Is It Ever a Good Decade to Have a Baby? Any Good Ideas to Make a New Mother Paranoid?
I dedicate this post to new mothers everywhere. Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers, but especially to first time moms.
My mother smoked a half pack of cigarettes each day she was pregnant with me. As a child of the 1970’s, I endured second-hand smoke for a decade before she quit. Many a car ride I suffered in the back seat of our frosted green Buick LeSabre begging my mother to manually roll down the car window another quarter of an inch so that I might breathe. The French obstetrician who she received pre-natal care from when pregnant with me put my mother on a strict diet not to gain more than twenty pounds. These facts sound crazy, of course, forty years later, but I think we are just as nutty these days with what we push onto susceptibly gullible pregnant women. Aren’t the hormones crazy-inducing enough? Don’t eat sushi. Not too much Vitamin A! Butter, not margarine. Feta will give your fetus brain damage. Eating mercury will turn your unborn child gay. (I would have scarfed down mercury every day if that worked. I’d love a gay child!) It’s enough to make knocked-up women cry like a baby.
Granted it has been ten years since I was last pregnant. Over the course of that time, the ubiquitous “they” have come up with all sorts of cooky pregnancy/new parent scare-tactic shenanigans. Did you know a company invented a home-test so paranoid lactating mothers can test their breast milk for alcohol? I understand that breast-feeding mothers are advised not to imbibe. I also get that those same mothers might enjoy an adult beverage on occasion, but I could have driven myself absolutely insane testing my breast milk. There were times I wondered if I should have pumped and dumped breast milk if I had a glass of wine, but breast-feeding was literally such a labor of love that I couldn’t force myself to toss out the precious elixir. You know what the best part of the alcohol in breast milk detector is? The results are unreliable!
Please! Leave Pregnant women and new mothers alone!