Monthly Archives: March 2022

A grandma’s pride

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I was on the phone with my mom other day when she was gushing about my baby, her granddaughter. 

“Don’t tell anyone I said this because it doesn’t sound good,“ my mom started. “It won’t make other people feel comfortable, so don’t tell anyone. My grandchild is the cutest grandchild in the world! There is no one cuter than my little Kaia. She is just so cute! Her cheeks! Her face! Her smile! She is the cutest baby in the entire world!”

I smiled while also half rolling my eyes as my mom gushed endlessly over how cute her grandchild is. Grandparents are generally like this about their grandchildren. They are just glowing all the time, and it’s easy to understand: they get all of the glory and all of the bragging rights without having to do any of the work. They get to have a full night’s sleep every night. They get to go about their day-to-day activities and hobbies. Their everyday lives do not change. What does change is their ability to enjoy a child without having to do any of the raising of the child. And that sounds pretty glorious in itself, doesn’t it, especially since they had their fair share of time raising children.

OK, I am clearly generalizing here. My grandma did not enjoy this: she actually played an active part in raising me, my brother, and all of my cousins for that matter. For most of my friends who live near their parents, their parents played a very active role in raising them, and doing everything from feeding to changing diapers to cooking for my friends after they returned home from the hospital. My parents are not nearby to be able to do this, nor our Chris’s. I’m sure my mom would have helped out with cooking and cleaning as needed if she were closer, but I don’t think she would be physically able to care for the baby given her own health conditions; I know my dad certainly would not have wanted to at all. With Chris’s parents, I don’t have a feeling they’d want to stay up all night, either. His mom might have wanted to do it for a few days or even a couple weeks, but there would be an end to that quite quickly. Plus, as we all know, in-law support is not quite the same.

The real reason I think this is all so comical is that my mom has made and will be making zero effort to come meet her grandchild in person, and she’s using the COVID-19 pandemic, which really isn’t much of a pandemic anymore, as an excuse to not travel. She is waiting for ME to take the baby THERE. And… I just can’t wait for the drama that will ensue when that happens.

When beets turn your pee red

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As a lactating woman, I spend a lot of time thinking about my milk supply, both consciously as well as subconsciously. And with that, in the back of my mind, I think about when my period will return, which hopefully will not be until at least month eight or nine postpartum so that my milk supply can at least remain stable at the level that it currently is at. When you are lactating and your period returns, your hormones shift, which causes an inevitable drop in your milk supply. This tends to freak out most lactating women, particularly those who exclusively breast-feed their babies and are strongly averse to formula.

So you can imagine my horror when one day, I went to pee, and before I flushed the toilet, I noticed that the liquid in the toilet bowl was a pinkish red color. For a split second, I flipped out a little bit. What? I thought. Is my period back? I touched myself down there and did not see any blood. Then, I remembered that I’d roasted beets and eating them for dinner. And beets have the ability to change the color of your urine if you eat enough of them, similar to how asparagus can change the smell of your urine. Phew, I thought. Thank God for the beets! I was only about 14 weeks postpartum and the idea of having my period back this early in my breast-feeding journey did not sit well with me. Most of the time when you hear of women getting their period back after giving birth this soon, it’s because they are exclusively formula feeding or they are not nursing enough. In my case, I was pumping milk around the clock and nursing a few times a day consistently for the last 14 weeks, so if my period had come back that soon, I would have been completely devastated. So hopefully, I still have at least 4 to 5 months before it returns.

Pre-teething

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The other day, I noticed that my baby was drooling a lot more than normal. Unfortunately for us, whenever there is stuff coming out of our baby’s mouth, it is usually spit up from her last feed, which is not particularly fun for me to see. Why is that? Well, here I am, working my ass off to pump milk 6-7 times a day for the last 14 weeks, and to see that precious liquid gold get spit up hurts my heart… Or should I more accurately say, my breasts! So drool is just something a bit different. In addition to that, I also noticed that when I nursed her, she seemed to be latching and unlatching a bit weird. It was just different than what I was used to seeing. And like clockwork, my Cleo rep send me an article to prepare myself for what to expect for pre-teething.

