Throughout my pregnancy, when I have reached out to other pregnant people or new parents to ask for recommendations on this or that product, the most common links they’ve sent back to me have all started with Amazon dot com.

As a rule, I don’t buy things from Amazon unless I have literally no other choice. This means I buy things there perhaps once a year because, turns out, there’s almost always another choice. (In fact it is very easy for most people to live almost entirely without Amazon and I strenuously encourage you all to give it a try.) However, for the sake of honesty, I must confess that the temptation to shop there has been a little greater this year. Amazon’s whole deal is that it sells everything I could ever want, which became mightily appealing when nobody else seemed to sell the specific things that I wanted. (Cotton maternity leggings! That’s all I was asking for!)

Not to sound like a scold, but it was still quite possible not to shop on Amazon even given this constraint because, I’m sorry to say, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. It is okay to be minorly inconvenienced from time to time. It is just fine to not treat the world like your own personal genie with unlimited wishes unlocked.

The second most popular recommendation from pregnancy veterans has been to “check Facebook Marketplace.” This was something I couldn’t have done even if I wanted to, because I deleted my account at the beginning of the year. I had absolutely no regrets about this decision until I started building a baby registry and thought, “I should be able to get all this secondhand.” The best ways known to me of getting things secondhand were through Facebook.

As generally sucky as Facebook is today, Marketplace and the various groups people formed there (specifically the Buy Nothing Group*) are undeniably valuable resources, ones that I was starting to miss. I wanted to get free maternity clothes from someone who didn’t need them anymore, in the knowledge that I could easily hand them off to the next pregnant person when I was done with them. I wanted access to the glut of baby gear that I know exists in my neighborhood so that I could receive the gift of a bassinet from someone nearby, use it for a couple months, and then send it to its next home.

So despite my visceral distaste, I trudged back to Facebook dot com with my head hung low and asked the world-gobbling Meta to readmit me into its insatiable maw. But for whatever reason, my attempt at reentry was flagged as suspicious and I was forever denied access to the Metakingdom. (Maybe Mark Zuckerberg has read my newsletter and singled me out as his personal enemy, in which case I will joyfully challenge him to single combat.)

I was embarrassed to have been rejected from a platform that I hated in the first place. I was also frustrated, both by this personal setback and by the knowledge that Facebook has seized so many elements of community living and turned them into proprietary assets. We should be able to share things with our neighbors through multiple means and media. It should be easy for people who live near each other to connect with and support each other.

We should have decentralized online spaces to do this; we should have physical spaces to do this. But instead we have megacorporations slurping up our attention to make profit and we have, despite the marvel of the internet, an unprecedented level of isolation from household to household because some dudes in the 1950s had a real kink for keeping their wives locked up in their kitchens all day. The history of capitalism has been one of constant, progressive enclosure, with more and more aspects of our society being designed to prevent people from helping each other so that they must instead engage in endless consumerism to meet their needs.

But I digress.

I was not going to fix the atomization and rampant consumerism of American life before this baby was born, so I would have to figure out some shit in the meantime.

Here, in an attempt to be at least a little useful to at least one person, are some of the alternatives to Amazon and Facebook that helped keep me clothed and provisioned while a giant water balloon slowly expanded beneath my ribs for nine months:

Getting New Stuff

Clothes
I think I bought 15 total new garments during this pregnancy. I really liked Quince’s offerings, especially this bralette in which my boobs are the happiest they’ve ever been. (Honestly recommend it even for non-pregnant people.) I did panic and buy a few things from Gap, which I regretted instantly. Never impulse-buy cheap clothes, even if your midsection is rapidly expanding! Love yourself!

Gear
As much as I would’ve loved to source all of our nursery items entirely secondhand, to build a virtuous and eclectic nest, the reality is that the baby industry is gonna getcha with its safety regulations and its online registries that let other people buy some of this stuff for you. Babylist was solid, no complaints. We indicated our preference for secondhand items often, and sometimes got them, but for the most part we just accepted a temporary deluge of large boxes and packaging materials. You gotta do what works for you. I’ll make a point to pass as many of these items on to new homes as possible when we’re done with them—my first stop will be WeeCycle, a fantastic organization in Denver that donates used baby gear to families in need.

My one recommendation on this topic is to find a brick-and-mortar store where you can try out rocking chairs and gliders. We drove all the way out to a mall in the suburbs for this reason, and the trip was more than worth it. Sit in the chairs. Make sure you and your partner both fit in them. Do not buy a chair online on the merits of its reviews alone. Love yourself.

Getting Used Stuff

Brick-and-mortar secondhand stores
I’ll be honest, this one was usually a disappointing dead end. My nearest big-name thrift stores (Goodwill and Arc) had no maternity selection to speak of. I found a place outside of town where I could buy a couple staples, but in general I was left with a strong conviction that someone needs to open a secondhand maternity/kids store in my neighborhood, which is the baby capital of Denver … and should that someone be me??

Friends with babies
Shoutout to some lovely people who sent us clothes, toys, carriers, gadgets, and other odds and ends their children don’t need anymore. We actually had to start turning people down because there’s nowhere else to put new clothes! Hopefully more of my local friends will start having babies so that I can continue the cycle in a few years. (Only joking a little.)

Nuuly
Wish I had discovered this one earlier in the pregnancy! It’s a bit of a pricey investment (a $100/month prescription) but it has an extensive maternity selection. I’ve found the cost well worth it to be able to wear nice outfits for events/holidays and to have outerwear on hand that zips over my largeness. I appreciate that you can suspend your prescription at any time and pick it back up again whenever the fancy strikes you.

Craiglist
I am happy to report that Craiglist still rules. If you are also exiled from Facebook, this is an excellent Marketplace replacement. I wasn’t satisfied with other FB alternatives out there like OfferUp or Freecycle—there simply aren’t enough people using those sites to make them a valuable resource. But lots of us are still going strong on Craigslist, keeping the dream of the early internet alive. Join us. The water’s fine.

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All of this to say: Big, evil companies believe your highest and holiest purpose in life is to increase their shareholder value, and they work very hard to make it as easy as possible for you to do that. And while sometimes it takes a little more time, research, and money to avoid giving them what they want, it’s not impossible. My personal view on all this is that if I have a reasonable ability to make a less harmful consumer choice, then I have an ethical responsibility to do so. If you feel the same, I hope some of the time and research and money I have spent while fulfilling an even higher and holier purpose—the reproduction of more labor power to feed the capitalist machine—can help you clothe and equip yourself in ways that align a little better with your values.

*The Buy Nothing Project is low-key library socialism and it rules. It is objectively awesome for so many people to be able to use stuff for free while they need it, then put those items back into community circulation when they’re done. It is dreadful that it only exists on Facebook.

Things to Read/Watch:

• My current nonfiction project is Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. It’s written in a highly accessible narrative style and it will make you want to smash some computers. If someone ever rolls their eyes and calls you a Luddite, you’ll be newly empowered to raise a finger and say, “Actually…”

• “Screens are inconstant, unsame, unstable. A screen demands my attention … through that fundamental inconstancy: I know something may have changed since I last looked at it, know I cannot trust it to remain the same, to be steady or faithful. I must be vigilant towards a screen, always on alert, suspicious.”

• How not to outsource your brain to a morally bereft multibillion-dollar corporation.