Idiots

Marriage, Motherhood, Milk & Mistakes

Laura Clery

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781982167110
• eBook ISBN: 9781982167127

A fresh, hilarious, and relatable collection of essays about everything from motherhood and marriage to sobriety and work-life balance (or imbalance) from the nationally bestselling author of the "honest, complicated" ( SheKnows ) Idiot. TRIGGER WARNING: TORN EVERYTHING!In her first book, Idiot, bestselling author Laura Clery gave us mind-blowingly personal life stories about addiction, toxic relationships, and recovery—establishing herself as the preeminent voice of infinite conviction meets zero impulse control. Here she is two kids later asking, "How did we get here?" Sex. Sex is how we got here.Laura's life has changed a great deal since she wrote Idiot, but her hilarious candor has only increased with motherhood—plus she tells some of the stories she was too scared to tell in her first book (which is really saying something). "Full of wit" ( Publishers Weekly ) and charm, Laura shares more than anyone wanted about: -Placenta pills, mom brain, and vibrator manifestation
-Nipple-twisting orgies and flinging a butt burrito in your doctor's face
-ADHD, autism, postpartum depression, and the wisdom of a ninety-eight-year-old sage named Anne
-Unsolicited dick, sexual assault, and sister-drugging
-Cheating, fights, and forgiveness
-Choosing love over fear and healing the worldLaura does not hold back when it comes to sharing stories of screw-ups, triumphs, and learning from her mistakes. Whether she's crying into a diaper in a Whole Foods parking lot or desperately soliciting advice from a random elderly stranger (who has most certainly considered a restraining order), Laura is able to laugh at herself even during her worst moments—more importantly, she makes us laugh, cry, and feel less alone in the world.

CHAPTER 1 Come Inside My Vagina

Childbirth is a miracle. It’s a beautiful, sacred, personal experience that transforms you and gives you a purpose deeper than you’ve ever known. Which is exactly why I invited 26 million online strangers to watch me primally scream and aggressively push out my gooey baby. My first birth has over 62 million views on Facebook alone. So between that and my second birth, over 82 million people have seen my punani—and I don’t even have an OnlyFans.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who has seen the videos of Alfie and Penelope’s wildly different births? Or maybe you’re frantically googling them right this second so you can watch. I’ll wait… Or maybe you’re recoiling in disgust as you imagine my mucus plug, placenta, and who knows what other bodily fluids gushing out in a gruesome (yet sacred) waterfall of actual human juice. If you’re in the latter camp, we’re just getting started, bestie.

I opened my last book by telling the story about that one time I came out of my mom’s vagina, so it’s only natural that I now share the rich details of my babies’ birth stories. It’s time to shift the focus to my tunnel of love (and pain). For example, there’s one heartfelt tale about the time that our son, Alfie, was yanked out of my body by a vacuum. It wasn’t a Dyson Cyclone V10 exactly, but still. As terrifying as it was having a whole person forcibly sucked out of my body, it was also magical. The human and the vacuum. I’d rate that vacuum five stars on Amazon if I could: powerful suction, lightweight, and fits perfectly in narrow spaces like my pussy.

Next there was the time during Penelope’s birth that I was on all fours in a hospital room shower, in agonizing pain, making primordial noises so guttural that Stephen thought I was dying. Because he couldn’t live without me, he contemplated jumping out of the hospital room window. When he remembered that we had kids to take care of, he decided not to jump one story to his death. It’s a sublime memory, really.

The second I got pregnant, I became weirdly obsessed with watching strangers give birth online. Birth vlogs, birth stories, basically anything to do with tiny humans barreling into the world through a birth canal. As a kid I loved writing and directing horror movies with my giant camcorder, so it makes perfect sense that as an adult I love to settle in with some popcorn and watch poorly shot homemade videos of hospital births, home births, epidural births, unmedicated births, water births, car births, I-didn’t-know-I-was-pregnant births, and DIY births. Yes, you read that right: DO-IT-YOURSELF BIRTHS. No, seriously, that’s a thing. Look up “freebirthing.” It will blow your fucking mind. So yes, basically, if you’ve put your own birth video online, whether you were in a hospital or in a river, I have probably watched it several times. While eating snacks.

