a gradual transition. And we were told by another mom that her kid refused formula when it was introduced cold turkey. As a trained perfectionist, I was failing in front of everyone and no one at the same time. There was no room for small mistakes at this point. Every ounce mattered to keep our tiny baby from losing weight

Part II

Breastfeeding in public is another factor I worked hard to be okay with. I wanted to feel empowered to feed my child without feeling shame. At its core, it’s incredible that mothers can feed their babies with their bodies. It should be celebrated. But like getting your period, you’re lucky if it’s celebrated by the other close women in your life who promptly show you how to deal with it in a world that makes you feel shame for the way your body naturally works.

I imagine if humans were birthed out of trees, we would stop and give our praise to trees. We would worship and make sacrifices to the birthing trees. The wonder that they are the portal that brings our species into existence would be one of awe and magic. Perhaps people would fight over the trees. But the trees would be inexplicably valued as the worthiest resources that keeps humankind going. Even the trees that hadn’t birthed a human but had the potential to be a birthing tree would be well taken care of. There would be laws to protect these trees because simply by their make-up they naturally nurture our species and have the capability to continue it. They are magical and without them there would be no us.

Or maybe, they’d be treated like women.

Anyway, one of the first times I took my boob out was at a friend’s casual get together. I was hesitant, my baby was losing her shit, ready to be fed, and my kind friend looked across the room me at me and nodded. Everyone went about the party as normal, and it was nice that I didn’t have to hear what was going on in a room by myself. I could participate. I didn’t need to hide.

So, I tried it again at another social gathering. My baby was hungry, I was sitting in the living room talking with friends and their kids, and my old friend who is a dad of 3 said feel free to feed her here if you feel comfortable. Every time I tried this, I had to tell myself, This is no big deal. It is completely natural. Be cool. I whipped out the boob, and everyone gradually made their way to the kitchen while I sat on the couch in the other room. I was later told that my friend’s 11-year-old couldn’t stop looking at my boob. I was slowly learning that I can’t change the culture even though I knew shouldn’t have felt shame.

The final straw was at a restaurant. I met a couple of buddies for lunch and my baby was hungry. In a booth, I lifted my shirt, and my baby was not latching, so my bare boob was just catching the breeze. My baby’s cries were a megaphone to patrons that something exciting was going on over here, and they should all look. Just as I was struggling to get my baby to cover up the boob and eat, the hurried waitress came over to get my card to pay which I had no hands for. My friend rummaged through my wallet and did her best to shield me. The commotion caught the attention of the table next to me, who unaware of why the commotion was taking place started goo goo ga ga-ing over my baby. After this experience, I realized, I had nothing to prove. As much as I wanted to feel comfortable taking my boob out to feed my child because yes, it is natural, I had to fend off years of shame about showing that part of my body. That and my baby could feel my discomfort and refused to calm down enough to feed.

In the beginning, I worked with a lactation specialist who not so casually mentioned each visit how breastfeeding helped her body bounce back. Then she would get out her scale, measure my baby’s weight, and shake her head and ask how it’d been going. I had no reference to how it was supposed to be going. Apparently, my baby’s tongue was tight, so the specialist would stick her finger in my baby’s tiny mouth, yank the tongue up, and hand back my red-faced screaming child. Then she would watch me attempt to nurse her and let me know what I was doing wrong. After assessing my bloody chapped nipples, she suggested that I wasn’t getting my baby to latch right. Eventually though, my baby learned how to open her mouth wide like a shark and I learned how to shove my boob into her face so that she could get a good latch. After weeks of bloody nipples and a hunched back trying to get my posture and latch down, I wasn’t ready to call it quits once we started to get the hang of it. I wanted to be the mom that breastfed for the recommended first six months.

I did not want work and stress to force me out of what I’d worked so hard for.

Breastmilk is medicinal. It can heal rashes, ear infections, cracked skin. When your baby starts daycare and comes home sick, it is the thing the pediatrician recommends to breastfeeding moms that will help her heal. It has magical healing powers. My body would read my baby’s saliva to see what nutrients and antibodies she needed to heal, and my body would produce it in the breast milk. When everything else was so hard, the ability to heal my baby felt like a superpower and like I was doing something right.

Part III

In Canada new parents have 69 weeks for parents to share that are paid at 33% of earnings or 40 weeks to share paid at 55% of earnings. Our Mexican neighbors have 12 paid weeks entitled by law. Neither one of our neighbors have the best paternal leave in the world, but they provide a nicer cushion that the 0% of federally paid leave Americans get. Some jobs in the US follow FMLA and get 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and anything beyond that is packaged as a privilege not a right. The World Health Organization shares that while 80% of U.S. mothers start out breastfeeding, only 26% are still exclusively breastfeeding at the recommended six months. It is well known that the work culture is the reason American women can’t keep up with the recommended six months. [LV1] [LV2] [LV3] As a new mom who didn’t know what she was doing, I set the rigid standard for myself to make it to those 6 months so that I could feel like I was doing something right in this new role.

While I was on maternity leave, the return-to-office mandates came down in the business world. This was led of course, by male CEOs who could go into work as they pleased. The business college following this trend meant my work from home days disappeared. When I asked for them back, a couple of days a week to pump or feed my baby at home, I got a hard no from the man at the top.

