I never really pictured my birth until halfway through my pregnancy, when I took a class on Zoom. Over the course of two weekends, a childbirth educator talked about avoiding unnecessary medical interventions and shared strategies for coping with the pain of labor without medication, like an epidural. 

When I started the class, the closest thing I had to a birth plan was “anything but a C-section.” But as we practiced breathing techniques, visualizations, and long, sustained eye contact with our partners while pressing ice to our wrists, visions of my “ideal birth” came into focus.

I knew I wanted the freedom to make my own choices about how my labor would go — to have agency, to follow my own intuition in the moment. Maybe I would labor in a tub, maybe I would refuse to push on my back in a hospital bed and squat down to the ground instead. Maybe I could even make it all the way without screaming for an epidural and earn that coveted trophy of childbirth: a “natural” birth. 

At some point, that “could” slipped into “should,” and birth became something not just to experience, but also to achieve. 

During one of the classes, our instructor showed us videos of women in labor. As someone whose high school sex-ed curriculum had somehow not included “The Miracle of Life,” I’d never seen this before and had, in fact, never seen anything like it — women lowing and moaning, any semblance of self-consciousness stripped away by raw pain. I listened to their gasps and guttural groans and became overwhelmed with curiosity: In this moment, whose voice would come out of my mouth? Who would I become in this animal yielding? I couldn’t wait to find out. 

Late at night, as my future son’s in utero hiccups kept me awake, I dipped into birth Instagram and binged on the black-and-white images of women clutching their newborns to their chests in bloodied birthing tubs; women whose minds had turned fully inward in that moment, or maybe even transcended the walls of the room. As my third trimester dragged on, I daydreamed about my own labor: the warm bath I’d take before heading to the hospital, the music we’d play to get me through that last exhausting stretch of pushing. I pictured the idyllic photos I’d seen and superimposed myself on them, imagining my own body in that tub, my own face drawn into complete concentration. I made a labor playlist.

At 39 weeks, I waddled into the hospital for my appointment, just as I’d done once a week for the last month. I shared with the midwife on duty how suspenseful and frustrating, but also secretly thrilling, the mystery of spontaneous labor felt to me: Would it happen tomorrow, or two weeks from now, or tonight? I thought about it, frankly, all the time — what would happen, when it would happen, what we would do, what we would say — and knew it didn’t matter. I could think about it all I wanted, but ultimately my body would lead the way. After all, birth, we agreed, was about yielding control. 

Then I heaved myself up onto the exam table. Five minutes later, all of the mystery fell away and any sense of control was indeed yielded. The baby, we found, was breech, a position that most providers (including my own) consider too high-risk for a vaginal delivery. He’d have to be born in a scheduled C-section instead.  

At this stage in my pregnancy, it was unlikely I’d have time to change things — though I could certainly try. According to the internet, there was no shortage of things I could attempt if I wanted it badly enough: chiropractor, Spinning Babies, acupuncture, moxibustion, inversions, floating in a swimming pool, and one extremely painful procedure in which a doctor tries to manually maneuver the baby into position from the outside. 

“You can drive yourself crazy trying to do all this stuff,” my doula said when I called her, sobbing, on my way home from the hospital, “and you need to know that it might not work.” Left to my own devices, I knew I’d easily fling myself down this rabbit hole and feel completely personally at fault if my efforts proved fruitless. I was also only three days away from my due date, with a baby wearing an umbilical cord around his neck.

Instead, we scheduled the C-section. After weeks of reveling in the uncertainty of when, the mystery was suddenly distilled into something as clinical and banal as a Google calendar slot. He’d be born not in a room with twinkle lights, aromatherapy, and a birthing tub, but in a clean, cold operating room on the other side of an ugly blue curtain on the following Monday morning.  

At home that day, I cried on and off for approximately eight hours. I was shocked by the sheer force and relentlessness of my feelings: waves of sadness and disappointment as I processed the realization that I wouldn’t experience any of the moments I’d allowed myself to picture; I wouldn’t discover the depths of my own animal strength in the hardest parts of labor. The new reality was — after all that hoping and planning and grimacing with ice pressed to my wrist — I wouldn’t experience labor at all. I’m still not sure if I ever will. 

