On Not Rocking It Like a Pro #

You want to postpartum like a pro.

That’s what the latest ad says.

Before I was pregnant, my ads often featured fancy notebooks, occasionally a new planner system or some sort of online course about how to attract more clients to my business. All of these told me what they would do for me, how their products would transform my life.

But none of these ads presumed to tell me what I wanted.

The pregnancy ads, and, increasingly the ads for nursing bras, lactation smoothies, and portable pumps, as the algorithm seems to know exactly how pregnant I am—are much more pushy.

I can’t avoid wondering if this is because of the culturally gendered nature of pregnancy, the way that in so many ways, anyone who has ever lived in the world in any way aligned with femaleness and/or femininity is presumed to be impractical, confused, unsure of what they want.

Is pregnancy assumed to be such a disempowering time for me that I can no longer be trusted to know what I want for myself? I haven’t personally found this to be my experience. You want to postpartum like a pro.

Or is the idea that everyone would want “to postpartum”—if this is even a verb—“like a pro”?

Because I don’t. I really, really don’t.

I want to postpartum like a first-time parent who wasn’t expecting to be pregnant this year.

I want to postpartum like someone who has no expectations of his postpartum self other than keeping himself and his baby alive.

I want to postpartum wildly, messily, with abandon.

The truth is, I don’t even know what it means to do something “like a pro,” or why anyone who has never done a particular thing before would ever expect or even desire that any product or knowledge would get them to a place in which they were able to manage “like a pro.”

I am reminded of one of the ads I wrote about before: You can rock your birth.

I’ve wanted to rock job interviews. I’ve wanted to rock major presentations. I’ve wanted to rock public speaking gigs.

In each of these instances, when I wanted to “rock” something, it was a situation in which I was presenting myself to others in a particular way, and in which my professional reputation or opportunities depended on my ability to perform in a specific and highly competent manner. There was probably even a somewhat linear relationship between my level of preparation and my ability of success in “rocking” the event.

None of these are true of my birth.

I find myself particularly curious about the language of these ads, which suggests a strange professionalization of my birth and postpartum experience, as though my birth were something to be rigorously prepared for, performed, and then externally assessed.

As though the manner or experience of my birth reflected something particular and essential about me—my readiness, perhaps, or my good judgment as demonstrated by my ability to seek the “right” knowledge, purchase the “right” products, undertake the “right” nutrition and exercise program.

As though I might truly believe I can ward off the unknown, the overwhelm, even the potentially tragic, with any particular product, knowledge, or decision.

I do not believe this.

I do not believe this at all.

Lately, I have sometimes been asked about certain decisions I have made over the course of my pregnancy or regarding my plans for birth or postpartum.

Sometimes, depending on the person or context, I choose to answer these questions. What I find fascinating is the frequent assumption—sometimes subtle, sometimes overt—that I might feel that I made the best or ideal decision, or a decision that would also be good for someone else. I almost never feel that way. I made a decision. I usually had reasons I made that decision. Usually those reasons made sense at the time. I presume other people also make decisions that make sense to them at the time, and may differ from my own. I have no particular investment in the idea that my decisions are particularly good, any more than I feel that someone else ought to dress exactly the way I do.

It’s hard to cultivate much spaciousness around any of this when we are apparently invited to desire to “rock” or be “like a pro” at something we’ve never done before, or even something we’ve done only once or twice. I’ve “rocked” plenty of major conference talks, but before that, I gave smaller conference talks, and before that, school presentations.

I’ve not given birth before. I don’t know how I will experience it.

But I believe, whatever happens, that eventually, I will find the threads of a story and begin to weave them together.

I trust that, regardless of how the specifics of my birth unfold, I can weave a million different stories, all with different shapes and textures, with different beginnings and endings. I can weave stories that can hold me immediately after my birth, and stories that change shape and hold the person I am in ten years.

I don’t know what my birth will be.

But I know, for sure, that it won’t be just one story, one chance to pass or fail.

It will become story threads that I can find and lose, weave and rip out and reweave, as I need to, or as I desire, for a long time to come. It will become not one story, but many stories that tell me about who I was, who I became, who I am becoming.

It will become stories that tell me what I need to hear. It will become stories that grow with me, change shape with me, move with me, dance with me.

It will become a multitude of stories. Stories that will nourish, whatever their shape.