Category: Mom Stuff

Exhausted? Good news: It’s your fault
It seems like everyone is absolutely exhausted these days. Tired beyond reason. Like the kind of tired that sinks into your very bones and turns you into a depressed but sentient form of human goo that can do things like earn a wage but can’t do things like brush your teeth, shower, or make a phone call.

Luckily for you and for everyone else, I have a little secret. It’s called self-care. And if you do it, you will completely turn your life around, eradicate all your problems, become a more productive worker, a better partner, and a more involved parent. In fact, you could be a woman who has it all.

If you don’t do it? Well, everyone will resent you and talk about you behind your back for being such a complete and utter failure.

Isn’t this fun already?

Listen, we’ve all heard that systemic issues are to blame. And it sure can feel like it. Maybe you’re tired because healthcare is really expensive and so is housing and food and transportation but salaries absolutely have not grown to meet rising costs. Maybe you’re exhausted because you’re a parent and you just received notice that your child’s been exposed to COVID (again) and ebola (at least it’s new) and school will be closed 11 of the next 17 days and you have no backup childcare but somehow also still owe someone $1,000 for that. It could just be the daily grind of modern life, the 24 hour news cycle, everyone screaming at you from all directions no matter where you go.

I get where you’re coming from. But you’re wrong.

It’s all your fault! Isn’t that great?

If you are taking naps in your yard, that might also be why you’re tired. (Photo by nrd on Unsplash)

Okay, okay, hear me out. Maybe you have anxiety because climate change and job insecurity and the stress of parenting and just general mental illness stuff. So, do you have therapist? Oh, therapists are too expensive? Have you tried making more money? All therapists in the area are booked? Have to tried calling some more? You tried it and didn’t click with your first couple and aren’t quite ready to try another one? Have you considered that you’re a quitter?

Did you know that there’s probably a venture capitalist firm out there who would give you the money to create a therapist using AI that would almost definitely (probably) work really well and not lead to more long-term psychic pain for the population at large? Have you tried that?

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I did once have the idea of creating an app that someone could use to become a licensed physician, so trust me when I say that I have the advice you need. Exhaustion and that deep pervasive tiredness could have a lot of causes. Here are some reasons you might be tired:
- You aren’t drinking enough water
- You’re drinking too much water
- You don’t do enough yoga
- You weigh literally anything at all
- You didn’t take a nap
- You took too long of a nap
- You stayed up too late working
- You saw someone else yawn and it made you yawn
That list isn’t exhaustive, but the point is that these are all things you could absolutely fix. I understand you’re in a bind. You want to better yourself, but the amorphous blob you’ve become is really holding you back. That’s why I’m here to give you a few self-care tips:
- Turn yourself into a houseplant in the home of an extremely responsible plant owner. They will give you the correct amount of water to help you grow and thrive. Plus plenty of sunlight.
- Make enough in investments that you can retire early and then spend all your time traveling all over the world and learning how people live. Eventually you’re bound to stumble across someone who holds the secret to immortality. You’ve got to. One of us will find them.
- Don’t look at blue light too close to bed time. It’s a little known fact that blue light will actually turn those memory crystal balls in your head blue, which makes your memories sad, and that’s how people become depressed.
- Try to find a spinning wheel somewhere and prick your finger on it so you can enter a deep and enchanted sleep. Everyone else will be too tired and busy to come wake you up. Score!
- Kids waking you up at night? Spend a week or two waking them up at least two to three times during the night. Then they’ll understand that it makes them tired and they won’t want to do it to you anymore.
- Simply float away on a cloud and escape all your problems.
Once you discover that the key to your happiness all rests on you, I bet you’ll turn it around. You can turn it all around. You have to turn it all around. You just have to.

You’ve made it this far, which means you’re really invested in your health and wellbeing. Congratulations! I’m proud of you. And as a reward, I’ll let you know the really simple trick to being well rested: Go to bed in a quiet, dark room. Keep the temperature in your house low. Don’t look at screens an hour before bed, drink some herbal tea, do some meditation, journal a bit, express your gratitudes to yourself, have all your clothes laid out for the next day, have all your meals prepped for the next day, take a shower, and take deep breaths. Go to sleep exactly on time and fall asleep immediately. Sleep for at least eight restful hours in the exact right position without any children, dogs, or partners to wake you up. Don’t have insomnia or chronic pain. Don’t set an alarm but wake up naturally with the sun to a peaceful, quiet home with no immediate morning responsibilities.

