This Might Be Too Personal by Alyssa Shelasky

Author:Alyssa Shelasky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

sixteen

Mommy & Not Me

I had no business whatsoever joining a mommy & me group. It was never going to end well.

But the truth was, I absolutely loved being a new mom. Hazel and I found our groove pretty quickly, and I thought, what better way to display our high-functioning capabilities than to join a group of ladies with Oeuf cribs and Monstera plants and babies all named Annabelle to bond about it?

Life with a nocturnal newborn wasn’t easy by any means, but I had dreamed about the sheer exhaustion and raw nipples and gross diapers and general overwhelm for so long that I felt ongoingly stupefied to be so “in it.” Life with a baby was so much happier than life without a baby and as long as I could pause and remind myself of that, I felt good.

After about a week back home, I even went halfway “back to work,” filing my columns and drafting book proposals, now about “parenting” naturally. Surprisingly, more than one publisher told me that the marketplace had “motherhood fatigue,” which seemed kind of crazy considering we make all the people, but I went back to love and sex with a greater appreciation for my flexible career than ever. (Keep in mind, unlike 99.9 percent of working moms in this country, work for me meant puttering around in my Anthropologie bathrobe and then typing on the keyboard whenever the caffeine hit my bloodstream, and if it did not hit my bloodstream, I’d just watch Friday Night Lights, and tell myself that tomorrow was a new day. You can’t compare my situation as a single working mom to most.)

Whether there’s any merit to this or not, I also believed that my partnerlessness was an asset during those first few months. With just my baby and myself, there was a lot less to manage than if I had to juggle a marriage, too. My autonomy never felt more useful than during those first few weeks of my daughter’s life. If I wanted to assemble a chocolate-chia-banana smoothie while simultaneously breastfeeding, or lie in Savasana on the rug for the entire day, or lumber around all night long naked and sweaty and fleshy, then, cool. If I wanted to eat cold pad Thai for breakfast and Trader Joe’s Scandinavian Swimmers for dinner, who was looking? If my one-month-old daughter’s only social interaction was with The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Beverly Hills, and New York, I considered all of them our crazy aunties, and saw nothing wrong with spending so much time together.

So why not throw a mom group into the mix? This could be fun, I thought, filling out my credit card information for ten Tuesday morning sessions. And that’s when things went a little—as Hazel would eventually say as a toddler—wonky donky.

The group of eight moms, along with their babies, met at a kids’ play center within walking distance from my apartment, in a small, colorful space in Cobble Hill that reminded me of a cheerful visiting room inside a mental institution.

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