If I had known how much more immensely interesting I would become by gaining fifteen pounds and running around in clothes covered in vomit, I would have taken up binge drinking years ago. After years of living a fairly solitary life unfettered by in-laws, long distant realities, and advice giving strangers, having a baby has turned me one very popular zombie-lady.
Never in my life have so many people displayed such a passionate interest in my day-to-day routine. How much sleep am I getting? Am I breastfeeding? How old is my daughter? Doesn’t my baby need a sweater in this weather? Am I sure the baby isn’t overheating in her sweater?
It is not just requests for information, there are also the endless stream of well wishers who want to hold the baby, and talk to the baby, and try to make her laugh. People I don’t know have begun introducing themselves as “Grandpa Joe” and “Nanny Suze,” and while the stranger sponsored belly rubs have stopped, the new mom diet patrol has picked up the slack. I’m often approached by other WWC’s (women with children), asking me how much I gained, how much I’ve lost, and how I’m planning to deal with the rest.
It is driving me crazy. Seriously, if one more person asks me if my nipples ever chapped I’m going to move to Alaska and become one of those crazy crab fishermen I saw on Deadliest Catch. On those boats men are men and no one cares about your feelings on organic baby food.
I thought I had built a bubble; one similar to those lovely little pink ones that Glinda the Good Witch travels around in, except mine was more practical and came with a car seat. My husband and I have been on a team of two for so long it feels strange when other people want to sign up and sit on our bench. When I we found out that I was expecting, I imagined what our family would be like after the baby was born. I didn’t see a herd of people gathered around a dinner table or the emotional coming home to a house full of family. It is not that these things disgust me or I find something intrinsically wrong with these scenarios, we’ve just never had that kind of relationship with either set of our parents. But everything changed when we announced the pregnancy. Everyone suddenly wanted to make plans for their “role” in the birth process. My mother-and father in-law wanted to be there for the whole hospital fanfare, while my mother offered to come to our house, dog sit, and make me lasagna. Our respective siblings claimed “privilege” when we told them we’d be keeping the name a secret because, as my sister-in-law said, “I’m this baby’s aunt.” Phone calls and emails increased to mammoth proportion and, in all honesty, this new found attention was jarring.
To be thrust from solo act into a Menudo situation is a little much.
The night I went into labor we didn’t call a single soul until the she was out, safe, clean, and fed. I was in labor for almost sixteen hours, I’d pushed for two, I’d had major abdominal surgery—I was not up for visitors. This urge to cocoon myself and my child stretched from hours immediately before her birth into the weeks that followed our homecoming.
I’d like to say my desire for privacy was strictly emotional, some desire to hole up with my husband and new baby and spend all the precious hours of her first moments on earth together. And it was … kinda.
It was also because having a baby makes your tired, grumpy, and gross I didn’t want anyone else to see me. I wanted to just lie around like Jaba the Hutt and have my husband bring me food and hand me the baby. For the first four weeks of Emery’s life my husband knew that if I was wearing a shirt, any shirt, even my old gross white T-shirt with the hole in the armpit, I was getting dressed up. If it had been up to me, I don’t think I would have even tried to wear pants until Emmy was five weeks old.
