We Choose Our Cults Every Day
Way back in January, I was idly thumbing through Instagram when I received a message that shook me like a nascent martini. “Did you hear that Taking Cara Babies donated to Trump?” a friend wrote. This sentence likely makes no sense to you, unless you’ve had a baby sometime in the past few years. Taking Cara Babies is the brand name for Cara Dumaplin, a neonatal nurse turned baby-sleep expert who became, in 2020, my everything.
In the weeks after I brought my twins home from the hospital, all I could think about was sleep—the absence of it, the craving of it, my physical and psychological inability to do even the most basic tasks without it. In came Cara, a sweet, inordinately soothing woman based in Arizona whose virtual newborn-sleep class ($79) was filled with mantras (“There’s no better mama for that baby on the planet than you”), neologisms (“SITBACK”), buzzwords (“witching separated babies from their parents felt like a . (Dumaplin and said she did not agree with all aspects of the Trump administration.) My inbox started blowing up with messages from not only by that dissonance, but also by the fact that they’d lost a trusted figure who’d taken on a mythic status—who’d become a kind of idol.