Pre-teething tends to happen somewhere between 2 to 4 months. This is not necessarily the teething stage, which tends to start around month five or six of a baby’s life. Pre-teething, just as it sounds, precedes actual teething. Your baby’s mouth is starting to get ready for the teeth to grow in, and with that comes a lot of excruciating pain for your tiny little human. That excruciating pain is going to manifest itself in a lot of screaming and crying that is going to seem a little bit out of the nowhere. So I went and disinfected her silicone teething toys, froze a few, and offered them to her. As with most new things, she kind of looked at the first teething toy skeptically and was slow to accept it. But gradually, she has learned to suck on it. And I knew that pre-teething had really begun when one afternoon, out of nowhere during her nap, she started screaming and crying nonstop. Nothing would sooth her. Holding her didn’t help, singing and talking to her didn’t help, and she clearly was not hungry. She just needed to be soothed because of the pain in her gums. She accepted some of the teething toys for a little bit, and eventually I just offered her my boob… Because access to the boob is just comforting to a teething baby.

We have been extremely lucky so far in that our baby is always predictable when she cries. She has a specific cry for hunger. She has another cry for attention. She has a faux cry for hunger. But with teething, that would be a very different territory for us to understand and to help with. And so, the adventures of parenting continue.

Day out sans baby

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Clearly, I am Asian and very Asian at that because as soon as I have one day (sort of) to myself during maternity leave and decide to leave the neighborhood, I immediately make a beeline to Chinatown. Well, what can I say? I am true to my roots, and when I crave most foods, it is most often Asian food, and more specifically, when I think about food that I crave for comfort, it is usually Cantonese Chinese food.

 It’s funny, though, to think about this because my story about how I have looked at my culture’s food is very similar to pretty much every other immigrant child. Growing up, food was mostly Cantonese Chinese on the table. And of course, being like any other child, I was not particularly grateful for that food. Instead, I was envious of my friends who got to eat more of a variety of different types of food, particularly when their families dined out. When our family ate out, it was always Cantonese food or Vietnamese food. When my extended family would get together, it was always, always Cantonese Chinese food, and it got so redundant. We would always order the exact same dishes at the exact same restaurants that my grandma or my aunt deemed authentic and good enough. It was tiring as a young person always eating the same food with family. I always asked my parents if we could eat something different, and the answer was always no. “You should be grateful that our family has enough to even eat out!” My parents would say to my brother and me in various ways.

Well, when I went off to college, I had to deal with eating really boring and bland dining hall food. The dining hall’s version of Asian food was pretty disgusting, but no surprise there. And when I dined out, I had no idea that there were weird variations of Chinese American food like crab Rangoon. And… I found out that people actually ate white rice topped with soy sauce and thought that was Chinese?? I ended up craving Cantonese food and wanting it when I went out with my friends. We obviously went out and ate many other things, but Cantonese food was always something that was just so comforting and made me feel at home. And now, whenever I get food cravings, the dishes that I always ate with my family growing up, whether they were made by my grandma or dishes that we ordered while at restaurants, those are the things that I always want.

 During maternity leave, I have not had easy access to Cantonese food. And so when I made that beeline to Chinatown today, I made sure to get a pound of cha siu from my favorite restaurant that makes it, plus beef chow fun. Those are the comfort foods that remind me of home. I also stopped by my favorite place for wontons and had wonton mein. And of course, I also made sure to get some bubble tea, some black sesame moon cake because I love all things black sesame, grass jelly and sweet soy milk from a family run place that I like that makes it well, as well as endless produce that Chris had to help me carry home… Even though he was not going straight home and was going to lunch with his colleagues. I probably strained my elbows and wrists carrying all of this home, even if it was only half the haul, but it was worth it in the end to get my Asian fruit and vegetable fix, as well as my Chinese food fix.

