• Year End Greetings • 

This is the last issue of 2018 so I decided that in honor of Baby New Year, I’d fire off a bunch of pieces I have about and by new moms. It is the great crossing over, and it’s so insane that even though this is the oldest thing in the world, we are still completely ill equipped to make sense of it, in part because people lie to you and act like everything you’re about to go through is a happy thing that only assholes don’t absolutely adore.

Expectant mothers and new moms out there—this one is for you. Hope it makes you laugh a little, say “right on” and of course pee your pants, no matter what. 

I asked some of my old-hand mom friends what message they could send to new mothers out there, or to women discovering that they are witches (welcome.) The message was one of permission—what you are allowed to do but don’t think you can or should. Some of these things take more resources than others, but the idea is that even after kids you are entitled to make your own life work for you however you can.

You Have Permission To:
 

• Take a long shower.
   

• Prepare your family the food that you want to eat.
   

• Not volunteer, even if you technically have the time.
   
• Buy a doughnut at the grocery store and eat it before you get home so you don't have to share.
   

• Sit in a bar and read while your kid is at swimming practice.
   

• Use a parental leave day, get a sitter, and go day-drinking with your partner.
   

• Go straight into your room when you get home at the end of the day and change your clothes.
   

• Go out with your friends on a regularly, pre-scheduled, no-questions-asked basis.
   

• Go out of town and leave your spouse with a sick kid.
   

• Stay home for no particular reason when your spouse takes the kids to see their parents.
   

• Get a babysitter to go to the gym.
   

• Hire a house cleaner or give your house cleaner more hours.
   

• Not use all of your non-kid time productively—for example you can hide in your room and read Us Weekly for an hour on the weekend while your partner is with your child(ren). You don't need to cook or clean or work out or run errands or some other BS.
   

• Have kids that are normal and average instead of gifted and talented or #deeplyrooted or whatever.
   

• Scroll through your phone in a parking lot for however many extra minutes before going inside.
   

• Put your kid in front of the TV so you can keep sleeping.
   

• Get a babysitter two nights in a row.
   

• Say things like "I do really love to play with you, but right now I'm enjoying [insert thing you like: a magazine, a crossword, staring out the window while I drink this coffee]."
   

• Hire a babysitter when your spouse goes out of town.
   

• Decline to visit your in-laws more than once a year.
   

• Drop your kid at the birthday party and get a pedicure.
   

• Assign things you don't want to make when people ask what they can bring.
   

• Not tell your kids about Elf on the Shelf. If your kids find out from friends/family, an acceptable answer is “We don’t have one.”
   

• Decline to sign up for an activity (sports, scouts, etc) because it is clear you will have to lead it if your kid is involved.
   

Thanks for reading and sharing and encouraging. Evil Witches is growing in 2019—I’m putting it out there, now I can’t go back. Shit! Is it too late to unsend this? Ah well, I guess not. Anyway, hope you accompany us on the journey.

Be well and talk to you in January. If a child coughs into your mouth over break, at least I hope that child is related to you.

~ Claire

Food • Every day

Kids • One weird trick to stop peeing on everything after childbirth• By LW in Chicago 

When I gave birth, my epidural didn’t work: the only things I couldn’t feel, as my uterus contracted into the vice that pushed out my baby, were my legs and my bladder. The feeling in my legs came back within a few hours. But the urge to pee didn’t return for weeks, thanks to nerve damage from a physically traumatic delivery that erased the sensation.

In the recovery room, once my legs felt just solid enough to carry me to the bathroom, I put one arm on the nurse and another on my husband and stood. I didn’t even have to pee, but the nurse thought I should try.

Well, she was right. Standing had the effect of taking a crimp out of a garden hose. I peed, and I peed. My socks soaked through and the puddle spread halfway across the floor. It would not stop.

“Next time tell me before you have to go this bad,” the nurse said. But that was the problem! I didn’t know I had to. She assured me that I’d get the urge back in the next day or so.

But I didn’t. Every time I stood, I peed, and never once did I know that I needed to. The nurses started acting like it wasn’t normal anymore and I started to freak out. Of course I knew that women in Poise commercials made cute little spurts into flowery pads when they laughed or sneezed.  Ah-choo—oops!  I felt like a racehorse pissing at a pretty little tinkle party, and I was terrified it would always be this way.

Finally, the discharge nurse came by on my last day in the hospital to make sure I knew not to kiss my newborn on the lips or put blankets in his crib. She asked me if I had any other questions, and I cried about how I couldn’t stop peeing myself.

