Read Planting Dandelions for Free Online

weeks. It takes me that long after having a baby just to start thinking about personal hygiene again. The notion of myself as a briefcase-carrying mom, with a steady salary and a freezer full of breast milk, was the first of many maternal illusions I’d come to forsake, and probably the easiest one to let go. I was a college dropout who had always been able to talk my way into jobs that exceeded my education and maturity. But with no degree, and a foreign résumé, I was going to have to move my marker back to start. I was just as glad to sit out.
    Patrick’s paycheck covered our car payment and the rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment. Being at home afforded me the time to be creative with our resources and frugal with our money. I breast-fed and cloth-diapered, shopped with coupons, and cooked in batches. I studied parenting and nutrition books, joined Internet forums, and went to La Leche League meetings. I threw myself into domesticity with reckless abandon. I was zealous, idealistic, and probably quite tiresome, but it takes a certain fervor to get through the baby years. It helps to fall in love with your captors. The infatuation anesthetized the pain of separation from the person I was before: rested, unfettered, accessorized.
    Some new parents struggle with abandoning normal. They wait for its return like castaways watching for smoke on the horizon; go slowly mad waiting for sleep, sex, and privacy to come back for them. I found it easier to face facts. Normal wasn’t coming back. I moved deep into the interior of mothering, and forgot I’d ever known anything else.
    Human beings have been keeping infants and young children within arm’s reach ever since we had fur they could cling to. But in twenty-first-century middle America, that tradition is considered an alternative lifestyle. Fortunately, even in the suburbs, there is subculture, and it didn’t take long to find kindred oddballs. Wearing a baby sling in public is like going out in a Highland kilt. It identifies you to your clan. I was taken in, and embraced, by a small tribe of mothers gathered under the umbrella of attachment parenting, a name popularized by Dr. William Sears’s Baby Book . We met for weekly playgroup and monthly potlucks, and I looked forward to those times with an eagerness formerly reserved for romantic rendezvous. I was twenty-nine years old, and though I thought of myself as a feminist, and had grown up with a loving mother and sister, two splendid grandmothers, an abundance of aunts, and assorted female elders, for the first time in my life, I fell in head over heels in love with women.
    How could I not? These were smart, passionate, funny, and fiercely independent women. Some were young moms, barely out of their teens, with tattoos and piercings; and some were routinely mistaken for grandmothers. There were those with advanced degrees and impressive résumés; and there were those who had become mothers before they had a chance to try their hand at anything else. Some were transplants, like me, and some had never left their hometown. They were all very brave. It takes guts to trust your own authority in the face of disapproval—and sometimes, harsh judgment—from doctors, relatives, and total strangers. Even within the group, eyebrows were sometimes raised at the mothers who were furthest off the grid: breast-feeding not just through but past toddlerhood; adopting controversial positions on education; or taking the concept of natural parenting to such an extreme that their kids were half feral and terrified all the rest. But our experience was common at the core, if not at the fringes. We could sympathize with each other’s sleepless nights, aching backs, and cracked nipples without feeling defensive. We could joke about not being able to pry our attached kids off our bodies, and laugh at our mothers’ concern that we were having sex next to our babies in the family bed. As if