While down in Chinatown though, I thought about how not stroller friendly Chinatown was. Most restaurants are too small to accommodate a stroller to be pushed through easily. Most stores do not have aisles that are conducive to a stroller. And when it comes to the subway, I do not even know where the elevators are to be able to take the stroller up and down easily, which means that we will likely need to have one person carry the baby and the other person carry the stroller up and down the stairs. That is going to be particularly challenging when it comes to the huge grocery hauls that I always get whenever I come down here. Plus, I have wrist and elbow pain, so none of this sounds particularly fun or attractive to me. People tend to use the bottom of the stroller to carry things like groceries. But then, if you do that, you don’t actually plan to carry the stroller with all the groceries in your arms… So these are things that I am thinking about now that we have a baby. 

I want to make sure that my baby is immersed in my culture, as well as Chris’s. I want to make sure that she is familiar with and embraces neighborhoods like Chinatown, which have all of the delicious foods that her mother grew up with and craves. I want to teach her an appreciation for her cultures. And the only way to do that is to make sure that she has regular exposure to neighborhoods like this and to travel to these countries.

When the night nurse comes during the day

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Given that our baby is slowly starting to sleep longer stretches at night, we have finally gotten her to a point where she can sleep up to about 5 AM, which… Kind of makes having a night nurse a little bit redundant. We did not necessarily want to forgo paid support completely, and so we asked our night nurse to come during the day this Friday. Okay, we did not ask her to come during the day; Chris asked her to come during the day. He asked her to come during that particular day because the weather was supposed to be good and that would mean that we could be out and about… But not together because he happened to have lunch plans with his colleagues. That was great planning as you can see. 

However, I am still pumping every four hours, and so while I am comfortable using my portable pump with my wearable cups, I still need to think about logistics of the cups getting set up and taken off, as well as milk storage. I have to think about clean bathrooms where I can lay out all of my pump parts, empty out the milk into bottles, and safely store the milk. Having a wearable pump is not necessarily as convenient as I originally thought it would be. I suppose if I drove and had a car, it would be a little easier, as I could do all this in my car, plus keep a cooler in my fridge with ice for the milk storage, but it is what it is. It’s fine if I just go out for a couple hours and come back to my apartment, but if I am going from place to place, the logistics tend to be a bit more iffy. And what I am really eager to do is to go down to Chinatown and stock up on a bunch of pantry items, freezer staples, fresh Asian fruit and vegetables as well as bakery items. But honestly? Chinatown is probably one of the worst places that I can think of when it comes to… Clean, spacious bathrooms where I would be comfortable taking apart my pump and handling my baby’s food. And I also want to get a pedicure because I would really like to have my nails polished, but I cannot deal with doing them myself. So we will see how the day goes.

Dropping pumps

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After your milk supply regulates after around 12 weeks postpartum, hormones play less of a part in terms of your milk supply and instead, demand dictates it a lot more. Because of that, I wanted to wait until after I reached 12 weeks to start dropping pumps. Even though I was only pumping about 2-4 times a day in the first week of my baby’s life, and then six times a day in the next three weeks, I increased to seven times per day to increase the demand that would fuel my supply based on what I had read on exclusive pumping via the exclusive pumping mamas website as well as the Facebook support group. These have been my two sources of truth on EP since starting. The exclusive pumping guidelines strongly urge that in the first 12 weeks postpartum, pumping moms pump at minimum 8 to 12 times per day around the clock, every 2 to 3 hours. I knew I would never be able to do that and retain my sanity, and so my compromise to myself was seven pumps per day. Even for those rare moms who have an over supply in their first 12 weeks, if they do not pump at this frequency around the clock, their supply will likely plummet quite drastically after 12 weeks, and so their oversupply tends to be a bit of a false security.