Before I left to have a baby, the university started a class comp raise incentive to try to match or stay competitive with the external market. Knowing the qualifications I had to have to direct 15 employees, I was excited to get a raise while on maternity leave. Upon my return, I found out that the business college took the trickle-down economics approach to class comp. To get away with this, my position was redefined to be 2 levels lower than the duties I was required to do. It went from me being required to have a master’s degree to apply for the position to an associate degree level position. In other words, a position to help college and graduate students learn how to write and present in their college classes and careers could now be run by someone who never went to college. Long story short, I was still expected to do the same work I had when I left, I just had that relabeling so they didn’t have to give me a salary that matched those duties. Just as I was grappling with my new identity as both a working person and mom, my work blatantly let me know I was less valuable now. Right away, I had to start advocating for myself and remind people of the work I did before having a baby.

My baby was sleeping through the night at this point, but I was not. I didn’t have the words to relieve the rage I felt about how I was getting treated at work. I knew it was wrong, but I knew that even bringing up that this felt discriminatory would get eye rolls from the people in charge of the rules.

Every night this work frustration eeked into my head and I would have to figure out which sleeping medicine wouldn’t knock me out too hard so I could wake up and feed my baby when she cried. The stress wrecked my mind. Eventually I had a very real problem of not being able to produce enough milk for my child. Because the supply shortage was a shock to me, I hadn’t made a plan b of gradually introducing formula to my baby so it didn’t hurt her tiny tummy.

At the time, I didn’t know the science that was going on in my body. I didn’t know that the hormone prolactin that produces the milk also suppresses estrogen. I didn’t know that low estrogen is linked to anxiety and poor sleep quality. I did know that when I pumped, I wasn’t getting the calm that I got when I was nursing my baby. I knew what I felt. That oxytocin reward from feeding the baby was no longer there. In its place was cortisol, the stress of pumping, which directly inhibited milk production.

As my supply depleted, so did my sanity. I hated the men who had set up this pretend work world with pretend rules that only suited them. I hated men for not understanding the shit it takes to grow a baby, birth a baby, go back to work while still producing the milk to continue grow the baby. I fucking hated men.

Rage filled my body when I thought about work. Not because my job was hard, because I could see so many mediocre men doing jobs and enforcing these pretend rules that made them look successful. The women enforcing the rules hurt in a different way.

I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I sat crying on our floor before having to go to work. My baby would push my hand away from my phone as I scrolled through LinkedIn looking for something that would give me the flexibility to be a mom and make money.

I finally decided to admit defeat and tell my boss that I was struggling with my milk supply and mental health. Stuffing down the rage and tears, I pleaded with him to let me work from home a couple of days a week like I had been doing prior to mat leave. We decided to let HR know that I was struggling with my mental health so I could go through the proper channels. I got a note from my therapist with my mental health diagnosis. Full of shame, I turned this into the people who held the fate of my position in their hands.

I was asked if my mental health would be better after I stopped breast feeding. I was asked how long I’d be breastfeeding. And, even if I could know the answers to this, I didn’t want to tell them. Before the hard no, I got weeks of silence as they conversed about my situation. My pumping sessions had turned painful, and I had to go 10 minutes longer to get the same amount. This led to more clogged ducts. I didn’t get the reason they were taking so long to contemplate letting me work from home, but I could imagine the conversation “no she doesn’t need that. She’s just trying to get away with working less. If we let her, we’ll have to let everyone. These other new moms aren’t being this difficult”

So, I quit.

I quit, and my milk supply dried a couple of weeks later.

Epilogue

When your body is being stripped down to survival mode, you can’t bullshit yourself anymore about what doesn’t matter. Every night while I was trying to force myself to sleep, my body and mind rejected the big lie that the work schedule was more important than my ability to feed my baby.

At home, I was back in the world of emotions with my baby. The world we all started out in and eventually start ignoring. At work, emotion was a weakness. Intuition wasn’t valued. Me coming in saying hey this doesn’t feel right was not getting me anywhere, but the story that I was less valuable now was something I could no longer give air.

My existence as a large-bodied postpartum woman who wouldn’t shut up and cower to the rules built for men was a nightmare for leadership. My milk tits and mushy belly were a reminder of a power that most of these decision makers didn’t have.

I was not playing along. And I hope I never do.

[LV1]https://www.who.int/tools/elena/commentary/continued-breastfeeding

[LV2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK619944/

[LV3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/19/the-shocking-number-of-new-moms-who-return-to-work-two-weeks-after-childbirth/

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This little girl has a magical pull towards you. All the grandkids do. They get to see you the least out of everyone, and still they light up in your presence. It’s almost like the dementia brings you closer to them. You are a comrade in the world of big emotions and limited ability to express what you’re thinking. Your love reaching them before words.

You and her walk at the same teetering pace, each a step away from stumbling to the ground. I am constantly holding my breath over stair steps and street curbs as I watch you both tackle something I take for granted. When you take a hard fall, your main concern is consoling her who’s main concern is you. Her cries skip like a record player, unable to catch her breath.

On the ride home from your last neurology appointment, we sit in silence. Both trying to choke down tears to be brave for the other. If I cry, the news that this disease is reaching its final act will be real. It’s been 20 years of hearing what act the Parkinson’s is in. Each time the disease shape shifts into a new blurry dark unknown just as the oldest version starts to feel familiar. I glance over and see your eyes getting misty. “It’s okay to let it out.” I say with a lump in my throat, “I think I’m going to cry too.”

Tears form damp trails down our dry cheeks. It feels good to grieve with you. To not pretend everything is going to be okay. It makes it less heavy. When we start talking about dinner, I question whether the moment even happened.

