Weston 53

parent trap

HOW I TURNED NAPTIME INTO MY JOB by Hillary Frank

THE EMPEROR’S NEW ONESIE

ILLUSTRATION BY JEN CORACE

Four years ago, during the last storm of the snowiest winter in Philadelphia history, my stomach began to gurgle loudly like a draining bathtub. It took about an ho r to realize what this meant: my daughter finally wanted out. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I’d found out that my baby was facing my belly in my womb—“sunny side up,” the midwives called it, which sounded to me like an apartment listing that calls a tiny studio “cozy.” I was told to hang out on my hands and knees as much as possible and the baby should turn in time for delivery. She was angled in a way that meant she’d have to do nearly a full 360. Apparently fetuses can only rotate in one direction, like a flushing toilet. If only we were in Australia. She never did turn, and the natural birth that I’d hoped for turned into a barrage of machines and drugs, and finally ended in episiotomy. A few days after we took my daughter home, we discovered that my episiotomy stitches had busted and I needed to be recut and stitched. The surgery left me unable to climb stairs for two months—or walk, really—so I lived on an air mattress in my dark living room during that time. I couldn’t stand long enough to change the baby’s diapers. I couldn’t carry her around to comfort her. I couldn’t even sit and comfort her because sitting on my butt hurt too much. I couldn’t get in a good position to nurse her.

I couldn’t be the kind of mom I wanted to be. Four months later, my husband got a new job, and we picked up and moved to a town in northern New Jersey where we knew nobody. I was desperate to connect deeply with other moms, but it’s hard to walk up to strangers and ask them if they feel like a failure. After a decade of making radio for shows like This American Life and Studio 360, though, I knew that if you stick a microphone in someone’s face, you pretty much have a license to ask anything. That’s what I did. I interviewed the music teacher from my daughter’s baby music class about how her son hated lullabies; I talked to a friend about how she broke her lifelong vegetarianism and ate meat to cure her son’s gastrointestinal problems; another mom told me about her toddler who went entirely naked for over a month. I edited the interviews dur- ing my daughter’s naptime and posted them every couple of months as a podcast called the Longest Shortest Time— a phrase my best friend used to describe the first few years of motherhood. People from all over the world started sending me their stories, asking me to consider interviewing them. And asking me to produce the show more often. I wanted to, but I didn’t see how that was possible unless I could make a living at it—a prospect that did not seem very likely. Still, last

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