When I reached the 13th week, I finally decided to drop a pump. Instead of pumping approximately every three hours during the day and four hours overnight, I would pump about every four hours around the clock, with a five hour gap between pumps from 3 AM to 8 AM to allow me to sleep a little bit more (yeah, like 3.5 hours vs. 3 – very luxurious as you can tell). Also, it makes sense that I would pump six times a day if my baby eats six times a day. In an ideal world, the amount I pump per pump session would match the amount that my baby needed to eat. This has never been the case, as my supply has always fluctuated throughout the day and yielded very different numbers, so every time I started pumping, it would always feel like a crapshoot as to how much I would produce. However, I have read that this is very common with most women who are lactating, as your prolactin level is constantly fluctuating throughout the day and tends to peak in the middle of the night through the early morning. The only time I could semi-accurately predict what I would produce at a given session at a given time was during the middle of the night pump as well as my very first morning pump when I woke up.

Anyway, I was really scared to drop a pump because I wasn’t sure how my body would react. I was especially scared of losing supply, but I knew that as I approached returning back to work, my eventual goal was to get down to five pumps per day as well as to cut out my overnight pump. And so, dropping at least one pump at this point made sense for me. So I sucked it up and told myself, even if my supply drops by an ounce or so, there is really no going back once I drop pumps. Once I start dropping pumps, the number of pumps per day will only go down, never up again. I had to do this for my sanity, for my own mental health. I really need to start getting my life back again and not constantly focus on the number of milliliters of breastmilk that I was producing for my baby to eat. As my night nurse always says, this is only for a short time, and this will not last forever. And so, that short time is being defined partly by my return to work date, as well as my own sanity and desire to be unshackled from my pump.

So now, it’s been about one week since I took the plunge and did it. Well, I was pleasantly surprised after dropping a pump: all of my outputs at every session increased dramatically, with the exception of my first morning pump, which tends to be pretty similar to before I dropped pumps. Every other pump increased: it was like it was almost predictable at this point and very even. The amount that I was producing per session on average increased about 20 to 70mL and it ended up evening out to more than what I was producing when I was doing seven pumps per day. In fact, it was like my supply had increased over the course of the last week with just six pumps a day. I was almost matching how much my baby was eating in a single day! I could not believe it. I never thought that I could get to a point where I could even call myself “a just enougher,” But it looked like there were a couple of days where I could actually have given myself that label. I had a late start to priming my body for exclusive pumping because of the crappy advice I was given early on from the lactation consultants that I had met in person. I was not forward thinking enough at that point to think about a life of potentially exclusively pumping for my baby given her weak suck and poor milk transfer. I didn’t start doing my research on this until about a week before her one month check up. In retrospect, I really regretted not looking into it sooner or being more prepared. I just didn’t have the information early on enough to establish my supply early enough, as those first one to two weeks postpartum are really crucial in terms of establishing one’s milk supply. Timing REALLY matters here. And when I spoke with another lactation consultant through Cleo in March, I told her that my goal was to get to 75 to 80% breast milk for my baby. I would obviously love for it to be 100%, but I would be OK if it never got there; I had made peace with this at the end of January. Given my late start with aggressive exclusive pumping, she told me that 80% was a realistic goal given the trajectory I had shared with her, but 100% would be unlikely. It would not be impossible, she said, but it would be quite difficult and against the odds.

 Well, here we are looking at the data and we have achieved that in two days in this last seven day period, when I was able to match my baby’s needs 100%. We still gave her one bottle of formula on these days as we normally do because as per usual, I was scared that my supply would not be that consistent, and I wanted to save for a “rainy day,“ which could easily be tomorrow when I may not produce as many ounces. But if we wanted to, we could’ve easily given her just breast milk that day. My fear in that, though, which has always been a fear, is that my baby will get so used to having breastmilk that she will start rejecting any and all formula. And that will be particularly difficult and scary when eventually, my period returns, which will inevitably result in my supply tanking. That happens with literally every woman who lactates, and every lactating mom dreads that time. Well, fingers crossed that my period does not return until at least 8 to 9 months postpartum.

