From Breastfeeding to Book Publishing:
The Unlikely Journey of an Iowa Housewife

It all began on a Tuesday. I know the exact year, date and time that changed the course of my life forever. January 11th, 2000. 7pm. I walked into the University Avenue Barnes&Noble, a nervous 24-year-old mother with a new baby and mean case of baby blues, unsure of what exactly I was looking for when I entered the store. It wasn’t books I was after, but people. Writers, to be exact. My first ever critique group. And so much more, as it turned out.
 

I chose a hard folding chair on the fringe of the group, a circle of men and women in all shapes, ages, colors and sizes. I know I must’ve sat rigidly, clenched into a tight, stressful little ball. I was sweating, I remember, because I always sweat when I’m nursing, and crossed my arms over my leaky breasts, praying the meeting wouldn’t take longer than two hours. After quick introductions, I listened to the words of stories, poems and essays from the others, smiling and nodding politely in all the appropriate places. I had been too chicken to bring and share any of my own writing and experienced the meeting as a mere observer, contributing nothing as I figured I had nothing of use to offer.

My twenty-four years on earth up to that point in the bookstore had been fairly uneventful. A born and bred Iowa farm girl, I spent my childhood barefoot and playing in barns, creeks and fields. Living so far out in the country, books or my own imagination were often my only playmates. I was surrounded by loving, wonderful parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and many a family pet who died a tragic death under the wheel of a tractor. I graduated from high school a perfectly average student and attended a perfectly average community college where I obtained both an Associates and Missus degree—as in Mrs. VanBaale—when I married a handsome Dutch boy at the ripe old age of 21. We bought a new car, house and furniture to fill it that first year of marriage. I finished university, took a jaunt across Europe to congratulate myself and got a full-time job working with disabled adults. Pregnant with my first child a year later, I quit the workforce to be a stay-at-home mom and finally pursue my dream of becoming a writer on the side. And also throw in a little charity work for good measure. It would all work out because everything was as I assumed it to be—right or left, black or white, up or down. I had all the answers, concrete plans and an ambitious list of expectations. I would be a mother! An author! A philanthropist! I would teach my child to read before he was out of diapers, pen the next great American novel, feed the poor AND make my own environmentally-friendly baby wipes! I was a modern woman living all the benefits of freedom and choice hard earned by women before me! (Double explanation point.)
I was, in a word, a fool.

See, a funny thing happened during my intricate planning. That funny thing was called life. I had a baby who somehow failed to get the memo outlining my great list of life accomplishments. He cried a lot. He wouldn’t sleep when I wanted him to sleep. He wasn’t interested in my great American novel, my homemade baby wipes gave him a rash, and all he did with books, when he got them into his sweaty little hands, was chew on them.

I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t doing much of anything except breastfeeding and feeling sorry for myself. I had never been so miserable and unsure about my place in the world. I was hours away from any family members and turning to other mothers my own age often left me riddled with guilt because my experience with motherhood wasn’t that of angels singing and harps playing, as it so often seemed for them. And, I was squandering my chance to make a real go at writing.
Four and half months of watching too much daytime television and scribbling on the same ten pages of a story later, I was ready to throw in the towel and go back to work. Abandon my dreams to stay home with my kids and write. But after seeing an advertisement for a local writer’s group, my husband convinced me to give it one more month. Go to the group. Get out of the house one night a week. Take some of my writing and share it. So when I arrived at Barnes and Nobles that cold January night, I would imagine I wore all of this stress, confusion and disappointment on my face, and it was that same night, I met my Ya-Ya’s.

It started out as an invitation for coffee after the meeting with a few women from the group, all older than myself with varying backgrounds—married, divorced, gay, straight, kids, no kids, nurses, accountants, Christians, Pagans. At first I begged off—I had to get home, my husband was alone with the baby, I was breastfeeding and couldn’t be away long. But after a while, they stopped accepting my excuses. Is your husband not smart enough to operate a bottle, they asked me. Have you never heard of a breast pump? Is there some Iowa law we’re unaware of that says a mother cannot be separated from her newborn for more than two hours? It’s thirty more minutes, one woman told me. If you start to leak, just throw on your coat. No one here is going to care. Don’t forget you still need to be a person.

Still need to be a person. Such a simple concept, yet so unthinkable in the millennium mother’s Age of Anxiety, where mothering had evolved into a take-no-prisoners perfectionist approach, where stay-at-home mom’s faced off with working moms in the ring and bottled formula was equated to crack pipes.

So I stayed that extra thirty minutes. And another thirty minutes the following week. I bought a pump and used it. I stopped apologizing profusely to my husband when I left each Tuesday. In fact, I eventually began to meet him at the door in my coat to hand over the baby and tuck my purse under my arm like a football, making a 50-yard dash for the garage.
Eventually, the thirty extra minutes grew into an hour, sometimes two, sometimes more if I was having a really bad week, or just too much fun. There were invitations to get out of the house and see a movie, paint pottery, take in a concert or a reading, eat some pie. We talked freely about everything—writing, movies, books, relationships, sex, families, failures and successes—not just pacifiers and potty training. Advice and words of wisdom came without condescension. I was supported without being patronized, challenged without being criticized. Slowly, I loosened my white-knuckled grip on living a perfect life, and started the work of becoming myself.
In time, I saw the effect trickle down to my writing, as well. The more honesty that came from my mouth, the more honesty showed up in my words on paper. My confidence, discipline and skill increased. I finally released the white-knuckled grip on writing and found my storytelling voice.
When I published my first book, my Ya-Ya’s threw me a launch party. No individual’s success story is self-made, and mine is no exception. Successes are made up of small stones given to us by others—a kind deed, a spoken word of encouragement, a helping hand—until the stones have created a mountain, and we’re standing on top.

So, how do I define a Ya-Ya’s exactly? Well, there is the book and movie you’ve likely heard of—Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—where our name started. One friend described a Ya-Ya as “someone you call when you’ve killed your husband and need help burying the body.” Another friend’s husband once mistakenly referred to us as “the Yo-Yo’s.” And when my sister was in the hospital and received a beautiful bouquet with a card that read, “Get well soon. Love, Kali’s Ya-Ya’s” her husband replied, “Why are Kali’s breasts sending you flowers?”

Confusion and definability aside, Ya-ya’s to me, are my grown up soft place to fall. With a Ya-Ya, there is no pretense, no pressure to impress, no competition. Just grace. I’ve often said that my husband made me a wife and mother, but my ya-ya’s helped make me a woman. It’s true that a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

I’ve ultimately learned through my friendships with these women, that being vulnerable is not the same as being weak. The display of vulnerability requires a most intimate form of trust. We trust one another, thus learn to trust ourselves. Only then are the possibilities of our talents, confidence, and ultimately our hearts, fully opened. I think of a quote from the French writer Anais Nin (Ah Nah EES * Neen), “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
How different my life might have been, had I never gone to B&N that night, or not bought a breast pump.