If you do this, you’ll be so awake, it’ll be amazing.

And to think! The key to this whole thing was just you doing the right thing all along.

Don’t you feel better now?
January 31, 2023
You’re a woman who has it all

The sunlight filters in through the window and highlights your laughter as you eat salad with your friends.

Yes, you have a lunch break. And friends. You are a woman who has it all.

A career that you enjoy. That doesn’t feel precarious (at least not at the moment). You are lucky that your job challenges you and opens new avenues for advancement while at the same time remaining flexible and understanding when family stuff arises.

You’ve never felt the pressure when it comes to having kids. Never felt the squeeze as you debated whether work or staying home with the kids was the best option. Never tallied up the exorbitant cost of daycare and compared to your salary, to your benefits to see which came out on top.

You don’t have to worry that other colleagues are rocketing past you because they are able to put in the time and work that you are not. You don’t wonder if some of your teammates wish you could do more. If they do, that’s their business. What’s it matter to you?

You have a beautiful home with decor that speaks to who you are not what you desperately want to be. (Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash)

Your children are adorable and a delight to be around. As you had planned while you were pregnant, you stuck to cloth diapering and breastfeeding. You and your partner tackled baby sign language with enthusiasm. You pureed vegetables that you boiled and roasted yourself for the baby and now cook healthy organic meals for your older child. She eats these healthy meals, fully accepting that what you make for dinner is what’s for dinner.

You tackled pumping at work with the first and the second and carried it on for the full year recommended by the World Health Organization. You provide carefully filled and labeled bottles to daycare every day (a daycare you carefully vetted against other area daycares with your selected list of questions that allowed you to weigh a list of options based on what they had to offer and not what they cost. You did not have to make a panicked decision after a ten minute conversation because otherwise the spot would be filled by the next family touring the place).

You wash and sanitize all bottle and pump parts as directed. And replace them after the allotted amount of time. After a day of answering emails and taking meetings while pumping, you measure and label, then scrub and dry the dirty set after washing the dishes for the healthy meal you prepared but before you cycle through a last load of laundry and fold what has just come out of the dryer. None of this makes you feel like screaming until your voice gives out.

You have a partner who supports your decisions and picks up his half of the work. He supports all the work and decisions you make for the children and admires the career path you have chosen, fully bought into whatever you need to do to make it work. You try not to think about the couples where both parents work because they can’t afford not to or the single mothers who have no such support system and have to grind through and find a way to make it work. In order to have it all, you must believe that others can also have it all and that there are not pressures at play that make it impossible for some.

About that loving partner. You make coparenting decisions that you both agree on. You are able to talk through your problems with each other and are so lucky that at the end of each day, you still feel that giddy romantic feeling you did when you first started dating. No crabbing at each other over cold takeout pizza after the kids are in bed before falling exhausted down on a pair of sheets that should have been washed a week ago and barely mustering the energy to touch each other on the hand.

You sleep through the night. You are able to wake up early enough to get something productive done. Each day consists of at least ten minutes of meditation and then finding time to either do yoga and/or go on a run or pursue some other type of cardio. You also manage to fit in a hobby. After all, just because you’re a mother doesn’t mean you’re not still you.

Days are portioned out and unfurl like they are supposed to. You projects and tasks at work don’t get delayed. You don’t forget to bring pump parts with you when a manager decides it’s time to start going into the office again a few days a week. You don’t sit at your desk and worry that someone else you barely know is nurturing your children during the day. You don’t sit at your desk and worry that you enjoy this quiet time away from your children too much and that says something about your suitability to be a mother.

You don’t scroll through social media mindlessly but you do find the time to craft thoughtful posts updating your family and friends about your life. You are able to stay up to date on the latest television shows and definitely know what Ted Lasso and Squid Game are.

You read and listen to interesting podcasts and create playlists to fit your mood and read to your children and buy them STEM games and ensure they can express themselves creatively and also say basic requests in Spanish and find ways to creatively turn even basic tasks into fun games to avoid whining and boredom.

