Aubrey Hirsch's Loco Parentis columns for The Butter can be found here. I was talking on the phone with my friend the other day, telling her about a particularly tough day home with my son. Everyone in our house was sick and I’m super-pregnant and as much as I wish I could be an endless fountain of patience…I am decidedly not. Trying to cut to the chase about how the day had gone, I…
Previous Loco Parentis columns can be found here. I recently spent some time paging through my copy of What to Expect the First Year, the holy bible of advice when it comes to keeping your infant alive until its first birthday. Looking at those pages brought me right back to the experience of day-to-day care of a new baby. It’s exhausting and joyful and horrifying. It often brought me to the brink of my…
Aubrey Hirsch's previous Loco Parentis columns for The Butter can be found here. Let me start by explaining that I have a bit of an empathy problem. I have a lot of it. Way too much. When I was a little kid, my sister pretended that my favorite doll had a broken leg and I felt sick to my stomach for a week. Once a stuffed animal I won at a carnival flew out…
Marissa Maciel's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Exhausted parents lying on the floor, surrounded by government-provided boxes of diapers and wipes. Tired women with their feet elevated staring into space, while human resource managers do not have any reason to call them to talk about maternity leave issues or concerns. Tired men holding up two brands of diapers, debating between chlorine-free versus extra-absorbency, making that decision themselves, feeling confident about…
My son was a planned surprise, which means I wanted him but didn’t think he could ever happen. What was even more unexpected were the feelings that arose around my ability to care for him. It took years for me to figure out that a lot of my struggles as a new mother were directly related to my history as a sexual assault survivor.
One of the unanticipated difficulties was breastfeeding.
It takes a few months to settle in and get to know and understand a new daughter, work at which I have been diligent since, oh, before her arrival. And now that it’s been a tad over three months I feel confident in stating that I will keep her. That said, there are some parts of The New Daughter that I have felt to be challenging. There’s no question that The New Daughter brings with…
To Prevent Changelings, seek a basal body temperature as cold as iron or a virgin woman's suffering. To Ensure The Birth Of A Child With A Caul, A Most Fortuitous Blessing, seek to conceive within 12-24 hours of ovulation or touching the cloak of a master thief. To Ensure Your Child Is A Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, abandon your daughters by the banks of a river with only a ring and a blanket as markers…
Dear Childfree Person, I am writing to you to share some vital information that has only become available to me in the last couple of years, since I became a parent. Before that, I was subjected to the same saccharine clichés from parents that you are undoubtedly hearing over and over again. You’re probably being told, like I was, that you never really love until you become a parent. You’re probably hearing a lot about…
It’s almost Christmas and all over the Internet, mom blogs are filling up with gift guides for babies. You’ve seen these. They’re packed with affiliate links and, therefore, stocked with the priciest and most instagrammable versions of things you might typically buy for a child. Gifts like this $167 hoodie. For a baby. And these $60 shoes sized for a non-walker. And this $198 rag doll. You read that right. Who in…
Editorial Note: I love women and I want you to live. I personally think that good hospitals are the best place to deliver babies (and that the onus is on hospitals to be better places to give birth, a lot of these women are coming off really shitty hospital experiences), but if you do decide to give birth at home, which is 100% your choice, please hire a skilled attendant. In the US, that's…
About nine months ago, as it became obvious that I was With Child to even the most absent-minded professors in my engineering research center, I had the following conversation about two or three times a day: Nervous Graduate Student: So, um, when are you going out on maternity leave? (I wrangle all of the ~50 graduate students ‘round these parts.) Me: Well, my due date is March 7th, but since [university name redacted] doesn’t have…
How soon is too soon to begin introducing basic gender theory and Lacanian self-definition to an infant? A primer.
BABY: dont want u want daddy ME: GENDER IS A SPECTRUM OF BEHAVIORS NOT A FIXED IDENTITY STOP DENYING MY AGENCY BABY: want juice ME: I'M GONNA READ JUDITH BUTLER TO YOU AGAIN BABY: [nurses] ME: you realize youre literally consuming me BABY: [nurses] ME: wow its like de Beauvoir never even wrote The Second Sex…
Cut off their hair and sell it to a wizard or something Designate a single door in your house Forbidden. If they open it, lock them in the attic for seven years. Turn some, but not all, of your children into swans. Build them a tree house, only instead of a tree it's a hundred-foot high nest of thorns, and also they have to live in there, and also they're never allowed out and no…
Question: Should I sail around the world with my kids?
You had these children, clothed and fed them, got them to the doctor and the dentist and made sure their hands were washed before they ate - and now you want to take them into the wide, wide ocean? You want to offer their adorable faces, with their big cheeks and bright eyes, up to Poseidon and the winds and the weather! Did you
Here’s the situation: I want kids. I could have them. But I’ve decided that I shouldn’t. I’ve fought mental illness since I was a child—I remember being suicidal in fifth grade—and I’ve been medicated since I was 15. First for depression; after I got dumped at a birthday party and took forty-seven aspirin in the bathroom, then walked calmly into the next room and told someone I’d just taken forty-seven aspirin, I was diagnosed with…