It’s funny how things turn out. It is true what they say: once you stop worrying about your milk supply and just throw in the towel and say, it is what it is; I will produce what I produce. I will make peace with it. I will drop pumps and accept whatever supply dip comes — At that point, when you least expect it, you actually end up producing more.

Well, I hope this keeps up. I only have seven days of data right now, so I am looking at the next seven days to see how consistent this will stay, if at all. Because if the next seven days look good, then after that, I will try gradually weaning myself off of my middle of the night pump. Then, I will have five pumps from the time that I wake up to time that I go to bed and actually… Have a real, full night‘s sleep for the first time since two days before my baby was born. And I am really looking forward to that happening. I really deserve it.

Chai meditation – daily calm

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During the pandemic, I started supporting (in a greater number, anyway) smaller, minority owned food businesses. It was also an added bonus if these small food businesses were owned by women. One of the businesses that I discovered via Instagram that I absolutely loved was The Chai Box. It is a small chai company that is based in Atlanta and owned by a female Indian American who immigrated to the US from India when she was a young girl. I love the story behind how her business got started: she and her husband raised three sons in Atlanta and after school, when the kids would come home with their friends, she would make chai for all of them to enjoy with their after school snacks. Their kids’ friends enjoyed the chai so much that they would go home and tell their parents about it. Then, at school events or sports games, the kids’ moms would ask about how she makes her chai. A number of them offered to pay her for her blends. So initially she started gifting and selling them to these moms and family friends. Gradually it became an actual business — their family business. They source all of their tea from India, and all of their spices, which are crazy fresh, are sourced from small, fair trade businesses in Kerala, the state where Chris’s family originates. They also are all hand picked and do not use pesticides.

I especially love her chai meditation, which she does every single morning when she is not traveling for work in her beautiful kitchen. She records herself in her Instagram story making chai, always a slightly different version, and then she records the pour and insists that you make time for you. Her time to herself is her daily morning chai meditation. I watch it every single day, no fail. I actually find it very soothing, particularly the #ASMR from the heat aeration as well as the pouring of the chai into the pot and cup. I have learned a lot about chai just from following her Instagram handle and watching her daily chai meditation. She says that when you add spices to hot boiling water, you know how fresh they are if the water changes into a faint golden or brown color. And she always says that chai is not chai unless you do a double boil: first, you boil the water and add the tea leaves or spices and boil; and then you do a second boil once you add your milk of choice and let simmer. My favorite blends that she does so far are the Punjaban Party and Hill Station.  

Well, I thought about her rule of thumb that spices are not fresh unless they change the water color in boiling water. One morning this week, I decided to make chai the way I used to make it before I started buying her blends by using my Dilmah teabags, a slice of ginger, as well as some crushed cardamom pods, fennel seeds, and clove. My pot was too dark for me to see if there was a color change, but when I tasted the chai, it really fell flat: the richness of both the spices as well as the tea was really so inferior to her blends that there was genuinely no comparison at all. It was like I was knowingly giving myself subpar chai. Making chai in the morning a few times a week is like my little indulgence for myself in the midst of the massive fatigue and chaos in raising a baby: I love doing the double boil as well as the heat aeration, and that first sip always hits the spot. Even when I made matcha, which I love, a few times a week in the last few weeks, that has been nowhere as satisfying as my first sip of chai each morning when I make it. It is definitely a process, one that takes time and patience to do right, but one that I really love and look forward to.

