Swallowing the Red Pill, Part 1

I think I was a decently healthy pregnant person. I wouldn't call myself vigilant by any stretch: I ate a lot of cupcakes, and after the first trimester I drank a small cup of caffeinated coffee most days and had the occasional sips and eventually glass of wine. I still colored my hair, although I did switch to vegetable dyes. (I started going gray in college, so the choice was basically between hair dye or large doses of antidepressants to cope with my frizzy, 90% gray image in the mirror, so I chose to continue coloring my hair.) But I stayed away from soft cheeses, deli meats, tuna fish, swordfish, sushi (my favorite food), Advil, Pepto Bismal, Aspartame, even peanut butter because of some random, questionable news item I read.

I took my prenatal vitamins, I ate my extra vegetables, and when Belly was born I spent her first days sitting next to her little isolette in the critical care nursery. As her glucose levels struggled to normalize, I tried desperately to breastfeed her around all the tubes hanging from her tiny body and despite pressure from the hospital staff to feed her more and more formula to get those sugar levels in line. But in four and half days she was all better, we figured out our breastfeeding, and we were ready to go.

We gathered together her soft cotton clothes prewashed in Dreft, prepared her super-safe top-of-the-line car seat, had her injected with one of the most dangerous and potent known neurotoxins in existence, and home we went.

To be continued.