Part 5: The Light
“Is everything OK?” I asked Randy in a panic. It’s one of the clearest memories I have of Juno being born.
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Election Baby
This boy made us parents on Election Day 2014. I’ve always viewed his birth and its relationship to Election Day as a harbinger of good things — the start of our next trip around the sun together seems inextricably linked to each election season’s spirit of renewal, resetting, refreshing. I hope that take always rings true.
In kindergarten this week, Moses and his friends also had an election. The candidates were cupcakes and donuts. Donuts won handily, thanks in part, no doubt, to Moses’ tireless campaigning for the obviously better choice.
Happy birthday to our big kid and good trouble-maker. We love you like crazy.
Moses vs. Vegetables
I haven’t written a single word about vegetables in the year of our Lord 2020, so I’ve decided to retire from food writing and hand over the reigns to my successor. Read More
Part 4: Hail Mary
There’s no easy path to IVF, because nothing about coming to that decision feels good. Before couples choose IVF, they have had their hearts broken, maybe irretrievably. They’ve been on the receiving end of crushing news, perhaps more than once, perhaps many times. And they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that their family makeup had been decided for them, but for this one last Hail Mary. Read More
Unicorn Baby
For the third time in about as many months, we’ve schlepped our kids across the country and asked them to sleep in strange rooms, in strange beds. Moses would dispute that this is a big ask on account of the fact that he’s thrilled to be sleeping on a foldout couch in an airport hotel, watching planes take off all day from the top floor of a building with glass elevators, with rooms dispersed around what can only be described as a track, which he has lapped no fewer than one million times. His body has been vibrating with excitement since 47 days before this trip. I know because we counted.
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Part 3: In the Bleak Midwinter
The anesthesiologist spoke with a slow, thick drawl I felt more than I heard. He was tall and sturdy, wide with muscles that flexed when he talked. He was a long way from the Tennessee hills where both our roots were sown, but he seemed right at home next to my hospital bed, laughing thunderously at his own jokes while a nurse threaded IV fluids through a tube to the catheter in my forearm.
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Part 2: And Then the Rains Came
I recall exactly zero details about how we came to know I was pregnant. I was still in a fog from having just become intimately acquainted with medical terms no person with access to the Internet should ever be in possession of, and while miraculously turning up pregnant should have cured my depression overnight, it didn’t, not exactly anyway. I was happy, or maybe relieved is more accurate, and I managed to forgive that bullshit fertility doctor who called me old when I am fresh and shiny as the morning dew, but I wasn’t over the moon. Edges were soft; a hazy sheen muted the good times.
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Part 1: The Heatwave
In 2014, I wrote a series of essays chronicling our son’s journey to us, and I opened the series with a vignette I figured would come back to haunt me, but I wrote it anyway, like an asshole.
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We’re Working On It
We’ve been visiting our families last week and this week, giving our 2-year-old some dedicated, quality time with his grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. First we saw Randy’s family in South Florida, and now we are with my family in South Georgia. To get from there to here yesterday, we took a six-hour road trip with a toddler. Read More
A Word on Co-Parenting
“I can’t wait to read about this experience after it comes out of the spin cycle.”
That’s the last thing I heard Randy say as he disappeared into the lab, wrestling both a toddler and the giant bag of tricks I brought with us to distract Moses from the sword being aimed menacingly in his direction. I cowered in the corner of an adjacent file room, near Moses but out of his sight, plotting our escape. Read More
This Week Can Go Fuck Itself, Some Thoughts on Grief
Yesterday started out like any other day, as bad days sometimes do. I woke up after a full night’s sleep already tired. I nursed a toddler. I changed a dirty diaper. I went to work. I drank half a pot of coffee. Then my mom called, and I answered.
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Let’s Talk About Me
Since I became a mom, I have fallen prey to the one tragic thing I heard happens to some moms but never believed would happen to me, and that is the almost compulsive urge to put someone else’s needs first, before my own, all day err day. This is antithetical to my whole existence and it’s frankly a pretty cruel characteristic of parenting. Read More
10 Things You Will Learn in Your First Year as a Parent, If You Are Me
Although my son is a mere 9 months old, I am writing about what we as new parents learn in the first year because then I get to pat myself on the back for posting this ahead of schedule, which I would have done anyway because I’m a mom and I can do whatever I want. I reserve the right to amend any and all lessons learned this time next year when we’re on the backside of toddlerhood, but for now, on the backside of infancy, this is what we know. Read More
A Baby Story — Part 3
Monday, November 3, 2014, 9 a.m.
Labor Hour 9
The passage of time during childbirth is completely confounding, especially to someone who lives with her head in the clouds and who may also be prone to exaggeration. Read More
A Baby Story — Part 2
Monday, November 3, 2014, 3 a.m.
Labor Hour 3
Fortunately for Randy and the lifelong health of our young marriage, he eventually realized “I need you” was code for “this is happening with or without you, so pick a side.” Read More
A Baby Story — Part 1
This is my baby story. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Read More
Pregnancy is An Exercise in Tolerating Extreme Discomfort
[WARNING: THIS POST INCLUDES GRAPHIC DETAILS ABOUT BODILY FUNCTIONS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.] Read More
I Used to Be a Writer
I used to be a writer. Then I wasn’t. Or maybe I always was, because maybe being a writer, like being an addict, doesn’t cease to be part of who I am just because I am not actually putting words on paper or licking the bottom of a snifter (I have some experience with both). At least that’s what I like to tell anyone who asks what my goddamn problem is and why I quit writing. Read More
julie nattis 