Sometimes I Hate My Toddler

by Alexis Barad-Cutler

[Everyone gird your loins because I’m about to make a big confession here. And I am especially talking to those moms who seem to never have a negative thing to say about their children. The ones who are always beaming at their offspring, even when the entire roll of toilet paper has been thrown into the toilet bowl and the organic chicken that cost more than a cute shirt from H&M is now on the floor, being happily gobbled up by the family dog. So here goes:]

Sometimes I really hate my toddler.

I really do. Not in a cute, “I want to write him up on my local Brooklyn listserve and try to give him away,” kind of way. (The ad, if it existed, would read: “FF: One almost-potty-trained, high-energy, destructive, whiny, annoying toddler. Will leave on stoop for pickup any time.”) I mean in a base, ugly, shockingly awful kind of way.

I know I am not supposed to say these things. It is very not maternal of me. And when I have said this out loud to people, the response I usually get is, “No, you don’t really mean that.” But yes, I do. The feelings sometimes are so real and so overwhelming. And confusing. They seemingly come out of nowhere and can happen anytime. Like when my infant is sweetly nursing on my breast in bed in the morning and smells so good and makes all these hungry, “num num num” noises when all of a sudden my toddler takes his hard plastic penguin toy and smacks it across the baby’s back.

“We do not hit!” I yell, maybe a bit louder than I should. And at the same time, mildly aware of the mixed message I’m sending, I forcefully shove my toddler away from the baby. The toddler falls back onto the bed, cackling and kicking his legs at us both, hoping to strike a target. Gleeful. He comes at us again, standing up this time and wobbling like a punch drunk fighter. Wack! He smacks the baby once more. Baby flinches, unlatches, and lets out a wail.

“I want to hit the baby!” says my toddler. “I want to hurt!”

“NO!” I say, pushing the toddler away. He is at this moment not my child, but instead my bratty little brother trying to pull my hair and rip my favorite doll’s dress. (How easily I can transport myself back in time, and shrug on my old childhood skin.) My first impulse is to call out to my husband, to tattle tale on my son like a child to her parents and say, “He’s hitting us and won’t stop! Do something”. Childishly, I want my husband to help me dream up and enforce some elaborate punishment, to make our boy pay. But my husband is in the shower, and can’t hear what’s going down and besides, I need to be able to handle stuff like this on my own sometimes, so this is all on me.

I scramble out of the bed, my breasts still uncovered from nursing, and hold the baby high over my shoulder so that his brother can’t get to him. I hide out with the baby in a corner of the living room, helpless like a frightened woman standing on a chair as a rat scurries across the kitchen floor. I watch my toddler continue his rampage. He throws all of the pillows off our couch, whacks his sippy cup off the kitchen table, and grabs the nice photograph that his teachers from his new school gave to him as a “special gift” to help get the kids comfortable with the new schoolyear, and rips it into shreds.

“I ruined it!” he says proudly, like an emperor watching his city burn. I am livid. He is ruining everything: the quiet moment in bed with my newborn, the house, even something of his own that he prized. My first impulse is to show him that he is going to regret what he has just done. I want to be mean to him. So I say, “Yes, you did ruin it. And now you are going to be sad because everyone else in your class will still have their pictures and you will be the only one who doesn’t. And isn’t that just too bad for you?”

“Yes, it is, I ruined it!” he says again, stomping at the little paper pieces at his feet. “It’s broken! It’s broken!” He dances on the city’s fallen ashes. He doesn’t regret what he has done at all.  I could almost go right up to him and hurl him across the room. Almost.

How does a mother like me, someone who strives to be a Beyond Mom, reconcile these complicated feelings? I view myself as conscious, together, composed, and am trying so very hard to balance “everything”, yet I fall into these strange spells of rage against my toddler. I don’t like it.

