An Excerpt

From Lowery Cate Morgan’s Admissions Letter to Brown University

April, 2029

...and so I must come to the point in every admissions essay in which the impact of the parents must be acknowledged. While this is a standard, albeit cliche, elegy, my parents must be understood in order to understand the kind of applicant you are considering.

My mother and father raised me well. At the very least, I never wanted for anything. I was loved and supported and given almost every opportunity that was crucial to my future success. I won’t praise my parents for doing what parents should do—raise and protect their young—but I will acknowledge the kind of people they are and the kind of marriage they share, as I cannot deny its significance in my upbringing.

On more than one occasion my mother has been accused of having a “big personality.” She’s energetic and outgoing and is extremely passionate and opinionated about even the most ridiculous of causes and the details surrounding them. She is a self-proclaimed Marxist, her biggest pet peeve is religion, and no matter how many documentaries we watch, she still adamantly denies the moon landing. She can be a bit eccentric and politically too radical, but she’s somehow mainstream and gracious enough to have lots of friends. She’s always in a happy, nearly hyper, mood and the only times I see her depressed are when she is without a project or any time she gets an email pushing the need to put “Christ” back in Christmas.

I am nothing like her. Nothing.

In fact, to a certain extent, I resent her. Not because I don’t love her, or admire her or see the wisdom in her way of life, but I sometimes find it difficult to be around her. Because not only am I nothing like her, but she exhausts me.

My mother’s smart and driven, which is apparent by many of her accomplishments, not the least of which was earning a PhD before she was 30. But for all her brains and ambition she often loses her keys, forgets her social security number and has, on more than one occasion, left my baby sister in the cart at the grocery store. Though no one would call her uptight by any means, her constant excitement for whatever the case may be makes it impossible for her to calm down unless she’s drinking a large glass of wine. In all my years with her, watching her mercurial vigor for various political and social issues, I have never once seen any part of my mother in me. But when I start to theorize about a mix up at the hospital, I look toward my father and find myself.

My father is my soul mate. Mostly because I find his personality, his serenity, his consistency, not only a refreshing change of pace from my erratic mother, but the mirror image of my own seemingly sedate personality. My father is smart. He’s smarter than my mother, no matter how much he denies it. His passions equal that of hers, but he is not so forthcoming with his opinions and that kind of restraint impresses me. I aspire to carry through life with his command of respect, his inquisitive nature and undeniable work ethic. Whereas my mother puts her opinions ahead of herself so that even our postal carrier knows her side, my father presents himself first and allows his points of view to catch up to his kindness, his sincerity and his equable personality.

My dad is a writer by trade and a photographer by luck, which are both skills that require patience, persistence and an un-jaded view on life. He and I both love the quiet, the peace that comes from silently reading a book, and the eye rolling we share as my mother dances to salsa music while she vacuums joyfully around the house. But I suppose what I find most endearing about my father is the pure selflessness he brings to his marriage to my mother and his parenting to my siblings and me. Upon graduating from film school, his professional life was on the fast track—working for one of the major TV networks as a screen writer—and he chose to leave the exciting world of Hollywood behind so he could move to the Midwest, buy a home and wait to fill it with a family. That time in his life proved that my father was beyond capable, talented and in demand, but even still he could happily reject it for a different kind of excitement. My mother, I believe, would have never left the exciting circumstance my father was able to abandon because, while she would have hated the long hours and impossible workload, she would have basked in the glamour of it all and would have struggled to let it go.

More than a decade older than my mom, my dad patiently allows her to steer the ship, urged her into her master’s program, and shortly after marriage, allowed her to quit her job to pursue a PhD. Perhaps in trying to bridge the age gap he carefully and methodically lets my mother call most, if not all, the shots so that she can rise to the maturity and the demands of adulthood and also not feel as though she was robbed of any of her youth.

Most people couldn’t help but admire my strong and independent mother braving the world of academia, even while 9 months pregnant, but it is my father who is the true hero. After all, he was the one who held me—14 months old with an earache—while my mother defended her dissertation.