I felt angry, too — at the situation, at my providers, but also at myself, for letting all those “maybes” take root and bloom into “shoulds.” For letting myself slip into the fantasy that I was in charge, that birth was something I could not only achieve but excel at. That the only thing separating me from my ideal birth was grit and effort and determination — wanting it badly enough, advocating for myself loudly enough. Intellectually, I was ashamed that I allowed myself to be fooled into even momentarily thinking that one kind of birth is more noble, more valid than another. Emotionally, I felt like I’d already failed the first test of motherhood before I’d even become one. 

Somewhere in all this, I had a flickering moment of clarity and decided to make a Sunday night dinner reservation for me and my husband on the patio of one of my favorite special occasion restaurants.

I like to tell people it was logistical, a type-A planner’s dream: If we can pinpoint the exact day and time we’ll become parents, why not squeeze in one hurrah of a nice meal, right under the wire? But if I’m being honest, I think it was a decision made a little bit out of spite. I’d spent the last nine months following the rules, preparing, abstaining, studying, visualizing, doing all the right things — after all that, if I still can’t get the birth I wanted, I can at least have a damn drink. (Besides, I thought, with only 12 more hours to go after nine months of pregnancy, one drink didn’t feel too irresponsible — he’s pretty much fully baked, right?) 

So the night before our son would be born, and for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, I brushed my hair, put on a dress, swiped on some lipstick (and immediately wiped it off when I remembered masks), and went out to eat with my husband. We sat on the restaurant’s patio, and over the course of two hours, I feasted on one of the most expensive meals of my life while gleefully crossing off half the items on the “What Not to Eat When Pregnant” list: a platter of raw oysters, a little spoonful of white sturgeon caviar and a cured egg yolk on top of rice grits, and, yes, a drink — one perfect, effervescent French 75, made the old-fashioned way with Cognac. 

I worried that I would throw it all back up the next morning in the operating room as a side effect of the anesthesia, which I’d read about online. Beneath that worry were other, more gnawing fears: being wide awake for my own surgery; lying strapped to a table as a scrum of people rummaged around my abdominal cavity like the TSA inspecting a suitcase; witnessing the exact moment in which my life would irreversibly shift on its axis. You’d think all this would inhibit one’s appetite. I ate and drank anyway, and after a spring and summer of barely leaving the house, the two of us somehow racked up a $298 tab.  

In the previous three days, I had experienced such an onslaught of emotion that I’d barely had time to reflect on the fact that I was days away from the most significant before-and-after moment of my life. And in the previous few months, I’d become so preoccupied with imagining those final hours leading up to birth that I’d nearly forgotten what awaited me on the other side. Sitting before an iced plate of oysters on the half shell and a sweating champagne flute, I could finally pause long enough to remember. 

The next morning, we arrived at the hospital before dawn, rolling a suitcase through the eerily empty hospital hallways. In the triage room, I changed into an ugly gown and laid in a bed while a half-dozen nurses did a lot of things to my body: swabbing, shaving, injecting, drawing. I curled into myself over the table as an anesthesiologist numbed my spine and a nurse held my hand. They laid me back and slipped my wrists through straps as the entire lower half of my body logged off from my nervous system. My husband, masked and scrubbed, came in and knelt beside me to tell me I was doing a good job. (I was not, in fact, doing anything, except nervously making jokes and weeping.) 

The physical sensations of birth I’d spent months imagining were replaced by the cold tingle of the table, the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights, the murmur of nurses and PAs making water cooler small talk over my abdominal cavity. I could not see or feel anything on the other side of the blue curtain suspended over my torso, but I could hear. And just as my silly little labor playlist cued up a song by Otis Redding, I heard the squawk of a whole new person entering the world, and the entire thing felt preordained, every last bit of it. 

