Stripper Mom
by
Sheila Hageman
Stripper Mom began when I was a new mother, overwhelmed and frustrated by my new role. I had no mother friends, had never even babysat an infant before, so I felt isolated and clueless.
I knew there must be many women in similar situations. I decided to start blogging to figure out how to navigate motherhood and to hopefully reach out to those other mothers. I sensed a feeling of community was what I was missing.
I found a whole world of blogging mothers as overwhelmed as I was on websites such as The Mom Blogs and the Mom Blog Network.
Writing daily turns out to be exactly what I, and apparently a lot of other mothers, need. It’s like a daily checking-in, a few minutes where only you exist, even though most of the time you may seem to be only writing about baby things.
I blogged my thoughts about who I had been: an exotic dancer, actress, model, a woman addicted to receiving attention for what I showed. I blogged about what I was discovering about my new role as mother: it is all time-consuming, tedious, and momentous, which led me into exploring how who I had been affects me today in my role as mother.
It’s been five years since Stripper Mom started. Blogging has helped me to write for at least fifteen minutes a day, to reflect more on my experience, and to appreciate the enormous task and responsibility being a mother and a woman separate from “mother” is.
I always return to the original impulse for Stripper Mom’s birth—the urge to reveal myself, slowly, through words, to the truth of myself.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
The girl voted “Most Shy” in high school swung open the blackened-out door with the “No Fat Women Allowed” sign and entered the darkness. She slipped on her stripper stilettos and danced in her underwear for a room full of drinking men. For every dollar bill that she clutched, another word was recorded into her journal, where she tried to make sense of what she was witnessing, feeling, and becoming.
I now wear comfortable sweats as I sit at a laptop beginning a blog about being a mom who once shed her clothes for a living. The only people who pant after my naked breasts are my fiancé and my daughter. The only exotic pose I find myself striking is lotus pose, legs crisscrossed over themselves, as I teach yoga.
I live an ordinary life as a new mother, but life does not feel simple. I push Genny in her blue stroller along the crowded Jackson Heights sidewalks. I stop to buy a coffee on my way to the grocery store with the extra-skinny aisles that were not made for baby strollers.
I feed Genny twenty times a day, wash countless loads of laundry in the scary dark, building’s basement, entertain Genny at the playground at Traver’s Park, and try to shower and prepare for a trek to the babysitter’s, a bus ride to the subway to a walk to my yoga clients in the city.
I struggle every day to fully embrace who I was and who I have become.
Before I was your normal, busy wife and mother, I was a wild, single woman with a past. I danced naked on tables, dined in five-star restaurants, hung out with celebrities, and toured the country as an actress.
But, that was then, and this is now. And what a difference a few years make.
I diligently try to keep my eyes open from lack of sleep to get a little writing done in between nursing, teaching and taking care of my apartment.
I wonder how I will manage to finish my memoir about my life as a stripper, attend graduate school in the fall, take care of my baby and have a fulfilling personal life.
I wonder if anyone will want to read a blog about how all of this past experience of being an actress, a model, and a dancer affects my life now in some way every day.
While I write about all of my experiences and revelations during the years I worked in the adult entertainment business for my memoir, I will journal here about the issues that arise for me in the present—from living in Queens with my fiancé, Nick, and my 11-month-old daughter, Genny, to figuring out why I have this need to write about it all and share it with the world.
April 18, 2005
I finally made it back to my psychiatrist.
I’ve suffered from depression all my life, but only sought treatment after I quit stripping in my twenties. For the past decade I’ve been in and out of a myriad collection of New York’s finest mental health professionals, talked my tale numerous times, and even swallowed daily doses of Prozac, Welbutrin, and Zoloft (not all at the same time).
I hadn’t been to my current doctor since July, two months after my daughter’s birth. My normal depression had become compounded by postpartum and I found it necessary to go back onto antidepressants. I’ve been on a low dosage because I’m breastfeeding, but my old scary, depressed tape loops have been playing in my head again, so we’re upping my dosage.
Genny is down to nursing only about three or four times a day now, which is good and bad. She’s growing up quickly.
Pushing her stroller home today after visiting Travers Park, I asked her if she’d like me to put her hat on. There was a slight breeze kicking up.
"No."
Simple and clear, but very unlikely. I stopped and asked her to say it again, but then all she said was, "Baa, bah, baaa..."
I have the distinct feeling that she understands more than she lets on. I realize that before I know it she’ll be snooping around our apartment, digging through old photographs of me that appeared in magazines. Instead of being surprised by a single word coming out of her mouth, I’ll be surprised by questions like, "Mommy, why aren’t you wearing any clothes in this picture?"
I haven’t figured out yet how I will talk about my past. I don’t know what the proper age is she’ll need to be before I can discuss those kinds of issues with her. I’m counting on learning as I go. And I’m hoping that she’ll be a very understanding and loving young woman. Loving me no matter what my life has been.