Sometimes, yes, a kid gets sick or you get sick or you suddenly realize everyone is expecting you to host for the holidays this year and the house will really need a deep clean for that to happen and did you ensure the kids will be fully vaccinated by that point and you need to create a menu on top of the other meal planning and preparation you do and how will that layer in to ensure you have work and yoga and cooking and bottle cleaning and cleaning and running and reading and a touch of television and sleeping enough all while ignoring that underlying tension that we are living on a dying planet in a dying democracy and maybe it’s impossible to find any shred of happy when the systems are crumbling around you–

You take a deep breath. Your heart rate slows. All that practiced meditation really comes in handy!

You’re amazing. You’re incredible. You’re a woman who has it all. And the best part is, anyone can do it! We made it, ladies.

November 19, 2021
What I should know better by now

Life is a nonstop self-improvement project.

Unless you are magically perfect and always do everything right. (Sad to say, but doubtful.) Or if you’ve decided you’ve done enough to get better and now you can stay the same as you are forever. (Don’t do that. It makes things awkward for the people who have to interact with you.)

I am, at many times, an anxious perfectionist who has to accomplish things or I feel like I haven’t done enough. I have grown more aware of my own foibles over the years and have even come to accept a few of my shortcomings (maybe, just barely). I am making definite strides in the right direction.

But there’s some shit that I’ll just never learn. I’m going to wake up thinking I’ll change it today, then I won’t change it, and then go to bed promising myself I’ll do better tomorrow.

Hilarious.

You’d think by now I would just accept that there is some stuff that’s just not going to happen. But I absolutely will not. My brain is convinced that future me will unlock the key to the secret that changes who I am. (Narrator: She will not.)

Here’s what I should know better but will never actually learn.

I’ll go to bed early tonight.

I absolutely will not do this. Instead I will look up from bottle washing or from dog walking or from folding laundry and sigh heavily.

Oh hey. It’s me, tomorrow morning. (Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash)

I’ll wake up early tomorrow.

When I am training for races, I manage to convince myself that I’ll wake up early and run. I don’t. I managed to do this successfully for a stretch of a few months when my first kid was a baby. I will never get that magic back. Instead I will do the four mile run after the kids go to bed. (But don’t worry. I’ll still get to bed early.)

I’ll have more time to read next week.

In addition to going to bed early, I will also read an actual print book in bed before I fall asleep before 10 p.m. Oh wait. No. I won’t do that.

I’ll start regularly cleaning parts of my house on a schedule instead of when it gets too disgusting to stand.

Anyone who has ever known me my entire life can attest that I have never, not once, ever done this. (I sometimes have flickers of understanding, but they never last.)

I’ll get that that show on my watch list.

No, I haven’t seen The Wire or Friday Night Lights or Call the Midwife or Chernobyl or Killing Eve or Homeland or This is Us! Saved on my lists across various apps though. Don’t worry, I’ll never get to them.

I will successfully cook a healthy meal every night, work full time, do all the laundry and the dishes, update my blog, go on a run every night, and still get to bed early every night.

Just a parody of myself at this point.

I’ll invent time travel, go back to the Regency era, and find Mr. Darcy.

Really, he’d just be a complete nightmare. Get it together, me.

I will successfully convince people online that they should be more empathetic.

Never will anyone online be convinced of anything ever. It is why I type out impassioned defenses and then always hit the ol’ backspace before posting anything.

I will come to terms with the fact that I can’t do everything all the time and that’s okay.

Maybe this one’s not fair. I do come to terms with it sometimes and feel good about it on occasion. But it never lasts. Oh! There it is:

The self-improvement efforts I make will stick once I’ve made them and I won’t have to continually work on them like other humans do for reasons.

Turns out self-improvement doesn’t exist on autopilot.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to sign off so I can go to bed early, wake up at dawn to go on a four mile run so I can be ready for a full day of work, using my thirty minute lunch break to fold the laundry and prep dinner. That’ll give me enough time after dinner to read a few chapters and then hit the hay early.

August 5, 2021
Life hacks? More like…not life hacks

This blog post brought to you by sick children and no sleep brain.

I subscribe to several newsletters and several of them are written by mothers of young children and they often talk about things that get to my soul.

In the past couple weeks as I’ve been starting new things in life and absolutely losing my grip on reality (okay, by reality, I mean dishes), these newsletters have been a source of comfort for me. I also don’t have time to do the things I want to do! I, too, have been neglecting laundry, forcing my husband to run through all the cycles until we end up with absolute mountains of unfolded laundry that need to hastily be folded and put away when we realize nobody has any underwear left.