When I was pregnant with our son, Alfie, I forced Stephen to watch birthing videos with me. The snacks helped lure him in, but he was a reluctant viewer at first. Why he would not want to watch a bunch of strangers writhe around in agony, with blood and gunk flying around, is beyond me. Anyway, after watching Ricki Lake’s The Business of Being Born I suddenly became skeptical of the military-industrial birth complex with its hospitals and C-section-happy doctors. The star of Hairspray had successfully convinced me to have a drug-free water birth… at home. Before watching that movie, I figured I would have a good old all-American hospital birth with a shit-ton of epidural on the side. This is what both my sisters and most of my friends did, after all. Besides, I was never known for having a high pain tolerance. I was the kid who was taken to the ER by my babysitter because I started hysterically crying about stomach pains and she didn’t want me to die on her watch (which, at eight dollars per hour, was fair). My parents had to leave a New Year’s Eve party, which I’m sure was the place to be in Downers Grove, Illinois, that night. They rushed me to the hospital, only to hear the doctor say that it wasn’t terminal—I just had a stomachache because I had eaten too much rocky road ice cream. So, considering that rocky night of dairy-induced agony, an epidural seemed the sounder road.

Despite the fact that I apparently can’t so much as eat ice cream without going to the emergency room, after watching Ricki Lake’s movie, I decided to have a home water birth—with a doula, a midwife, and no pain meds. I had been inspired to make informed choices because the host of a trashy 1990s daytime talk show told me to. SHE WAS REALLY CONVINCING, you guys. As Tracy Turnblad said in Hairspray, “Things need to change, and I won’t stop trying to change them.” I’m not against hospital births, epidurals, and C-sections. I truly believe that however you have the baby is a freaking miracle. During my first pregnancy, I just became set on having my baby in a no-drugs/home-birth situation. I didn’t want to freebirth it, with no one around at all to help catch the baby or remind me that I’m just giving birth, not dying. I was convinced that this was the best path for me (and Stephen… but mainly me, for obvious reasons), so I bought a home-birthing tub and some evening primrose oil off the internet. It was all about to go down… my birth canal.

If you’ve seen the video of Alfie’s birth, you probably know that things did not go according to plan. At all. It was like someone (God?) took my plan, crumpled it up in a ball, set it on fire, and then ran over the smoldering ashes with an eighteen-wheeler.

But before all that happened, about six months into my first pregnancy, I started looking for a midwife to help with the home birth. After careful, painstaking research, I finally found a woman I liked. I’ll call her Maude. I stopped going to my regular OB-GYN except for the important 3D scans, which Maude couldn’t do because she wasn’t a doctor and her tool kit didn’t involve electricity or any science whatsoever. That didn’t bother me, though. She had good Yelp reviews!

Meeting Maude was like meeting the fairy godmother who would help bring my baby into the world in a relaxing, drug-free, miraculous way. I put all of my trust in her. Every time I saw Maude the Midwife, I felt that she was truly listening to me. She seemed to care so much about me as a whole person, not just a hole-person. She asked about my diet, how my relationship with Stephen was going, my sleep schedule, my emotional state, my sun, moon, and rising signs, my most embarrassing middle-school moment, my favorite brand of cereal, AND how my cervix was doing. It was such a nice change from the rushed feeling of going to the doctor’s office and having cold gel squirted onto my stomach. At the doctor’s office there was no “So how are you really doing?” But here was Maude, asking where I got my shoes and about the consistency of my discharge. I was into it!

