February 22, 2012

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The World’s Fattest Toddler: I’m Not Worried

March 28, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

Step aside, infamous Indonesian smoking baby, there’s a new gross-you-out and get-you-incensed Internet sensation in town. It’s the obese Chinese toddler!

Perhaps you have seen photos of Lu Hao, a 132-pound 3-year-old who eats three bowls of rice at a time and refuses to walk to school. It’s compelling stuff, the swollen kid crammed into a raft, floating in a pool, the massive baby gnawing on a chicken bone or being hoisted by his sweating, regular-sized dad as his girth tests the tensile strength of a T-shirt.

If you see the story anywhere online, don’t even bother reading the comments section. This is very predictable, the kind of kid story that causes parents to do one of two things: A) lots of pontificating about how mom and dad need to take charge and are actually abusive in their neglectful/idiotic parenting or B) feel sorry for the child and post about their pity, which causes group A to attack group B. These two groups will go round and round while missing the point: This fat baby is onto something, and I don’t just mean a steel-reinforced Bumbo chair.

I don’t know exactly what Bethenny Frankel does or is, but I know her name, I know she has written a couple of bestselling books, and I know she regularly trends on Twitter and has been featured on five reality shows, two that focus solely on her life.

Forget about the Strasberg Institute or the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Skip Juilliard, practicing your guitar, attending classes at Second City or even going to culinary school.

Just have yourself some brawls like the “Desperate Housewives” or the cast members of “Jersey Shore.” In other words, embrace your total lack of impulse control, and you will be on the road to fame and fortune.

If you find you can’t keep your mouth shut, you might end up getting punched like Snooki and become an overnight sensation. If you can’t restrain yourself — from toppling a table at a party, screaming, conniving, drinking, vicious gossiping, smoking, having inappropriate sex, having a zillion kids or, in the case of little Lu, eating — we are going to be very interested in you. You could be five bowls of rice from your own series.

Discipline gets plenty of lip service, but if you want to “trend” in our culture, don’t call a therapist when you can’t control your impulses. Call CAA. I think they are opening a special “Impulse Control” division because that’s how profitable it is to completely give in to your urges, at least if there’s a camera there to capture it. Only suckers bother with training, practice and long, boring, expensive educations that mainly lead to working mundane jobs while hacking away at manuscripts that will never sell. You know who sells books? The Situation. He sells books, and last I checked, he hadn’t “paid dues” or “even read a book” himself.

If TLC doesn’t get ahold of this obese baby, they are missing out on a chance for a docu-soap that could fit nicely into their lineup, the way Lu’s diaper fits perfectly over a queen-size bed. “Little People, Big Baby” could be the story of two little people struggling to raise a giant child. Look out for “The Littlest Biggest Loser,” in which Lu competes in weight-loss challenges with other chubby babies from around the world.

Lu could move in with the Duggars or be disciplined by Jo Frost or perhaps team up with the smoking baby (who has finally quit smoking, by the way) to live in a house on the Jersey Shore with Bethenny, her new family, a few MTV Teen Moms and an aging Puck from “The Real World.” A swirl of ids could provide new catchphrases, books, spin-off shows and viewing parties.

This fat baby is already learning something important about making his mark. The only thing he really has to worry about? The next 500-pound 4-year-old knocking him off his top spot. Or the smoking baby picking up again. Fame is a hard habit to break.

 

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It’s Ivy League Preschool or Enlarged Bust

March 21, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

 

Photo courtesy of Gideon Tsang

She goes by the name Divine, but her life is anything but. When she can afford it, she speedballs cocaine after a long night giving lap dances at the Diamond Bar. Early mornings are hard — the sun coming up, the old baby toys glaring and gathering dust — and the memories of her baby, born drug-addicted and taken by the state, haunt her. The Xanax helps her sleep until her next shift.

 

When money is low, she carefully plucks half-smoked butts from the coffee can on her stoop and saves them in an Altoids tin.

She tells her johns she’s working her way through med school. No one ever believes it.

She smells like cheap detergent from the vending machine at the laundromat mixed with vanilla and regret — all of this could have been prevented 19 years before.

The same is true for Sam, who waits for dinner to be left in the dumpster behind a Pizza Hut. He eats the cold slices left behind by families who will go home to warm apartments and finds comfort in a tattered green sleeping bag perched on the stairs of a church where he sleeps most nights.