I like that you are honest with me when you see a hallucination. When the floor starts moving, or there is someone in the corner. Asking if I was sitting at the end of your bed in the night. Having trouble differentiating dreams from reality.

It reminds me of the fever dream I entered when I became a new mom. Time doesn’t function the same way. The VHS is on fast-forward, and I can’t pause it in the spot that I’m trying to take in. When I look at pictures of my sweet girl, I realize a year has passed and I can’t remember what she was doing even a month ago. She is changing so fast. My own childhood is of another lifetime. It’s so hard for me to remember what life was like when you were the parent in charge. I keep searching for the person I used to be and how she fits with the person I am now.

Is that what it’s like for you? What were you like before you became my dad? When you fell in love with Mom? When you found out you were having a baby? It’s hard for me to even remember what you were like before your diagnosis. I like hearing stories from your friends, because you’ve lived a life that is of another person to me. The life of the parent being so mysterious to the child.

As a parent, I now know that the love you share with your child is different than the love a child shares with the parent. When I became a mom, I didn’t realize how deep my love could go and go.

Just before I’m about to give in and carry our little stinker up the stairs she flutters her eyes open. She waits to make sure we’re laughing. Then with a satisfied grin, she turns and starts climbing her way back up.

I saw her before I got into the car. I had a brief thought to pick her up and move her to the grass but didn’t want to feel the squirmy wet body in my hands. In a hurry, I hoped the tire wouldn’t hit her, knowing it was likely. At the bottom of my driveway, I saw two halves of her writhing in pain as I drove into the street. Why did I do that?

Returning home, I walked past half a worm cooked into the concrete. No sign of the other half. I had seen her. I had the instinct to help. Discomfort and hurry took over.

Inside, I found my daughter stepping over the metal hammock leg on our back porch for the hundredth time. Big steps for her little legs. She took her time going back and forth, trying not to trip. After a couple of minutes, I started cheering her on, and then she started clapping after each attempt. She has the instinctual determination of the worm, calmly inching her way closer. Never getting discouraged after tripping. No awareness of failure. Just the next attempt, and the next.

I love how sure of herself she is. Why does that feel so fragile, so fleeting? Like something the world is already lining up to take from her.

We talk a lot about growth mindset in school, but our culture doesn’t reward it. It rewards performance. It rewards polish. Students receive a final grade at the end of a unit with no acknowledgement of where they started and how far they came. When the growth mindset doesn’t reach the scheduled milestone, we are rewarded with shame. That shame is a current. Patient, invisible, relentless. It doesn’t announce itself. It just pulls. At some point, you stop noticing you’re no longer on the bank, you’re downstream in the rapids convinced the current is you.

How can I, with generational training in perfectionism and people pleasing, teach my girl that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be liked? It’s even okay not to be liked. In fact, she will be more free if she doesn’t care about that external validation. She can like herself and be in control of which thoughts she gives weight to, without needing anyone else for that.

Not realizing she was answering this worry, my mom sent me a video of winter Olympian Eileen Gu. In an interview, an inspired reporter asked Gu, “Do you think before you speak? Because you respond so quickly with articulate and insightful responses.” Gu lit up. She explained that she spends a lot of time in her head, observing her thoughts, actively training her mind, the way you’d train a muscle. Noting that our minds are flexible, not stagnant. They can be influenced. And we can do the influencing.

“You are capable of becoming who you want to be!” she exclaimed. She articulated the idea of mindfulness that I’d been circling. The ability to watch yourself think. To notice when an emotion is trying to write the whole story and choose whether to let it. That video showed me what it looks like when the shame current doesn’t win. A 22-year-old who never stopped moving at her own pace. I want that for my daughter. I want it, still, for myself. Not that I’m a LaVona Fay Golden trying to train my Tonya Harding into being the best athlete. But, it is rare to see a young woman excited to become a student of her own mind.

Growing up, I was not taught to be student of my mind. To get out of the river of thoughts and feelings and observe them from the bank. I’m starting to see the costs of learning this late. Swimming desperately to the bank before my daughter is old enough to watch me get swept downstream.

This is something I’m working on in therapy, spotting when my thoughts and feelings take the steering wheel and attempt to write a narrative that might not be true. Observe the first thought: I’m the only one holding this all together. Inhale…2…3…4… I don’t remember being so quick to anger before having a kid. I’m still in that 2-year window of hormones trying to get back to normal. After that, I might have to reconcile that I have become someone who is quick to anger. Hold...2…3…4… When something goes wrong, I am supposed to pause and question if my first thought is the right narrative. Exhale…2…3…4… My daughter is the rock that breaks the current. She gets the best me. Hold…2…3…4… The next person downstream gets what’s left.

My daughter twirls in her dino onesie. No music. Just her giving into the song in her heart. I study her leg muscles as she spins, her tiny bare feet step into my memory.

She still has that original certainty. The worm’s unhurried confidence. I want her to always be this free. I want to protect her from the external pressures that make her question her intuition. Pressures that turn this natural default of singing and dancing into a hurried woman. I want to pull myself out of the river so that when she looks up, she sees someone who knows how.

Inhale…maybe, there is a way for me to fend off the societal forces of being a “good” worker, a “good” mother that keep dunking me into the river of my thoughts. A way for me to navigate the rapids of getting shoes on, diaper changed, daycare bags ready, dogs fed, work tasks done, house maintained, being a thoughtful partner, relearning boundaries, finding time for exercise and self-care. Exhale... maybe I can start trusting my instincts and pull myself back onto that damn bank.

Before I take her down with me.