There are two photos on my phone, separated by about 14 hours. In the first, I’m in a yellow lace maternity dress, holding a French 75, grinning under a pastel mask and posing next to an iced platter of raw oysters on the half shell. In the next, I’m masked, hair-netted, freshly Covid-19-swabbed, and giving an anxious, goofy thumbs-up from a gurney, waiting for someone to roll me into an operating room and deliver my son. There are no string lights or birthing tubs. But my birth wouldn’t have been mine without either of these moments. Both, I think, were a kind of labor. 

One decadent night of oysters and champagne wouldn’t be enough to absolve me of disappointment — in fact, it took me months to even be able to use the word “birth” when talking about the day my son was born. (Until very recently, I called it “the day of my C-section” or the more Santa Claus-like “the day he came.”) It also wouldn’t soften the sting of envy I still catch myself feeling toward other mothers, or the ugly, insidious feeling that I didn’t earn the title of motherhood quite like they did. 

What that extravagant night on the patio did offer, though, was the chance to reclaim some agency, make a decision without subconsciously comparing notes to what I saw on birth Instagram. In retrospect, a fancy meal the night before my C-section wasn’t just a concession prize, but a rebuking of a culture that valorizes women’s pain and veils it as a virtue. In a strange way, it led me right back to what I wanted from the start: following my intuition, allowing myself to decide what I needed in the moment. I still experienced all of that, in a way. My intuition just happened to lead me to oysters and caviar, and, of course, my son. 

Oh, and I didn’t throw up.

Gray Chapman is a freelance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia.

Hand soap is, of course, having a moment.

At my local Target last week, stockpilers loading up on Purell, toilet paper, and dried beans had also picked the hand soap aisle practically clean. (A number of grocery stores have since enacted limits on how many items individual shoppers can buy at one time.) As someone who reflexively reaches for Mrs. Meyer’s more by force of habit than a conscious decision, I wondered how many others intentionally chose the brand for their quarantine soap of choice, bypassing the utilitarian workhorses in doing so. I had to imagine a band of wild-eyed, panicked shoppers flooding the soap section, only to pause and consider whether they wanted their quarantine to have notes of rosemary, basil, or oat blossom. 

Though some are skeptical that an organic soap brand touting essential oils is effective in the face of a virus, experts say that soap, period, is one of the best tools we have at our disposal right now, and it doesn’t have to be harsh or hospital-grade. The Mrs. Meyer’s brand is (wisely) not overtly using Covid-19 as a marketing peg, but it doesn’t have to: Amid all the coronavirus service journalism to emerge in recent weeks, Mrs. Meyer’s soap and surface cleaner have been recommended by CNN, The Strategist, Mashable, and CNET, to name a few. 

I’ve never been particularly attuned to hand soap brands, but once I started looking for it, I realized Mrs. Meyer’s was everywhere. On an overnight trip to New York in February, I spotted it in the bathrooms of two out of the three Williamsburg restaurants I patronized, and in the studio of the artist I was there to meet. Back home in Atlanta, it lurked at friends’ kitchen sinks and in the bathroom of my neighborhood bakery.

In conversations with other people who regularly buy Mrs. Meyer’s, the same three or four reasons were echoed again and again: It looks nice on a countertop. (In an era when trash cans, cookware, and other formerly unremarkable utilitarian objects now make an aesthetic statement, this feels important.) The fragrance is nice, and never too sweet, too artificial, or too astringent. It seems gentler on hands. It feels just a tiny bit indulgent yet can be procured easily at most major grocers. And my favorite: “It’s environmentally friendly … I think?”

My $4 bottle of basil hand soap says, perhaps obnoxiously, that I’m not the kind of person who springs for Aesop ($39), but I’m just a little more discerning than basic “lemon zest.” 

“Consumer expectations, in general, are much higher than they ever have been,” explains Cara Salpini, an editor at the industry trade magazine Retail Dive. “They’re expecting products to have sustainable, clean ingredients, to look and smell nice, to be really pleased with the product, and for it to function.” It’s why a mattress can’t just be a mattress anymore. And it’s how, when Mrs. Meyer’s began appearing on grocery store shelves in the early aughts, it was ideally and preemptively positioned to captivate millennial suckers like me. 