Donating IVF medications

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When I look back, I always feel extremely grateful and lucky that I only had to do one IVF cycle to have Kaia. Through all of the IVF support groups, Instagram handles, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I know who have gone through and are currently going through IVF, I know that I am not the rule: I am the exception when it comes to a successful IVF journey. Every single day, when I look at Kaia‘s face, I am so grateful that I have her because I know others are nowhere as lucky as I have been. Even though I only had one embryo that made it, that one embryo is now my healthy baby. And for that, I am beyond blessed. I read real stories of people’s endless IVF cycles, failed transfers, zero embryos that made it through genetic testing, and sometimes, I have broken down and cried. All these people want to do is start a family or expand their family. It’s not like they are asking for much, but given the environmental factors that we are facing in a very polluted world now, our eggs and sperm have collectively been compromised. And so, some of us face more challenges than others when it comes to conceiving and carrying babies to term. And because I can relate to that pain, as there were many moments in the last two years when I wondered if I would ever have my own biological child, I wanted to be able to help others in some small way.

I knew I had a lot of IVF medication left over from my single cycle last year. I was also fortunate from a financial standpoint and that I had Chris’s amazing health insurance that paid for the vast majority of the IVF costs. The total raw cost of all of the medication that I got was likely around $15-18K. What did I pay? Only about $300 out-of-pocket. When I looked at my remaining medication that would be expiring in the second half of this year, I realized that I had about $7000 of medication that was still sealed, brand new, and never used. This would completely go to waste if I just left it in my closet. It’s illegal to resell medication, and so that never even crossed my mind for a second… Even though I am sure that people would have bought it from me, and I could’ve made a decent amount of money. For me, to resell IVF medication feels very wrong, to play on the hearts and minds of those who are the most vulnerable. And so, in the one private IVF support group that I have continue to stay in on Facebook, I posted that I would be giving the medications away for free to anyone who would be willing to pick them up from my apartment here in New York. I asked for them to follow the honor code and only request the medication if they were a self pay patient. Of course, I got a lot of responses. Some of the people who responded lived as far away as Pennsylvania and Chicago. They were willing to either come here or have a friend or relative pick it up from me who is local. All of them asked if there was any way for them to repay me. I told them I did not want to accept any money… But if they really wanted to give me something in return, then I would appreciate something sweet, maybe ice cream.

Well, these women were very grateful and thoughtful, as well. They all asked me about what flavors of ice cream I liked and what brands, and so I rattled off a short list of flavors as well as brands that I liked. And now, after having given away all of my medication to three different self-pay IVF patients in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, we now have over seven different types of ice cream that are sitting in the back of our freezer. We have Häagen-Dazs, Malai Ice Cream, Tollhouse ice cream sandwiches, and Adirondack Creamery. Is the value the same as value of the medication? Of course it isn’t. But none of that really matters to me. When I heard their brief stories of their own IVF journeys, my heart just broke. All of them have done multiple IVF cycles. One was on her fourth IVF cycle. Two of out of three of them have paid completely out of pocket… Just for the mere chance of having a baby. I have not forgotten the pain and suffering that I went through when going through the exact same process as they did. So I hope this little bit that I have done will help give them some hope for the future and help with the expenses.

My growing baby

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Being a parent, as I can personally attest to now, is most certainly a full-time job, and not a 9-to-5 job but a true 24–7 job. It is the most exhausting thing I have ever done in my entire life, but now, I finally understand why parents say that it is also the most rewarding thing that you can do. As Kaia has gotten older and now that she is over 13 weeks old, she is getting more and more attentive, active, and playful. Watching her develop every single day brings me the greatest joy. It’s almost like I can feel my heart is being squeezed. She does the most quirky and cheeky things: sometimes, when I am swaddling her, she farts and I exclaim in response, she gives me a huge grin, as though she knows that what she did is stinky and silly.  Every time she smiles when I smile, my heart melts just a little bit. And last night, when I was bottle feeding her before putting her down to bed, out of nowhere, she reached her hand out to hold my pinky finger and let it stay there the entire time. And I just thought that was the cutest thing ever.