“That is totally normal!” she said. It could take as long as six weeks to improve, but there was a incredibly simple exercise for retraining my bladder, even if I still didn’t know I had to pee:

1. Every time I fed my son, I was supposed to drink a glass of water.
2. Two hours later, I should go to the bathroom.

This cycle continued around the clock for weeks. But it worked. I had a few more accidents, but I started to be able to hold it most of the time. I lined anywhere I laid down or sat with a disposable dog pee pad (also useful for the baby’s changing table). By my six-week checkup, most of the sensation had returned and I could stop timing my pee trips.

Now, nearly two years later, I still leak a little bit when I cough or laugh too hard, even after religiously doing kegels. And I still have pelvic pain that I’m working through with a physical therapist and pain specialist. Like Cardi B discovered, childbirth breaks your vagina and a lot of other muscles. It is a lot worse than the incontinence commercials lead you to believe. But even severe incontinence improves and there is a lot of help out there. So you don’t need to feel weird about it! Every day, you’re surrounded by moms at the grocery store and daycare pickup who are all just living their lives and peeing their pants.

A Word With • Virginia Sole-Smith 

I interviewed Virginia, a New York writer and mom of two, in 2016 for a piece I wrote about quitting family dinner. I had read about how her own child’s early life on a feeding tube altered her perspective on food and kids, and was hoping she’d offer me me some forgiveness/insight on this great familial failing of my own.

Virginia has recently published more broadly on modern food culture in her new book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. We hopped on the phone recently to talk about how much eating dinner with a toddler sucks, how much people overstress feeding their kids, and how she loves Michelle Obama but wished her book came out on a different week.

I also asked Virginia what she’s learned about baby-led weaning in her research in food culture, food shaming and kids, and why a child feeding himself a slice of apple is a movement, not just good luck:

So what’s the deal with #babyledweaning? Why did I feel so bad that my kid didn’t do it? I never heard of it until six months after he was born, and suddenly it seemed very important.
 

I think of baby-led weaning as an extension of the breast vs formula debate. The hardcore breastfeeding community has glommed onto baby-led weaning as an extension of its mentality—that you don't offer food until 6 months, and food before 1 is just for fun because they should still be getting everything they need from breastfeeding. This is not to shame breastfeeding, but we know that can be a very militant aspect of the parenting spectrum. I think baby-led weaners do the same shaming of formula as they do of “processed” food, like you'd shame rice cereal or baby food from the store the way you would formula.

I think that is obviously bullshit. I breastfed my second daughter for five months, but I am also a proud formula mom. One thing that’s interesting about baby-led weaning is that there is plenty of useful stuff in there. When our older daughter was coming off her feeding tube, she couldn't handle spoons coming into her mouth, so we let her feed herself and muddle through. But it wasn’t a dogmatic approach. Our second daughter was ready to start solids at 4 months, but she really needed purees because she was really hungry and she couldn’t self-feed enough to be satisfied.

It’s so interesting that it’s become this black-and-white thing. Everyone is going to puzzle through in a different way. When we are dogmatic—“It’s gotta be baby-led weaning,” “No, that's so dangerous”—we’re coming in with this whole external messaging, which is what we do with diet culture. Let's not trust the kid to show us what she needs, let’s not trust ourselves, let’s get some outside experts, get on some bandwagon, shame those who don’t believe in us.

Yeah, like pouch shamers.

Pouch shamers can go straight to hell.

Be sure to check out Virginia's podcast Comfort Food, co-hosted with Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food, about the "joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and ourselves and how to let go of all the pressure and unrealistic standards and just do you."

Body and Health • Repeat after C • By Rachel in Chicagoland

I'll never know if my C-sections were necessary or not, and I've been confused and pissed about it for a long time. I was talking about this once, when my kids were still very little, to a friend who'd also had C-sections. We were in the middle of a crowded cocktail party and she grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Repeat after me: I have the vagina of a sixteen-year-old." She actually made me repeat it. So now I can't think about the whole situation without also thinking of this, which somehow makes it much better.

• End Credits •

Thanks for reading Evil Witches. It will be back in 2019, with hopes of evolving as a publication/community in the new year. Thank you for all the support and encouragement in 2018. In the meantime you can follow us and talk to us here. If you know someone who'd like this sort of thing in their inbox about twice a month, forward it their way, and encourage them to subscribe. 

This issue is brought to you by preteen boys who refuse to wear coats outside in the winter because we wish we were as cool and tough as they are. 

 • One Witchy Thing •