the pregnancy industry: preventing over-population with every effort!

i just want to read a story, internet. JUST. WANT. STORYYYYY.

And not the story of the beautiful, fertile woman who abandons her every selfish whim to do X with/for her newborn and, in doing so, ensures she and her infant will be forever followed around by a golden light of health and happiness.

And not the story of the evil, arrogant feminist who doesn't do X and therefore cruelly condemns her infant to a life of allergies! low test scores!! and irritable behavior!!! never to be corrected because mom was a BAD BAD MOMMY who couldn't get her infant to latch/sleep/poop properly!!!!!!

And so help me, if i see one more photo or drawing of a woman who is dressed and styled like she crawled out of the bowels of the 70s, i will take my dog and move outer space and never come back. If my husband wants to meet his offspring, he'll have to come along.

My (crackpot) theory: the pregnancy industry is why the population is getting dumber/nuttier/tasteless...er. i don't know about you, but my smart, stylish, savvy friends are all refusing to have kids, and i suspect it's partly because they believe they'll have to give up their style and savvy immediately upon being fertilized. i can't really blame them. The 'What To Expect' book series, widely regarded as the Holiest Of All among its peers, looks like the book equivalent of the culottes your Great Aunt Janice would buy for your Christmas present at her local Salvation Army.

The other books have groan-worthy titles you're embarrassed to be seen purchasing, like 'The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding'. (Why yes! There IS a beatific, 70s-era woman serenely-yet-brazenly breastfeeding a Perfect Baby on the cover! Enjoy landing with that book at the 18 yr old male checker's station at Borders.) Lordy. Is there any other word as gaggy as 'womanly'??

If you've never had the pleasure of reading this literature, trust me, it's nearly all cheese, all the time. i'm not sentimental (surprise!!!!!), but i have to wonder if even the sentimental, 'feeeeelinggggg' preggos out there don't get tired of all the saccharine-covered blathering in these books. The problem is that they established themselves as The Sources for information decades ago when there was little competition and have been stalwart ever since. Yes, they're informative, but only in between all the filler.

To be fair: there are more recent additions to the genre that eschew the poetry and propaganda, or at least have updated cover art and layout design. i am deeply thankful for them and hope they take their own advice and procreate. So far one favorite is Dr. Oz's 'You: Having a Baby', which tells it like it is (very efficiently and informatively) and has an easy, relatable voice. Ie:

In the world of fetal development, the 10-fingers, 10-toes test gets all the attention, but we all know that this digital obsession is a mere symbol of the bigger picture: making sure everything's humming along perfectly during the 40 weeks of gestation. That's especially true when it comes to the newborn noggin'.

i also love 'The Baby Name Wizard' which ditches the notions of listing every name's meaning (pointless) and origin (nebulous) and opts instead to give you an idea of just how many other 'creative' parents are naming their future car salesmen Cayden. (Hint: a bajillion. Avoid.) There are a growing number of fun, savvy pregnancy/child-rearing memoirs like 'It Sucked and Then I Cried' and 'Didn't I Feed You Yesterday?' and i'm all for those, but i would really like it if the staples were updated for the new generation of breeders.

Por ejemplo, i'm going to rewrite the atrociously painful 'Womanly Art of Breastfeeding' and call it 'Milked: How to Master the Art of Feeding Your Little Sucker'. Instead of nauseating bologna like, "with his small head pillowed against your breast and your milk warming his insides, your baby knows a special closeness to you. He is gaining a firm foundation in an important area of life: he is learning about love", (i'll pause a moment to give you the chance to gag and/or throw up) (their unspoken alternative: a bottle-fed baby will never know love and therefore will be a sociopath) i will say things like, "it's pretty spiffy how you get to be a human crock pot complete with every nutrient another human needs... and it's FREE!" And due to the absence of cheese and propaganda, my book will be just as informative without being 460+ pages long, because i happen to know that being pregnant actually REDUCES the hours of productivity in a given day and we, the fertilized, are busy people who don't have unlimited time to sit in a holy pool of light reading about how suckling an infant is "beyond even one's wildest dreams." (Sorry if that made you gag again. And yes, it says that. Apparently its target reader does not have very wild dreams.)

Argh. For the record, i'm not anti-breastfeeding at all. What i am opposed to is telling women who are physically or situationally unable to breastfeed that they're failures and their kid is doomed. (Exaggeration? perhaps, but unfortunately not as much as you'd think.) i realize this is part of what comes out of literature published in 1958, but for that and other reasons i think it's time to trim the propaganda and give the modern pregnant woman what she needs: reassurance in her abilities and encouragement to take it all on with style and grace and guns blazing.

....i swore that having a baby would not mean that i'd start posting posts chock full of awkward words like 'breastfeeding'. Fail.