Think this but multiply it by five. (Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

Or, also as likely, to be folded and put into the correct hampers and then have those laundry hampers sit in your room for a week and you just pick the clean clothes you need out of the hamper as the pile of dirty clothes collects on the floor next to the hamper.

Yeah. I’m not much of a homemaker. Cluttered, disorganized living spaces are my bread and butter. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been absolutely abysmal at keeping my living spaces tidy. My desk at work? Immaculate. My family room? Please don’t look at it, you might go blind.

This problem has only compounded with having small children about. In the before children era of my life, I would just take a weekend to scrub the place down and try to pass myself off as a presentable adult. Now that my weekends are full of…well, kid stuff, I don’t have that option anymore. The only time you have available to vacuum is when the kids are taking naps or have gone to bed and that is not exactly the best time to get that chore done.

Add that to the fact that I’m desperately clinging to the parts of my life that make me feel like a complete adult human separate of having children (hello, blog!) and that causes everything to fall into even more disarray.

Sort of the state of having young kids, right?

NO. Get on the internet and figure out some life hacks, you lazy slob!

The key is motivation. The key is making a schedule. The key is being a magic fairy who can make both your kids sleep for 10 hour stretches uninterrupted. (If you possess this magic, please share.)

I have always liked exploring personal and professional development in the form of exercises and discussions and reading books, but earlier in this week I was in one that struck me in a weird way. The content of the training was great and the advice totally made sense and I thought there were actionable steps in there.

But not ones for me right now, I don’t think.

As the time came to an end, I wanted to ask if the trainer and if anyone else in the class had babies or once had babies and if they had any advice on how to wrangle the steps into being when you also shared a house with chaos.

I can set my running shoes out the night before and set the alarm early to get up and exercise. But what if I am up four times in the night? What if one of the kids wakes up before my early alarm even goes off? Where does the scale land when it comes to trying to balance getting enough sleep for the night and getting a two mile run in?

In the fall of 2019, a time so distant and beautiful I can scarcely remember it, I used to take the nights when it wasn’t my turn to put the toddler down and go to the gym, where I would run as many miles as I wanted to.

Now I never have a night off from bedtime because there are two of them and the baby still nurses and I don’t feel safe going to the gym so I can’t run after dark.

How do I life hack and schedule myself around that?

My husband is a swell dude. I could ask him to cover one night a week and try to go out and run at a more reasonable hour. Assuming it isn’t 90 plus degrees out that day. And then that’s only one run week. Not exactly a pinnacle of fitness over here.

I find this intersection of life approaches extremely interesting. In one corner is a bunch of tired moms (and dads) who are letting some things go just to get in a little relaxation or pursue one measly hobby. In the other is the promise of improvement if you just approach it from the right angle.

Is there a right angle? I don’t know!

Some people would argue that my giant pile of laundry and inability to sweep is not the right angle.

But surely neither is scheduling yourself into a corner so that you must run yourself ragged trying to get done all the things you want to get done.

Is the answer that there are simply no life hacks? That you can’t do all the things? Is that what prioritization is really about? Realizing that you have the pick the most important one and let the others fall to the side?

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have a storied history as a perfectionist who can’t let things go. So it’s hard to accept I can’t do everything I want. I just have to try a little harder, schedule it out a little better!

Or I maybe I accept the encroaching entropy and do the little part I can to push back against it. Without sweating so much about all the rest of it.

So I guess my life hack is…let go of the life hacks.

And don’t worry so much about the unfolded laundry.

July 22, 2021
On being human

So you’ve realized you’re human this week and it kind of stinks.

I get it. I’m human too.

We all are.

I don’t know why watching sunsets make you contemplative about the world, but they do. (Photo by Heshan Perera on Unsplash)

We blast into the world with all that we are. And we screw up. We are disappointed and we disappoint. We unintentionally hurt someone. We say the wrong thing. We can’t get to our goals. We discover yet again that our journey toward self-discovery and self-improvement has hit some sort of obstacle.

We’re not perfect.

That last one has always been difficult for me. Whatever the right mix of anxiety and achiever lands you on perfectionism, I’ve got it. And while it can sometimes make my work better than it ever needed to be, usually it just serves as a reminder that it’s impossible to achieve the perfection I so innately crave. That I can’t get there. That I’m a human.