Both of these young people could have been spared a life of failure, struggle and despair.

Sadly, because their parents didn’t push hard enough to get them into the right preschool, didn’t do their research, didn’t attend the requisite school-sponsored Mommy and Me classes and fundraisers, because their parents missed this all-important bus to happiness and achievement, Sam’s and Divine’s fates were sealed as toddlers. Without admission to the right preschool — which could have provided access to elite elementary schools, which of course would have meant a high-caliber high school followed by college — their lives hit the skids. With one boneheaded move, Sam and Divine were robbed of the fulfilling lives they could have had.

Sam and Divine aren’t real people.

They are only real inasmuch as this is how serious parents are made to feel our choices about preschool really are, as evidenced by the lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court alleging that a $19,000-a-year preschool failed to properly prepare a 4-year-old for the ERB, an exam required for entrance into the city’s top elementary schools. The toddler’s mother, Nicole Imprescia, is suing York Avenue Preschool for sticking her child with younger students who were still learning shapes and colors and essentially charging her for running “one big playroom.”

According to court documents filed by the family, “(G)etting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school.”

When Imprescia realized her daughter wasn’t getting appropriate test prep (the ERB happens to be notoriously unreliable as a measure of intelligence from what I can tell, but no matter, it’s important to schools in New York, so it was important to this mom), she yanked her kid out of the school in a matter of weeks and wanted her 19 grand back. The school told the mom no dice, we’ll have our lawyer, who is well versed in shapes and colors, see you in court.

Sure, there’s much to mock here. Overpriced preschools, parents who bite and claw for the privilege of paying a fortune for “creative play.”

I have visited one preschool so far. My only question: Where are the books? You know, books? Those things that help you learn how to read?

“Learn by play,” they explained.

As we drove off, I muttered to my husband, “Whatever happened to learn by … learn?” and he muttered “$17,000″ over and over to himself, like the name of a lover lost at sea.

On the upside, the tour was very diverse: There were not only white parents; there were also SUPER-white parents.

It would also be easy to make fun of the mother for suing. But hey, I don’t fault a lady for wanting her dough back after a few weeks of shapes and colors. I’m just saying, let’s focus on what’s important in the life of a child: It’s the preschool, folks. That’s obvious from this lawsuit.

Forget family of origin, community, genetics and peer-group influence, and focus on where your kid will finger paint for a couple of years. Make the wrong choice, and mark my words, Sam and Divine won’t just be imaginary. They will be as real and stupid as this entire fiasco.

 

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Winning: It Has a Nice Sheen to It

March 14, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate 1 Comment

 

Photo courtesy of Angela George

My new favorite writer: Edgar Allan Me . That’s Charlie Sheen‘s latest nom de plume, in case you’re some kind of troll.

Sure, Sheen’s blazing self-confidence is probably the result of hypomania, but there’s a reason it’s so compelling. It’s a word, it’s a catchphrase, it’s a movement, it’s a T-shirt slogan, it’s a way of life, it’s an evolutionary necessity, it’s even a new parenting philosophy. It’s WINNING.

And that’s where, from my new vantage point as a mother, I see Sheen colliding with another recent pop-culture phenomenon: Amy Chua. One is a Tiger Mom; one drinks Tiger Blood. But they both know how to win . Duh.

Chua sells us on the idea that we can help our kids win academically and win piano competitions, and ultimately, we’ll win their abiding love for believing they were winners in the first place. Sheen, well, without making light of his situation, which may indeed be dire, I have to say I kind of understand his appeal.

I’d like to have the best plan in the room, lambaste my enemies and burn with the fire of my own excellence and superiority. We parents became obsessed with Tiger Mom’s bold and badass dedication to her daughters’ excellence, the way she focused on getting the all-important “W” for her kids. Turns out, we like that quality in our insane, downward-spiraling TV stars, too.

In a world filled with participation trophies and a cloying, bogus focus on “self-esteem” that isn’t earned, there’s something satiating about this warrior attitude. Winners take all, so do warlocks, so do little girls who play the crap out of the piano.

Not to get too deep when talking about Sheen and how he’s kept the country spellbound, but there’s almost nothing more primal than the need to win.