Inhale…maybe it’s okay that I’m learning it late, grasping desperately for a hanging limb to pull myself out of the water. Inhale…Yes, I am learning it late. Not too late. Exhale…

And she will learn it sooner.

“Why would you bring another person into this world?” asked my imaginary child as I contemplated becoming a mom.

The question feels as inevitable as “I didn’t ask to be born!” in a mother-child fight. I understand why my mind-child asks this. How could I even begin to answer my child who arrives in a world that numbs us to headlines about powerful men sexually abusing children? A world that allows kids to be torn from their parents in the name of “policy.” A world where we continue to burn the Earth’s resources to chase the imaginary money-god. And yet in that dark world where my thoughts tend to spiral, my real daughter’s squealing giggle snaps me back to the present, challenging me to a game of chase, reminding me to notice what’s right in front of me.

In graduate school, while writing about immigration coverage, I stumbled across Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony. Writing from prison under Mussolini, he explained “how we got here” by showing how the ruling class made its worldview feel like “common sense,” convincing the rest of us to accept everyday suffering as normal. “Common sense” doesn’t mean good reasoning; it’s the story that gets repeated so often it fades into the background noise of our lives. If the government says it’s acting “for freedom” or “pro-life” most people stop asking questions because they want to protect those things. It’s the same move that shows up when people dismiss a new mother as whiney. Instead of digging into the history and policies that make her life impossible, they roll their eyes and tell her to be grateful she has a job. Wearing her down until she is obedient or burnt out is easier than challenging an entire system. If “common sense” keeps us numb and efficient, then anything that wakes us up (curiosity, laughter, singing in a hospital room) starts to look suspiciously radical.

A perfect example of “common sense” popped up at my physical therapy one Monday, as my therapist groaned about the long week ahead. It was the kind of conversation that is as standard as hearing “Man, it’s only Tuesday” on a Tuesday. I mentioned to him that Sweden trialed the four-day work week and found that people were happier and just as productive working less. He scrunched his nose like he had suddenly caught the sweaty smell of the room. “Well, I’m not for socialism,” he said, brushing the thought away and that was that. As quickly as the complaint came, he walked it back and settled into the belief that the five-day workweek is “just how it is.” And “how it is” feels safer than risking a different, more balanced life.

“Common sense” won out in the Arkansas senate race in 2014 when the twenty-eight-year-old Democrat Tyler Pearson campaigned on improving education, healthcare, and free pre-k. He lost to “tells it like it is” incumbent Republican, Jason Rapert. Rapert’s campaign centered on impeaching then-President Obama and opposing same-sex marriage and women having control over their bodies. When people complain now about the cost of daycare, I think about Pearson. Arkansas now has the harshest abortion restrictions, ranks among the top states for teen pregnancies, and is near the bottom in education and healthcare coverage. We could have had free daycare twelve years ago. We could have been led by someone who cared about women’s health over the distorted “common sense” rhetoric of being “pro-life.” If “common sense” says we should be grateful for unpaid overtime and impossible childcare bills, then maybe wisdom looks like challenging the common narrative, building lives where family comes first, and refusing to apologize for needing rest.

One way I escape the grind of “common sense” is remembering places and people lit up by rebellious joy. By that I mean joy that shows up in places or seasons surrounded by anything but joy. In our society, the default is to sigh, “It’s only Tuesday,” without changing anything about the workweek that makes Tuesday a drag. If you came to work and greeted your coworkers with “Woo hoo! I’m happy today is Tuesday!” they’d likely assume you were being sarcastic or dismiss you as the office loon.

There are plenty of reasons to be upset by what is going on in the world (See my first paragraph). Rebellious joy doesn’t ignore any of that in the toxic, positive way employers try to convince teachers and nurses they aren’t doing the job for the money; they’re doing it because they are compassionate, caring people. A person with rebellious joy looks straight at the hate in the world and chooses joy both to survive and fuel their resistance.

In Cuba, joy itself can feel like a quiet rebellion, an insistence of living well in the present rather than waiting for everything to be fixed. During my time there, music and dancing in the street were an everyday sight. Dancing is joy in motion. Back home, I have to wait for a wedding to experience that joy. In Cuba, when a song came on, no one was ashamed to get up and dance in the restaurant, in the living room, or right on the street. When you’re traveling, what counts as “normal” shifts. “This is how it’s always been” gets tested. Walking through Havana, I never did get used to the piropos (cat calls), but I secretly envied the couples making out at stoplights, blocking the crosswalk with their affection. Looking back, I miss the endorphin high of walking and talking with a friend on our way to a destination, something my day-to-day life at home rarely offers.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance felt like the same kind of rebellious joy: music and dance insisting that Latine cultures are vibrant and alive, not the threat certain politicians would like us to fear. On the most American of stages, bodies moved in salsa and reggaeton rhythms turning love and joy into a shield, a public refusal to shrink in the face of “common sense” hate. His celebration of Latinidad wasn’t just entertainment; it was a demonstration that joy and love is what connects us as humans. Latine communities have long been teachers of that kind of resilient, rebellious joy.

I grew up around these joy teachers—adults who carried laughter and playfulness like a sacred duty. They stand out because I haven’t run into many adults who have maintained the joy default we’re given as children. Manuel, an eighty-year-old family friend who worked with my dad, would gleefully shout “¡Buenos Días!” to us as he walked into the house. Each morning, he wrapped us in hugs like we hadn’t seen him in years. His life wasn’t easy. He had to work much harder than I ever will. Yet, he still loved being my eighty-year-old friend who played chase around the house and soccer in the backyard.