 Lately, she has been cooing and babbling nonstop during certain periods of the day when she is very awake. She particularly loves it when I am singing to her. I have captured her cooing and babbling many times, but she seems to be picking up on the fact that I am recording her on my phone. In the last two days, when I put my phone up to record her babbling and squawking, as soon as she sees my phone, she immediately stops talking. It’s as if she is saying in response, “Get that rectangle thing out of my face and let me be!“

 I suppose that is also another reminder to me that I don’t necessarily need to record and capture every single thing that she does on photo or video, but I really should be more in the moment and just enjoy her for the time and the moment itself. But I really do love sharing these photos and videos with her grandparents and some of my friends who truly adore her and look at her like a niece. At the same time, though, I want to document her growth and development. I want to be able to share these photos and videos with her when she gets older. When I was young, I always loved it when my family showed me photos and videos of me when I was a baby. Because even though I could not remember that time clearly, it was still fun to see me, myself, at a younger age. It was also fun to be able to see how others, like my cousins and brother, interacted with me as a baby. It’s almost like you are making memories of something that you don’t actually have a memory of for your child. And I really like that.

Socializing again post birth

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Last Saturday, I went to the first social event since giving birth to my baby. It was also the first party that I had attended since pre-pandemic, so almost 2 years. It’s kind of crazy to think that once upon a time, bridal showers, baby showers, birthday gatherings, and family gatherings were just a normal part of life. And now, it feels like it’s all new and something that we are getting adapted to attending again.

My neighbor, who I had been friended while spending a lot of time at the gym over the last two years, is having a baby in May, and so her friends threw her a bridal shower in our building’s lounge room. She is 40 years old expecting her first child, and we have IVF in common. She and her husband were trying for over eight years to conceive and did not resort to IVF until the last year. She was so excited for me when she found out that I was pregnant, and I found it peculiar at the time when she knew so much about pregnancy as well as baby stores that were in the neighborhood. At the time, she had said she knew about all of this because she had so many friends and family who had recently given birth, and so that’s why she was so knowledgeable. When she told me right away that she had conceived via IVF, I had also told her that we had the same journey. I generally don’t tell people that I went through IVF unless they are close friends or I know they have gone through it themselves. It’s one of those things that I’m happy and comfortable to discuss, but only if I think that the people who are there want to hear about it.

Anyway, the baby shower was really beautiful: her friends clearly went all out for her. She is expecting a little girl, so there was a lot of pink all over the lounge room. There was even a drink station with water with strawberries sliced in it, all pink drinks, and even pink books decorating it. Because she works in child literacy and as a literacy professor, she asked for only children’s books as gifts. And given the book theme, the entire lounge room was decked out with the most extensive collection of children’s books I had ever seen, strategically placed at all of the food and drink stations as well as at the sitting areas. A bunch of her friends had pitched in to make a variety of beautiful salads and put together some meat, cheese, and cracker trays. There were also gorgeous spreads of fruit and veggies. I especially loved the cookie and cupcake station, where they set up little boxes for you to take these home as party favors.

As for me, I was excited to finally wear something that was different than just my nursing tops, pumping bras, and sweat pants. I actually wore jewelry and makeup, put on a dress, and shaved my legs. When I looked at myself in the mirror before leaving, I smiled: I actually remember this person… This person who had a life before pregnancy and birth and outside of just being a mother. I no longer saw just the dark circles under my eyes or the split ends in my greasy hair or the post-birth belly I still hadn’t lost. I wasn’t focused on all the bruises on the tops of my breasts. But given that it was a baby shower, I still talked a lot about my baby as well as my birth experience and pumping, since there were a lot of other moms there who asked me about these details and wanted to know about my experience. But it just felt nice to be socializing again and in the midst of a lot of people who were just gathering to have some fun. Gatherings in general were missing obviously during the pandemic, and it felt really good to be in a group setting once again.