The thing is, sometimes I can get excited about the Maudes of the world and overlook the red flags. I basically spent my entire teens and twenties doing this. Like the time I decided that because a strange guy I met ONCE wrote his name and number on a cocktail napkin and told me I should be a model, that was reason enough to get on a plane to New York City and MOVE IN WITH HIM. That decision worked out great, if you think falling for a dangerously abusive sociopathic drug dealer sounds great. Anyway, Maude’s office was in Los Angeles and it was decorated in a modern hippie style with tie-dyed fabrics and crystals everywhere. The only thing missing was a lava lamp. Oh, and ANY MODERN MEDICAL EQUIPMENT AT ALL. I remember one day after an appointment, Stephen was freaking out because all of Maude’s “medical equipment” looked like she’d borrowed it from the Game of Thrones prop room. It was all ancient torture device–type scales and prods that I hadn’t really noticed before, maybe because I was so charmed by being asked about my relationship with my grandmother, how much gluten I consumed, and whether I believed in any conspiracy theories. She also asked what my primary emotional state was, but as a pregnant person, I couldn’t pick just one! Irritable, terrified, anxious, thrilled, bloated, blissful, achy, horny, tired, hungry, nauseous, irate, itchy, stretchy, annoyed, and did I say tired? Is bloated an emotion? It should be! Maude listened to it all, without judgment. Or medical equipment. She was awesome.

Or so I thought.

“Laura, I don’t know about this whole home-birth idea,” Stephen said after one of our appointments with Maude. “Everything in her office is so… medieval. What if something goes wrong? How will we live with ourselves? And what is that iron thumbscrew-looking thing she keeps poking you with?”

“Stephen, it’s FINE,” I said. I was still very certain that the birthing tub I bought was a solid purchase, even though, in reality, when you’re using a birthing tub the nice clear water soon looks like a vat of tomato-beef stew. I know this because I’ve watched precisely 679 water births online.

At my final, thirty-week, let’s-squirt-gunk-on-your-stomach-and-look-at-your-3D-fetus scan with the OB-GYN, they told me that Alfie was measuring big, to which I replied, “Are you fat-shaming my fetus?” “No, I’m strongly suggesting that you and your big fetus ditch the tub and give birth at the hospital, just in case there are complications.” When I later told Maude what they’d said, she confidently pulled out her cast-iron calipers from 1492 and measured my supposedly thick baby from the outside using the magical power of dowsing.

“Nope, this baby is the perfect size,” Maude said, totally self-assured. “3D scans aren’t always accurate,” she said, dismissively waving her fireplace tongs. She was totally persuasive, whispering soothing anecdotal evidence and assuring us that our baby was “the perfect size.” Then she lightly struck her massive gong, told us we had nothing to worry about, and we went on our way.

After the appointment I was like, “Okay, great, the baby is perfect!”

And Stephen was like, “Bloody hell!”

A few weeks later, Stephen turned to me AGAIN, very nervous, and said, “Laura, I don’t know about this home-birth idea. If something bad happened, how would we ever forgive ourselves?”

Still feeling totally confident about my birth plan, I assured Stephen that women have been giving birth at home for centuries (why did he think Maude’s devices were so old?), and that natural home births are very popular in his home country, the U.K. Plus, about 1.6 percent of U.S. births happen outside of the hospital, which is huge! When Stephen still wasn’t convinced by my stats, I decided to pull up Yelp reviews of Maude again. I would prove to him once and for all that we were in the best prenatal care, even if there was a didgeridoo stashed in the corner of her office. I had read her reviews before, of course, but a few months had passed since I’d looked. How much could change?

“Here, I’ll show you, there is nothing to worry about!” I said as I pulled up Maude’s Yelp page. It all seemed positive, but then I scrolled down further. My confidence in Maude instantly collapsed. I landed on a one-star review that shook me to the core.

“Laura, what does it say?” Stephen pleaded. Maybe he was tipped off by the fact that all the blood had drained from my face, or that I was sitting so silent and still it was as if my soul had temporarily evaporated, which it might have.

“One second,” I said, skimming for other, better reviews.

“Laura!”

“Okay, fine,” I said. I realized that I had to read this terrifying review to Stephen. I had to admit that he had been right about Maude and her torture gadgets all along. The review was written by a husband, and I’m paraphrasing, but not by much:

We had an extremely bad experience with Maude. There were red flags that were ignored, and my child almost died.

“Should I keep going?” I asked. Of course, Stephen said yes. How could we not continue down this horrifying path?