My widowed host mom, Ximena, in Chile was the same way. “HOLAAAA LISAAA” greeted me every afternoon when I got home from class, followed by an invitation for me to crawl under the covers to watch a telenovela with her. Even when they were tired and had plenty of reason, like the rest of us, to be in a bad mood, being together was the point. Their greetings said: you are worth getting excited about. Their joy was infectious and went against the grain. A deliberate choice to find delight when life insisted they shouldn’t. I hope my daughter feels this not only from me, but from the Manuels and Ximenas she meets in her own life. I hope they remind her, as they do me, to return to the joy and wonder default we’re born with.

Lately, I’ve been clinging to this idea that experiencing joy during this dark time is a rebellious and necessary act. My daughter slips easily into that rebellion. In my dad’s hospital room this week, she pulled a worn-out nurse into singing “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Row, row, row, your boat.” We all laughed at the line “Life is but a dream.” For a few minutes the monitors and lab results fell away; there was only clapping and off-key singing. Maybe that’s what I’ll tell her someday when she asks why I brought her into a world like this: that I wanted another co-conspirator in the world who refuses to fit in, who dances when we’re told to be still.

When I started teaching 7^th grade, I learned quickly that kids hear your emotion before they listen to what you say. Emotion is their first language. And, unlike adults who are out of practice, they’re fluent in it.

I was full of nerves my first day teaching. Of course, they caught on immediately and started testing the waters. While I was introducing the curriculum, a hand went up.

“When does puberty start?” a bold, scrawny boy with wide, curious eyes wanted to know.

An audience of amused 12-year-olds watched me squirm for the right words so we could move on.

“Well err, it kind of differs for each person. Um, but don’t worry, you’ll all get there.”

“I have a mustache!” announced a proud crust-ache-wearing kid named Dalton, who slowly turned in a circle so everyone could see the dill-weed hairs sprinkled on his upper lip.

“Ah, yes. Very good, Dalton. Okay, let’s get back on topic.”

People often told me they would never want to go back and teach middle school. They were too traumatized by that age. And although challenging, I found this group refreshing in ways that adults are not. The trick was that the more secure you were with being silly, the more they’d open up and relax. If you were clearly the goof in the room, no one would be looking at them.

This age came with a raw honesty. They wanted to look cool in front of each other, but when one of them was truly struggling, watching the class rally around that kid was incredibly rewarding. One day, after reading that Dally got shot in The Outsiders, a boy pulled up his hood, put his head down on his desk, and sobbed. I tried to usher him out of the class to protect him from getting bullied, but quickly realized that that was unnecessary. The class that was so quick to “check” anyone whose forehead wasn’t an acceptable size, just kept going with their day as if this was the most normal reaction someone could have. Some offered a soft pat on the back as they walked by. They often left me slack-jawed with surprise when they showed a side of humanity I didn’t see from the emotionally constipated adults in my day-to-day.

They were also just fucking funny. That first week, I saw a boy squinting at something written on my board. After reading it, he threw up his hands and yelled “Awww man!!”

“Got ‘em!” cackled a dude in the back.

My curiosity piqued, I went over and found ‘U ugly if u read dis’ written in permanent marker on my board, so tiny you had to lean in and squint to see it. Pure, poetic genius.

Comedic writing aside, I get why people hesitate to go back to the seventh grade. It is inarguably the hardest year of growing up. There is a new, painful awareness of self and an exhausting scramble to figure out where that self fits into the world. At twelve, the group you hang out with becomes your identity, and if you don’t have a group, that also defines your identity. The latter is where I entered the 7^th grade scene.

My social awareness heightened as my body changed into unrecognizable versions of itself. I constantly compared this new body to the ones around me. On the shorter, less developed end of the 12-year-old crowd, I found myself watching how people’s butts moved while they walked through the halls. Did my butt look like that when I walked? Do I know how to walk right? Oh my gosh, what if I’ve been walking weird my whole life and never knew it? I craned my neck back to try to see if my butt made the same creases in my jeans, then quickly snapped my head around to see if anyone noticed what I was doing. Thoughts like these constantly filled my 12-year-old head. It was exhausting.

In my mind, I was invisible at school, until I did something embarrassing. Then everyone looked at me through a magnifying glass. As I got ready for school, I’d give myself a morning pep-talk, some version of, “Today people will realize how cool I am. I’ll have casual conversations, laugh, and make jokes. It will look natural. People will wonder why they hadn’t noticed this casual, cool girl before.”

Unfortunately, my social skills were formed by my Friends, Rachel and Phoebe. I didn’t put together that their jokes only worked because the audience was in on it. So, my self-deprecating quips usually got awkward looks from people who were not aware that they were part of my sit-com humor.

Seventh grade is a time of so much change. Everyone is uncomfortable and insecure. No grace is spared because no one is giving themselves any grace. Every word, a risk. Every move, unsteady. And being noticed in the wrong way is all consuming.

All of that insecurity eventually condensed into a few sharp moments branded into my memory. In science class, the boy behind me, who I thought was cute, because I thought everyone was cute, dropped his pen into my chair.

“Eww ewwwww! My pen touched your butt!!” he yelled as everyone turned our way. “Oh my gosh, you can have it! Bleh! I don’t want it. Ha ha, you can keep it. Eww, oh my gosh, it touched your butt! He, he, he, that’s so gross!”

My face burned as I shoved it back at him and uncleverly croaked “No it didn’t!” A lump rose in my throat as my eyes flooded with hot tears. I fixed my gaze on a spot my desk and willed the class to be over before it began.

