© 2014 by Jordan Reid

Illustrations by Katie Rodgers

Published by Running Press,

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E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5305-4

Edited by Cindy De La Hoz

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﻿21

For Kendrick, who makes everything possible.

﻿12

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world. . .
is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.”

—LESTER BANGS
(Almost Famous)

Introduction

﻿21

About three months after I found out I was pregnant, I went to a dinner party at my friend Morgan’s house. Another woman there had her one-month-old baby with her, and upon finding out I was expecting immediately insisted I hold the child “for practice.”

In my experience, you know what happens when you hold other people’s babies? They cry horrible, soul-wrenching tears, and make you feel extremely guilty. And then you hand them back to their mom and they immediately become happy again, and it becomes clear to all present that you have terrible parental instincts and should never be allowed to come into contact with children, ever.

I did not want to hold this baby.

But I did anyway, mostly because I didn’t want to insult the nice woman who was offering me her infant. I bundled his delicate little body into my arms, no idea which part of him was supposed to go where or how I would keep his head from falling right off of his neck, and then decided that sitting would be my best bet. I set him down on my lap and held on to his arms like they were teeny-tiny life preservers, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t make any sudden moves or wail piteously, having gathered that the woman holding him was not only not his mother, but also quite clearly not a particularly maternal person.

He looked up at me, and I looked down at him. We evaluated each other. But—to my considerable surprise—he didn’t make a peep. He looked . . . pretty much okay, actually. It was the first time that I thought maybe—just maybe—I might be able to do this “mom” thing.

A few months later, my son was born and I realized that I was right: Not only “can” I do it . . . I love doing it.

If you’re a new mom (and if you’re reading a book with “New Mom” right there in the title there’s a decent chance that you are), enormous congratulations to you. You made it through childbirth—a thing that no human being in possession of pain receptors and the potential for hormonal fluctuations should be able to make it through—and came out on the other side with a brand-new life, made richer by your tiny, wrinkly addition in ways that you expected and in ways you never dreamed.

New motherhood is awesome.

You know what’s not awesome? That you’re about to hear these words a lot (a iweird-lot. An all-the-time-from-every-single-person-you-pass-on-the-street-lot):

“Oh, it goes so fast. Enjoy every second!”

My son is nearly two now, and is walking (or rather sprinting, primarily toward things like swimming pools and stairways) and talking (or, more accurately, using the word no as a placeholder for the entirety of the English language, including the word yes) and becoming more and more his own person with each passing moment. Having abandoned the wilderness of the Newborn Era for the shores of Toddlerhood, I can vouch for the fact that this whole parenting thing is really fun, and gets even more fun every single day as your child learns more and more ways to interact with the world around him.

And as annoying as all that enjoy-every-second-ness was (oh my god, super annoying, and guaranteed to make me terrified that I’m not savoring every! single! moment! enough), I’m starting to see what these people meant . . . because now that my son is in the midst of the second year of his life, time is sprinting by at light speed, and all I want to do is stop the clocks so that I can spend more hours watching him wobbling all over the house and trying to destroy things. These days, he is growing up too fast.

The first year, though? That took forever.

Seriously, I look at pictures from when my son was six months old, and they feel like they were taken sometime back in 1983.

Why is this?

Because time passes really, realllllllly slowly when you’re not sleeping. And when about 80 percent of your way-too-many waking hours are spent bouncing a very small (yet surprisingly heavy) person up and down while emitting an extremely loud whooshing noise directly into his eardrum because that is the only thing—literally the only thing—that will stop him from crying . . . nonstop . . . for about seven months.

I remember once, around 4:30 a.m., I was doing cartwheels or whatever it was that I had to do to calm our child down out in the living room, and my husband, Kendrick, came wandering out to see if I was okay. I looked up at him all wild-eyed, and all of the sudden saw myself through his eyes: a crazy lady with hair that was basically in a mohawk, wearing one of those robes that are cozy but that you really don’t want people to see you in—for the third day straight—with a rivulet of spit-up running down one shoulder. It’s also pretty likely that the robe was hanging open and that I was still attached to a breast pump. For those of you who have never seen a breast pump, let me be clear: This is not a sexy thing.

I mean, look: It’s completely normal to be a total disaster in the weeks (months) after childbirth, and I’d heard that this was how those first few weeks (months) were probably going to go . . . but it still threw me for a loop. I suppose that deep down I pictured myself as a glowing little postpartum Mother Teresa, all joy and benevolence and blissful calm. I certainly never pictured myself pacing our living room floor while doing my very best impersonation of an angry water buffalo having a bad hair day.

In case I haven’t yet made this clear: I didn’t really handle the first few weeks following the birth of our son all too well. I felt scared, and overwhelmed, and lonely, and I worried constantly about whether we had created a safe and comfortable environment for our new arrival in our fourth-floor walk-up apartment, conveniently located smack in the center of a construction zone on New York City’s Upper East Side. And part of it was hormones, and part of it was just the way it goes, but part of it was also that when I stepped back for a moment, I had trouble even recognizing myself when I looked in the mirror.

I am someone who loves—cherishes, even—the little luxuries in life. I started an entire website, Ramshackle Glam, devoted to the idea that these small joys are not just wonderful . . . they’re important, and they’re worth taking the time to integrate into your world in whatever way makes sense for you. I don’t mean Chanel dresses and limo rides to eight-course meals at four-star restaurants; I mean a nice candle that smells like cucumbers, or a beautiful handbag that actually fits everything you need it to fit and looks even better with age, or watching a truly atrocious horror movie (because those are the best kind) while drinking a big glass of wine . . . and, yeah, a little mascara and lip gloss, if that’s what makes you feel good.

Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat: Having a baby changes your life. A lot. And that’s good and okay and the way that it should be, because the baby is the Number One Priority. You don’t need me to tell you that. But something that my first year of motherhood taught me is that it’s important to remember to make yourself a little bit of a priority as well—to carve out slices of life that aren’t about your significant other, or about your baby, or about what others want from you . . . but are rather about you.

There are plenty of books out there about how to take care of a baby, or books about how to diet and work out after giving birth. This book isn’t a replacement for those guides; it’s simply an addition. In these pages, you’ll find information on all those things you kind of want to know but aren’t quite sure who to ask about . . . like how to dress to celebrate (or downplay) the new shape that you’ve developed courtesy of breast-feeding, or how to rearrange your living room so it doesn’t attack your child but still looks respectably chic, or how to do your makeup in five minutes flat with one hand while keeping that bouncy chair going with the other.

The little luxuries that you maintain in your life can be faster than they used to be, sure. And they’ll certainly involve more corner-cutting, but that’s okay; the point is that they’re there. There to make you feel like yourself, to make you feel like an adult, and even to make you feel . . .yes . . . a little glam.

This book isn’t about being Superwoman—oh my god, no. It’s about finding realistic ways to enjoy the amazing new addition to your life while still maintaining a semblance of your spectacular self. Life changes, families expand, and people evolve to fill the corners of their new lives, and that’s a great thing. . . .

But it’s also important to remember that it’s okay to take a second every once in awhile to paint your nails purple just because you love the color.

Because that’s cool.