Evolutionarily, our lives depend on it. We need to win strong, fertile mates, berries to eat, battles against predators and prey. If our sole biological purpose is to keep our DNA afloat, on some level, we need our kids to be winners, too.

That’s right, you may not even know why Tiger Mom and Tiger Blood have sunk their teeth into your world, but just think about the language. Blood. Tiger. This is brainstem stuff. It’s primal, like my need to win the spelling bee back in fifth grade.

Let me take you back to my epic rivalry with a kid nicknamed Mookie.

Beating Mookie was everything. He took the states and capitals contest (I made one mistake, misspelling Austin, and I’ll never forget it), but I snatched the spelling bee right out from under his prepubescent chin. I studied for hours, had my dad quiz me over burritos when he took us out for our weekly joint-custody-guilty-divorced-dad dinners. (Sheen may have some of those in his future.) I put Mookie in the ground. I destroyed him. What did I win? Our teacher took me to Baskin-Robbins. I know, but what did I really win? The experience of winning.

Say what you will about “doing your best,” but it isn’t winning. And anyone who has ever won anything, from a spelling bee to a sales contest to a spot on an all-star team, knows the difference. Winning is to self-esteem what nicotine is to Sheen’s lungs: deliciously satisfying.

Thanks to Charlie (and Amy), not only can we admit to liking it, loving it and embracing it, but we can’t stop saying it. Last week, I found beets at the salad bar of a Chuck E. Cheese’s and un-ironically muttered to myself, “Winning.” My standards are low. And seriously, when a vegetarian finds beets in a sea of pizza and chicken fingers, it’s a win.

There’s a timid, second-guessing, loser-like inner troll in me that responds deeply to the braggadocio of the tigers. Maybe I want a little of that swagger (possibly dangerous, stupid, bad for the Sheen kids, lacking in humility, I get it) to rub off on me. Just a little.

Yours, Louisa May Me.

 

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Why I’m Jealous of Your Baby

March 7, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate 1 Comment

There are two kinds of babies: those who are described as busy, spirited, high-energy, active, sensory-seeking, adventurous, precocious or driven. And then there’s the good kind.

I have the former.

He’s busy. Busy. Whoever came up with that one should get one of those MacArthur fellowships.

Welcome to the world of baby euphemisms. The babies you covet, well, we can’t just go ahead and call them “good.” We have to refer to them as “Zen-like,” “old souls,” “mellow,” “taking it all in” or, if you’re a hipster, “chill.” You can’t just admit you got one of the easy ones — that would sound braggy. But we know what’s behind the terminology. We who chase our “high-energy” kids around while they shove pine cones into their gullets and attempt to run down the neighbor’s pit bull, we know what “mellow” really means.

It means that baby just sits on your lap at baby music class while my kid rummages through random diaper bags, climbs on a bench, helps himself to anyone’s juice, pulls off his socks, gums the side of a tambourine and attempts to escape out the front door before the wheels on the bus have even gone round and round.

But your “old soul” just “takes it all in” when the teacher sings songs about the earth being our mother. And I hate you for it.

That’s a strong word.

I’m jealous and resentful and confused. Why did I step off the curb of Mommy Street and get sideswiped by a busy baby? Is it something I did? My DNA? These are the questions I ask myself as I toggle between enormous, visceral, gigantic love for my busy baby and trace amounts of shame and envy that swirl around and settle at the bottom of a massive vat of physical exhaustion.

Baby classes that involve sitting in a circle? They just enable those of us with spirited kids to have our spirits broken by staring right at the good babies. That’s right, let’s call them what they are.

The only word that really feels right to describe my baby is “spazz,” but at some point between junior high and today that term became completely offensive. So, I apologize. But in the argot of long-ago teenagers playing Atari, listening to Juice Newton and wearing Le Tigre, my 17-month-old Buster is a bit of a spazz.

Bless the hearts of today’s baby experts. They tell you that though your kid may be “excitable” and “exuberant,” this is because he is actually “advanced.” Really? I would like him to advance himself toward some building blocks and amuse himself for 37 seconds so mom could blow dry three-quarters of her hair.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m thinking it, too. I’m telling myself daily that I have no right to complain. I have a healthy baby. What about parents with real problems? They wish their biggest concern were never getting to sit still. I know. I’m sorry. This is a high-quality problem.

