"You look tired"
A chat with Jenny Pritchett AKA Jenny True
Writer Jenny Pritchett, AKA Jenny True, has a new book out called You Look Tired: An Excruciatingly Honest Guide to New Parenthood, and there were so many parts of it where I dogeared a page and mentally noted, WITCHY. It’s the perfect combination of funny, honest and angry and you should get it if you’re a new mom or know one. I chatted with the California-based mom/stepmom of two about some parts of the book that most made me miss ranting IRL with fellow moms.
Chapter 6 is titled “Birth Hurts: Prenatal yoga is a waste of time.” Why are pregnant people given the impression they can somehow hack their way out of first-time birthing trauma or pain?
I write in the book about how all we have is each other, all we have is the village to help us out. But the village that went through pregnancy and childbirth has not had time to catch its breath and is happy that part is in the rearview and is attempting to move forward with the parenting part, for which US parents don’t get much support. I hope that is changing.
I do feel part of a cultural moment where a lot of new parents like Serena Williams and Amy Schumer and Ali Wong are being very visible about the diversity of experiences. There are so many people at that level using social media as well as traditional journalism essays about what it’s really like. I also think for some reason in the US, there is this almost cultural disregard for mothers. I cried watching Biden’s speech at the part about funding universal childcare and preschool for all kids. We do not have leadership at the top valuing the generation of the species, we don’t have much representation at the top as far as women and people of color. Instead, what we get is this made-up cultural war between women who identify as moms and women who identify as workers when the reality is that most of us are in both camps.
I think that there is still so much delicacy around women’s intelligence and capability to handle information about our healthcare decisions and about our own bodies. We are all indoctrinated, infused in this cultural idea that pregnant people need to be protected and it infantilizes us and it hurts us. The truth is that childbirth fucking hurts! Women had told me that it hurt, but there was a disconnect. Here were healthy people, fully clothed, covering up all the evidence of their childbirth, so it didn't compute. Part of it was that I wasn’t seeing images of the wreckage of our bodies directly after childbirth. For god’s sake, you can’t even pull a breast out in public to feed your child which is a biological function without criticism. There certainly isn’t much that is visible about abdominal separation, tearing, even loose skin.
There’s a teacher in San Francisco whose name gets passed around for prenatal yoga classes. She does not have a kid. I learned that after taking one of her classes. I remember being in that class in that darkened room with all these other moms kneeling on the balls of my feet to do practice withstanding the pain and it was such a waste of fucking time. You have no idea what your birth experience is going to be like. You cannot mentally or physically prepare to have a baby. It’s always a good idea to eat well if it’s available to you and to exercise but I believe that that industry is just set up to protect us from fear and I think I would appreciate it more if that instinct was paired with reasonable federal policy around prenatal labor, childbirth, postpartum care, but it’s not.
You address how once the baby home with you, nobody gives a shit about you anymore. Why is this, and why aren’t more parents prepared for it?
From the time my water broke to the time my kid came out was 40 hours. My mom, who grew up in a different era when they had no information—she thinks we have too much information—swears it was 3 hours of labor with each baby. That’s what I was expecting. But after 30 hours of labor, I was like, “Fuck this, give me the epidural.” Later, the hospital administrator came in to kick me out. She was standing at the end of the bed and smiling. She wanted to make sure my stay had been good and I wasn’t responding. I wasn’t functioning at all. I’m sure she was nice. She said “I’ll get you a hospital tote bag” and she tells me what's in it. I’m looking at it and it came over me, she’s expecting me to say “thank you.” We were about to get in the car on the highway to make this long drive home when nobody has slept and I’m supposed to say thank you for this free nightshirt from the hospital.