It’s almost like, sometime around Y2K, a shrewd marketer got a glimpse into the buying habits of the future, and returned with the perfect formula for convincing people with a tiny bit of disposable income to spend it on something as objectively boring as soap for their hands. Step one: Design packaging that looked nice on countertops, and fragrances that felt a little bit special. Step two: Build the brand around a rustic and virtuous character from simpler times who loved gardening, taking care of her living space, and other wholesome activities one might categorize as “self-care” today. Step three: Gesture at being environmentally conscious. Step four: Profit. 

For years, Mrs. Meyer’s was one of few brands offering something slightly elevated for the kind of person who needed hand or dish soap, and wasn’t particularly willing to look for it outside of the grocery store — but was willing to spend $2.50 extra for it not to be orange Dial. Jarod Jones, a Mrs. Meyer’s loyalist who works in e-commerce and product merchandising, attributes the brand’s early success in part to its packaging: “When you see it next to the Dials and the Softsoaps, you’re like, ‘Well, clearly this is cuter,’” he says. “It seemed like trendy design at the time.”

Jones also makes candles, and found inspiration for one of his favorite creations (a radish and fern scent) in a bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s Radish, the scent that converted him into a fan of the brand. “That was something where I was like, ‘I am not finding this anywhere else,’” he adds. “Especially with kitchen stuff, it’s either ‘fresh scent’ or citrus over and over again … so radish was really rad, because it smelled fresh but it’s not standard.”  

When Mrs. Meyer’s launched in 2001, Pamela Helms headed up product and fragrance development. Helms continues to hold that title at S.C. Johnson, which acquired the brand in 2008. “When [founder Monica Nassif] explained the idea, I thought it was a radical approach, to bring this beauty of experience to a cleaning product,” says Helms.

Nassif, a former Target marketer, named the line after her Iowan mother, Thelma, a hardworking homemaker, gardener, and mother of nine. Thus, Helm explains, those early fragrances were mostly literal interpretations of what might be realistically grown in a Midwestern backyard: herbs like basil and rosemary; produce like radishes and rhubarb; Iowa pine during the holiday season. She describes these fragrances as having “a halo of healthiness to them.” (The line has since expanded that definition a bit to include less literal expressions, like “snowdrop,” “plum berry,” and “oat blossom.”)  

Around the same time Mrs. Meyer’s entered the marketplace, Method, which hit Target shelves in 2002, also joined the soap-disrupting fray. The brand’s modern fragrances and Karim Rashid-designed packaging felt, and still feels, like a youthful foil to Mrs. Meyer’s homespun, folksy vintage; both looked distinctive from anything else on shelves at the time. Like Mrs. Meyer’s, Method worked sustainability and social responsibility into its messaging, trumpeting nontoxic ingredients and recycled packaging. In 2017, S.C. Johnson & Son (which also owns decidedly non-green chemical products like Windex, Drano, and Off insect repellent) acquired Method, too. 

By the time Mrs. Meyer’s had made its way into higher-end grocery stores like Whole Foods nationwide in the mid-aughts, the New York Times Magazine nailed the brand’s throwback packaging, and the virtuous rural Midwestern homemaker for whom it was named, as part of the allure. “The goal isn’t to sell to the Mrs. Meyers of the world; it’s to sell to those who like the idea of her.” 

It’s true: In the same way that actual farmers’ homes probably don’t look like what Joanna Gaines calls “farmhouse,” actual homesteaders probably don’t spend $4 on 12 ounces of hand soap because it smells like geraniums. (Because, I mean, they probably use lye and lard instead.) It’s labor turned aesthetic, scrubbed bare of its dirt and elevated into an upper-middle-class Pinterest board. And in a time when an anxiety-riddled middle class might look for solace in soothing, cozy imitations of folk life (see: cottagecore), Mrs. Meyer herself and the wholesome, nurturing ethos she embodies welcomes one like a verdant meadow; a caricature of A Time When Things Were Simpler. 