I assumed I’d graduated from that kind of emotional whiplash when I left seventh grade behind. Then pregnancy, and the 4th trimester, showed up and handed me a new hormonal assignment. It’s impossible to remember what that hormone surge was like at twelve, so when next one hit 23 years later, it didn’t feel familiar or temporary. Like 7^th grade, it felt endless.

At the very beginning of my 4th trimester (the ‘bonus’ trimester that sounds made-up but is painfully real), I felt trapped in the hospital room after having my baby. Nurses came in every hour or so, making sleep impossible after being up for 48 hours in labor. The baby constantly needed to breastfeed, and we both had no idea how to make this “natural” thing happen. None of us spoke the same language. My baby only had emotion to work with, and I wasn’t fluent in that anymore.

After I finally fell asleep, my morning nurse freaked out that I’d let the baby sleep too long without food. The indescribable joy of meeting my baby quickly gave way to the feeling failure staring me in the face, and the weight of keeping her alive outside of my body was crushing.

It was seventh grade all over again: a body I didn’t recognize, a room full of people who seemed to know the rules, and me completely lost as to what was the normal way to function in this world. I lay there leaking onto the puppy pad while someone pressed my deflated belly for the fundal ‘massage’ and shifted my boobs for breastfeeding like a butcher arranging chicken cutlets on display. I survived it by slipping out of my body for a while.

Later, I finally cracked. After another failed breast-feeding session, I wailed “I’m a horrible mother!” sobbing heaves into my startled husband’s chest. About 30 seconds later, the timely nurse appeared and casually handed my husband the postpartum depression survey. I scrambled to fix my face and smile, perhaps a little too manically. Blinking through tears and sweat soaked hair sticking to my red puffy, face, I tried laughing loudly to communicate “Oh, I know how this looks, but trust me I’m so normal. HA HA HA! See, HA HA!”

I hiccuped between sobs while my husband set the survey aside and delicately muttered, “We can get to this later.”

“No, we fill out that I’m fine right now” I argued, “so we can get the hell out of here!”

In my mind, if I could show everyone I was holding it together, maybe they’d sign the discharge papers and I could escape. My husband assured me that being honest on this survey wouldn’t make us stay longer. But what did he know? Bleary eyed, I rushed through the form and marked that I was happy on all accounts.

Looking back, I know mine was a ‘good’ birth, no major complications, a supportive team. Still, I felt like a trapped animal desperately scanning for the exit. Everything was so new and heavy going home felt like the only way anything might become familiar again.

In seventh grade, I studied everyone’s walk so no one would notice mine; once I finally made it home from the hospital, I memorized every squeaky floorboard in our house so no one would wake the baby. Pregnancy brought on superhuman qualities that carried over to the 4^th trimester. The same heightened sense of smell that fueled my early morning sickness was joined in the 4th trimester by something unexpected, a sharper sense of hearing.

The same anxiety that came with keeping a tiny human alive attached itself to every sound in the house. When the baby finally went down, I became hyper aware of anything that might wake her up: my husband’s booming voice, every door slam, the clink of trash being thrown away, the flick of a light switch. Suddenly, every noise my husband made felt like a personal attack on my sanity.

While he romped through the house like a bear fumbling through trash, I moved like a ninja. The invisibility I perfected in 7^th grade suddenly came in handy. I could glide through the house without making a sound and find my cup of water in the dark, all in the name of protecting my baby’s sleep. Was this rational or even necessary? No one will ever know.

Like many experiences as a new mom, I wasn’t aware that the obsession with sound and moving like a spy in the night was common. Before I finally deleted social media for the sake of my fried new mom nerves, I found a validating post called “Texting Your Partner: Co-Sleep Edition.” It was simply screenshots of moms texting their husbands to stop making noise, and they read like a warm hug. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Rules for tonight. If she’s waking up and chatty don’t respond. If you are snoring, respond when I KICK you by STOPPING. If you have to pee, choose a time when she’s not fidgeting. If you have to pee, don’t be loud as fuck. If you have to pee, don’t get in and out of bed like an animal.”

• “Please refrain from farting loudly until we are settled”

• “Please stop clanking”

• “Omfg your sweaty feet sticking to the floor are waking her up. Please put socks on before walking back in here”

That men do not gain these superhuman senses after the baby arrives is just cruel.

I spent so much of the seventh grade wishing I could mute the emotion channel and tone down how much I cared about what everyone thought. In the fourth trimester, I wished for the same thing, just with different stakes: less noise and fewer alarms blaring in my nervous system every time my baby grunted in her sleep. But the more I tried to shut it off, the more obvious it became that this sensitivity was how I stayed in tune to her. My baby and I were both speaking in emotion. She was reteaching me the language.

Seventh grade taught me what it feels like to be a walking exposed nerve. Motherhood is teaching me that the same sensitivity that once felt like a liability is the uncomfortable superpower that keeps a tiny human alive. Over time, the shock of feeling out of control has settled, replacing the illusion of control I had before I became a mom.

Perhaps, this phase of life, like 7^th grade, is for leaning and squinting into the unknown. And, on the good days, absorbing the shock and finding the humor in realizing that sometimes… U ugly if you read dis.

On maternity leave, I observed a family of robins occupying a nest wedged on the gutter of my back porch. I watched the mama and papa robin take turns sitting on the nest while the other brought back grubs and insects for the fledglings every hour or so. I admired their instincts while I was fumbling to get my own baby to open wide, like the fledglings do, so she would get a proper latch.