We get the majority of our care through US Western medicine and they are not concerned with our comfort. They are concerned about your safety, life or death only. That’s the reason that we get literature about postpartum depression—because it’s serious, it can lead to suicide or infanticide, they’re looking out for that. Postpartum anxiety, as far as I can tell, is much more common and in my case led to panic attacks. I literally believed someone had to be awake with the baby at all times. I was killing myself. I had these shifts my partner and I were doing; had to be awake with the baby 24 hours a day. That could have killed my baby. It turned out my partner was falling asleep on the couch with the newborn on his chest. We need more midwives. It would be a basic first step in this country if medical care were accessible and affordable to every person on an equal basis. When it comes to this we need more professionals in that space to look at the whole experience so that we are truly taken care of.
Your mom guilt anecdote about the woman assuming she made her kid get bitten by putting him in an alligator shirt made me laugh. My husband is convinced our younger son is a defiant bad listener because Steve used to get fed up with him kicking on the changing table and yelled at him as a baby. Please share a good story of ridiculous mom guilt with me.
My kid has an imaginary friend. Guja has been around for awhile, at least a year if not longer and this coincided with the pandemic. Guja is both a boy and a girl and is a beautiful princess who has a mustache and comes up with a lot of great ideas. The logical part of my brain says that this is totally developmentally appropriate and it’s normal, but also this part of me is so full of guilt that because at home I work, and I’m constantly telling my son “You can’t come in the room” or I can’t play with him because I have to work. I’ve convinced myself that I’m the reason he has come up with an imaginary friend because Mommy can’t play with him.
In your book you mention some evil cunts on an airplane who refused to smile at your kid. I remember being at a restaurant once with my kids who were not being quiet and a man and his wife got up and moved tables to get away from us and I said “SORRY” in a really loud and sarcastic way. The thing, is if I were them I probably would have wanted to move tables too. Why do we care??
When I look at my kid, he is the cutest I have ever seen. I recognize other people's kids are cute. Some of them. I don’t have any objectivity around my kid. My partner and I very nearly got into a fight because he would not agree that objectively our kid is the cutest kid who ever lived. “I know he’s really cute.” “Not really cute. he’s the cutest kid.” I kind of still don’t trust him because he doesn't feel the same way. You come out of this cocoon of so many things and at least for me it’s this complete mind-meld of love for this child and then the realization starts to dawn that other people don’t feel this way about your kid.
I make decisions around my kid that I hope are right for him but are also not going to contribute to any kind of a system that hurts other people’s kids, and I think that once we all get to the point that these are everybody's kids, that maybe those bitches will smile at my kid when he is just playing on an airplane.
Tell me about your final chapter and what made you decide to end on an optimistic note.
That was my idea. One of the things that stood out in Meaghan O'Connell's book And Now We Have Everything is that she writes about how her mom friends come over and it is a relief to talk seriously about what it was like and to not have to qualify it with “of course I love my kid.” You don’t have to do that with other parents. It’s understood. With that, as much as I thrive on getting it all out in terms of everything I’m frustrated and angry about, in equal part I just want to talk about how much I love my kid. I want to get that into words too.
What did your partner say after reading the laundry chapter where you put him on blast about being bad at doing laundry? Did he clean up his ways? (Pun intended).
I don’t publish anything about my partner without reading it to him first. I think most people would be surprised at how much we cry laughing. We have been working with this really wonderful counselor; we meet with her every couple of weeks to practice how to communicate. The unequal division of labor is a continuing thing and we’ve made one simple change recently—his full-time task is emptying the dishwasher. I was so surprised that that one change to our household duties has been a game-changer. In some ways I’m fighting against millennia of patriarchy that we both are infused in and the family structures we both come from. I'm most grateful we can talk about these things with humor.
But no, he doesn’t do any more laundry.
End credits
I hope you enjoyed this issue of Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Feel free to forward it to a friend or enemy who might like getting this in their inbox twice a week or so. If you haven’t, please consider supporting this independent, nonsponsored work and joining the subscription level (less than a dollar a week!), which gives you extra context and access to fun/helpful/honest witchy discussion threads.
If you have any questions, feedback, ideas for guest posts, or suggested topics for the newsletter you can reply right to this email. You can follow us on Instagram here and talk to other witches on Twitter, too.
Thank you to the folks who give us shout outs! The word of mouth is everything.
One witchy thing