Still, thinking about those who have it worse doesn’t change the fact that some have it easy. You know who you are. You go rolling by me as your kid meditates peacefully in the shopping cart, blissed out like the Dalai Lama with a pacifier and a sippy cup of Propofol. In the two seconds I waste in awe over your baby, I’ve missed the fact that mine is now clutching a jar of strawberry jam over his head like a grenade. Motherhood, while rewarding and life changing, is getting to be like “The Hurt Locker.”

Those of you who insist that busy babies grow up to be curious, dynamic balls of intense intelligence and great empathy, I hope you aren’t lying to make me feel better. However, if you are lying, you’re doing the right thing. Maybe temperament, like jam, stays the same unless something comes along to smash it. No one likes it all over aisle three, but it’s sweet on toast.

 

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The Mother of All Fans

February 21, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

Natalie Portman has hemorrhoids.

I don’t know that for sure. I’m just guessing, because she’s pregnant and I’m a new mom and that makes me love her all the more.

Like many celebrities, all Portman had to do to win me over was get pregnant. It’s that easy. Where before she was just a tiny thing with tiny pores and an air of remoteness and inaccessibility, that’s all changed. Now, I’m pretty sure her nether regions are itching and swollen. And I like that.

Rationally, I understand that her pregnancy hasn’t categorically changed her personality. (Never met the woman, but like most of us, I have unilateral relationships with celebrities that toggle between quietly snide judgment and adolescent reverence.) But motherhood is such an equalizer that even the Black Swan will likely get cankles, varicose veins, bleeding gums, gas, leg cramps and insomnia. No way can she assign the hemorrhoids or any of the rest of it to a personal assistant or publicist. That baby will have to come out of her one way or the other.

With Oscar time around the corner, I find myself rooting for the home team. It’s simple. Just like I’m from San Francisco and I root for the Golden State Warriors, no matter how much they suck, now that I’m a mother, I can’t help but feel like these women are representing for my home town, the place where pacifiers, nasal aspirators and spent tubes of Balmex live. It’s not Paris, but it’s where I live now, and I’ll buy the jersey of anyone playing for me. While I didn’t give much thought to Portman before, now that I’ve reproduced, that’s my girl. The same can be said for the other nominated moms.

There’s four-time Oscar nominee and mother of four Annette Bening, who plays a cool spiky-haired lesbian mom in “The Kids Are All Right.” There’s also Nicole Kidman, a mother of two adopted children, one biological child and a new baby born via surrogate. Her performance in “Rabbit Hole” involves losing a toddler son. (Are you kidding me? Someone with a baby had to go through that, even just play-acting? Give her the statue.) Don’t forget Melissa Leo in “The Fighter,” who plays a mother of nine, including two boxers — one of them a crack addict — and seven crazy-haired, thick-accented, boozy sisters. And then there’s Amy Adams, also from “The Fighter,” who totes around her new baby in between award-season appearances. I’m also rooting hard for Michelle Williams, a real-life single mom who plays a frazzled, overworked mother in “Blue Valentine.”

When it comes to capturing the hearts of moms, having a kid is the best PR move an actress can make. Or adopting one, that’s just as effective. Because even if you are a cold, conniving, selfish narcissist, we will imbue you with all of the characteristics we want mothers to have — warmth, selflessness — and maybe even the dark ones we have ourselves — fatigue, overwhelm, confusion and even moments of grief for the carefree lives we had before.

Now back to Natalie Portman’s rear.

Team evolution, well, let’s just say fertility always has a winning season. So while it’s nothing special to procreate, if it’s happened to you in the recent past, you know what it is to squeeze into an empire-waist dress and hope your boobs don’t leak. You know what it is to absentmindedly rest your hand on your bump, as Portman does these days. You know what it’s like to win a Golden Globe and make a speech blathering on about the new life you’re creating with your choreographer baby daddy you met on the set of a ballet thriller. OK, that gets too specific, but you feel me. If you’re a mom, you feel me. You feel me like she feels that fetus kicking her right in the rib, because you’ve been there.

So come Oscar night, I’ll be sitting down with my baby, my customary tub of caramel corn and my picks. No matter how many children they have or are about to have, I’m pointing a foam finger at my imaginary team and betting with my heart, ’cause I’m the mother of all fans.

