Free Exploiting My Baby by Teresa Strasser

meditating or chamomile tea is going to get punched in the face.
    I know. I should process all my fears by reaching out, or by “sitting with the feelings.” If the feelings are sitting on a bar stool, I’ll sit with them and have a nice full-bodied pinot. Otherwise, I don’t like sitting with my feelings. It’s like sitting with an obese teenager on a cross-country flight, uncomfortable and sad.
    My doctor didn’t sweat me having one or two last cigarettes before my sixth week. Though he didn’t love it, he could see the need for gradual weaning. That being said, he is categorically against drinking alcohol in pregnancy. His hard-line attitude about Drinking While Gestating is sobering. Literally.
    The man said I could smoke, something society sees as tantamount to bunny drowning, but allows not one drop of liquor. My pregnant friends, they are all wink-wink about a nightly half glass of wine, and most doctors say a very moderate amount of booze in the third trimester is fine, but my doctor’s warning haunts me.
    At a restaurant in Napa, the sommelier gives us one of these: “My mom drank when she was pregnant with me and I’m fine.” You hear that a lot, and anyone who says that to you is probably a good person and should be befriended or tipped well. It’s true, in the course of modern human history, lots of moms drank and most of those babies are fine, like Betty Draper’s kids are fine, like mine will probably be fine if I decide to take my medical advice from a sommelier.
    Giving up alcohol is relatively easy for me, so I basically do it. Like getting dumped by a guy you never really liked, you get lots of sympathy, but inside, you aren’t exactly crushed.
    Experts are all over the place with this one, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, which is the only thing left you can take.
    ADVIL —I never used this much, but now that I can’t, I realize it was nice to have around. Headache, pain, inflammation? Live with it, because you probably shouldn’t pop anything containing ibuprofen. They say watermelon helps reduce inflammation, and I’m shoving some down my gullet daily to address the puffiness that has overtaken me, but really, ingesting some cubes of fruit to do what a pill should be doing? That hippie nonsense is right up there with warm milk to help you sleep and petting a puppy to reduce blood pressure. Bogus.
    CAFFEINE —I have a decaf now and again, but some scary article I read when I was trying to get pregnant linked excessive coffee drinking with an increased rate of miscarriage. As losing this baby is the stickiest, most pernicious worry I’ve ever had, it seems like every caffeinated beverage is just a miscarriage-a-ccino.
    Green tea, diet soft drinks, chocolate, no más . I know I’m not downing a thalidomide milk shake with a DES chaser, but my guiding principle is starting to be when in doubt, leave it out.
    With coffee, it’s not so much the buzz I miss as the experience, the ritual, the palming of the overpriced latte, the constant refills of diner coffee at breakfast, the sight of my environmentally friendly plastic mug in my car’s cup holder. I’ve never trusted people who don’t drink coffee because “yuck, it tastes bitter” or “eeew, it makes me wired.” Wired and bitter are defining qualities that I now have to give up to make room for some kind of earth mother, mellow, natural vibe that just may never come, well, naturally.
    RETIN-A —Careful, constant and expensive grooming helps me address the genetic hand I was dealt, not a total bust but a pair of threes at best. With a few bucks and some toxic treatments, I can look all right. Now, I’m pregnant and won’t even have that saving grace of chubby women everywhere, a pretty face.
    Who knows if it works, but they say Retin-A staves off breakouts and wrinkles and I have both right now as my prescription tube sits in the drawer, expiring. Oh, goody, now I can buy organic lotions with powerful ingredients