How Baby

A non-exhaustive list of why it feels impossible to talk about ‘how it’s going’ after having a baby. Other topics include: how much breastfeeding sucks at first, how having a child forces you to consider the mortality of your own parents, how someone having (often painful) access to your body 24/7 is super triggering, how the biological facts of pregnancy and new motherhood exacerbate gendered expectations…

I remember feeling a little cheated after having a baby, like, why didn’t anyone tell me about this? And I think there’s a few reasons: a lot of pressure not to talk about the gritty, gross, alienating parts of motherhood; the impossibility of describing these massive upheavals in mere words; the unfixability of most of these problems; a genuine amnesia about most of it, once you’re a few years out.

I think with my words, and I don’t have a very good filter on what people do or don’t want to know about me, so – sorry to anyone I weirded out when I was Going Through It. I have a comic to talk about it, now, haha.

Thanks to my friend Katy for allowing me to put her in the comic!