One morning, Papa Robin returned to the nest with some grub. Chest puffed out with pride, he tapped his feet on the rim of the nest and tweet-tweet-tweeted a gleeful tune to the dewy, translucent necks stretched before him.

Pretty quickly into his little song, Mama Robin on the nearby fence chirp, chirp, chirped at Papa Robin, flapping her wings and cutting her eyes my way. As a mother, I recognized that exasperated warning look. “There is a human a few feet away, ya ding-dong! Hush!” she huffed. Papa Robin shot one quick glance my way and, in sudden alarm, cut off his song mid-chirp. Without a peep, he pressed his grub into the impatient, grasping mouths of his fledglings.

The way his tune stopped in his throat reminded me of a moment in my own nest not so many nights before. My partner was carrying our infant to bed, rumbling a lullaby in that deep, echoing baritone of his. I saw she was already fast asleep and worried he’d wake her, so I pointed at her and shushed him. Eyes wide at our sleeping baby, he snapped his lips shut, and the booming song cut off mid-word. The abrupt silence made us both giggle in the dark.

Moments like that marked the soundtrack of maternity leave, which felt like a disruption to the familiar song and dance I’d been used to. My life had suddenly changed tempo; the music was new, the old steps no longer worked, and I couldn’t get the footing right on the new steps. Uncoordinated moves aside, I didn’t particularly dislike this new song and dance. It offered me the rare chance to move through my days outside of the usual work rhythm, even if most of that time was spent in a fog of exhaustion. When I wasn’t forcing sleep against anxiety, rotating loads of laundry, feeding the baby, changing diapers (hers and mine), and hauling trash bags of diaper shrapnel to the curb, there was a different internal tempo that led me outside to look at birds and clouds instead of computer screens.

As the end of my twelve weeks crept closer, that wandering, loose, bird-watching rhythm clashed hard with the one waiting for me on the other side of maternity leave. I dreaded going back to work. I dreaded returning to the myth of the noble worker that everyone silently adhered to. The worker who always says yes, stays late, delivers polished work, and is supposedly rewarded for it, was going to be even harder to navigate as a new exhausted mom. I’d fallen for that “hard work = success” story plenty of times, especially with my people pleasing tendency to say “yes” to the higher paid men above me, naively thinking it would lead to opportunities. Instead, my hard work just meant more work. My reliability became a reason to pile on tasks, and anytime I brought up pay, it was like I violated a silent pact. The hard worker they relied on instantly became a problem to manage.

Sitting on the patio with my sleeping baby’s heartbeat thrumming on my own, I found myself asking: who decided the 40-hour workweek was the tempo we must keep? A quick Google search brought me to 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, locking in eight-hour days as the norm. The original bill was drafted for a 30-hour workweek by Senator Hugo Black, but that was met with strong opposition from—shock of all shocks—business leaders who fought hard against paying livable wages for fewer hours. My guess is that they shamed this Senator with accusations of laziness and dishonor for not treating work as the number one indicator of good character. Not unlike how Millennials have a reputation for being lazy for wanting to work from home instead of wanting to put on a suit and go into the office — God forbid we find value and purpose outside of the corporate machine.

Yes, 8-hour days are better than the 12-hour days that came before, yet somehow that compromise became the sacred norm for employers who find endless ways to stretch workers far past forty hours in practice. The Protestant-flavored morality tale of the ‘good worker’ still keeps the whole thing humming, making sure employees go above and beyond to be good and pure.

Of course, this 1940s work system was written for a world that depended on a woman running the unpaid shift in the background, so wage-earning partners could come home to a picked-up house, a hot meal, and children who had been bathed and tucked into pajamas. It only ‘worked’ because someone else’s time was invisible. Then women stepped into the paid workforce in large numbers during World War II, and the old setup started to crack. Of course, to make this work, the nation rose to the occasion and shifted the system to meet the change. Federally run schools stretched their hours to end at 5:30 so that the wage-earning parents could pick-up their kids after work. Since there was no one home to cook a long nutritious recipe, grocery stores stocked healthy ready-made meals and fast-food restaurants provided cheap healthy options for families with two wage-earning parents. Ahhh, don’t you love alternate histories? Needless to say, the change to the woman’s schedule just meant she had to find a way to cover the unpaid and paid shift simultaneously.

All of this rattled around in my head as I dreaded my return to the rigid work rhythm. It’s no surprise that, I am among good company with this feeling. 1 in 4 women leave the workforce in the first year of motherhood. The modern workforce quietly counts on mothers to absorb the cost by stepping back so the forty-hour work tempo can continue. Economists call this the motherhood penalty: after childbirth, women’s earnings drop by roughly 30-50 percent while men often receive a fatherhood bonus, out-earning their childless male peers, making parenthood one of the main engines of gender pay inequality.

Those stats are hard to unsee, but while the 40-hour system runs on “productivity and time spent” the women in my life were running a different kind of economy entirely. A flock of women showed up for me in those survival weeks of new motherhood. They brought me quiche, texted me encouraging messages, and held my baby so I could take a shower. I had friends travel in from out of town to make sure I was surviving okay as a new mother—showing me how to rub my baby’s tummy in the I L U motion to help her get rid of gas.

