Across the chest, in clear, all-caps font, it reads, "This is what a feminist looks like."
"Feminist" can look like many things-- fat, thin, black, white, athletic, disabled, young, old, male, female. But I couldn't have imagined that the shirt would ever look so painfully ironic on me. I remember catching a glimpse of it in the mirror when my oldest child was two years old. I was emaciated, sick, dirty, and sallow. My eyes were mad with panic and sleep deprivation. I couldn't remember the last time I'd showered or slept. I was losing it.
This is what a feminist looks like, indeed.
We rarely discuss the hidden costs of what the crunchy community calls "natural" parenting. We rarely talk about the toll it takes on women and the number of moms who have struggled, hurt, and even died because of a desire to fill the role of Perfect Mom. But natural parenting has a human cost. And women are almost always the ones who pay the price.
Let's consider, for example, Charlotte Bevan. She and her baby died because she stopped taking her medication for schizophrenia so she could breastfeed her baby.
Then there's Joanne Whale. She wanted a natural birth and trusted her body. She died as a result.
Or what about Katy Isden? She took her own life in devastation because her baby was unable to breastfeed.
Those are only the deaths of course. They don't account for all the other pains and toils of being a "natural" mom. They don't account for how it feels when it's two in the morning and you're absolutely covered in vomit and you really need to put your crying child down for a minute to take a shower, but you can't because your child shouldn't ever have to cry.
They don't account for how it feels when your doctor prescribes you a medicine that might impact your sleep, and when you ask your mom friends for advice getting your baby to sleep in his own crib, they all tell you to stop taking your medicine or to let your baby sleep with you anyway-- and you know that they're telling you to choose between risking your life or your child's.
They don't account for when you're in your twenty-third hour of posterior labor with a nine-pound baby and you're screaming in pain but know that you'd be betraying everything you believe in if you ask for an epidural.
They don't account for when you're extremely sick and you're so dehydrated that you pass out every time you try to stand, but your spouse keeps bringing you the baby so you can breastfeed him, and you don't even think of formula as an option.
They don't account for when you're "baby-wearing" your four-year-old and your back hurts so bad that you're near tears, but because she's a special-needs kid with gross motor delays, you can't let her walk... and you always swore you'd never buy a stroller.
They don't account for when your baby has never taken a bottle, and Dr. Sears and Dr. Newman both say that's fine-- even preferable-- and while you nurse your baby, you start weeping over how much you would give to just be able to leave him with someone else for an hour.
They don't account for when you banned food coloring and preservatives from your home and have to explain to your children why they can't have a Superman birthday cake or eat their Halloween candy.
They don't account for when you have to shake rotavirus diarrhea out of a cloth diaper while you're struggling with untreated morning sickness, and you retch and gag and dry-heave over and over.
They don't account for when your two-year-old is screaming in pain from an ear infection and you just keep putting garlic oil in it, hoping that it will somehow solve the problem, until you finally go to the doctor and hope that your crunchy friends never find out.
They don't account for when you really, truly, desperately miss your career, and you fantasize all day about just having a normal job and picking you kids up from daycare, but instead, you're at home spraying poop off your cloth diapers and wondering if anyone is ever going to know your deep, dark secret about wanting to go to work.
"Natural" parenting hurts. But more than it hurts men or even children, it hurts women. We are held to a superhuman standard of behavior. We are not supposed to have human needs. We are not supposed to need a night out with friends, or a job, or hobbies. We're not supposed to want to spend the day anywhere besides the playground, the farmer's market, the kitchen, or the homeschool co-op. We are not supposed to want sex, or alcohol, or soda, or babysitters. We are supposed to spend every moment of every day enslaved to our children, folding to their every whim, and we are supposed to enjoy it.
That's what the culture of crunchy motherhood-- the greener-than-thou cliques of organic Stepford Wives-- orders of us. That's why, in the "Bible" of attachment parenting authored by definitely-not-a-mother William Sears, all but one in twenty paragraphs is directed at mothers. It's why attachment parenting Facebook groups have a 98% female membership. It's why there are no beards anywhere to be seen at cloth diaper meetups. The culture of natural parenthood tells us that parenting is hard, and that those of us who give birth have an obligation to bear these burdens ourselves.
Real "natural" parenting: Aka Father with his son.
Perhaps the strangest reality of natural motherhood is that it isn't, in fact, natural. Women in hunter-gatherer societies actually have a tremendous amount of help caring for their children. Aka fathers, for example, hold their babies for about 20% of the day and most of the night, only passing them off to Mom or grandma to feed. Overall, hunter-gatherer fathers are actually more involved and more attached to their babies than people surviving by any other means of agriculture or production. If we want to live "naturally," we need to hold other caregivers responsible for our babies-- not just the parent who happens to have given birth.
Of course, it's never a good idea to do anything just because it's natural. But, if your goal is to live in the way that humans were designed to live, the kind of attachment parenting that places near-sole responsibility of children on their mothers' shoulders isn't the way to go. Real natural mothers have help. They have sisters, brothers, husbands, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who feed, nurse, and otherwise care for their babies. They don't spend the first three years of their babies' lives as most crunchy moms do-- drowning in sleep deprivation and worry. They have help.
We need to abandon the toxic, sexist culture that has come to dominate the natural parenting community. The culture of crunchy moms that values a child's every whim over the human needs of his mother is not a sustainable culture at all. It's time to shed our conceptions of motherhood as an arms-race to see who is the most successful martyr of natural parenting. It's time to stop shaming mothers who can't, or don't, breastfeed, cloth-diaper, stay at home, homeschool, buy organic, and cosleep.
It's time to evolve.