Bossypants

Fey writes that “[l]ike most people who have had one baby,” she is “an expert” and will offer advice on “how to raise your kid” (215), starting with whether mothers should breastfeed or give their babies formula.

Formula was created to nourish “orphans and underweight babies” and “has since been perfected to be a complete and reliable source of stress and shame for mothers” (215). Bombarded with literature stating that breastfeeding is best, Fey feels “an obligation to [her] baby to pretend to try” (217). Opinions vary as to how long mothers should breastfeed, so “you must find what works for you.” Fey’s “magic number was about seventy-two hours” (217).

In the hospital, when Fey struggles to find a hold that works for her and the baby, a nurse gives the baby some formula without asking. Once home, Fey “wanted to succeed at this so she could tell people she did” (217) and continues to try different holds, with little success. Fey begins supplementing with formula. However, as “[y]ou must, must, must provide them with breast milk,” she also pumps breast milk for the baby, something you can do “[i]f you choose to not love your baby enough to breastfeed” (218).

When she stops pumping, she no longer feels “trapped,” but she does suffer “an overwhelming feeling of disappointment” because she “had failed at something that was supposed to be natural” (219). She struggles to associate with friends who successfully breastfeed and remind her of its benefits. Eventually, she begins to feel less guilty, although she is still plagued by “Teat Nazis,” or “women who not only brag endlessly about how much their five-year-old still loves breast milk, but they also grill you about your own choices” (219). Fey clarifies that many women breastfeed “without giving anybody else a hard time about it” and that “Teat Nazis are a solely western upper-middle-class phenomenon occurring when highly ambitious women experience deprivation from outside modes of achievement” (220).

Fey concludes that when people tell you that you need to do something, it’s a sign that you don’t need to do it. She ends the chapter with a text box of ways to find “me time” (221). She suggests new mothers “[g]o to the bathroom a lot,” “empty the dishwasher,” and “establish that you’re the only one in your family allowed to go to the post office” (221).

Whereas some celebrities spend Christmastime on tropical islands or mountain paradises, Fey and her husband Jeff make a long drive across 80W to Youngstown, Pennsylvania, to visit Jeff’s family.

As Fey doesn’t drive, Jeff drives the entire way. Fey also “can’t cook meat correctly” and has “no affinity for animals” (224). Although “[t]here are plenty of positives to being married to [her],” she “just can’t think of any of them right now,” and she concludes that she is “the worst” (224).

Fey discusses the spotty radio reception on the “hypnotic and relaxing” (224) drive through the Alleghenies. She recommends various Roy Rogers restaurants and even a Subway for the “die-hard ‘foodie’” (225). Toward the end of the drive, the GPS stops recognizing where they are.

Inside the “cozy warm” house, they enjoy “hugs and kisses and pies and soup and ham and biscuits and a continuous flow of Maxwell House coffee with nondairy creamer” (225). While her sisters-in-law, who “have always been welcoming and affectionate,” clean up after dinner, Fey “half-assedly” offers to help (226). She is, she states again, the “worst” (226).

As Fey’s daughter grows into toddlerhood, the seven-hour drive becomes more difficult. One year, Fey invites the family to their New York City apartment. Her “Country Folk” in-laws don’t take to the city, and through their “non-admirer’s eyes” (228) she becomes aware of questionable things she hadn’t thought about before. Even their visit to the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, “which is unlike any tree in the world, except for hundreds of trees near their homes in Ohio” (228), isn’t as exciting as she’d hoped. When her nephew says there “are a lot of foreigners” in the deli, Fey corrects him by responding that “those people live here” (229).

The following year, the family meets halfway between their houses, at a Holiday Inn in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. They enjoy the hotel pool, cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster, the Lycoming Mall carousel, and exchanging gifts by a tree they don’t have to take down. They eat dinner at a Victorian inn “where city jerks and country carnivores could find common ground” (230).

Fey and her family will go back to Youngstown this Christmas. She intends to spend New Year’s Eve in New York City, “where we do more of an Ahab-and-Jezebel thing” (231).