Lisa Wood Shapiro - Hot Mess Mom: Misadventures of New Motherhood

Lisa Wood Shapiro is a writer and an Emmy-winning filmmaker whose work has appeared on PBS, A&E, Nickelodeon, Noggin and elsewhere. She studied nonfiction writing with the late Lucy Grealy and the poet Thomas Lux.

Lisa lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

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Copyright 2016 by Lisa Wood Shapiro

Paperback originally published 2004 by Lyons Press as How My Breasts Saved the World

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-63076-151-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-63076-152-3 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

FOR SOPHIE, EBEN, AND FLETCHER

This book describes the authors experience nursing her daughter and reflects her opinions relating to those experiences. This is not intended as a medical guide. Every woman and child are different, so readers should consult with their health care provider when follow ing the suggestions outlined in this book.

Some names and identifying characteristics of individuals mentioned in the book have been changed to protect their privacy.

The Most Natural Thing in the World and Brooke Shields

THE WOMEN in my family held certain convictions that they believed to be true. They thought women and girls looked best in short pixie haircuts, and this misconception was imposed on their daughters at random. They believed one could never own enough cookbooks, a game of bridge was good for the soul, and that women should breast-feed their babies.

Breast-feeding is the most natural thing in the world, my grandmother used to say. Why would anyone do anything else? My grandmother wasnt one for keeping her opinions to herself and she was more confounded than judgmental when it came to nursing. She didnt own a dishwasher until in her forties and couldnt understand why anyone would clean all those bottles and boil all those nipples.

I cannot say when I was conscious of the fact that my family came from a long line of breast-feedersI mean didnt we allbut my family kept on nursing even after the advent of formula and the trend toward prop feeding. They were proud of this and though they werent the kind of people who bragged, they flaunted this fact whenever the subject of babies came up, which was often.

When I was a child I loved visiting my grandmother who lived in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. I remember lingering over breakfasts at the kitchen table where we ate fresh papaya and mango. I listened to stories about my mothers childhood. She was eleven when her parents, brother, and sister all relocated to the island. For the first year they lived in a hut on the beach. A colossal resort sits there today, but back in the fifties it was just a one-room beach cabin. My mom ate fresh coconut from the tree and she had several frightening encounters with barracudas. It all was far more exotic than New Jersey, where I grew up. I used to think the only exciting thing that happened to me was being born on that island.

How I came to be born in St. Thomas is a complicated story that involved my parents meeting at George Washington University, a chicken farm in South Africa, a denial for a renewed visa, and my mother being six months pregnant. But how I was born became part of my familys oral history, usually told every time we visited my grandmother. It was 1969 and my mother was twenty-three years old. My parents left South Africa, where theyd been living, under adverse circumstances. They decided it was best for my mother and sister to live temporarily with my grandparents while my father secured a job up in the States.

I was my mothers second child, due a brief sixteen months after her first. As the story went, after my mothers water broke, my grandmother dropped her off at the front entrance of the hospital. She entered unaccompanied, and she stresses that it was a different time back then, especially in an out-of-the-way Caribbean hospital. Women rarely brought their spouses into the delivery room, much less their mothers. My mother was given an intravenous drip of Pitocin without any pain medication and left alone in the delivery room. There was no one to hold her hand, no nurse to wipe her brow. It was just my mother and Pitocin.

The doctor returned when it came time to push. My mother had given birth to my sister in South Africa with only Demerol to dull the pain, so in her mind she knew she could do it, and she did. Perhapsits because that story was retold so many times, or it was the only testimonial I ever intimately knew, but either way that story shaped my own perceptions of labor and delivery. It was scary and painful, and one needed to have an advocate and most of all be prepared. That was the hard part.

After the delivery my mom was rolled into the recovery room and I was placed in the hospitals nursery. No longer in pain, she was thrilled to be served hot porridge with raisins, my mothers favorite. Several bites later, my mom noticed that the raisins began to move. They werent raisins.

Get me out of here, my mother told my grandma over the phone. She got dressed, got her baby, and walked out of the hospital fourteen hours after giving birth. Since she hadnt been properly discharged she would have to return later for my birth certificate, which in keeping with the hospitals standard of care had listed me as a male. My mother reapplied for a new certificate with the proper sex, but somewhere in a shoe box of childhood mementos is a birth certificate with my name on it. In front of the typed word male my father wrote an FE with a blue ballpoint pen.

The story continued with a disputed ending, which has my mother returning to the house just in time to cook for my grandmothers bridge party. With each telling the number of guests grew and my mother described something like a sit-down dinner, which was plausible.

My mother nursed me at my grandmothers house. She was feeding me in the back bedroom when my sister Anne walked in. She looked at me, who was nursing, looked back at my mother, and walked over mouth agape. There was Anne with all her pointy baby teeth moving in to nurse as well. Anne had been weaned long before and my mother didnt want to encourage her to start again.

No, no, no, I told her. My mom would then pretend to protect herself from the canines of an invisible toddler.

What I loved most about nursing was being in sync, my mother told me. I would feel my milk come down and at thatmoment I would hear you cry. She described the time when I was a baby with such pleasure.

For as often as I heard my familys stories about breast-feeding, I had never actually seen anyone nurse. And then I saw The Blue Lagoon.

Im not exactly sure when I first saw the movie, but somewhere between my Bat Mitzvah and high school graduation I had seen The Blue Lagoon at least a dozen times.