Another Robin taught me about this kind of economy, acclaimed author and botanist Robin Kimmerer. In her new book, The Serviceberry, she lays out the Potawatomi value for the gift economies that are modeled by the natural word. The gift economy runs on an abundance perspective, gratitude, and sharing cycles that multiply in results. The serviceberry does this by gifting food for birds and animals who spread the seeds ensuring the trees survival. Unlike the capitalistic scarcity mindset, this economy builds community and mutual well-being. In the book, she notes different examples of how we do this in our own culture with neighborhood libraries and free farm stands. As I was reflecting on these examples, it clicked. This is what the women in my life do, quietly, in the cracks of our capitalistic schedule: they throw baby showers, pass meals, send hand-me-downs, and share baby soothing rituals. These women help mothers and new families survive by sharing resources, which gets paid forward to the next mother and the next. They provide community and abundance in a society that celebrates the hoarding and the scarcity mindset of supply and demand.

Those female friendships and Robins were teaching me a different way to mother—one that measures success in love and presence, not productivity. Something that is missing from the 9-5 work dance.

That new measure was tested a few nights ago, after my daughter was prepping another battle for the war on bedtime. For the last few days, she fought bedtime like it was physically giving her pain. In her crib, she’d curve her back in a C shape and buck like a bronco alternating between kicking her legs up and arcing her back, while screaming like a rabbit being attacked. After 5 harrowing evenings of this, I bravely headed to her room determined to find a way that wouldn’t leave me vibrating with her distress. So instead of her regimented bedtime routine, I went up there and let her lead the dance. I did whatever she wanted to do, not letting time and structure rule the evening. Ohhhh did she favor this. First, she decided to go through her bookshelf and take out all of her books one by one. Handing some to me to start reading, then moving onto the next as she got bored a few pages in. Next, she moved on to my tummy as the source of entertainment. She hopped on and bounced up and down with her air lasso, as I sang the Ridin’ Cowgirls song. You know, the one that goes… Dum de de dum de de dum de de dum de de DUM DUM… dum de de dum de de dum de de dum de de DUM DUM DUM DUM, yee haw!! Ridin’ cowgirl!!

After a couple of bouts of Ridin’ Cowgirl, she proceeded to slap my belly enjoying the percussive sound as I pleaded with her to be gentle. Slowing down to a pat, she expressed curious interest with the crater in the middle of my mushy abdomen and started digging her sticky finger into the mysterious depths of my belly button. Satisfied after exploring her mom’s musical belly, she finally started to slow down long enough for me to gently wiggle her into her pajamas and sleep sack. She sleepily requested Wheels on the Bus for a bedtime lullaby by rotating her fists into a circle. And as I sang, her eyelids grew heavy and she went down without a squeak of resistance.

Ahhh, okay… she is teaching me the moves to the new song and dance I’d been fumbling with. The efficient bedtime schedule reinforced by our productive workday was not the move that would work for her. I’m slowly picking up what she’s putting down. She isn’t familiar with the steps to that rigid dance yet, and is guiding me through a softer, more fluid song and dance, more natural to her. She got me to change tempo, take a step back from the strict bedtime regime to sing and play. In return, I didn’t have to tear myself away from her gut-wrenching wails and flailing limbs, leaving the room tingling with frayed nerves. As tired as I was, it felt good to play with her, something I know I’ll miss when I’m not her top choice for a playmate. Leaving her room that night, I shuffled down the stairs, chin up and chest puffed out like Papa Robin, feeling on top of the world belting: The baby on the bus says, night night Mama, night night Mama, night night Mama. The baby on the bus says night night Mama, ALLLLL THROUGH THE TOWNNN!!

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On motherhood, womanhood, and observations, some might say overthinkings, of this beautiful, painful life.

Here goes… I have been writing for years, to myself. I have finally gained the confidence to realize, I have something to say.

Why this, why now?

After burning out of two education jobs that valued my work but didn’t value me, I realize I have to take things into my own hands. When else am I really going to sit down and share my thoughts? After I burn out of my next job?

As an anxious over-thinker, I can easily convince myself that this will not work. I’m refusing to listen to all of the reasons why I shouldn’t do this. Instead I’m asking, what happens if I don’t ever do it?

What is this you might ask? Honesty, I’m not totally sure what this is yet. What I can tell you is that I will take you on a roller coaster of feels and hopefully laughs as I parse out experiences as ordinary as being confronted at the grocery store for “skipping” the line, and as painfully vivid as staring straight into the tired eye of a shriveled up old dick.

Who is this for?

This will be a safe space for people wanting to hear the raw honest experiences of what it is like to be a woman, a working person, and a brand new mother. It is not going to be a facebook rant of opinions that you didn’t sign up for. So if any of this sounds intriguing to you, welcome.

I have recently gone through the biggest life change that has happens to anyone who has given birth, and it is so strange and wild that I wish more people were talking about it. Literally every person reading this had a mother who has gone through the wildest ride of life by becoming a new mom though the honest content on that topic is so quiet. “Who wants to hear a woman struggle out loud?” says the devil on my shoulder. But if I shush that devil, I can dig into the fleshy content that is as messy, magical, strong, and soft as my post-partem body. Again, this won’t be a complaint fest, but I’m not going to say I won’t have some qualms here and there. I’ll try to keep things interesting and write what I wish others were saying, so this experience feels less alone.

When should you expect posts?

I will be posting once a month, at the beginning of the month—let’s say the first Monday of the month. How does that work for ya?

TBD on what subscribers and free subscribers will get. I assume, things will get more raw and real if you subscribe and the the free subscribers will get the easier to swallow posts… I still need to sort this out. (Overthinkings to come)

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Thank’s for considering me.

Alright, now you know what you’re in for. I’m excited to start this journey with you! Cheers!