![]() ![]() There’s a tinge of class resentment, certainly-of course, these rich women roll into the delivery room with things like “birth plans” and a mandate to “curate their experience”-but a lot of my attitude is toxic lady-machismo. I certainly paid enough lip service to the idea of flouting authority as a kid. It’s the impulse that says, “I’m not like all those other whiny bitches.” Where this urge to prove myself in some kind of good-soldier capacity comes from I don’t know. This desire to prove I can get along, to keep a cheerful face on it, is one that I recognize as a terrible impulse. There’s an audacity in doing things exactly as you see fit, and I know in my heart that my truly audacious moments have been few and far between. ![]() She most certainly has read all the home-birth books she probably has an astral connection to Ina May Gaskin she probably did things like “listening to her body,” and moved in ways that were “helpful to the process.” See how impossible I find it to list the good and smart things that she did without rolling my eyes? This pettiness tastes an awful lot like jealousy. What might have happened if her baby, like mine, had been facing the wrong way in the birth canal? Was her husband beefy enough to squeeze her like a tube of toothpaste? One thing I knew for sure: she would have had no interest in proving how good she was at taking orders. I think about that conversation as I look at the woman and her newborn. I wasn’t complaining I was telling a funny story about the time I was a puppet! That it happened to be the most physically painful thing that I’d ever experienced was utterly beside the point. ![]() A wash of shame went through me at the thought that I might have presented myself as such. Happened to me? That made it sound like I was a victim. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” the husband said quietly. I’ve played this story for laughs, but the last time I told that story in conversation with friends of mine, a couple who have kids of their own, they looked at me stricken, as though I were describing a trauma. I also wanted to show my ob-gyn that I was a good team player, that I was on her side in getting her job done-kind of like when I find my old waitressing instincts kicking in at restaurants and I start automatically stacking the plates to the side of the table in an easily bussed pile. I told myself that I mostly just wanted to leave the hospital with a live baby and preferably no more and no fewer holes than I came in with. I did not write a list of birth preferences it struck me as so arrogant, so unwise, to attach myself emotionally to a certain set of hoped-for ways that the birth could go. I have just one child-I actually do a lot of my Instagram-creeping curled up in her bed as I coax her to sleep-and I gave birth in a regular hospital. When I finished reading the description of the unmedicated, unassisted home birth that accompanied the photograph, it was impossible not to recall my own birthing experience. When practicing this kind of social-media creepiness, you find yourself feeling small in two ways: you understand yourself as less than, living a life that is not nearly as fun, interesting, or worthwhile as the account you follow, and you also sense that you are a petty person, swiping the screen while huffing fumes of self-righteous antipathy. #Living off grid nicole instagram full#Their days seem idyllic, full of mud pies and chickens and art. She and her husband are young, tattooed, and good-looking, but have a hardy, outdoorsy style that is not overly calculated or curated. Her family lives up to a lot of hippie stereotypes: the off-grid life, the multiple home births, the homeschooling, the (hot!) dad in a band, the fanciful names of the children. The woman with an armful of newborn baby isn’t exactly worthy of hatred. That may sound like a long-winded description of a hate-follow, but “hate” is a bit much, description-wise, for what I’m feeling. One of the easier ways is to follow people on social media toward whom you have feelings that are other than warm. There are so many ways to be a creep these days. I peer at it in the dark, and hiss-whisper, “How dare you.” It’s a beautiful, celebratory image of human existence, as raw and pure and joyful as anything seen through the orderly square of an Instagram post can be. In her hands, she cradles the purplish, bloody bundle of a just-born child. The woman in the photograph looks out at me with a face full of exhaustion and bliss. ![]()
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