The first time I left my baby, it was to go to a strip club in Milwaukee. Three weeks postpartum, I booked my flight and wondered whether my Owlet baby monitor app would have service at the Silk Exotic Gentlemen’s Club.

I hadn’t planned to report on the adult industry at the same time I tried to teach myself how to strap my baby into a BabyBjörn. (I failed. It looked like a straitjacket.) But there I was, with my reporter’s notebook, watching Stormy Daniels strip down to a silver thong against the backdrop of strobe lights, a fog machine, and—in a strange nod to our surreal times—a 60 Minutes clip. I had been asked by Vogue to profile Daniels after she said (on 60 Minutes) that President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had paid her $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to keep silent about an alleged 2006 affair with Trump. (Weeks later Trump confirmed that he had reimbursed Cohen.)

My mind was a fog machine, still in a postpartum haze, and yet from within the thick vape cloud of a Midwestern strip club, I started to see something. Were these two worlds—new motherhood and sex work—really that different?

Daniels displayed her body to middle-aged men nursing Pabst and old issues of Playboy and a gaggle of enthusiastic #Resistance ladies armed with “Dump Trump” buttons and $20 bills. I gave my body to a tiny dictator who never napped. She got cash and sold merch, part of her “Make America Horny Again” national tour. I got paid in the marvel of a middle-of-the-night smile—the moments of unimaginable joy that sustained me through the slog of another sleep-deprived, disorienting day on the tour bus of new motherhood. My nights all bled into one milk-drunk routine. Each night I mustered the energy to do the same dance. I’d also never seen so many bare boobs. At the strip club, they were taut. At Miss Susie’s Messy Play, they were leaky. In both scenarios, they perhaps did not belong entirely to the women they were attached to.

Of course, there was nothing remotely sexy about my existence. I wore my hair in a messy bun and maybe showered twice a week. I got peed on (not in a Pornhub kind of way) and, on at least two occasions, wiped my hair from my face not realizing it was smeared with vomit. I wouldn’t let the mirror, much less my husband, see me naked. Or God forbid, a room full of strangers. Or the internet. But I couldn’t stop thinking: Around the edges, didn’t they have more in common than we might think?

I’d never felt more exposed or exhausted. Then there was the endless commentary about my body that somehow seemed totally acceptable. Why hadn’t I “bounced back”? Did I look tired, healthy, thin enough, blissful enough? “Come on, Mama, give us a smile!” a construction worker yelled. I was in line at Black Seed Bagels in Nolita when a chic woman (she appeared childless, but maybe her kids were with a bilingual nanny playing with Montessori toys) looked down at my baby sleeping in his stroller (freakin’ beautiful). Then she looked at me. “Are you breastfeeding?” Ma’am, I’m just trying to get a bacon, egg, and cheese.

I filed these observations away. I hardly had the brain cells to watch Bravo, much less opine on a sociological connection between sex work and motherhood. Besides, motherhood seemed like invisible labor, not the stuff of Great Literature. I had a pile of silicone nipples (not that kind!) to wash, a baby cooking class that cost more than Tracy Anderson to go to, and so many tiny socks to fold. Do you think Cormac McCarthy ever folded socks? No, he was busy writing “dad lit.” It’s called The Road.