In moments like these, I remind myself to take a breath (the breath is so important) and as I am breathing in, I take in the sweet milky baby smell of my newborn. I am reminded that he is here too, feeling my rage, exposed to both the toddler’s and my mood swings. So I meditate on trying to see my toddler for who he is beyond just being an extension of my own body, beyond something that grew inside me and is now navigating the world on his own. I try to see him more clearly. And as I do, he starts to appear to me as not so much a force of destruction but a bundle of raw feelings that are far more fluid and untamed than mine. The same way that I can simultaneously love every fiber of his being but also really hate his guts, he has even more complicated feelings about me too. About how I brought this other little guy into our lives and am showering lots of attention onto him and giving so much of myself, my body, to this other person. My toddler doesn’t know yet how to rein his own feelings in. He does not have the tools. But I do.

The pieces of the photograph are now crumpled and torn far beyond repair.  “Oh no!” he says, finally realizing this. He crouches on the floor, poking his finger at the pieces.  He looks up at me, the smile gone. “I broke it!” he cries.

The spell breaks. I don’t hate him anymore. I feel so sorry for him. The baby and I go over to him and I take him under my spare arm. “It’s OK,” I say. “We can try to get another one. I’ll ask your teachers for another one, alright?” I take him by the hand into his room and insist that we build the toy penguin a castle out of blocks. That is really what he was looking for all along. Some attention and care from me. I know it is hard to attend to the emotional needs of a toddler and the physical needs of an infant at the same time. It is hard, but it is possible. I am capable of doing both.

The well of patience that mothers are supposed to have does seem to have a limit. There are days when I am positive I have reached it. But the thing about mothers, the secret that sometimes we even keep from ourselves is that there are reserves underneath the bottom of the well. We just have to keep digging deeper and have faith that under the concrete surface there is earth, and then moist earth, and finally, the water, a little deeper still.

Originally published on Beyond Mom.

This NYC Mom Shares Why Breast Implants Were Right for Her

by Alexis Barad-Cutler

Originally Posted on January 29, 2020 for New York Family Magazine

Moms don’t wear makeup in this part of Brooklyn. Our wrinkles are hard-won — badges of honor, from worrying about preschool acceptance, or milestones, or whether our kids need speech therapy or OT, or PT, (or all the T’s.) Mascara at drop-off means we must be going somewhere fancy, or . . . to an office. “Botox” is something we allow our cohorts on The Upper East Side to do, and maybe a sprinkle of folks in Park Slope. If we get Botox for a medical reason, like chronic migraine, we get a pass. But we make sure we let everyone know THE REASON. I am something of an anomaly among the moms around here. I am a mom who not only disobeyed the local treatise to avoid Botox, I took the nuclear option as well — and got breast implants. I hope after writing this article, they still let me live here because our zoned school is really top-notch.

No one would really know, looking at them. They’re good. Like, really good. And they better be, because my family and I suffered greatly for them. Was it worth it? Well, let me tell you all about it. There’s a history.

After nursing each of my two kids for about 18 months each, my breasts looked like the balloons you find under the couch, days after the party — used for pleasure and then discarded and forgotten. And I was not thrilled that any time I bent over, they assumed the shape of jiggly Hershey’s Kisses. But it wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have been able to live with.

I also wasn’t really sweating the decision like it was anything major. Many women in my family had gotten plastic surgery. They had lived to tell the tale. It seemed like a new pre-teen celeb every day was coming out with a new chin, or butt, or ankle (who knows?) … How big a deal could it really be?

When I told a few friends about my decision to get implants, their first question was always, “are you THAT unhappy with your breasts?” No. I had reached a point in my life, three years postpartum with my second child, that I was really feeling good in my body. I liked the strength I had built back after two c-sections, thanks to aerial silks classes. I liked where my professional career was heading. I liked where my husband and I had worked to be in our marriage. I wanted fuller breasts because I was happy with everything else about me, and I wanted breasts that matched.