In the moments when I can’t seem to understand my mother, or at least I can’t relate to her, I just look at the way my father looks at her and I recognize that what he sees in her is reality and it makes me love my mother all the more. His love for her is unconditional, pure, and a surprise, I think, to no one.

Now, it may sound as though I see my mother as terribly flawed and my father as perfect. But this is not the case. I admire my mother, even when I don't understand her. In many ways, I wish I had her energy. She carries herself with such ease and confidence—often buried behind a self-effacing modesty—and though she fully recognizes that I’m nothing like her, she never pushed her children to be anything but the very truest versions of themselves. And she truly seemed to be in awe, and in love, with both of us. This made me mad at myself for wanting her to be different sometimes, when she never once wanted that of me.

My mother gives herself fully to her students at the university where she’s a popular professor who always packs her political science classes. She encourages heavy, tear-inducing debates among 18 years olds who’ve never once thought about the constitutionality of gay marriage but are pressed by her on this issue the first day of class. She’s an academic and highly respected in her field, and for the work she does in the nonprofit community, but she loves go-cart racing, well done scatological humor and nights out drinking. She’d rather have the respect of her students than her colleagues, and when the university tried to promote her into an administrative position for substantially more money, she politely refused on principle.

The evening my mother came home to tell my father the news of her promotion, he burst into laughter at the thought. I couldn’t understand this logic. More money, less work. Why were they laughing? My mother made so little as a professor that it barely covered her gas money for the commute. My father, an editor for a popular regional magazine, barely made more than her. Our dishwasher leaked rust, our old creaky house was always drafty and they were about to send their first child to an out-of-state university and they just laughed in the face of a financial solution to it all.

I couldn’t understand in that moment but what it came down to was that my parents were happy. Not just with each other, and not just with themselves, but with the life they had purposely built.

For all their faults it was their union that allowed for the much-needed balance. Without my father, my mother would be overdue on bills, would struggle to focus on her career, and would have burned down the house. Without my mother, my father would sink into his natural state of seriousness, would become obsessive compulsive about folding clothes just so, and would probably never have had the joy of laughing so hard he almost peed. I could point to the times when my mother embarrassed me, like when she staged a protest outside my high school upon learning my biology teacher was covering Intelligent Design. I could complain that my father sometimes spent more time reading books, or writing his magazine articles about other people, than experiencing or reveling in his own life. I could point to the most difficult, and consequential, conversation I’d ever had with my mother—the time I told her I had learned about Reaganomics in government class and I kind of bought into the philosophy. And I could fault my dad numerous times over for letting my mother be too powerful, too demanding, and too crazy without the slightest protest from him.

But with the two of them together there is a strange equilibrium that made growing up anything but tense. When most of my friends struggled with arguing parents, or a broken family, my siblings and I at least had the comfort of a stress-free home life. And I think that’s the greatest gift they gave to us—the freedom not to worry about our parents' happiness or their marriage.

They took care of all that for us.

Meg says...

I appreciate front closure bras because it feels like I'm putting on a really tiny jacket.

Meg says...

Nothing makes me more nervous than when I'm put on the spot with a simple math question brought up in normal conversation. "Hey," a friend will say. "Quick, what's 28 times 40?" My bodily organs shut down. This is why when I was a waitress I just consistently gave everyone back $3.50 in change, regardless of their payment.

Meg says...

Allow an extra twenty minutes anywhere you take the baby because strangers will want to stop to admire her. Unless your baby is ugly. Then just proceed as you normally would.

Impressive

I wouldn’t say I had a desire to breastfeed. I would say I had an obsessive passion to breastfeed. I read countless books on the topic, clicked through endless websites, visited with my friends who had successfully breastfed, pitied those who were unsuccessful, and signed my husband and me up for classes in which I dunked my nipple in a doll’s mouth. I talked endlessly about it to everyone. Registered for a breast pump with more horsepower than my car. I bought heaps of nursing bras, nursing tops and breast pads. I refused my friends’ offers of used bottles and bought extremely stylish apron-like contraptions that would hide my baby and exposed breasts as I fed her at places like the Farmers’ Market and the cloth diaper emporium. It was going to happen. I hadn’t prepared for anything more in my entire life, and there wasn’t anything I didn’t know about nipple texture, let down, mastitis, positioning and colostrum. I spoke to my doctor about making sure after delivery that my child’s lips would touch my nipple as quickly as possible. Was there a way I could bend myself into a position such that I could breastfeed my child as she was coming out of me? Because that would be impressive.

