{"id":10578,"date":"2016-01-26T05:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/?p=10578"},"modified":"2016-09-07T10:54:03","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T15:54:03","slug":"reading-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/?p=10578","title":{"rendered":"Reading…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After Birth, by Elisa Albert<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m nearly finished with After Birth<\/em><\/strong>, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Its premise is a new mother struggling with postpartum depression who finds solace in a new female friendship — a friend who is just as tough, raw, and somewhat messed up as she is. It’s raw, sometimes vulgar, usually bitter (but in a funny way, if that’s possible), and at times hurts to read in its truthfulness about new motherhood.<\/p>\n

There are parts early on in the book, where the main character Ari flashes back to thoughts of her earliest days of a mother that made my chest tighten with the memory and anxiety of it, the way it feels to suddenly have this delicate fragile being under your care:<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0shocking days that followed [the birth] I saw the requisite\u00a0<\/em>awfulness: the baby harmed, the baby hurt, the baby suffering, the baby hurled to the ground, the baby’s head crushed against the wall, destroyed. Ongoing fever dream. In the grip of a kind of\u00a0black magic for which I was entirely unprepared. Woke in a sweat from intermittent sleep to find him still — oh thank God, thank God — breathing.<\/i><\/p>\n

This, of course, to a lesser degree (as I did not suffer from postpartum depression), but the \u00a0enormity of the situation, the anxiety and craziness I felt a lot of the time taking care of a newborn baby Milo in a new city with no family nearby to speak of — and even if there had been, I was so convinced that he needed to be with me\u00a0at all times\u00a0<\/em>I was crazy if he was not. It was not easy.\u00a0That dark side of new motherhood is clear and open in this book.<\/p>\n

The part of the book I’m not digging is just how bitter and negative Ari is about other women in general. There is a kind of disdain that comes across for the mass female population save for her one “cool” friend Mina, who of course used to be in an all-girl punk rock band. This is the part that makes me cringe, this “feminist” character completely hateful of all other women. Then again, perhaps it is part of the depression, the inability to see others in a \u00a0positive light, especially when they reflect a part of who you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Birth, by Elisa Albert I’m nearly finished with After Birth, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Its premise is a new mother struggling with postpartum depression who finds solace in a new female friendship — a friend who is just as tough, raw, and somewhat messed up as she is. … Continue reading “Reading…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[186,187],"tags":[48,132],"class_list":["post-10578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-motherhood","tag-motherhood","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10579,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578\/revisions\/10579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}