The “look,” I described to my surgeon, was: “woman who doesn’t get surgery, who lives in Brooklyn, who doesn’t wear a bra, and barely any makeup.” I gave him the equivalent of a Pinterest board of inspirational “boobs” until finally, I was confident he knew my style. When I picked the smallest implants possible, the nurse thought I would instantly regret it. “Everyone wants bigger,” she said. “You’ll see.” (She was wrong. But I still love her.)

My husband was worried sick about the whole thing. He was anti any type of procedure or surgery that alters one’s appearance. He loves me every shape I’ve ever been, and I am grateful. But again, this was for me. We disagree when it comes to non-invasive procedures and plastic surgery. I have always had an interest in body modifications — from tattoos to piercings, to surgeries. I don’t ascribe a moral value to keeping one’s body “natural.” Our bodies are our own to do what we wish with them. What freedom! What joy! Who is anyone to judge another person’s “reason” for wanting to change something? All that being said, we have to know the risks associated with every procedure.

One risk associated with surgery — and with implants specifically — is of developing a hematoma. A hematoma is a collection of blood beneath the skin that can occur when blood vessels are damaged. The risk of a hematoma happening after surgery is between 1-6%.

When I awoke from surgery, my doctor explained that a vessel near one of my breasts bled quite heavily. Because of my chest muscles (thanks aerial silks), he had to wrestle with my body more than with the average patient to cut into it. “It was more like doing surgery on a bodybuilder.” I would have felt pretty fierce after hearing that if I didn’t feel like a dump truck had rolled over me, and then slashed me for good measure.

I was sent home from surgery with “drains” on either side of my breasts, collecting any excess blood and gore from the surgery, to help prevent a hematoma. No one had mentioned anything about drains. I felt just as betrayed as I had felt after childbirth when I looked down at my body and saw that someone had inserted a catheter in me, and dressed me in that dehumanizing mesh underwear. But in this case, there was no Village of Plastic Surgery Women to blame for not warning me. I hadn’t advertised this far and wide.

In the hours following surgery, my right breast began to swell (even more than what is to be expected after augmentation), until it looked like I had an ice pack lodged up to my collarbone. On a scale of 1-10 of pain, I felt like an 11 by the time I made it to the Emergency Room.

I went under the knife around midnight, to drain the hematoma, and preserve the implant. Recovery took much longer than expected, because of the back to back surgeries. My family was not prepared for just how incapacitated Mommy would be. The drains — which feel like you would imagine a tube stuck inside an open wound might feel — made it hard for me to do almost anything at all in the house. Any small movement made the drain chafe against my skin, to the point that I was taking painkillers to numb the pain around the drain site more than the incisions from my breast surgery.

It was clear that the breast that had had the hematoma was positioned much higher on my chest than the other breast. My doctor told me that the only thing we could do was wait and see if the tissue would eventually allow the implant to settle into place. If not, we could revisit surgery in 9 months. I became obsessed with the mirror. Several times a day, I’d photograph myself topless, and in profile, to see if the position of the breast had changed — gotten lower. I pictured that breast like a small, scuttling animal; something separate from me. A rolly, polly creature that was just inches away from burrowing its way to its nest — its rightful home.

For nine months I walked around with one beautiful breast, and one misshapen breast lodged practically under my chin. I even went on vacation with my uneven breasts, and unapologetically wore bikinis. You get used to things. In the spring I prepared for my third surgery. Knowing what I was getting into this time made it much harder, mentally. I was advised to wean off of my antidepressant — out of concern that that may have been the reason for the excessive bleeding in the first place. I went through three weeks of dark, utter despair as I weaned, my body crying out for the drug it had become so accustomed to. I fantasized about ending it all. I almost stepped into oncoming traffic on Atlantic Avenue.

But I survived to Surgery Day. The breast was repaired with a new implant. My doctor did some kind of wizardry that made it so you would never have known what poor Righty has been through. The breasts are fraternal twins that you’d mistake for identical ones unless you were their mother. Or surgeon. Healing was much more straightforward. Again, like childbirth and postpartum — I knew what to expect of recovery this time, and had the proper support in place to get me through the tough days following surgery.

