PARENTS: Can We Address the Real Reasons Moms Are Drinking More, Please?
We've seen the memes and the TikToks, but what is really behind the seeming rise in moms drinking, especially during the pandemic? We spoke to psychologists and experts in alcohol dependency for insight into the cause of this oft-ignored problem and how to stop it.
Published on Parents.com June 24, 2021
We've seen the memes and the TikToks, but what is really behind the seeming rise in moms drinking, especially during the pandemic? We spoke to psychologists and experts in alcohol dependency for insight into the cause of this oft-ignored problem and how to stop it.
Read the rest at Parents.com
Sometimes I Hate My Toddler
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.
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
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.
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.