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Parenting, Oprah and the Never-Ending Poker Game

February 14, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate 1 Comment

It was worth having a kid just to know that Oprah didn’t lie to me. I thought she was pandering when she’d stare into the camera at her audience of stay-at-home moms and declare, “You have the hardest job on earth.”

C’mon, you’re better than that, Oprah, I’d think to myself. Eye rolling became one of my Favorite Things.

Here’s what I didn’t know: Whether or not you like gambling — and I never have __ when you’re a mom, every hand is all in. The stakes are painfully high, and there’s no leaving the table.

If I tune out at my radio job, maybe I mispronounce Fallujah or Jermajesty. Make a mistake on baby duty? My kid drowns in a bucket of water and I end up on “Dateline.”

At work, maybe I say something spectacularly mundane. At worst, I slip up and curse repeatedly and get canned. That’s bad — but not as bad as turning my back for a second at the park, just long enough for my son to choke on a leaf.

Every moment, I’m one choking hazard away from a cautionary tale.

One sloppy baby-proofing job and my boy is guzzling bleach and chomping fistfuls of Ambien thinking, “These Skittles are kind of lame. I’m tired. Nighty-night forever.”

Aside from the unimaginable pain of losing one’s child, I’d be that lady — the lady whose baby drowned in two inches of water. For life, I’d be the mom who let her kid asphyxiate on a leaf because she was checking e-mail on her iPhone. There’s nothing worse you can be in this life than a bad mom. So if you let your kid overdose on Ambien, you have a serious PR problem to go with a lifetime of guilt and loss. And it’s going to be hard to get another prescription.

As the working mom of an 18-month-old baby, I can honestly say that going to “work” is like a vacation because the worst that can happen there really isn’t that bad. Working is quarter slots sipping a watered-down drink. Being responsible for a human life, the one nature has designed you to love and protect, is being pot committed every second. You may have a pair of threes, but you keep sliding chips into the pot until you’ve mortgaged everything you have and pawned your gold teeth to stay in the game. You can sweat and fidget all you want, but you can’t leave. It’s like an awful Eagles song.

Sorry I ever thought you were kissing up, Oprah.

I assumed you were just making moms feel meaningful as they defrosted chickens. I figured we both knew you were lying, that the hardest jobs were, I don’t know, running a Fortune 500 company, sitting on the Supreme Court, dismantling bombs, air traffic controlling, or being a chess master or a cellist or something.

Now I get it. The stakes. That’s what I couldn’t have understood before. Cellist.

There’s something about the combination of sometimes aching boredom punctuated by random moments of transcendent parental joy, all coated with a thick layer of exhausting hyper-vigilance that is unmatched by any other “job.”

And this is why I shouldn’t write Mother’s Day cards.

That is so much darker than I mean it to sound. Being a mother is everything great I thought it would be. My priorities are reshuffled in a good way. I don’t waste as much time worrying about who likes me or whether or not I’m good at things.

It still feels foreign, but “mom” really is the title I’m proudest to have. When the kid clings to me because he’s scared and I’m comforting, I feel a rush of achievement. I just have to get used to the idea that while I was once a nickel poker kind of girl, I’m a high roller now.

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Accepting the Unexceptional

February 10, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

My boy is about 10 months old, and he doesn’t exactly crawl yet. He just rolls across the floor or scoots on his belly. He has a normal amount of teeth. He kind of says “mamamammam”, but he ain’t referring to me as he babbles. He sees the cat and says “kah” or “kee-kah.”

So far, he hasn’t set the world on fire with his precocity. I assume he will not be scooting to the prom on his belly, so I’m not worried. Sure, there’s something fun about having the kid who crawls at 5 months, walks at 6, talks in full sentences at a year and writes in iambic pentameter at 2. It’s undeniably cool having one of those stunning children about whom versions of the same story are always told: “We were out to lunch, and an agent said he’d be perfect for commercials.”

When my parents said they just wanted me to be happy, I kind of believed them, but empirical evidence showed me that they weren’t exactly bummed out when I won the spelling bee or the state poetry contest. Side note: Earnest poetry written by a 9-year-old from the point of view of a concentration camp inmate might win a contest or two, but could also be the worst prose ever written.

