In case you missed the fantastic STFU Parents book party the other night—the above is a photo of the seriously creepy party cake—this is the piece I wrote and read for the event. (Though that cake isn't as creepy as this one.)
I’ve known Blair Koenig — or as I call her Poor, Sad, Barren Blair—for several
years. I started reading her blog and then we figured out our boyfriends used
to work together. Small world!
You would think that as a woman old enough to be Blair’s
much, much older sister or scandalously young aunt, our relationship would be
one of teacher/student. And you’d be correct.
But in the Blair/Judy relationship, it turns out that young Barren
Blair has been the teacher, and old (yet fabulously well-preserved) Judy is the humble,
sometimes unwilling, often grossed out, student.
For example, before reading STFU Parents, I had no clue that
announcing ones pregnancy by posting a photo of your pee-soaked pregnancy test
was a thing. Apparently it is. Lesson learned.
Also, sonogram photos. Nothing wrong with those, though I
thought it was kind of nuts when my sister-in-law photoshopped my niece’s in-utero
picture before she would email it out to our family. And well, it was.
But nothing compared to the parents who freak
the fuck out upon finding out they’re having a boy.
Now when I look at a sonogram photo, I can barely discern
the potential human floating around in the goop, let alone isolate any kind of
sex organs. But some parents—and let’s face it, it’s almost always the dad—are
so excited that they got themselves a boy that they crop out the rest of the fetus,
enlarge the baby boypart, and then slap it up there on facebook for everyone
from their employer to their Aunt Fanny to see.
And lest their friends try to fool themselves into thinking
they’re looking at some kind of abstract art, not a fetus’s penis, one helpful
mom crowed by way of caption, “Look at his huge effing pecker!”
Sadly, the penis pics don’t end once the baby is expelled
from the womb. Oddly enough to this non-breeder, babies often have giant
scrotums, just ripe for photographing. Who knew? Certainly not me before I
started reading Blair’s blog. They can get a thing called a “hydro seal,” which
causes the sac to fill with fluid . . . never mind.
Parents have also been known to share proud stories of baby boners
but I just can’t.
Labor, and all its bloody gore, are another big topic on
Facebook. Until I saw the dark side, I remember being skeeved if a friend in
labor documented how many centimeters dilated her cervix was. Then I read the
entry by a woman chirpily announcing, “I just passed a piece of my mucous
plug!”
But even that soon paled in comparison to what was to come and
sometimes I yearn for those innocent days . . . to be exact, the day before Blair
ran a photo of an entire family—mother, father, two young children and a
newborn—all posing for a nice wholesome family photo while soaking in the
bloody, afterbirth-filled kiddy pool where the mom had just given birth. Luckily for you, I can't seem to relocate that post.
I have a fairly strong stomach, but that was one of the
posts that actually made me scream out loud.
I had wished I'd thought to put together a slide show for tonight's event, because a slide show would illustrate how many people post
shots of their baby crowning in lieu of a birth announcement festooned with a
tasteful stork.
Why on earth would you want your Uncle Phil to see his new
niece for the first time, covered in a layer of gore, being pushed out of your freshly
waxed hooha?
I know having a baby is a huge experience and allegedly very
beautiful and all that, but if you want me to buy you a gift off your registry,
I don’t want to see that kid until it’s been cleaned off and wrapped in some
sort of swaddling cloth!
Oh, and your lotus birth? The practice of keeping the
placenta attached to the infant until it “naturally” rots and falls off—not
only do I not want to hear about it, I especially don’t want to see a
photograph of you nursing your baby sitting next to a big bowl of biohazard,
still attached to your kid via its umbilical cord.
But still—even the lotus birth isn’t as gnarly as the final
thing I learned from Blair’s blog. Now I grew up with cats and dogs and so have
seen small animals lick their pups and kittens clean. I figured they probably
snarfed down the placenta too, though I never gave it much thought until I
discovered that actual grown-ass human beings, living in large metropolitan
cities were also devouring their own placentas!
I’m sorry if any of you afterbirth-eating hippies are in the
audience, but I cannot back down from this point. That shit is dis-gust-ing. I
mean, you know you've seen too much when you get to a place where you’re thinking, “I guess that placenta teddy bear isn’t so ugly” or “well, she had her placenta powdered and put into
capsules—that’s not so bad.” Because, thanks to
Blair, I now know afterbirth can and has been baked into a casseroles, carved
into a sandwich, and sautéed in a kind of cannibalistic stir-fry.
I wouldn’t dream of using my tampon for a teabag, so I don’t
understand this at all. And for a long time, I was able to comfort myself
thinking these people who ate their own waste were some hemp-wearing,
Park-Slope dwelling mombie types. Surely I didn’t know anyone who would do such
a thing.
Until one day I opened up Facebook and saw that my old pilates instructor had posted what appeared to be a deliciously refreshing
cocktail of some sort. It was a cheery bright red beverage with a layer of
frothy foam on top. It had been exquisitely photographed like it was about to
star in an Applebee’s menu.
The caption: Mommy’s first placenta shake. It tastes like
heaven.