nipple confusion

The end of the semester is always a crazy time -- students frantically trying to write that paper a little better ("can I please just email you one more draft?"), my trying to grade that paper a little faster ("no, sorry. I just can't."(finger down throat gesture)) -- and this year the crazies have been compounded by wedding planning, shower attending, karaoke singing, book editing, weight watching. Usually the semester ends and I approach my summer doings with a relish. In North Carolina, I would plant like mad and sew a quilt top in a weekend, as if all the intensity of the semester would simply translate into all the intensity of summer doings. By August, though, things would always slow down, my ambitions diminished in the heat of the South. This year is different. The semester has ended, but its ending has only made the looming deadline of my book project (a new edited history of Bryn Mawr) more glaring. I still have about fifty years to account for and I'm just absolutely exhausted.

The kind of exhausted that feels like you're always looking through a dirty window, like you forgot to put in your contacts, but they're actually in. Exhausted like you don't feel like taking off your shoes before you go to sleep.

So this weekend was all about resting...and grading those papers, and writing thank you notes for the best (really, truly, the best) celebration with my lady friends last weekend, sealing up invitations, and well, you know, sewing and knitting. I've been champing at the bit to finish a couple project, like this one:

Booties! I love booties. I didn't know that I loved booties until this morning, but I do. I mean, what's not to love? The pattern is from Anna Maria Horner's new book, Handmade Beginnings. This pair is for a super special friend who, I hope, will find these the perfect little coverings for her new babe's tootsies. Horner's book seems to have several good projects and the directions were clear and concise. M would be well satisfied.

But now let's get down to business. You ask, why the cheeky title today? Nipple confusion, huh? Well, that's what I said. I mean that's what I said when my kindly doorman fetched this package for me yesterday:

Yes, it seems that the kind folks at Similac ("For Strong Moms") seem to think that I'm the one due to deliver. I can't quite explain how the arrival of this little care package made me feel. Equal parts bemused, confused, angered and saddened. I will say that the anger seems to have stemmed from a kind of consternation: why does Similac think I'm the kind of lady not to breastfeed? But as I looked up a near-by women's shelter at which to donate this little bit of bizarre benevolence from corporate America, I just felt a strange kind of empty terror. I don't know what else to say about it, but I think I'm just going to sit with that feeling. I haven't yet thought of a brilliant response to Similac (surely this calls for one), but its arrival has got me wondering: why in the world is this company sending me baby formula?

How did I get on a list of expectant moms?

Did this package intentionally arrive the day before mother's day as a cruel joke calling to the absence of a baby in my life?

Might my recent purchase of several baby sewing books put me on a list of pregnant ladies (which doesn't seem like a particularly smart marketing move on Similac's part given all those sewing grandmothers)?

Does Similac simply send formula to all women who have wedding registries? Oh the horror.

Or should I just give over to obvious: that there's just far too much private information out there in circulation and Similac actually knows something that I don't?

In any case, I think this is, in fact, nothing more than a true--and cruel--case of nipple confusion.