I knew where my bread was buttered, and in the land of American Jews, it’s buttered on the side of achievement. I don’t hold it against my people. My grandparents came here as immigrants and were thus obsessed with public displays of “making it” here in the land of opportunity. But it sucks when the only way to stand out or to be unabashedly loved is to become a concert cellist or a chess master.

One of my first epiphanies as a mother is that I am not unique. The bliss, the boredom, the sense of grief for the old life, the panic over poop color and rashes, the elation over milestones, the wanting to drive away and never come back between bouts of wanting to stare at his tiny face forever, this is basically how it is. I didn’t break the mom mold, and instead of needing to be different, I find deep comfort in being the same. While the banality of my maternal concerns can bore me, so can a good night’s sleep and a bowl of broccoli, and I need those things.

It follows that accepting my child for who he is will also be comforting in the long run. Most moms, most babies, toddlers, tweens, teens, young adults, old people, most of us will be unexceptional. We’ll all need buckets of love and acceptance just because, and not just because we have an eight-octave range or can dunk.

The thing I notice about Buster, the thing that makes me want to brag, though I usually manage to shut up about it, is that he smiles at strangers. And sometimes he just smiles at the front door. But he smiles. I can’t believe I’m not even slightly full of it when I say that this thrills me and makes me more proud than anything.

If my child is a happy person, if his little soul is peaceful and his moods moderately mild, if he enjoys himself and seems to interact well with others, I’ll be kvelling. Happiness has eluded me like the cat (mostly) eludes the baby. I grab at it, I eyeball it, I grasp it momentarily by the tail, but it outruns me and scurries away before I can get it to curl up in my lap.

I hope I won’t ever need Buster to do anything extraordinary, but if he keeps up the smiling and, by extension, the overall sense of joie, that will be good enough for me.

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Formula Isn’t Poison

February 6, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

Every week, I go to a breastfeeding moms support group. I stopped nursing three months ago.

At first, I tried to blend — made my baby a bottle of formula beforehand and fed it to him during the group hoping people would assume it was previously pumped breast milk. But I’ve gotten brazen. Now I just take out my little bottles of Good Start and feed him right there, as the other moms try not to stare in horror.

I guess I’m just lonely.

Any guilt I had about weaning at 4 months is healed by these weekly meetings — the nonstop obsessing about what size breast shields to use, what kinds of supplements to use, how often to pump and for how long, how to wake up in the middle of the night to pump so the supply doesn’t drop, the best way to freeze and store milk, how to deal with plugged ducts and babies that need to nurse every hour through the night.

Sometimes, I want to raise my hand and say, “Listen, you crazy mamas, it’s not all about the breastfeeding. I’m sure you can bond with your babies in lots of ways that don’t involve turning your lives inside out just to make sure you never expose your baby to an ounce of formula. It’s not poison.”

But I was one of those crazy mamas. I took the herbal supplements and drank the tea. I tried to go as long as I could, but at 4 months, supply just couldn’t meet demand. Did I want to make motherhood all about nursing, or did I want to let go knowing I did the best I could?

Well, I didn’t want to let go, but my body was in charge, and that’s how it went. The well ran dry. To see the pressure these women put on themselves is to look in a mirror. Would I have been a better mother if I chose to get up every couple of hours and pump so I could keep nursing? Or would I have been a sleep-deprived mess who let myself get brainwashed by my peers?

So I go to the group. Maybe just to kill time, but maybe also to feel better about the formula thing because these moms look downright miserable. In the end, instead of feeling inferior, I just feel relieved. I have enough crazy obsessions without adding this one. And as much as I truly understand that breast milk is superior, I wonder about all the struggles that seem to go with nursing a baby.

It’s natural. It’s right. It’s what Mother Nature intended. And yet, so is breathing, and most moms don’t go to breathing support groups. My pediatrician says we need help to nurse properly because we no longer live in communal situations with aunts and cousins and elders who could show us how to do it. Stores and groups and books are the new “village” it takes to raise a child, or at least to nurse it successfully.

The dark secret for me is that I had to work. Worse: I chose to work. I had a book to write, and I went off for four hours a day and let the baby have a bottle. Maybe that’s why I stopped making enough milk. The less I made, the more formula I needed to use, the less I produced, the more I used formula, the more demand shrunk, supply shrunk, the whole thing unraveled, and it’s all my fault for working. Or that’s what I tell myself when I’m kicking myself in the butt about the whole thing.

