I wish I'd hired this one doula I met while pregnant at a Positive Birth Stories meetup. She seemed like the all-natural type, but said she would completely support whatever the mother wanted, including things like epidural. My birth experience turned out to be the kind that I have PTSD and depression from, 18 months…

Yeah. I have a 19-month-old and faack, the part where they told the boy that he wouldn't ever see his mommy again just broke my heart and I want to adopt him. What scum they are.

I had this!! I also loved it so much that, being the little endlessly-deferring-gratification weirdo I was, I never used most of it, just some of the cologne and powder on special occasions. I would just stare at it lovingly. It's probably still fermenting in my childhood home somewhere.

Minus the sweaters, it actually was! He/they are from southern Kazakhstan. We got married there totally traditionally, with a bard and unveiling ceremony and stuff. If I hadn't been so nervous/sweaty and personally involved, I would have had a lot of fun observing.

I'm so sorry. My wedding joy was also stolen by my MIL (and my husband was a doormat and took his anger at her out on me). Five years later, we're going to do it again with a big party as soon as we can afford it (we'll outfit our toddler in a tux and everything), and my husband has promised to go to the local jewelry…

I wore a red dress! It was more of a red velour bathrobe and pants, which is the traditional dress of my husband's region. Underneath I wore a few sweaters and a pair of pajama pants because part of the ceremony took place outside and my MIL is batshit and afraid of spring drafts. (I just gave in because of nerves and…

Thanks! Sometimes I think it's us and we're incredibly high-maintenance or something, but if we had guests, we'd make sure they weren't hungry at the very least, and would be up-front if we couldn't afford food for them (though we'd make sure we could before we beg them to come over). I still like her, but I don't…

This reminds me of an incident that's still fresh in my mind. Mr. Chortcake and Mini Chortcake and I were staying with relatives of mine whom we liked but were not close to, and had never stayed with before. FemaleRelative (the one I'm related to) had bought a new house and was very insistent about our visiting. She I…

Yeah, unfortunately...the whole experience (not worth going into here) left me with PTSD, as did my prenatal and postpartum care, so this no-epidural thing is going to be part of the 21-page single-space letter I'm sending to the hospital ombudsman 18 months later now that I got my stress level down and was able to…

I have to say that after being induced and having mega-contractions for five or so hours and being refused an epidural by a bitchy nurse with a woo-tastic agenda, my epidural, once I campaigned hard enough and collared another nurse to get it, felt *DELICIOUS.* The needle did not hurt, and the thing itself was like…

FRESH WAILING MANDRAKES. I love it! My heart seizes up when I'm by the elevators and hear my toddler howling in our apartment down the hall because I'm going to belly dance class instead of staying there, but that wears off really fast and then I feel amazingly weightless.

I have a toddler, and I love him unconditionally and all, but this is not the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. It's up there, but so are doing art that I'm proud of, and cutting toxic relatives out of my life, and living abroad and stuff like that. Having him did make my life better in that I never experienced…

I was kind of hoping her milk would spontaneously dry up so that she might be forced to have a little more compassion for others, but I like your idea too!

Oh boy, it seemed in my upper-middle-class crunchy neighborhood that everyone else in the local mom's group was getting enough sleep, blissed out, tripping around stylishly in sundresses and expensive nursing tops, and taking their regular-sized boobs out to nurse discreetly under designer nursing covers, and here I…

I'm having ongoing PPD (my son is 18 months) due to bad medical care I had during pregnancy and the first year postpartum (the medical care is ongoing, which is probably the main problem). If you don't mind my asking, how do you feel like your PPD affected your son? Mine has a language delay (we're a…

I'm not plus size, but my boobs are (32H), and I never found any tops in a store when I was pregnant (with a giant bump too) that wouldn't get me arrested. I tried and tried. It sucked. Apparently people above a C cup or with large (or multiple) babies don't get pregnant either.

This sounds word-for-word like my late abusive, personality-disordered mother's toxic extended family, which is presided over by my grandmother, who's like a poisonous spider in a toxic web. Everyone else hates her, and she's emotionally damaged her children and grandchildren. But when I cut her off after some…

Oh my...this sounds like my alcoholic/pedophiliac /malignant narcissist/sociopath father, except that he's an atheist who looks down on believers as inferior beings, and he owns a (garbage-filled, hoarded) house. And I was the scapegoat who experienced the "inappropriateness" from him in the family, and I was still…

I shudder to think what my 18-month-old's first really coherent expressions will be, because sometimes when he's almost asleep, or JUST asleep, during his nap or when he's going to bed at night, our solicitous nursemaid-type cat goes "MYAAAAARRRR????!!!11" and I have found myself hissing, "shut the FUCK UP, Jewel!"…

I'm American, and I agree with you. I'm Jewish, and my coreligionists have been (and are) similarly denigrated visually, particularly in Europe, and I don't think that "we satirize everybody!!11" is an acceptable rationalization when a) insider and outsider mockery have such inherently different flavors and…