Always a baby shower guest, never a baby
Salad with a side of attempted wisdom
I have joked that women can never be totally free until we give up the practice of the baby/bridal shower. When done badly, they can be a tedious/depressing/possibly enraging 3 hours of your life where you sit around in nice clothes and eat some food that someone decided women must like to eat (#luncheon). Meanwhile, whatever your non-shower partner is doing during that time sounds a lot better.
But I did go to a lovely baby shower this last weekend. There were no embarrassing games that made you pretend chocolate was poo or where you had to work as a team, or you treat the pregnant person like a prop. The weather was good; everyone was happy; the salad was generously loaded with healthy fats.
It’s been a minute since I’ve been to a baby shower— most of the people I’m shower-close with have long since closed up the baby factory. Something else that indicated I’m an old lady now is that I could have had my shower gifts sent right to the couple but I ordered them to my house to give the new mom at the shower. I realized belatedly this was silly: did I do it because I love wrapping? Because I love extra trash? Because I love making a pregnant woman open a gift in front of me and then have her husband carry it to the car? Idk what went through my head. But one of the gifts I got them was the Frida Snotsucker, which I found incredibly effective and satisfying when I had babies around, so I at least got to verbally impart my love for the tool in front of a group of people.
I had my own baby shower back in the summer of 2012 at the same restaurant, sweatily sitting in the same hot seat in the front of the room, trying to open gifts both graciously and quickly. “Ana looks so pretty,” I noted this time over my sorbet and berries, and it’s true, she did, her skin glowing, her hair gleaming, her sapphire maternity dress hugging her 37-weeks-along belly. Then, without considering whether this should have been a silent observation, I followed up with, “I’m so glad I’m not pregnant.” I wasn’t trying to be snarky, but everyone around me laughed. Maybe they just all agreed with me.
There was one activity where guests could write out best wishes for the family/baby, but one of the sheets never came my way. I instead told the soon-to-be mom, “Just be ready that your laundry life as you know it will change forever. You are going to have to do laundry all the time soon. I used to feel ‘caught up’ on laundry before I had kids. Never again. That took me a LONG time to adjust to.”
Ana smiled politely, and I realized after I said it that it was a pretty pointless thing to tell an expectant parent. It’s like telling people who don’t have kids yet to enjoy their sleep. You really can’t tell people shit about parenthood until they’ve been pulled through the portal and are on the other side with you. (But it’s true, that laundry thing was more potent to me than any sort of pablum about love or motherhood or tiny smiles.)
As my mom and I headed home 3 hours later, with portable umbrella party favors in our purses, I thought about those sheets of paper offering the new parents advice and best wishes that Ana would gather up and take home along with her gifts and cards. I wondered about where she’d keep them, how often she’d come across them and if any of them would stick with her or they’d just be a memento she’d forget about and stumble upon someday. I wondered if she’d read the pile with nostalgia, or avoid looking at it because it would remind her of a past self that no longer exists and there’s no point.
If you had a shower or sip-and-see, did anyone try to impart wisdom to you that stuck for good or bad reasons? Is there much you can even tell someone about parenting before they have kids that will help them (aside from the 3 crib sheet trick)? Or do we just wish them luck and keep our mouths shut?
End credits
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One witchy thing
My husband after I showed him how I got our shared Spelling Bee over the hump to Genius by contributing just one word at the very end:
I did not feel strongly about having a baby shower at all, and my MIL felt very strongly, so this meant there were only 2 people at my shower under the age of 65 – all the guests were her friends, which was honestly extremely sweet in its way. And they did do a little book where everyone got a page to write some advice! AND one of the pieces of advice was literally something I thought back to, and relied on, and even still rely on now, with 10- and 7- year olds, and impart in my turn to new parents!!
That advice was: do whatever works, until it doesn’t. That was it. That was the whole page.
I have thought a lot about it over the years. How so, so much of the pressure we put on ourselves as parents – especially parents of infants and toddlers – comes from feeling like the things that “work” in our situation are actually BAD, because they are “crutches” or something. Pacifiers. Nursing to sleep. Rocking to sleep. Co-sleeping. Putting the baby in a separate room and shutting the door. Bouncing the baby on a yoga ball for hours a day. Stroller naps. Car naps. Giving M&Ms for pooping in the potty. Laying on the floor of your toddler’s bedroom until you army-crawl out once they are finally asleep. Propping an iPad up to watch YouTube for all meals because distracted eating is the only eating your kid does. Whatever. I did many (all?) of these things, between my two kids, and there was always this pervasive sense that, like, “am I going to do this forever? If not, aren’t I making my life worse down the road, creating a situation I will need to wean this kid off of eventually?”
NO. You are making your life BETTER by doing whatever works now. We use all kinds of “crutches” that we do not weight with this weird guilt. Diapers! You will need to eventually transition a kid away from diapers, and maybe it will be hard, maybe it won’t – but it will in no way be worse than just not using diapers on a 3-month old. Diapers work in a given stage, and when they stop working for you/your kid, you will move on from them. “This isn’t working anymore” can also just mean “this isn’t working FOR ME anymore,” as was the case for me for, say, laying on the floor of my 4-year old’s bedroom for 2 hours a night. But up until it just stopped working, it was our best solution, and so? I DID IT. Without apology.
Do whatever works, until it doesn’t. The freedom of that – freeing myself from weighting the present down with imagined future baggage, just knowing I could always change things once change became the thing that worked better, whatever “better” meant – was such a gift. I wish I had any idea who the old lady was who wrote that. I feel like I would have liked to actually know her.
My actual baby shower was, as requested, full of both dudes and women and was mostly just gay men drinking mimosas. It was just a lovely hour of “I’m pregnant but still a human.” (The host’s one year old spent 30 minutes spinning an empty beer bottle on the floor which was also a great “this will be fine” moment.) Also there was a cake with Kermit the Frog on it.
But because my in laws never honor my choices, we got a second awkward suburban shower full of “relatives” I had never met before complete with mandatory gift opening.
My advice is always “somethings will be easy for you that are hard for others, some things will be hard for you that are easy for others, you won’t know which is which until you get there and you can’t predict it so take the wins and realize the losses are temporary.”