It’s served at times to make me into a procrastinator. I don’t have the right idea or the best approach, so I can’t get started. At other times it’s held me back from trying new hobbies and activities. When I do try a new thing, if I’m not good at it right away, my first instinct is to quickly give up and go back to what I know I’m already good at. (This philosophy has applied largely to sports of all stripes as I am a bad athlete to my very core. Oddly enough, this never applied to my writing even though I spent many years being one of the worst writers in the entire world.)

As I get older, I realize this trait in myself, and I work to mitigate it. I don’t have to be the best and I don’t have to achieve mythical levels of perfection.

This mindset allowed me to finally start running. I am a thoroughly mediocre runner, and I’m okay with it. I do try to go a little faster or a little longer, but I’m able to measure me against me. And the realization I’ll never run a record breaking marathon (if, in fact, I ever even attempt to run a marathon) is fine with me. I don’t run to be the best at it. I do it to take my mind off things, to pound out my frustrations and fears and joys into the pavement. To focus on a good audiobook at the path in front of me.

Sometimes, though, I can only get so far.

The last year and a half has been tough. The last six months, since my second daughter was born, have been tough in a different way. The past couple months since I’ve returned to work? Another difficult transition. And while I have triumphs and successes along the way, sometimes it feels like the full weight of all the toughness have compounded on each other. It’s pretty humbling to look at yourself and realize you don’t measure up to the standards you’d like to set for yourself.

I haven’t been quite getting there. I never really do, but I’m more aware of it lately. I’ll never be the Platonic ideal of a mother, although I do okay. I am far from the perfect spouse. I can be a decent daughter, a middling friend, a worker who keeps trying to find the solution.

But I can’t meet perfection. Not the kind I want. Not even the kind I’m sometimes willing to settle for.

So what’s the next step?

Breathe a little. Find something to appreciate. Maybe the feel of a dog curled up next to me in bed. Sitting exhausted in a rocker for another late night feeding, I can hear the patter of rain outside. Huffing and puffing my way down the sidewalk, I can watch the flowers blooming. Revel in a spontaneous “I love you” from the three year old. Appreciate a really well-written passage in a book I’m reading.

The little moments are there to fall back on. And while I’m far from perfect, sometimes the moments can feel a little like perfection.

Breathe a little. Find something to appreciate.
A beer? A cookie. I can compliment you.

So you’re human. You showed up late, you didn’t get enough sleep, you forgot to do an important task, you were a little short with your kids.

You and everyone else. All of us are making small screw ups and small corrections. Finding personal failings and potential successes. Looking at moments to rejoice and those to mourn. All of us are collectively grasping at our own forms of perfectionism and then, far more often than we want, falling short.

But we’re all doing it.

Together. Separately. Alone. Connected.

You’re only human.

Me too.

And I think you’re doing great.

May 26, 2021
Reading while exhausted: why I love audiobooks
Ever since I learned how to read, it’s been one of my favorite ways to spend the time. My mom likes to recall that when I was a little kid and I would go up to my room with a stack of books, close the door, and read for hours. I remember staying up past my bedtime with a lamp on until I got a warning knock on the door. Saturday mornings, I would wake up and immediately start reading, staying in bed as late as I could get away with.

Let’s not even get started about the hours of sleep I’ve lost staying up too late with a book I couldn’t put down. (Now that I get woken up on a nightly basis, I mourn the lost hours. I should have appreciated the sleep while I could still get it.)

I was expecting it to be harder to read once I had kids. And it definitely is. You can’t just pick up a book on a weekend afternoon whenever you feel like it. There’s no way in hell you’re going to stay in bed until 10 just reading. And once the kids are asleep? Good luck having two brain cells left to rub together.

So very, very tired. (Photo by Siddharth Bhogra on Unsplash)

Enter audiobooks.

If you want to read, but you’re an exhausted parent (or really just a regular exhausted person with a busy schedule), I cannot recommend audiobooks enough. If you read fast, audio might be slightly less efficient for you, yes. But an audiobook diet will keep you from looking up at the end of the year and realizing the only things you successfully read for fun were articles about your kid’s developmental milestones or reviews of movies you’re definitely too tired to watch.

The main selling point for me is I can listen to an audiobook while I do other chores around the house. All the repetitive, mundane tasks that must be done every day can be enhanced with books.