After the birth of my daughter, and the hour-long process of stitching my vagina back together, I finally got my baby to my breast. While it wasn’t like they showed in the video in class, with the dim lighting and soft music, it was a special enough occasion. A nurse came to me with my daughter in one hand and her other hand pawing at my hospital gown to expose my left boob. She flopped my daughter in my arms, took a gloved hand, squeezed my breast and forcefully guided it into my baby’s mouth. My child seemed tired and annoyed, but she suckled enough to let me know that I was already mastering breastfeeding. And motherhood.

My husband and I returned home with our little bundle feeling pretty damn good about ourselves. We were told our newborn would sleep constantly for the first few weeks. But our first two nights were very difficult as our baby cried—a lot. She was fussy, mad even, and would only sleep once she cried herself into exhaustion. I kept on breastfeeding, forgoing sleep and trying everything I could to make her happy. On her second day home I began to notice she was looking more jaundice with each passing hour. And despite breastfeeding her every two hours, she had not had a single wet diaper.

When I noticed the whites of her eyes were the color of autumn gourds, we decided to call the doctor. They said to run, not walk, to the nearest emergency room. We assumed that she just needed to sit under the Bili lights for a few hours until the jaundice subsided and then we would be back to kicking ass as parents.

But when her blood work came back in the ER, it was discovered that my child was severely dehydrated. She would need to be admitted to the hospital for several days to get her fluids up and to be under strict observation. She was only three days old.

My husband and I were in a state of shock. Having had no sleep because I’d been so impressively breastfeeding every two hours, I immediately burst into tears. And I didn’t stop crying until we were allowed to take our daughter home three days later.

After the long process of getting our daughter admitted, hooked up to an IV and situated in our bleak, sterile room, I began answering over and over and over again the only question any one seemed to care about: Was my milk in? Though I was a scholar at all things breast, I had no idea if my milk, was in fact, in.

The theory was that my milk had not “come in” and the colostrom I was producing was so minimal that my child was suffering from dehydration, or starvation. So while my three-day-old daughter was hooked up to an IV with a 5-pound bag of fluid, tiny, small and scared, I was to sit beside her and use a breast pump anytime I wasn’t breastfeeding to encourage my milk to arrive.

So for three days, I sat, in a bathrobe, still bleeding out the vagina, having had no sleep since giving birth, with a pump on each breast, looking in shame at the bottles not filling up. I would stop pumping every hour and bring my daughter to the breast. This was difficult as her arm was so bandaged with IVs, so I had to do the football hold, which always put a kink in my back. When she would finish, I was back on the pump. I would feed her whatever little I eeked out over the hour and then try to breastfeed again.

A lactation consultant came to visit me. She asked me a series of questions and concluded that there was a very high chance that my milk would never come in. I protested this assumption. No book, no class, no person ever said there was a chance your body would be the obstacle for breastfeeding. They told me about laziness, selfishness, inconvenience and just not being impressive enough, but they never said your body could fail you. But, the very hormonal imbalances that led to us having to seek fertility treatments were the same hormonal imbalances that were delaying my milk from coming in. My struggles with hypothyroidism and my extremely irregular periods are symptoms just like poor milk supply. Bragging through my pregnancy about not having my breast grow or feel tender was merely an early sign that I would have trouble nursing.

The consultant weighed my daughter, had me breastfeed her for an hour and then weighed her again. “We like to see at least 60 mgs at this stage,” she said.

“What did I produce?”

“Less than 6.”