Now, nearly two decades after the Meyer’s/Method disruption, even the most pedestrian soap brands seem to be getting in on the boutique fragrance action. Last year, Softsoap debuted a special collection “meant to bring style and happiness to washing your hands,” with fragrances like orchid and coconut milk. Dial’s portfolio now includes options like white tea and the eternally millennial-baiting pink Himalayan salt. I asked Helms whether she felt other brands were cashing in on the allure Mrs. Meyer’s initially created. “We’re delighted that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” she says. 

Does that change the way they do business, or how they think about their fragrance portfolio? “We’ve seen all kinds of sexy [fragrance] combinations out there, but we’re really staying true to what has got us to where we are today.” (Some might disagree — Jones, for one, sees some of Mrs. Meyer’s newer scents as straying from that path. “They’re not real scents. They have one called ‘oat blossom,’ which I’m like, that’s not a thing. It’s a made-up name.”) 

In 2019, Target debuted a new store brand, Everspring, a range of cleaning products in sleek packaging with interesting fragrances, a trendy serif font, and sustainability vocabulary words sprinkled on the labels. The line hit shelves on Earth Day. Like Mrs. Meyer’s, Everspring invokes its biodegradable packaging and plant-based ingredients in its copy. Some of Everspring’s products have received mixed reviews from the EWG, due to synthetic ingredients like methylisothiazolinone, a possible allergy trigger that could also present a hazard to aquatic life — and Mrs. Meyer’s has gotten pushback on this issue as well. In Mrs. Meyer’s case, there is also the ethical baggage of its parent company, S.C. Johnson, which has come under fire for animal testing, including toxic ingredients in some of its products, and donating to Republican politicians. 

From an environmental standpoint, Mrs. Meyer’s isn’t perfect, but few mass-market household cleaners or hand soaps are. Whether it’s intentionally vague language (“chemical-free”) or straight-up obfuscation about ingredients, greenwashing has crept into many products sold by major retailers, from Simple Green to Raid “EarthBlends.” S.C. Johnson settled a lawsuit over misleading “green” language on Windex labels back in 2010. (The one truly great soap alternative that comes to mind is that clunky old stalwart Dr. Bronner’s, which is completely biodegradable and, thanks to its absurdly high concentration relative to its absurdly huge packaging size, lasts an actual lifetime.)

But the language on the label and the earthy scents at least make it feel like one isn’t harming the planet by purchasing. For a lot of people who buy Mrs. Meyer’s, maybe that — the suggestion of sustainability, the general aura of nature, the suggestion of digging around in a rural Midwestern garden — is enough. 

Sustainability, as Salpini reminds me, has become not just a moral imperative but, in terms of capitalism, a crucial differentiator for brands, especially those that want to reach millennials and Gen Z consumers. “There’s a lot of interest [in sustainability], and it’s mainly coming from younger consumers,” she says. “I think you can imagine why.” And maybe that’s the other reason Mrs. Meyer’s seems to dominate so many middle-class vanities and kitchen counters these days. Its products telegraph the sense of “eco-friendliness” distinctly enough to capture the attention of a wide swath of shoppers: those who are vaguely interested in “green” products but not quite interested in researching a parent company’s lobbying efforts, or learning how to actually pronounce “methylisothiazolinone,” or strictly scrubbing their house with vinegar.  

(In other words: “It’s environmentally friendly … I think?”)  

When I shopped for last-minute provisions last week, I grabbed one of the remaining bottles of Mrs. Meyer’s hand soap (in basil), just to be safe. So did a friend of mine, Katie Lambert, who told me she purchased her backup Mrs. Meyer’s stash on March 6, the same day she chose to re-up on Kleenex and Cup o’ Noodles. Prior to the pandemic, Lambert didn’t consider herself a Mrs. Meyer’s stan beyond the occasional hand soap splurge; she now owns a full suite of products, including the multi-surface concentrate, the dish soap, and the everyday cleaner. I asked why she reached for this particular brand when any brand would do. “If I’m locked in my damn house, I might as well clean with geranium,” she said. Buying bleach in bulk felt extreme and a little austere, she added, “but geranium-scented Mrs. Meyer’s feels like my life still, I guess. Normalcy through soap.”

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