When I get undressed before showering, or try on a new bathing suit, I feel really confident about my new breasts. They really are gorgeous. I can go braless in almost anything, so that it is almost unfair. I would trade them in a second to get back the year of my life I spent miserable over them, and the stress I put on my family seeing me suffer through the weeks of recovery over all those surgeries. My mind goes blank when I think about what would have happened if my kids didn’t yell my name, and tug on my jacket that moment on Atlantic Avenue when I was at my absolute lowest point — having weaned off of a drug for the sole purpose of reconstructive surgery for these “perfect breasts.”

If my best friend were to tell me she wanted plastic surgery, I would support her wholeheartedly. But I would make sure she is fully aware of the worst that could happen. Sometimes you are that 1% that the worst happens to. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth that risk? Welcome to The Village of Plastic Surgery Women, population 1. Here to answer all questions, tell you everything no one tells you, and support you in your journey.

A Younger Woman Weighs In

When I had kids in my 30s, I immediately felt contempt for the so-called “sisterhood.” No one had prepared me for pregnancy and motherhood. Not one of my older female friends and relatives thought to take me aside and say, “Hey honey, before you decide to get knocked up, you might want to know a few things…” Perhaps if words like “cystic acne on your chest,” or “purple mask of pregnancy,” or “never-ending, insatiable sex drive — but only when you’re alone!” had been uttered, I might have been more prepared, or even chosen not to have children at all. Who knows?

The point is — I am grateful (I think?) for communities like The Woolfer, and their Facebook forum “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” After having spent considerable time hanging around with the raw, honest, badass ladies of WoolferWorld, I’ve learned a couple of things about what the next stage of my womanhood will look like. Mainly: I will be dry in places that I’d prefer stay moist, and grow hair in places I’d prefer it not grow. One cannot win the battle against time, but at least one can organize the weapons it throws at you into a neat collection, rather than an onslaught.

So here goes. A list of things I’m preparing for as I stand on the precipice of my 40s:

Cultivating an Obsession With Patti Smith

Ohhhkaaaay. I get it? I mean, like, she’s really good. She’s a legend. But by my Woolfer calculations, the minute I turn 40, I am going to go Beyonce Apeshit for Patti Smith. I’m going to buy allllll the books, hunt for all the vintage records, find all her articles, and for fucks sake, I am going to post about it on Facebook all the time, as much as possible.

Perimenopausal Rage (AKA The Red Rage)

I hear that dips in estrogen can cause an uptick in rage. Honestly, with the way things are going in the world right now (you know, the death of reproductive rights, utter lack of social justice, global warming, etc.), I have so much natural rage, I can’t imagine it getting any worse from here on out. And yet, apparently, it does. SO MUCH WORSE. What I can expect: Mood swings in which I feel completely fine, to intensely resentful or irritated within seconds — to the point that no one wants to hang out with me, including my own spouse, children, or the family dog.

Everyone Getting Divorced

Like, literally everyone. I was aware of the fact that not all marriages stand the test of time, back when I was a kid in the 80’s, but lately, I see my older peers breaking off left and right. It seems like as soon as the kids hit middle and high school, people (mainly the women) are like, “So, I think we are done here? Yeah?” And then it spreads like a virus, and the whole neighborhood catches it, and before you know it, your ex-husband is sleeping with a 30 year-old who looks exactly like your younger self, and the only men who will date you are either over 70 or just slightly older than your own children (the MILF factor). I have read this story over and over, friends, and I am frightened. Is no one safe?

Openly Using the C-Words

Cunt, Clit, and Cancer! Once you’ve entered the menopause stage, you give zero fucks! So you just say whatever the hell you want, wherever you are. All the words, without whispering. I’m already pretty liberal with my swearing, but even now I draw the line every now and then. But I know that someday, I’ll be cursing, and talking about horrible illnesses like they ain’t no thang — like a Woolfer! You know why? Because by then, I will have seen and experienced some things.