My husband kept cheering me on, not because he thought it was necessary to continue this path, but because he knew how badly I wanted it. He acted as though producing 6 mgs of breast milk was the most amazing thing I’d ever done. Next to my Mexican casserole. The consultant talked to us about supplementing in a way that wouldn’t discourage breastfeeding. So—instead of pumping, then feeding my daughter the pumped milk, then breastfeeding her, then offering her one ounce of formula out of a bottle—she suggested a more breast-friendly alternative. It was a bottle that clipped to my shirt, with a long tube I taped down my breast and around my nipple. While my baby was at my breast, she would be nursing, but also getting formula from the tube. Then, we would need to clean the tube and bottle so thoroughly or else risk an infection from leftover bacteria. Properly cleaning this contraption took nearly 20 minutes. And we would need to do this between pumping, breastfeeding and talking with doctors who came in on the hour to take more blood from our baby.

We spoke with a total of eight pediatricians during our stay, all of whom had a different opinion about my ability to breastfeed. The first doctor said I would never be able to do it and that pumping and giving her breast milk through the bottle was the only option for me. Upon hearing this, I burst into tears and cried so hard I fell on the floor. The next doctor said that I should stop supplementing and strictly breastfeed. This brought me to such a level of ecstasy that I jumped in the air with the breast pump still attached. The third, fourth and fifth doctors said that supplementing was the only way but that my milk should come in at some point and I could wean her from the bottle. This saddened me, but the idea of weaning off the formula at some point made me emotionally stable enough to remain moderately calm. The sixth and seventh doctors both suggested a tea and an herbal supplement that should easily bring my milk in and up the quantity. My husband left my side long enough to purchase these. So, while I pumped and he washed the bottle/nipple tube contraption, I drank the tea and downed the herbs. My dream of exclusively breastfeeding for six months was already shot to hell. Now it was a matter of trying to construct a feeding process that most resembled what I wanted.

Meanwhile, I spent my time on the pump texting my friends who had all done so well with breastfeeding. They offered words of encouragement even as they contradicted the doctors. They told me how doctors don’t know much about breastfeeding and to not trust them. They told me how no woman in the world has ever been documented as not being able to make enough milk. Despite my daughter’s dehydration and her plunging weight and health, they insisted that supplementing formula would doom us both. That breastfeeding is possible for everyone, unless they just don’t try.

All this advice. All this work. My tiny baby in a crib, dehydrated, yellow, tired, hungry. My dream of being able to do this for her. My friends telling me I was able, just try harder. The doctors giving me conflicting advice. My husband cleaning bottles and tubes and nipple clamps and running around getting me herbs and teas and clean underwear all led to an all out nervous breakdown while I was in the bathroom. My husband had to nearly beat down the door to get to me as I was on the tile floor screaming and crying with my raw nipples exposed. I failed to imagine a life outside the moment I was in. I couldn’t see beyond coming out of the bathroom. Because outside the bathroom was my sick daughter, a hard cot and that goddamned breast pump. The attack felt like the culmination of five extremely stressful, exhausting, and harrowing days, but also a way to escape. To pop the bubble of madness in which I had become trapped. Sitting on that bathroom floor screaming, crying, beating on my husband was the only way I knew how to release all the sorrow that was sloshing around inside of me. Luckily my husband was able to get me to a calmer place. A more stable frame of mind. And he got me a turkey sandwich. Life was going to go on. It had to.

We were finally sent home with the definitive word from the eighth doctor being that I should stop the formula all together since my milk had truly come in (it took almost eight days), though they were slightly concerned it wasn’t increasing any in volume. They thought that if my daughter nursed more the milk would come in stronger. So home we went thinking we could put the sad occurrence behind us and move forward as we had always planned; exclusively breastfeeding. I spent two days nursing exclusively, and pumping round the clock, and at her follow up appointment, she had lost even more weight. Supplementing was our only option.

Again, friends came back to contradict the doctors, saying if I had my child to my breast just eight times a day, my milk would be more than enough. I had my child at my breast roughly 15 times a day and she was facing another bought of dehydration. So I came to terms with the idea that I would just have to supplement.

Watching my daughter nurse should have convinced me to stop. I woke her up constantly, repositioned, squeezed my breasts to help the milk flow, and still she was tired. When it came time for a bottle, she was alert, gave me direct eye contact, stayed awake and burped like a sailor. I wouldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that her laziness on the breast was exactly like my college boyfriend; she didn’t want to put much effort in because she knew she wouldn’t ultimately get what she wanted.