The pendulum has swung so far since the days when doctors advised moms that formula was best, when nursing was seen as radical and kooky. Now, if you don’t nurse your baby for at least six months, you are a selfish failure. In the tacit competition between moms over who can nurse the longest, the competition that may exist only in my mind: I LOSE.

Yes, I liked nursing. It was pretty sweet knowing I could keep my baby alive with my boobs. I did feel like a natural woman. At the pediatrician, I felt like a rock star. Around formula-feeding moms, I felt a potent mixture of superiority and pity. And after awhile, I felt like an idiot for my nonstop focus on how I could keep it all going.

When I see what these nursing moms are going through, I don’t miss it. I’m angry that the unintended consequence of this well-meaning “breast is best” movement is to guilt working moms into nursing on demand, all the time, all night long, for six months or until most jobs won’t want you back. The accidental message is that if you don’t press the pause button on every aspect of your life to nurse your baby, you are the worst thing in the world: a bad mom.

So maybe I don’t go to the nursing moms support group just because I’m lonely. Maybe I go because I’m guilty.

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I Have A Stretch Mark

February 3, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

I have a stretch mark.

This is not a big deal. Or rather, I wish I were a person for whom this was not a big deal. But after spending two hours online last night looking at pictures of stretch marks, I realize I do not subscribe to the Warrior Woman thing about “my trophy” and how “this was my baby’s home for nine months.”

Did I mention I just have the one? Still, it’s red and loud like a blinking broken arrow, an arrow pointing right to the place where my vanity lives, a tenant I expected to be evicted and replaced by nurturing, maternal, “don’t care how I look because I’m so in love with motherhood” lady.

But I took a long look at the mark in the mirror in the middle of the night and had a choking, irrational cry.

Moreover, most women get a rush of stretch marks right about now, just before birth, and I can see several more appearing on the left side of my stomach, crouching, lying in wait to ambush my collagen and confidence.

My dermis is a ticking time bomb.

If you search long enough, you can find anything online, like sites that encourage moms to post pictures of their bellies, with or without stretch marks, and tell their stories. It was all very disturbing, the women who looked like they had been clawed across the abdomen by a giant, angry bear and their own genetics. I want to find them valiant, but instead see my own mother, practically disfigured by groups of chunky, textured, silvery marks. It never seemed to bother her much, which made it bother me more.

There were the photos, too, of the women who escaped unscathed, not a mark on their bellies. Well, goooooood for you, said my mind in the quiet calm of the Koreatown night. Goooood for you.

I worry about big things, too.

I worry all the time about the baby being born deaf or blind or not making it at all. I worry that I have tempted fate with my Diaper Champ and hand-me-down crib and drawers full of onesies, as if to say to the universe that I take it for granted I will get a healthy baby.

A few times a day, I flash on an image of myself sitting alone in the nursery I was scared to furnish, hugging the orange dinosaur my mom knitted, crying in the corner because of some unspeakable tragedy that rendered all of this baby stuff useless. I know, it’s twisted, but don’t accuse me of only worrying about the mundane.

As a Jew, I have enough room in my heart for all levels of anxiety. The shelves are stocked with sizes from XS to XXL.

When the doctor first told me the baby was “frank breech,” meaning head up and rump down, I was bummed about needing a scheduled C-section, disappointed about the controlled calm of appointment birthing. No water breaking at Starbucks, no manic drive to the hospital, no ice chips and sweating and gruesome rite of passage labor story.

Now I think, why did labor seem like such a mystical adventure?

I just want this kid out so I can sleep on my back without suffocating, roll over in bed without sounding like Fred Sanford and smoke a couple of cigarettes when I’m writing and need to feel like Norman Mailer. I want to drink a freezing cold martini, take a Xanax, fit into my shoes and schedule toxic beauty treatments. Most of all, I want to be done wondering if the kid is all right, if he’ll survive his journey out of my body, if he got all his Omega fatty acids and protein and Folic and fat and brain stimulation. Like probably everyone who is 39 weeks pregnant for the first time, I’m ready for this to be over. I just want to hold my baby.

Maybe for now, it’s just easier to focus on one single stretch mark. There’s only so far it can rip you apart.

