Diapers and Day Raves
A new mother brings her newborn to Ibiza, baby.
Words by Sophie Brickman
Illustrations by Simone Massoni
IN HER FIRST PASSPORT PHOTO, taken when she was just shy of 4 weeks old, my daughter, Ella, bears a striking resemblance to Al Capone — receding hairline, double chin, bags under the eyes, gut. In order to take it, I’d plopped her in the middle of the bed on a white sheet and performed all sorts of weird calisthenics to make sure the final picture checked all the State Department’s boxes. This seemed particularly deranged given that the subject was the size and shape of a burrito. I managed, somehow, and sent away the photo paper-clipped to the application (height: 1 foot 8 inches). A few weeks later, Ella’s second-ever piece of mail arrived, a crispy fresh passport inside. We were ready for Ibiza.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Even before we had a kid, my husband, Dave, and I weren’t the type of people who went to Ibiza. I’d never been to a rave or done many drugs harder than a strong Cabernet. But when I was five months pregnant, our British friends Izzy and Chris invited us to join them at a house they’d rented in Spain for the following summer. They’d visited Ibiza on and off throughout the years, and they continued to go despite the addition of not one but two “moppets” (sometimes “poppets” — apparently the terms are interchangeable), whom they’d pack up and take with them all over the world. They’d drop a line from Portugal, where they’d decamp for the weekend, or bring the girls to the States, time change be damned, effortlessly deploying the type of British witticisms that made me feel as eloquent as Scooby-Doo.
We had very few parents in our social circle, which meant we had very few peers for role models, and I was petrified that a baby would render me unrecognizable from the person I thought I was. Perhaps because of that, I devoured literature about badass mothers during my pregnancy, stashing away tips and insights for my future self. Anya Fernald, co-founder of the pasture-raised meat company Belcampo, not only teethed her baby girl Viola on goat chops, I learned, but also reportedly gave her fingerfuls of lard. (“You realize that babies know what’s what,” Fernald told one reporter, something I recalled when Ella went through a phase of adding strawberries to her tuna fish.) Eighteen-month-old in tow, Margaret Atwood and her husband circumnavigated the globe, making a stop in Afghanistan because Atwood, a longtime student of military history, wanted to see the spot where fellow subjects of the Crown met their demise in the 1840s.
That’s what I wanted for our new life of three: fistfuls of lard on a transatlantic flight to visit a battlefield. We could table Afghanistan until trip number two, though. For a beginner like me, Ibiza seemed thrilling enough. So we said yes. I had Ella in May, and I spent my maternity leave making sweaty, languid loops around Central Park with the stroller and casually dropping to everyone that I was taking my infant to Ibiza in July because, you know, that’s just how I roll.
I knew I was a fraud. As the trip drew nearer, I started stockpiling supplies like an anxious hoarder, as if we really were taking a trip to Afghanistan. A baby sun hat for the pool. Another baby sun hat for lounging. Enough pacifiers to calm the Eastern Front. A tiny pair of baby aviators for…what? A day rave?
And in the wee hours of the morning, after nursing, I would read websites with names like PregnantChicken.com and take screenshots of a mom’s group I’d joined, where women recounted horror stories of projectile vomiting and delayed flights, breast-pump parts lost and public diaper explosions. When the day finally arrived, half my carry-on was a mix of ziplock bags and tissues, a fully operational containment kit for bodily fluids, most of which I assumed would be my own tears.
As the plane took off, I had so many gadgets ready I don’t know how Ella could’ve made a peep even if she’d wanted to. Anytime she opened her mouth, something — bottle, pacifier, boob — flew in. But as we reached 35,000 feet, she fell asleep in a little bassinet plugged into the bulkhead, and when she woke up, the stewardesses whisked her off, cooing and tickling, giving Dave and me a few minutes to doze.
When we arrived, Izzy was by the pool, breezing around in a sundress with an adorable moppet on her hip and a poppet running barefoot in the grass. Dragonflies glinted in the air, metallic and green. The entire place smelled like jasmine. Ella gurgled approvingly. We’d entered a natural decompression chamber.
For the next week, we rarely left the house. There was lots of nursing, lots of napping, lots of snacking on chorizo and cheese and little nibbles the boys brought back from the nearby convenience store. We all sort of reverted into newborns ourselves: Time was fuzzy, food consumption the only yardstick for a day’s accomplishment. It would have been a perfect trip sans bébé. But as Dave and I handed Ella off for dips in the pool, it felt life-affirming, like we really could do this — take the trip, take the swim, not finish the New Yorkers we’d schlepped in our bag, socialize. All the things I’d done pre-Ella, but with her added cuteness in the world.
At the trip’s end, Chris suggested we do at least one activity that felt vaguely Ibizan. There was a sunset drum circle planned at a nearby beach the night before we left, and I decided I could either stay at home and sanitize baby bottles or ignore my better judgment and go dance at a drum circle. So a few hours later, with Ella strapped in, I tiptoed my way down a sandy, rocky path until it opened up into a cove packed shoulder-to-shoulder with hippies. At one end of the beach, drummers played djembes and tambourines. Wispy-haired people, skin crisp from the sun, danced around them, eyes closed, beers in hand. My own personal hell. But then I thought of Ella as a college freshman, telling her friends about her baby drum circle, and inched my way forward. I thought about Margaret Atwood, and Anya Fernald and her lard-
eating baby. I let one eyelid close, then the other. I started to sway. The sweet smell of — what was that, jasmine flower? — -enveloped me. My baby and I, we were one with Ibiza.
Then one of my eyelids popped open, almost involuntarily, my nose making a connection I needed my eyes to confirm. Jasmine? Yeah, right. Not four feet from me, a hippie with dreads, wearing not much more than what appeared to be a loincloth, was taking a long pull on an enormous joint, which he exhaled slowly in an arc that drifted down over Ella’s dewy skin. Ella may have looked like Al Capone, but she wasn’t cool enough for this scene — or her mom wasn’t, at least, and she never had been. We hightailed it back to the house, where we barbecued thick steaks over a fire and stayed up late playing cards. Ella, immune to jet lag, rotated among our laps, gumming a steak bone. It was perfect.
About the Author: Sophie Brickman is a writer and editor living in New York City. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and California Sunday.