My wife had expressed concerns to Maude about the size of our son (he was over 11lbs. at birth) and she assured us there was no issue. We were so wrong to trust her. Home birthing an 11lb. child is never easy, and my son had the cord caught around his neck. When he was born he was not breathing and Maude couldn’t revive him with CPR. We called 9-1-1, and I traveled with him to the hospital leaving my wife behind, bleeding and in shock. While they did manage to revive him in the ambulance, he had suffered brain damage and was in a coma for days. (He is alive now thanks to the incredible people at the hospital.)

Maude’s manual assessment of our son’s weight was inaccurate and irresponsible. If we had known his weight before the delivery we would have decided to deliver at the hospital birthing center. We have learned a valuable lesson: never let any “expert” have more power than your intuition. If you feel something is wrong, don’t let anyone dismiss your concerns. Make sure you are confident that you have the answers!

My stomach felt sick, and Stephen looked like he was about to throw up. It seemed that this traumatized husband was telling OUR EXACT STORY. We had been told that Alfie was measuring big but were just hearing reassurance from Maude. It was the most disturbing thing Stephen and I had ever read, like we’d been trusting Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit. We were shaking. The father on Yelp also said he’d had to repost his review because it had been deleted. I guess that’s why I missed it when I was investigating Maude initially. So long story long, I ended up returning that home-birthing tub the next day. And I returned Maude too.

As freaked out as I was, I’m not big on confrontation. I just emailed Maude, telling her it was best if we parted ways because our OB-GYN wants us to have a hospital birth. Here’s the email (notice how I used the word “revert”—maybe to make her feel better?):

We wanted to let you know that we won’t be coming in tomorrow afternoon because after much consideration, we have decided to take a different route with this pregnancy and are going to revert to using our OB-GYN.

We have been advised by our doctor that it would be safer to have a hospital birth this time around. We really wanted a home birth but we wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if something went wrong and we didn’t take into account the doctor’s opinion on his size and therefore the extra risk.

Thank you so much for all your help thus far. We learned a lot from you and so appreciated your time and care. Hopefully next time we can make it work.

Sincerely,

Laura and Stephen.

PS. I downloaded Turbo Tax like you suggested, and also thanks again for the gluten-free vegan mac and cheese recipe.

Please note my addition of “Hopefully next time we can make it work” plus the heart emoji. Sometimes I make myself sick. I had ZERO intention of EVER letting Maude near my gullible but well-meaning uterus ever again, but my people-pleasing character defect (PPCD) has not completely lifted yet. I’m still working on that one. Sorry, but I can’t help trying to make people happy. Why am I apologizing? Why is it so hard to stop apologizing?! Even with my PPCD, why I cared about hurting HER feelings is truly a mystery. Okay, according to some random article on the internet, people-pleasing behavior comes from having poor personal boundaries and a longtime need for validation. Supposedly this behavior is more common in people with a traumatic family history or a history of toxic or abusive relationships. Okay yeah, all that checks out. Oh, it’s also much more prevalent in women. Sorry that I got sidetracked, but I am NOT sorry for being a woman who has endured trauma. I mean, I AM sorry, but not sorry sorry. Sorry!

ANYWAY. Back to Maude. How did she reply, you might ask? Was she heartbroken, pleading with us to trust her with our precious, perfect child that she would deliver in the tub effortlessly, with her crude prods and scales? Did she want to sit and talk it out over a cup of red raspberry leaf tea? Meditate and bang a gong about it? Nope. This is what she replied:

Ok, se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: Idiots Welcome!
• Chapter 1: Come Inside My Vagina
• Chapter 2: Oh, the Places I’ve Pooped
• Chapter 3: The Accidental Lactivist
• Chapter 4: Did I Marry a Narcissist?
• Chapter 5: How Do I Fire Myself?
• Chapter 6: Me Too, Though
• Chapter 7: Am I Doing This Right?
• Chapter 8: Come Inside My Brain
• Chapter 9: I’m Rich, Bitch!
• Chapter 10: The Neurodivergent Bunch
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright