Melanie Sweeney

Microaffections

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Today I went shopping with my mom, who is visiting for several days. I was looking for a dress for an event next month, and she bought me that one and another for a date tonight with my husband, which we have yet to plan, other than the fact that we are going on a date.

This is how it is now, still, two years after having a baby. Shopping for myself is hard to justify. If my mom wasn’t paying, I wouldn’t have even gone shopping in the first place.

And when it became apparent that I need real bras with actual shape and support, as opposed to stretchy, worn nursing bras, I was struck with the overwhelm of buying for my body. I still nurse, so I cannot commit to normal bras all the time. Thus, they feel extravagant. There was a sale: two for $59, and I thought, Jesus, that’s half a week’s groceries. So when the sales lady tried to push a third bra on me, because I “can’t wear the same one every day,” and I said I didn’t want to spend much, and my mom offered to buy them, and I said that wasn’t necessary, and the lady said, “She just wants you to be beautiful”… I just couldn’t talk for a moment.

A) How would three bras make me more beautiful than, say, two?

B) I don’t need a bra to be beautiful. No one will see it, and even if I will be more supported and perkier, the location of my boobs on my chest factors very little in my own sense of my beauty.

Sure, she’s trying to sell more product. And sure, that product is tied up in assumptions and stereotypes about gender, beauty, and worth. But still, I was kind of stunned. There I was, working to accept the cost of something nice for myself, something I wouldn’t normally buy, but something relatively basic, and suddenly it was as though my moderation was some reflection of unwomanliness.

I explained that I still nurse regularly, so I will still be wearing my other bras. I felt like I was trying to get away with something. For awhile, she stared at me, but I didn’t relent.

Later, my mom tried on some bras, and the sales lady came in to check on her. I was nursing my son in the corner of the dressing room. She told me about her daughter, whose baby likes to fiddle with the other nipple while nursing, and I said, “Oh yes, he does that too. It drives me crazy.” I softened toward her because she didn’t look away from me nursing a toddler, didn’t make me feel like an aberration for that. Still, I wanted to say, “Tell me I’m not beautiful as I am right now, with my stretch marks and puffy stomach and my boob hanging out, comforting my kid.”

I find it very tricky, the way my body is at once something I accept and respect and mostly love, post-pregnancy and post-birth, while how my body fits in the world is often at odds with that. I care less about flab or stretch marks than I used to, but the world is shouting about baby weight loss and stretch mark cream, specifically shouting at women like me, women who are mothers. I feel the urge to shop at maternity stores because their clothing is functional and accounts for a sagging stomach. During pregnancy and for awhile postpartum, I felt really free from the pressure to be sexy in the ways society deems sexy. I have held on to that most tangibly through extended breastfeeding because needing access to my breasts means making certain, limited choices about clothing.

But the moment I decide to treat my body less like an empty vessel and more like a body that’s my own, if only for a date, I am confronted with all these extra ideas: If you’re going to wear a pretty dress, your boobs should be perky, your saggy parts should be contained.

Your body should not be the body of a mother.

Your body should not be your body.

https://melaniesweeney.com/today-i-went-shopping-with-my-mom-who-is-visiting/

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On this, the eve of my son’s second birthday party, I am reminded of his first few months. Most of the parents I talk to, whether new or old, say infant/toddler growth happens quickly—too quickly. They plump up, they get teeth, they roll over and crawl and pull up and walk, and they fall, and they fall, and the next thing you know, they can open the silverware drawer and come running into the living room with knives. Some parents I talk to say things like, “They grow so fast!” and “Uh-oh, you’re in trouble when he starts walking.”

My son’s first few months were a blur of screaming and an ever-present sense of panic. He wasn’t unhealthy, though he had some physical ailments. So did I. Breastfeeding was such a challenge that I began counting the days until he could be fed solids, until he could take a bottle with less risk of nipple confusion, until I could leave him for longer than an hour. He had colic. He was/is “high need.”

I fell in love with him for real, for the first time, when he laughed. I felt closer to him when he could interact with me, when he started to look like me. His first attempts at words bowled me over with pride—and relief. He was happier and easier with every milestone, especially walking and talking. I spent so much time when he was a baby waiting for motherhood to let me breathe… The things other parents didn’t want to pass, the things they mindlessly told me to cherish, were the very things I hardly missed as he outgrew them. Each new stage, though they all come as a mixed bag, meant my kid had a little more independence, which meant I could too. I am far more comfortable with toddler tantrums than I was with colicky screaming, and I’m pretty sure that’s because now he is communicating clearly, if somewhat irrationally, whereas infant crying feels so mystifying and one-sided and overwhelming.

At two, my son has conversations with me about animals, swimming, recycle trucks, his birthday cake. He likes to affirm everyone for everything. (“Good job singing!” “Really good walk!” “I love that book!” “Good job watching West Wing.”) He recites parts of his favorite books. (“There’s a clatter in the tree.”) He loves all animals, but especially bears, hedgehogs, meerkats, and goats. He likes to hug my waist while he rides in a shopping cart and says, “Aaw. Sweet Mommy.” He likes to make up stories.

In some ways, he still takes up as much of my energy as he did two years ago, but now, he replenishes it with his curiosity, his sense of humor, his sweetness, and how he loves so many things that I love too. So, instead of worrying about the fact that he can now unlock and open all the doors and run out of the house, I’m looking forward to all the new experiences Year Three has in store for us. Bring it on.

https://melaniesweeney.com/on-this-the-eve-of-my-sons-second-birthday/

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On Walking

On Walking

microaffections:

When my son was a newborn, he did not sleep well. I won’t try to explain the tragedy of a baby who doesn’t sleep because it will sound hyperbolic… But, his not sleeping led to me speed-walking around a botanical gardens nearby for an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours straight, because the…

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Jimmy Eat World & Those Nights in My Car

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When I was in college (2002-2006), our student center had a piano, and at nearly any time of the day, but especially at about 4pm when the place was quiet, some kid would be there playing Something Corporate’s epic sad love song, “Konstantine.”

If you’re about my age, I know you know it.

The early 2000s was a perfect time to start college if you, like me, wanted the experience to feel dramatic and terrible and fraught and SO MEANINGFUL. Dashboard Confessional was huge that year. I don’t know if I learned how to feel about love from cute boys singing sad songs, or if they just reflected what I was beginning to learn on my own.

I broke up with my first boyfriend right in step with the high school relationship cliche, just before Thanksgiving. I made out several times with a boy who played guitar and wanted me to write him lyrics. And it meant more to me than it meant to him. I believed in being friends with guys I was attracted to and pretending it was platonic but hoping it wouldn’t always be. I made mix CDs all the time, and the same songs were on all of them.

When I hear the opening notes of “Konstantine,” I think of the boy I thought I would marry. The summer we started dating, I was living at my dad’s house, he at his parents’ not far away. He would call at night, and one of those summer nights, he played the song and told me, “This song makes me think of you.” I listened in the dark, the receiver hot on my ear, trying not to breathe too loudly for all nine and a half minutes of it, all the while, thinking, God, this boy is so complicated and tragic and vulnerable. I started to listen to it every night when I went to sleep.

I didn’t marry him. I also don’t listen to sad songs eighteen hours a day anymore, though I have a good Rainy Day playlist.

I don’t know where the image of walking through the student center and hearing that song came from, but it sent me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia. This playlist is the result. And for about three hours last night, I remembered something IN MY SKIN. Aching, beautiful desire. Possibility. How a boy’s brown eyes across a room could lock with mine, and it could mean everything, and no one else even saw it.

But let me say this: perspective is everything. Love isn’t SUPPOSED to be tragic. Feeling messy in college and loving messy boys felt exciting because it was terrifying, not because it was True Love. What used to feel aching and beautiful, I now know, is the prelude to a low-grade panic episode. No thanks.

“They’ll never hurt you like I do.” How did I miss that line from the song that made him think of me? It might as well have been a promise. Nothing tragic-romantic about it.

Or this one from Taking Back Sunday’s “MakeDamnSure”: “I just wanna break you down so badly in the worst way.”

Once, in the extended, terrible, bad part of our relationship, I played Jimmy Eat World’s “Your House” for him and expected some kind of heartfelt speech in return. The song sounds upbeat, but it opens, “When you’re on, I swear you’re on. You rip my heart right out.”

A lot of the songs are like that, with up tempos, playful melodies, energetic guitars, and biting or maudlin or desperate lyrics. They are a perfect example of the intense contradictions of growing up. I laugh, a little, at their earnestness and abandon now.

But only a little. Because part of me sincerely hopes there’s still some boy sitting at that piano, hunched over, fingers catching on the keys, and a girl walking by, murmuring, “It’s to Jimmy Eat World and those nights in my car…”