A Girl...

Expecting

Recently I was talking to crafts maven JustJENN about baby onesies and how best to make sure the onesie-decorating paint that I provide for my coworker's shower won't flake off or fade or catalyze Baby's First Tumor. I mentioned to Jenn that when I told my coworker what a great idea onesie decorating was (and sure, I'd love to be in charge of it! (STUPID)), she (my coworker) was only lukewarm on the idea, hedging, "Yeah, I guess it would be fun, but I'm going to invite 3,842,312 people to my shower and how many onesies am I really going to need? Like, five or six?"

Yes.

Ahem.

WRONG.

Did I have the heart to tell her that she might go through five onesies in an average day, depending on what was eaten, what was digested, and what was spit up? Of course. Because if I brought my baby home from the hospital to little more than a Days of the Week wardrobe, I would be all about finding a pointy-edged rattle with which to brain the people who didn't tell me that, hon, you're going to need a lot more than that unless you want to raise your child in an environment of love and acceptance OF FILTH. Not to mention that each size of clothing has a limited shelf life because babies have this annoying habit of growing, what with all that societal pressure to walk upright and be tall enough to push the elevator buttons. (I blame the media.)

I could go on for another three paragraphs about the things this coworker has said that might be filed under "I Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Birthin' No Babies," but to talk about them here would be mean, even though seriously. SERIOUSLY. The good news is that this woman is by all other accounts a mature, intelligent, socially conscious, informed member of society, and if she can just get that kid through potty-training, I'm positive we'll have another one for the good side. Until then, it's just...gah.

There are two basic ways to live life, and if I may be so dismissive of that expansive gray area in between, they are these: acting and reacting. The first is characterized by becoming informed, planning, thinking ahead; the second is more go-with-the-flow. The latter people prefer to learn as they go along, cross bridges they come to, deal with crises if crises should arise. But even though I'm well aware that we can never be 100 percent prepared or 100 percent aware of every little thing that can go awry, I still prefer going forward with knowledge and caution to proceeding in blissful ignorance, only to have it shattered when Baby comes home with a nickel bag in his pocket on the first day of junior high even though you swore up and down that your kid would never do drugs.

Backtracking ten years and ten levels of severity, wouldn't you rather know about diaper blowouts so that when they happen to you you're prepared rather than overcome with horrified paralysis because you had no clue such things happened in the civilized world to civilized people? Sure, maybe diaper blowouts won't be part of your parenting experience (and the baby will never scream and never tell you he hates you and then pierce his nipples), but even then, wouldn't you rather be informed about how lucky you are to have such an angelic little moonbeam of a child when it could very earily be so much worse? It shouldn't be this way, but sometimes contrast is the only thing that shows us how very lucky we really are. If you don't know that babies projectile poop or bite or die in their sleep for absolutely no reason, what will happen to you if yours does? And if you have a non-poo-xploding, non-biting, happy, healthy, live baby, doesn't being aware of the other side make you feel just that much more blessed? Mark me down for knowledge, please, even if it's scary.

This morning my coworker had her twenty-week ultrasound and I got to see photos of the adorable bulging profile, miniature skeleton hands, and freakin' panda sunken eyeholes of her half-baked fetus. It was cute, really. She was telling me all about the doctor's appointment, how she and her hubby decided not to find out the sex during this, the only ultrasound they're having "because that's the only one you get" (uh...in prison?), and how it was great to hear the heartbeat. She told me all about the goo and the wand and the drinking fifty glasses of water so you show up with a bladder stretched to within an inch of its life. She--married, thirty-four, a woman of the world--spoke as if she were letting me in on the Ancient Secrets of Old, things "girls like me" never learn about.

Most women (at least the ones you'd want to be friends with) are aware of the delicate balance between mentioning now and then how the pregnancy's going and what legume the baby resembles this week versus yap-yap-yapping incessantly about the swollen ankles and the kicky bubbles and the cravings and the peeing and the acne and the nightmares, etc., etc. OMG shut up already. And perhaps that's why "girls like me" so often grow into child-bearing adulthood knowing relatively little about the greatest responsibility a person could have--because other women don't want to be The One Who Can't Stop Talking About Herself (see also: obsessed brides).

And this is where the wonderful world of blogging comes in yet again. Personal blogs are, in essence, little frames that come from the factory with tiny gold embossed plaques reading "The One Who Can't Stop Talking About Herself." Our blogs are places for us to dump all the brain chatter, anything and everything we think and say and do (or want to think and say and do but don't have the guts), without the fear of someone telling us we're self-centered. (I know people aren't always so kind, and I myself have been called self-centered because all I do on my blog is talk about myself, which, um...duh.) What better place, then, to write lengthy essays about the consistency of your baby's vomit, the embroidery on the hem of your wedding dress, or what you and your boyfriend did for eight straight hours on Tuesday night (watched GG, pervs)? If people don't want to hear about it, they can click on by and no one's the worse. Blogs can be just diaries, after all.

But blogs aren't, of course, just diaries, and the feature that makes it so is the interaction with other living, breathing, thinking human beings out there. These virtual strangers may not necessarily care about your baby's diarrhea, but they probably care about your baby, and they might not give a rat's about your diamond-studded organdy veil, but they're probably very happy that you've found true love after all you've been through. Hopefully we've all been out of ninth grade long enough to know it's not the details that count but the larger picture, and thus we're more forgiving when our favorite blog personalities are totally dull now and then.

But I digress. What I want to say is that while it's great to have a place to share my thoughts and find a small audience of people who find most of what I say interesting, the other part of blogging I love (and I've said it a thousand times before) is getting to know other people, where they're from, what they think, how they do what they do. And the things I've learned from the Internet--from music recommendations to photography tips to what kind of paint works best on onesies--are too numerous to count. I know a whole lot more about a whole lot more that never would have entered my sphere without my Internet friends. And that's the conclusion I came to this morning as my coworker was telling me about her ultrasound appointment and ,with each juicy factoid, I found myself nodding my head because, God, I know. I know this stuff.

Let me now take this time to temporarly put aside the fact that I want to steal your babies, roll them up into little balls like marzipan, and store them in my cheek pouches. You, Internets, have created some pretty spectacular people, and I WANT ONE, WAAAAH. But we're putting that aside. Away. In the drawer. With a lock. For now. Because I want to use up this little bit of time and space to thank you because what you have given me besides cute baby overload is an incredible library of knowledge. And maybe I'm needlessly or at least prematurely dreading pooping on the delivery table or battling a two-year-old's hunger strike, but at least I know it's out there. And whether any of the bad stuff is mine to bear, I sure hope the good stuff is. Prepare for the worst, expect the best, right? Now all I need is the baby.

(Simon, I'm just saying.)

Posted by Leah at June 22, 2006 03:50 PM