Have you missed me? I’ve been taking some time away from writing to focus on events with the hat shop and my grandfather’s funeral. We just put my last living grandfather in his lying place. I took photos. I forgot how Italian New Jersey is. Italian last names on every store. Lasagna, chicken savoy, sol oreganado, broccoli cavatelli, canolis. I had a good week of being fed well.

I came straight to Boulder after the funeral. I’m here to pick up my car for the winter in Montana. The seat belt is broken (if I haven’t already mentioned that). So pray for me on the 9-hour drive back. And, yes, I am just going to drive it back. It’s a 68 dollar part that my boyfriend will help me put on. I’ll ratchet strap myself to the car in the meantime, and if you see me on the road with no seat belt, no, you didn’t.

New York citay

When you think you’re ‘high class’ and you’re not, that’s a delusion I don’t understand. It was one of these phrases that I heard a few times when I was with my Italian family. They were raised in the New Jersey/New York area. My grandfather from the Bronx. My grandmother from Clark. Both to Italian and German immigrants. They come from stories of being called Nazi’s when they bought their first house or not being able to get home in the Bronx after going to buy milk. If someone knew you were headed to the store, it meant you had money on you. And if you had money on you, someone was gonna give you a hard time.

My grandfather never spoke much about his childhood. Never spoke much at all, really. But he got my grandmother pregnant at 17. She hid the pregnancy for 8 months. They got married a month before my mom was born. They had two other daughters, 7 and 11 years later, respectively. I love their story. It’s messy and it’s raw. It’s life coming together in the best way it can. To make something of our choices. And in the end, they lived good lives. They had a piece of the American Dream. They owned homes, and they went on cruises. They ran their own businesses: a roofing company and a bowling alley diner. They had pensions that still support my grandmother today.

I think about my own desire for the American Dream. To build something of your life and to leave a little legacy. To have children and a family. I’m almost 30 and I think often now about how much of a shame it is that I don’t already have children and a family. I think often about how I was raised out of my femininity. Out of motherhood. Out of seeing taking care of a family as sacred. I was told children were a burden on my “life’s goals” or even that it was disgusting to breastfeed. I don’t understand what happened to get us to this place.

Wake up

I’m on the path of family now. I know that. But I’m 30 and I do feel that clock ticking. I’m an older mom than I could have been. I spent years focused on a “career” that I never really liked and which still left me really empty. I remember, in my first job, after the first year and a promotion I worked hard to get, I looked around and said, “Is this really it?”

And I think a lot of women, and hopefully men, are waking up to this. To the fact that we were sold and raised on an ideology that left us with professional accomplishments but no home. The greatest legacy isn’t the one that gets you a fancy certification. It’s the one where your children tell their grandchildren how much they loved you. And with tears in their eyes, they recount the kindness of their father. And with warmth in their heart, they remember the morning you taught them what it means to value something.

Birth stories

Life starts at birth. The moment that is the most sacred one we have. That gives us a divine glimpse into the universe, into creation. That should be treated as a ceremony and respected and revered as the christening that it is.

But unfortunately, for most women (at least in the Americas), that holiness of birth has been lost. Interferred with by a medical system that doesn’t understand or respect birth. That over-medicates, even over-analyzes, aspects of one of the most natural processes on earth. And what this has done is take one of the most sacred moments of someone’s life, their birth, and traumatize it.

In New Jersey, I finally had the pleasure of hearing the birth stories of my grandmother and aunt.

My grandmother, giving birth at 17, though a fairly natural birth, but one that was still in a hospital, was administered a shot that dried up her milk instantly. When she got home to try to breastfeed her baby, she couldn’t and didn’t know why. She called the doctor and said ‘I can’t get my milk going’ and they informed her they had given her a shot to dry up her milk.

If that had happened today, you better know I wouldn’t stop until that doctor lost their entire fucking practice and that hospital was shut down. How horrible and irresponsible that was to do to a young mother and for that baby’s health. I actually had no idea my mother wasn’t breastfed until this week. We know, so very well, how incredibly important it is to breastfeed for more than one reason. Just some of them broadly are:

1. Perfect nourishment and immunity – Breast milk adapts to your baby’s needs and transfers antibodies, building lifelong health and resilience.

2. Emotional bonding and nervous system regulation – The closeness, warmth, and oxytocin release create deep trust and co-regulation between mother and child.

3. Maternal healing and hormonal balance – Nursing supports postpartum recovery, stabilizes mood, and reduces long-term risks of disease.

4. Intuitive communication and connection – The act of nursing strengthens the mother’s intuition and attunement to her child’s subtle needs.

For some reason, if you didn’t know by now, the medical industrial system is one of, if not the most, barbaric and toxic establishments for pregnancy and pregnant women. Not only is that kind of story common for modern birth, but it has become the normal view of pregnancy: that it is a “hard”, traumatic experience that takes place in a hospital and needs “doctors”.

My aunt had it even worse. Which is crazy, because you would think with a husband who’s an OBGYN that maybe she’d had a better chance than the rest of us. But, after a doctor said the baby was breech, she was administered an “emergency” C-section. We know the chance of the baby actually staying breech or coming out breech is so, so low and unlikely because the baby and the body know what to do. They don’t need to be forced or rushed. There doesn’t need to be any pushing or pulling or cutting. When you let the birth process happen naturally, mom and baby have a much better chance of everything going right. Medical intervention adds a framework to pregnancy that leaves lasting harmful effects on the baby and the mother’s health, and sees the entire process as something to be remediated, not respected.

And that C-section caused a major infection, where my aunt had to be opened up THREE TIMES. She was put on major doses of antibiotics, leaving her effectively incapable of breastfeeding her newborn baby.

Rage

I love that this is what you’re getting from me after weeks off from writing. Sorry, not sorry? I have even more stories I could tell. From my own mother’s pregnancy to the one I recently saw my girlfriend go through (and rack up a million-dollar hospital bill from—who really benefited there?).

I just write this to get out of my womb the rage for how motherhood and children are treated in this country. How with the choice, the choice to have children, you may also have to fight social and cultural norms. It’s funny, we’ve tried to create a world where women are not powerless, yet I still feel myself, here, powerless, to the things that matter the most.

Love,
Val

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