Vaginal Atrophy

C’mon. It’s apparently as bad as it sounds. Probably the worst of the lot here. Perimenopause means my vagina is going to dry up, thin out, and, I don’t know . . . say “fuck you” and run away with the rest of my will to live. (I am currently stocking up on ALL THE COCONUT OIL.) This also means that sex will hurt as much as it did those first few times we attempted it after childbirth. Can’t wait for that knives-stabbing-along-my-vaginal-wall feeling again. It will be just like the old days!

Shaving my Face

You read that right. Just when I’ve completed my expensive laser hair removal sessions for the lip hair I’d had since my teens, chin hair should start to make its appearance during perimenopause. And I won’t be able to get it waxed every couple of weeks like other kinds of facial hair. It will sprout every day, just like it does for the boys (give it up for gender equality!).

Uncontrollable, Unpredictable Sweating

I used to think that hot flashes were something that only happened during the day, mostly to fussy or sensitive ladies, and lasted a few moments before they passed. Now I know that much like “morning sickness,” hot flashes can last for extended periods of time, and often hit during the night. I’ve read through countless threads about beds drenched with sweat (and not in a sexy way), and women having to sleep in separate beds from their partners because of the bed wetting (and not in a pee-in-the-bed way). Delightful.

Going Bald

Time to break out the hat collection, because, according to Woolfers, a bald spot may well be in my future. Either my thyroid will cause my hair to thin, or the stress of getting my kids into college will do it. And I look terrible in hats.

Being Up All Night

I love staying up late — to drink and be out with friends, that is. Insomnia, on the other hand? Ummm. No thanks. But when you look at the time stamp on a lot of these Woolfer conversations, it looks like these women never sleep! This seems like really adding insult to injury. Not only will I be angry, sweaty, covered in the hair that I’m losing, and too wired to sleep — I won’t even be able to listen to Patti Smith, because it would wake up the rest of the house.

Losing my Mind

Another fun side effect of estrogen levels lowering? Brain Fog! Sounds like an old sci-fi movie, like “The Thing That Came From the Shadows,” doesn’t it? Nope! It’s real shit that happens to women when they’re entering menopause. The ol’ vocabulary list becomes less robust, and short-term memory isn’t as great as it used to be. As a writer, this one’s going to hurt. Now, what else was I going to say…

Originally published here.

The Day I Gave Birth Wasn't The Best Day Of My Life

Maybe you and I have different ideas of what qualifies as a “good” day. For you, perhaps a good day includes unbearable pain, bloodletting, strangers in surgical gloves poking and prodding you, and visits from your relatives while your boobs hang out as you attempt breastfeeding for the very first time. For me, well, I’m a simple gal. If someone tells me my hair looks nice, it has been a good day.But please, nothing involving blood. This is why I don’t understand why so many women carry on this notion of the day that they gave birth as having been one of the best of their lives.

The day I gave birth to my son was definitely not the best day of my life. Not even close. It happened on a Monday morning, when my wonderful and gifted OBGYN expertly pulled my son out of me via cesarean section. My baby was placed on my chest for a quick family photo, before being wheeled away along with my proud but dazed husband. My doctor then proceeded to put my guts back into my body and sew me back into a whole human again. I still swear to this day that I could feel everything she was doing, down to the burning sensation of when she was cauterizing my insides. My body shook for a full hour after the surgery, from all the adrenaline and the drugs running through my system. I passed out and was wheeled to a recovery area where after an hour or so I woke up groggy and confused to see my father in law standing uncertainly at the foot of my bed. Does this sound like the best day ever yet to you? Me neither.