For days after the hospital I pumped, nursed, supplemented and then lay on my couch and cried. My mother was supportive. She couldn’t produce much milk either, so my siblings and I were formula fed. My mother-in-law kept remarking on how much she loved breastfeeding but quit after five weeks so she could return to work. But I wanted to be better than my mother and my mother-in-law. And all other mothers, really.

So I kept pushing myself, continuing the routine from the hospital: breast feed for a half hour, pump for another half hour, lie down for 20 minutes, start over again. I’d walk around the house, crying, in an untied robe with my leaky breasts exposed to any visiting family members. I scoured websites to see if it was normal that my milk supply wasn’t building up at all (if anything, it seemed to be lessening), furiously read through blogs of mothers who kept claiming what a joy it is to breastfeed, and texted with my well-meaning friends who were supporting me so fervently that I couldn’t tell if they were just wanting this because I did, or if they were refusing to let me off the hook.

Part of the reason I really wanted to breastfeed was because of the bond it would help me form. At the time, in the throes of stress over breastfeeding, I didn’t have many feelings for my daughter. She was cranky and wiggly, but when she was put to my breast, she would fall into a sleepy stupor. I didn’t feel myself attaching to her in any way, despite many hours lying with her, pressing her naked body to my naked body as she nursed. Rereading everything I had read before about nursing, I couldn’t understand why I was struggling so hard. I refused to believe my body was failing. I blamed nobody but myself.

For days I nursed constantly. Once, she was attached to my breast for a five hour stretch overnight—I woke up in tears from pain and from flat out hating the experience. My child didn’t seem to ever be happy, and so I kept placing her to the breast in a fruitless attempt to cheer her up. Meanwhile, I was beyond sleep deprived. The typical equity between my husband and I was gone. I was holding her, nursing her, changing her and thinking about her 95% of the time while he ran around doing the only things he could: laundry, meal runs, vacuuming. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in years and was afraid our marriage was falling away. I couldn’t figure out what my priority should be. My child? My husband? Myself? Because I seemed to be sacrificing each of them for the others. And no one was satisfied. Least of all me.

The morning of our daughter’s newborn photo shoot, my husband rolled over after turning off the alarm to find me as he always did: awake and crying. “Someone has to tell me what to do,” I said. “Because I can’t seem to give this up.”

“We’re done.” He said quietly. Sweetly. Kindly. I knew in that moment, with his hand on mine, that we were. I couldn’t go on. My daughter wasn’t thriving. I wasn’t functioning. Our marriage didn’t exist. That morning we gave our baby a bubbling bottle of formula and nothing else. No pumped milk. No nursing. She looked at us with gratitude. And finally full, finally content and hydrated, she slept. Which gave our photographer two hours to photograph our darling baby, resulting in the most precious collection of images that I will forever cherish.

The choice to stop nursing was the right one. My daughter instantly changed in demeanor once I stopped. She slept great, sighed with happiness, gripped my finger with hers and stared at me with intensity. We finally started to get to know one another. My husband and I were able to alternate feedings, so I was finally getting sleep. He and I were able to find moments in the day to kiss, hug, talk. Our daughter started gaining weight, her cheeks filled in, and her skin changed from a pale yellow to a rosy pink.

But despite the many wonderful changes that came after I stopped nursing, I couldn’t help but continue hating the situation, loathing my inability to do it, being sensitive to any friends who stopped by and asked how nursing was going. I felt pressure all around me. I felt shame when I mixed a formula bottle in public. I felt, above all things, like a failure.

There is no doubt in my mind that breastfeeding is the absolute best thing for your child. Assuming you can do it. And I couldn’t. Doctors, lactation consultants, self-righteous mothers and parenting books all told me what was best for my baby, and I listened. For awhile. But I rest assured in the fact that I recognized breastfeeding wasn’t best for her and I stopped. And that is pretty damn impressive.

Meg says...

I never responded, “Oh I’m not pregnant…” to the strangers who would ask when I was due. And I regret it every day of my life.

Meg says...

Never tell anyone how frequently or infrequently you give your infant a bath. However much or however little you are doing it is wrong.