April 19, 2005
Today I’m feeling that buzzing, boiling urge to be doing something more with life. I should be more motivated, but I’m having a hard time enjoying the day to begin with. I count down the hours until Genny’s naps, and I daydream about her bedtime.
I want to be able to enjoy this part of my life as a new mom. I don’t want to be constantly wishing I had more freedom until finally I get it and then realize what a lucky thing I had.
I wish I could pretend it’s the future and my busy, creative and fulfilling life has driven me to rent a time machine to transport myself back to the present where I can enjoy my alone and home time with my daughter. Can I do that? Can I convince myself that this time is a gift without the benefit of the future?
April 20, 2005
Head trauma is not the description a mother wants to hear about her child.
I had planned on taking Genny to the park and then having lunch with a friend at a Thai place off 37th Avenue. I placed Genny on the middle of the bed and turned around, flipped my hair over and brushed it up into a ponytail. As I turned back around to the bed, Genny was diving off.
She landed flat on her face and began to scream. I tried to nurse her, but her eyes started closing and her body went limp. Shoving the stroller along the bumpy sidewalks of Jackson Heights on the way to Elmhurst Hospital—Genny threw up.
After sweating at a registration desk for fifteen minutes, I almost passed out. Meanwhile, Genevieve was burrowing her head against my shoulder, not normal behavior for her at all. The doctors decided to do a CAT scan to make sure everything was okay.
She looked so tiny all wrapped up in the white sheet, cocooned against the metal tube of the CAT scan machine. We had to step out of the room while they imaged her. I leaned against the long hallway’s wall holding Nick’s hand. Being in the hospital brought up too many bad memories of our past year together—Nick’s mom passed away the same week Genny was born and a cousin of Nick’s lost her baby in a drowning.
Biting its way through my brain was the thought that Nick must think I’m a bad mom. I kept seeing Genny falling over and over again in my head. If only I hadn’t turned my back on her. If only I had realized she would one day learn to crawl all of a sudden and maybe take me by surprise.
While we waited for Genny to wake up from the sedation, the results came back—everything looked fine.
What if everything hadn’t been fine? How would I have forgiven myself?
Nick said he doesn’t blame me. And I know he means that. And I know that accidents happen, but I felt like they would never happen to my baby when I was around. I can hold guilt against myself for what happened or I can learn from my mistake and not let it happen again. With a baby though, there is no way to totally protect her from the world. Genny is going to fall again whether I’m around or not.
She’s sleeping peacefully now, albeit with a rug burn tattooed across her forehead. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a calmer day.
April 21, 2005
I often place Genny in the hallway where I can see her while I use the bathroom. This morning she crawled toward me. Genny has been struggling with pre-crawling for months. And now, today, on her 11-month birthday, she crawled.
I was strolling her to the park when it actually hit me…I’m not such a bad mom after all. She must have done her first crawl yesterday morning when she lunged off the bed. That’s why the accident happened.
As I walked through the neighborhood today I was greeted by a few moms I know who all had “baby falling out of bed” stories to share. I now know that I’m not the first mom to have watched in horror as her child fell far enough out of her reach to save.
Genny seemed to be feeling fine today. And, so, yes—the crawling. She crawled across the living room. She crawled across the kitchen. She tried to eat cat food.
It’s amazing how she grows in such leaps and bounds. It seemed like she was stuck in the same in-between crawling stage for at least three months and then for her to all of a sudden crawl, without any more “baby steps” is bizarre. But then I guess that’s how mastering skills works, even for adults—we practice forever and seem to be getting nowhere and then all of a sudden, we’re suave experts.
Perhaps this is true for motherhood, too. But if it is, I don’t know where I am in the learning process. It’s almost like I begin each day brand new, helpless and unable to move and then as the day unwinds I find myself figuring out when to put Genny down for her naps, what and how much to feed her and how to keep her occupied. Then by the time that it’s her bedtime I have achieved mastery, for the day.
I’m an expert mom, tonight. I do find joy in that, but it also makes me aware that perhaps I’m not becoming expert at anything else. I have no time for myself—for my writing.
I’m writing now. This blog keeps me writing, if just this little bit every day. I’m finally oiling myself up again. Let this little bit of writing, this little bit of “me” time sustain me through motherhood.
* * *
Sheila Hageman dreams of having an uninterrupted fifteen-minutes to write, but as a multi-tasking mother of two (with a baby due any day), she often settles for 5-minutes of scratchy prose a day. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, CUNY. When she can, she teaches Yoga, Creative Writing, Composition and Literature. She is completing her memoir, “Stripping Down,” which has been excerpted and published in Salon, Conversely and Moxie. Check out her blog at www.strippermom.blogspot.com.
Gretchen Fletcher
Linda Pressman
Janet Kirchheimer
Erica Sklar
Jinny Henenberg
Leigh Gaston (link to come)