A Box of Baby Chicks

comes packed with postpartum memories

We were the first ones in the post office on Friday. The person at the desk knew exactly where our package was in the back. When she set the cardboard box on the table, we could hear little chirps coming from inside. I picked up the box, and the chirps multiplied and escalated; the surface vibrated with scratching. Thank goodness it was only a five-minute drive home, because every pothole (and on Michigan roads, there are many) was a struggle to keep the box as level as possible, even though that box had already traveled across the country in the back of some careless truck. 

When we got home, we went to the basement, and I carefully cut the four pieces of strong tape holding the lid to the box. I lifted the lid and let in the light, and staring back at me were eight tiny baby chicks, four a creamy mustard, four a muted black.

My husband held each chick up to the water bottle to get a drink, and it took a few seconds for them each to peck the spout and realize that a bead of refreshment had come out, but they were quick to catch on. I couldn’t help but think of the first time I tried to breastfeed my daughter, how I held her at my chest so many times, showing her that’s where her food was, and how she never learned. 

Today, they’ve been alive for a week, and all we have to do is change their bedding a couple times a day (because like human infants, they poop nonstop) and fill their water and food. They don’t need much from us.

It’s strange, since our infant needed so much from us every single moment of our lives. In contrast, these chicks seem so self-sufficient that it’s almost deceiving. Isn’t there more I should be doing?

With my own infant, she seemed so delicate, like the smallest thing could take her from us. It required a hypervigilance. If I turned my back on her for a second while changing her diaper, she might roll off the changing table and break her neck. If I didn’t check on her in the night to make sure she was sleeping on her back, she might die of SIDS. Peril lurked around every corner, lived in every second of the day.

That fear apparently still lives in me. Every time I come downstairs to check on the flock, I worry that one of them will be stretched out on the ground, forever in sleep. But just like my infant daughter, maybe they aren’t as delicate as they seem.

So cute! So small! So fluffy!

The trailer for the new Barbie movie came out this week and apparently broke the internet. I have to say, that opening where she steps out of the heels and stays on her toes was absolutely genius. I was not excited to see this movie, because…well, I don’t really know. Whenever I thought about it, I wanted to roll my eyes. An eyeroll is just a reflex of mine whenever I hear the word “Barbie.” I’ve been told for so long that Barbie is bad for body image, and she is—her anatomical proportions are impossible, and of course the biggest part of her is her boobs. For so long, she only came with blonde hair and blue eyes, leaving so many girls unrepresented. But then Susan Shapiro in her article for The Sun this week explains why Barbie is a feminist icon, and I was shook. Maybe I have been wrong about Barbie all this time.

Since Barbie was a hip teenager with her own apartment, job and car, she showed me you didn’t have to be a conservative wife and mommy, cleaning and taking care of other people all day long.

- Susan Shapiro

Director Greta Gerwig seems to agree, as the movie’s tagline is “Barbie is every-thing, and he’s just Ken.” Finally, a movie where the man isn’t the star of the show. I’m actually kind of excited to see this now.

My daughter’s first time coloring eggs, and they just scream spring to me.

Speaking of nostalgia and childhood, I stumbled upon this this Buzzfeed list of “31 Disney Guys Ranked from ‘Nope’ to ‘Yes, I Would Bang That Cartoon’” and I try to avoid these pointless lists, but I just couldn’t help myself here. For the record, Tarzan would have made it higher on my list and Robin Hood much lower. Tough to argue with the top 5. But I have a hard time believing Phoebus got beat out by a lion—not even the handsome lion! Also, why didn’t Kronk make the list? I mean, he can cook, talk to animals, jump rope—is there anything he can’t do?

I mean, just look at that winning smile.

Speaking of ridiculous things, my husband is kind of obsessed with the whole DeSantis PuddingGate situation, so I had to click when Jessica Grose of the NYT actually wrote about it this week. My husband doesn’t want to let the rumor die, because he figures as long as they keep undermining DeSantis with this factoid, it will act as a barricade to anything he wants to say or do. I’m not entirely sure he’s right about that. I am not at all interested in feeling compassion for DeSantis, whose political beliefs completely contradict my own. But the more I hear about it, the more I have to wonder why he needed pudding that badly that he chose to eat it with three fingers among witnesses. Maybe he had just done a lot of governor things and he was starving, and maybe that pudding cup was the only thing available and maybe there were no spoons and he was so desperate to ingest anything that he just went for it. I mean, as a former breastfeeding mother, I can relate to that. And the last thing I want to do to is relate to DeSantis. So maybe it’s time for the news cycle to move on.

But there’s a difference between information about eating habits that politicians control or release themselves … and the often unflattering details that leak, sometimes from anonymous former staffers who seem to have an ax to grind. The latter tend to make more headlines because we may think that the way someone eats in private is more representative of their true self.

- Jessica Grose

Keeping the ridiculous going, saw this at a library visit this week. Librarian life, amiright?

What I Am Reading:

This beautiful essay by Elizabeth Rush which talks about her trip to Antarctica and how women are overlooked as well as climate change and fertility and all sorts of interesting stuff done in compelling prose.

In their stories, the ice is “pure” and “chaste,” “impenetrable” and “erratic.” The descriptors, like those often used to justify the subjugation of women, make the land sound alluring, fickle, fearsome—a place that intoxicates and so demands that those who enter her “mysterious” realms must ultimately exert control over them to survive.

- Elizabeth Rush

You can preorder Rush’s book here. It comes out in August.

What I Am Watching:

Over spring break, we went to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH. Four massive hangars filled with planes dating back to the Wright Brothers. This inspired us to go back and watch one of our favorite movies: 1983’s The Right Stuff with near-baby-versions of Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris. Parts of the movie haven’t aged all that well, but I give it props for giving voices to the pilots’ wives, too. Chuck Yeager’s wife is always a favorite of mine. Talk about a badass woman.

High of 76 degrees today, and I am here for it. Hello, sun. We missed you ‘round these parts.

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