I know a lot of people like to listen to music or the news or podcasts while they’re doing these kinds of tasks. And I listen to all those things occasionally too, but I’ve discovered that what nurtures my soul the most is busting through my to read list. (It must be said at this point: yes, listening to audiobooks is reading. Please don’t make me enter this debate.)

My favorite activities for reading audiobooks:
1. Washing dishes/washing and filling endless cycles of bottles – My least favorite chore of all time, made tolerable by books. (Pro tip: Use earbuds or the rushing water will drown out the sound.)
2. Folding and putting away laundry – Words cannot describe how greatly this task is enhanced when you don’t have to think about how much laundry you will be folding and putting away for the next five years of your life.
3. Driving to the store – Grab twenty minutes of alone time by volunteering to pick up a curbside order and think about something that isn’t how to force your toddler to eat dinner.
4. Going on a walk/run – I’m one of those weirdos who prefers to run to books instead of music, but it is an amazing motivator to try to work out so you can read at the same time!
5. Trying to sleep – This one is tricky because you don’t want to actually fall asleep while the book is going. But if your mind is racing or stress is keeping you up, this is one way to crowd out the noise.
Some books don’t translate amazingly to audio, but many do. A good narrator can make a book. I love people with soothing voices or who somehow transform into the main character for me. Audio also helps teach me how everyone’s names are pronounced, which can be super helpful.

Now at the end of the day, I don’t have to deal as much with falling asleep in the middle of the same paragraph ten nights in a row. Or experience the dreaded flip side of reading “one more chapter” until it’s past midnight and I curse my very existence.

The past few years, more than half the books I’ve read each year have been audio. I wouldn’t have been able to fill the gap with print books. Which means I’d be missing out on 50% of my reads! And some of my favorite books from the past few years have been in audio form, which means I could have missed out on some really awesome writing.

An audiobook fan yourself looking for some reads? I got you!

Here are some of my favorite listens from the past year:
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
  - A woman makes a deal with a god to extend her life, but in return, nobody she meets can remember her. I loved this for a whole host of reasons including historical settings, testing the boundaries of a magical curse, pondering the meaning of life, just to name a few.
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  - Two sisters grow up in the town of Mallard, founded by and for Black people with light skin. They cut and run as teens. Later, one sister returns with her daughter and the other sister disappears after working at a job where she passed as white. This book does not have a lot of action, but I loved the deep dives into every single character.
- Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
  - You’ve probably seen this recommended all over the place, but it’s really good and worth checking out! Especially if you want to be more informed about America’s criminal justice system and how people of color are disproportionately affected by it. Thinking about the number of innocent people on death row is terrifying.
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
  - The government keeps getting rid of things, like hats, and all the people who live on the island are forced to forget those things. The amount they are forced to forget continues growing to disturbing new levels. This is such a strange little book and if I had been reading it in print, I’m not sure where I would have landed on it. But having the narrator to gently lead me through it really worked for me.
- Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
  - A woman and her daughter show up in town and start shaking up the other characters’ comfortable suburban lives. I thought Ng did a masterful job helping you empathize with all the characters in this book. You get to understand where almost everyone is coming from and really understand how complicated they all are. It also explores a lot of tough issues without being preachy about them!
Let me know if you have any favorite audiobooks yourself! If you want to try audiobooks out but don’t want to subscribe to a paid service, check out your local library. Most have tons of options at this point.
May 12, 2021
Why does television keep telling us the same old birth story?

This adorable baby could have been born so many different ways! (Photo by Garrett Jackson on Unsplash)

So a character on TV is pregnant

A character on a show you watch is pregnant. You already know how this ends.

Her water breaks. Maybe she’s at home or at work or at the store. Maybe it’s the morning or the middle of the night. But her water water breaks suddenly and unexpectedly. She rushes to the hospital. Or, maybe she’s in a new place and wacky circumstances mean that she’ll have to say where she is so a random person has to deliver the baby instead. Regardless, it’s urgent. That baby is coming!

Her husband or partner is freaking out. Maybe he faints or cries or in some other way indicates he can’t handle it. Or maybe he’s somewhere else and in a mad rush to get to her in time before the baby is born.

Now it’s time. She’s screaming because giving birth hurts. She probably yells at some people. Maybe screams at her partner that she hates him. But ultimately, it’s not so bad. She pushes for a few minutes and then the baby comes out.

The hijinks come to an end. She gets handed a three-month-old covered in goo. Everyone is happy and crying. It’s probably the season finale. Depending on how important her character is and what type of show you’re watching, that baby might be vaguely mentioned and mostly forgotten future seasons or it might become a recurring character.