By late morning, I had hosted about 20 members of my extended family in the small partitioned area of the hospital room that I shared with another mom who had just given birth to her second baby and who was already packing to go home (I’m sure she appreciated all the extra company).My mom visited and, as usual, complained of the traffic. She was hungry and wondered what kind of snacks I might have on hand for her to nibble on, as if we were home and in my own kitchen and she had been expecting me to have prepared a nice spread. I had to explain multiple times, to multiple family members, the importance of hand washing before holding my newborn child who, just hours before, had been protected in my womb by mucus membranes. And no, a squirt of Purell did not count.

Bringing a new baby into the family is as much about other people’s egos as it is about a major life change of your own. Did you know that? I didn’t. You will find that some family members will ponder, often aloud, “How does your new baby affect ME?” In the hospital room, I found some family members openly wondering not only, “How does this baby resemble me?” but also, “What does the baby’s name have to do with me?”

and even better, “How can I somehow impart some wisdom onto you and also tell you a funny baby story about me?”It is all very exhausting when you’ve just gone through major surgery and haven’t slept since your water broke, 24 hours before.

My family, though generally decent when it comes to reading social cues, looked puzzled when the nurses came to check on “the surgery site.” This sounded very proper and hygienic when a medical professional was saying it to a roomful of cousins and grandparents, but the nurse was essentially trying to say: “We need to look at this here lady’s vagina and also at the gaping wound above it. So could y’all step out a sec please, thanks?”

And when it came time to breastfeed, I had to endure the very uncomfortable looks on my mother’s face – as if I had just jumped onto my hospital bed to perform a sexy burlesque routine instead of struggling to feed my hungry newborn.

By the afternoon, a Facebook photo that my aunt had posted of me sitting topless in the hospital bed while awkwardly trying to nurse the baby for the first time had nearly gone viral. After my sister alerted me, my husband had to catch my aunt before she left for San Francisco to ask her to kindly take the photo (which I know she only posted with love and pride) down from the Interwebs.

So all this time, a new mother is supposed to rest and get some sleep, but that is fucking impossible with visitors coming round the clock to see the baby; plus all the nurses checking on the wounds and the catheter; plus my topless photo situation (FML!). Then, I attended a breastfeeding class, where I sat in a cold hospital chair in some kind of meeting room with other weary postpartum women.

I was wearing my husband’s oversize sweatshirt over my hospital gown, bleeding buckets of post-surgery slash post-labor blood into what was basically an adult diaper.This day was still not going down as one of my best.

After the last visitor said goodbye, my husband spent some time with the baby and me before going home. This was the deal we made: he would go home and recharge so that he had the energy to help me and the baby during the days at the hospital (and with a c-section, there were many). So after he left, it was just me and this little new guy.

This part of the day – or evening rather – was actually good. Great, even. I stared at my baby’s face, amazed that he was here, that I had something to do with shaping him. The day of his actual birth had been so busy, I hadn’t had a moment to process his arrival, to even look at his face, or to take it in.

“Oh, hey you,” I whispered to him. “When did you get here?” I nursed him in the quiet hospital room, alone for the first time, and closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling of this little life in my arms tugging on my breast and on the little whimper sounds he was making. It was all so new and wonderful, and I had almost let it all pass me by without a moment of being present. I felt like a bride who had been so swept up in all the things that had been going wrong or right on her wedding day that she had forgotten to look at her husband and listen to the music and just feel the good and the love of being there together.

That little newborn boy just turned five years old, and we have had so many awesome days since that first day together.And though the day he was born was special and one I will never forget, there have been far better ones, full of wonderful memories where I was much more present (and much more clothed!)and more engaged.A lot of our best days happen in the quieter moments and on much smaller scales than one might expect: sitting on the curb eating a snack from a vending machine talking about a weird dream he had the night before, watching him enjoy the thrill of jumping over the waves at the beach for the first time this past summer, or seeing him smile with satisfaction at the end of a particularly good bedtime story that I’ve just told him on the fly.Best days don’t always have to be epic ones.

And, call me weird, but my best days most often do not include trips to the hospital or peeing through a catheter. Maybe yours do. And if that’s the case, that’s cool. I won’t judge. You do you.

Originally published here.