Every transition involves a loss. Even if you are blessed enough to find yourself on the eve of motherhood and the luckiest 39-year-old alive, there is still something left behind. Even if that something is just a silly image of yourself in a bikini looking like Phoebe Cates in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (which you never, ever did), one thing gives way to another and it can’t hurt to stop and wave goodbye.

In my own way, I have to sit shiva, grieve a bit for what was and allow myself to be fully and fairly terrified and inspired by what’s coming. That or just get some self-tanner. Both are miracles.

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Hey, Other Pregnant Ladies!

January 30, 2011 By Teresa Strasser, Creators Syndicate Leave a Comment

Hey, other pregnant ladies, quit avoiding my gaze.

All I want to do is chat you up, find out how many weeks pregnant you are and maybe talk some shop — you know, where you’re delivering, what you take for heartburn, what you think of cord blood banking and the new iPhone app that times contractions.

I just want to be friends, pregnant strangers.

I’ve never done this baby thing before, and I’m always hoping we’re going to see each other, do a secret handshake and have a moment.

However, it seems you gestational types aren’t that into me. For a while, I tried to smile at you when I saw you in line at the movies or feeding your meter or buying groceries. I tried to look welcoming, but you looked right past me, and off I went with my tail between my crampy legs.

It’s not like you don’t see me. I’m the one who looks like a physics problem, like I shouldn’t be able to stand upright without toppling over. At first, I wanted to assure you that I wasn’t just carrying my weight in a very unfortunate manner, so I would rub my stomach in that ginger way only pregnant women do. But no dice. You and your fetus snubbed my fetus and me.

The truth is, I’ve been a social disaster most of my life, so I’m not unfamiliar with the sensation. I just can’t figure out why this dismissal is so pronounced.

Honestly, if we ran into each other wearing the same shoes or carrying the same handbag, we would probably at least look at each other and chuckle and maybe say, “Nice purse,” or “You have great taste.” A richly hued and hilarious interaction it would not be. But a human connection, yes.

If I were walking a mini-schnauzer and so were you, we would stop and have a chat about our doggies, compare schnauzer notes. Arguably, an entire friendship could spring forth from this one, shared characteristic. If we were both wearing Phillies hats or driving Mini-Coopers or reading “Eat, Pray, Love” at The Coffee Bean, there would be a warm interaction. But both heading into childbirth (big deal) and motherhood (biggest deal ever), and nada.

Important point: This pregnant girl snubbing only pertains to complete strangers.

I have now made three new friends simply because we are all pregnant at the same time and mutual acquaintances hooked us up. I love these moms-to-be, and seeing them feels so right and comfortable that even when we don’t get together, we end up texting and e-mailing all day.

I’m more pregnant than two of the girls, giving me a few extra weeks of wisdom, which is a luxury in a situation that is so new I mainly feel like a bloated dunce who is constantly faced with decisions she can’t understand: I’m 33 weeks pregnant and have yet to choose a hospital, a name for the baby boy or even a brand of nipple pads. I’m lost and sometimes euphoric, as well as 40 pounds heavier, three cup sizes bigger and 20 degrees hotter than I ever was.

Pregnant ladies who walk right by me on the sidewalk and turn away like I’m about to make you sign a petition about saving marine life, I know you can relate.

So I can only imagine there is some sort of animal kingdom thing at play here.

When I see you out and about, I sense you getting protective about your personal space and your baby. Maybe this is insane, but it’s almost like I represent a threat, another mother bear that might somehow compromise your safety or shrink your available resources. Is there something evolutionary going on, as in, that lady better not get more shelter, berries, attention or protection from strong males in the tribe?

In the classic horror movie “When a Stranger Calls,” the most chilling moment is when cops tell the terrorized babysitter, “The call is coming from inside the house.” There is a decent chance that this call is coming from inside the house, the house being my own haunted mind. Either I am unknowingly giving off a cold vibe that freaks out the women I’m trying to befriend, or I’m reading into this parade of pregnant girls some animosity that doesn’t exist.

Like I said, my social skills have never been great.

In the end, this could all be solved with an ice-breaking secret handshake. Or if that’s too intimate, maybe we just throw up a sign — one finger per trimester, sideways, OG style — and know for a sly, passing moment that we’re in the same crew.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer and a multimedia personality. She is the author of a new book, “Exploiting My Baby,” the rights to which have been optioned by Sony Pictures. To find out more about Teresa Strasser and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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