The end.

Why the standard birth scene?

Now, I’m not really here to complain about how this portrayal is unrealistic. Most people are probably aware at this point that the way birth is shown on TV is often not the way it goes in real life. Instead, I’m more concerned with why this became the narrative and why it seems to be the only one that we ever really get.

I think the most obvious argument in favor of this kind of birth scene is that it’s dramatic. Your water breaking unexpectedly is a great inciting incident! Having to get to the hospital before the baby is born or not being able to make it to the hospital or dad being stuck across town—maximum drama! Giving birth without an epidural makes for lots of screaming and interesting television! (Although I do think there’s a whole side question here about whether one of the reasons we always see this version is because on some level audiences like seeing women in pain.)

My kingdom for realistic portrayals of postpartum mothers!
I don’t have much, but I’ll give it all up.

Yeah, okay, it’s fairly exciting. And everyone loves a good baby. But you gotta make that shit the season finale because nobody wants to see all that immediate after the birth drama of getting stitched up or trying to nurse for the first time or getting your catheter removed once the feeling as returned to your legs after an unplanned C-section. What I wouldn’t give to see a woman sitting on a toilet and using a peri-bottle. My kingdom for realistic portrayals of postpartum mothers!

I wonder if some of the sameness of birth stories stems from the fact that writers’ rooms used to be pretty much all men (and, you know, lots still are). There’s a lot to explore through pregnancy and birth, ways to deepen characters beyond the standard beats we already get. Maybe writers have been unaware of that? Or, maybe, they just haven’t cared.

Let’s shake things up

Maybe it’s just because I freaking love hearing people’s birth stories, but expanding the way births are told on television could give us so much more interesting fare.

At this point, I’d be remiss to ignore shows that did break the mold with great success. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend featured your standard water breaking, but then Heather was in no rush to get to the hospital, and when she did get there, she had an epidural and calmly worked on crosswords while she waited for labor to progress. Also, if you haven’t watched “The Miracle of Birth” number, do yourself a favor. It’s incredible.

Superstore had Amy’s labor offer a commentary on how screwed up the American healthcare system is and had Dina getting an unplanned C-section. Refreshing as heck. (Also, a second shout out to Superstore for giving Amy practically no maternity leave and showing another example of how far behind America lags on this stuff.)

I can’t help think of all the other ways that different kinds of birth could reveal character and create drama. When I went into labor with my first, I had contractions for a full twenty-four hours before I went into active labor. I ran errands and finished an audiobook and paced around my house and around the neighborhood while my husband tried to finish a coding project to graduate the code bootcamp he was in. Think of the fun subversion of someone’s contractions starting and then all the amazing jokes you could pack in while waiting for labor to really kick into gear. I’m thinking of “The One Where No One’s Ready” as a blueprint here–one of the most beloved episodes of Friends!

Or maybe, like with my second, you’re planning on a straightforward birth and then the baby flips around breech at the last second and you plan for a C-section and then your water breaks and you have to go in for surgery before you planned. I got super emotional when my original plans for giving birth were upturned and the whole experience was really dramatic for my family. Things like that might seem high stakes when it happens to some random person on the internet, but if it happened to a beloved TV character? So much to explore!

Granted, that would mean that you would have to see characters making birth plans and talking through options and getting a sense of their communities and the quality of their care and the people they talk to about their hopes and fears. Which…good luck with that.

Life is a rich tapestry

Those two examples are just scratching the surface. My experiences were a lot different than the ones on TV, but they were still the experiences of a middle class white person with access to healthcare. What about the women who have struggles, who get trapped in the disparities? How are their stories different? This could help highlight a lot about how messed up giving birth in America can be.

Every birth is different. You get told that a lot when you’re pregnant, but it’s super true. Having a kid born one way doesn’t guarantee the next one will be too. People who give birth have different risk levels, hold different economic statuses, are different races and ethnicities, and are even different genders. All these factors make each experience so personal and individual.

And I think it’s a shame that the way television tells birth stories means that we think they’re all the same. Life is a rich tapestry. Writers are writing characters with specific interests and backgrounds and personalities. Those could all come into play in unique and surprising ways while they’re giving birth!

So why don’t they?

And what are the untold stories we’re missing out on?

May 5, 2021