At Your Cervix

During my first gynecological visit, at the pathetic age of 21, something inside of me pinched my feminist nerve. Sometime, while lying there under a tissue paper gown, trembling under fluorescent lighting with my legs propped in stirrups as a stranger became acquainted with the most intimate of my details, I realized that I, as a woman, was pissed.

Before the visit, I sat with my mother in the waiting room as she pretended not to look over my shoulder while I filled out the forms. She stifled a sigh of relief when I sheepishly scribbled “not applicable” to the question inquiring which contraceptive I currently use. My mother kept talking, seeming more nervous than I, explaining that, “The first time is a little painful.” She had my sweaty hand in hers telling me how this was a part of every woman’s life.

Moments later a plump nurse with a disproportionately small nose called my name. She quickly said hello and then immediately asked me to specify the last time I had sex. Then, like a scared cow, I was herded down the hall as they prodded and poked me onto a scale, under the tape measure and into a little room where a freckled lady with a bad perm casually breezed through a series of inappropriate questions, not even looking at me as she wrote my responses. A simple question about my interests and hobbies would have fit nicely in between asking if I ever experience vaginal burning and inquiring about the color of my nipples.

After twenty minutes of explaining to a stranger about my sex life, my weight, my eating habits, my breast size and my menstrual cycle, she gave me a split second of eye contact, and led me down a narrow hallway to a room where there was a tiny paper gown into which I was to change, and then promptly left me alone with only my thoughts and a life-size plastic replica of a human cervix.

I lay there under the glaring yellow lights, beside some very questionable medical instruments and tried desperately to maintain an ounce of dignity. But it was challenging, as I was completely naked with my nipples ripping through the most revealing gown I’d ever worn. I kept my socks on, though. A girl has her limits.

Instantly the door flung open, the doctor laid me back on the hard table, and like a bad prom date, went straight for my boobs. While the doctor felt me up, I couldn’t help but think of my actual bad prom date, who left me halfway through the night, having never once commented on my dress, my make-up, or my hair—all of which I had spent hours perfecting.

The doctor continued to poke around on my body asking random questions about school and the weather, which made me feel a little cheap, small talking through such an intimate moment. When the doctor picked up one of the instruments on the table beside me, one that resembled a caulking gun, I suddenly broke out into jittery conversation in an attempt to stall whatever pain that instrument was about to induce. The doctor rinsed the caulking gun under warm water and explained how the water would serve as a lubricant. And in one quick motion, the doctor placed my feet in the stirrups, lifted the gown up to my chest and proceeded with the most degrading moment of my life. “But Doc,” I nervously laughed, “I hardly know you.”

I screamed out in pain, a little embarrassed, cursing myself for not being a slut; being loose in that moment would have really helped. My cries of pain didn’t faze the doctor. While I was shifting uncomfortably in pain, desperately trying to cover the rest of my body with the thin paper gown and contemplating what that instrument would do, the doctor graciously looked up from my crotch long enough to explain that the wand would be inserted into my cervix and twisted several times so as to get a good sample for testing. Sure, suck my blood, bottle my urine and scrape my cervical wall. But you won’t call me tomorrow.

I just had to lie there and take it. While being scraped from deep inside and staring at a poster on the wall displaying unappetizing images of genital herpes, I started to get mad, really, really mad. I thought about how unnatural this visit was. How scared I felt when a boy in high school pinned me up to the side of his truck and asked if I was afraid of being raped. I thought about how Wes Hartley was always called on in the third grade while my hand just wouldn’t reach high enough. The time I was walking back from a study group and a drunken fraternity guy stumbled up to me, squeezed my breasts and staggered off. How nonsensical it is that women have to randomly bleed out each month. Get yearly pap smears. Treat yeast infections. Examine our breasts in the shower. Buy tampons. Ovulate. Grow babies. Give birth. Fashionably groom our pubic hair. Bleach our assholes. And always, always, always wipe from front to back.

When the doctor was done, I put my pants back on, reached for my bra, and with my head down in what felt like shame (and with KY jelly oozing out), waddled slowly back to the waiting room, where my mother was reading an article titled, “Knowing Your Child’s Sexual Maturity.”

I should have realized then that owning a vagina was going to be a real pain in the ass.