I'm Pregnant!
But what's a baby?
Hey! Yesterday I shared on social media that I am pregnant!
Did I spend excessive time brainstorming my reveal, so I came off as the appropriate balance of cool-but-not-cliche? Yes, duh, of course.
So, the big question is: am I becoming a mommy blogger? Or a motherhood-is-the-only-thing-I-talk-or-write-about-er?
I mean, I certainly don’t expect to start giving breast pump tutorials on the internet, but nurturing a life’s very beginning, like at the LENTIL LEVEL*, will be astoundingly hard not to work into conversation occasionally. (Especially when my alternatives topics these days are the at-home-COVID-test black market, the revival of Dexter, or new Safari browser extensions I’ve found helpful.)
I don't really "get" a baby. No more than bitcoins, the difference between windsurfing and kitesurfing, and why parents seem to refer to their child, even one well into their second year of life, whose room is probably adorned with an artsy Etsy wooden name decal hung on its wall, as "baby." (I’m more possessive of a sweater!) without even an “MY” to claim it.
Somehow, in my thirty-two years of life, I’ve wholly evaded all things baby, the way, by alternating addresses, I’ve escaped all things jury duty.
But it's not like I've been anti-baby. To be anti-something, you have to be aware of something and what I'm trying to say is that, from my perspective, babies and I have not co-existed. It's like when, after ten years as a loyal TD Bank patron, I switched to Chase, and suddenly I started noticing Chases where I'd never seen Chases before.
I've been the type of woman who intentionally chooses adult-only hotels, somehow evaded even a single night spent babysitting and has never seen live breastfeeding. (Aside from that time at ABC Kitchen when a baby was sucking six inches to my right and I told my friend I thought it was inappropriate as I ate my $21 salad and she, a new mom, almost threw hers at me.)
Hell, my wedding was firmly no kids allowed!
But now that I have a twenty-week-old babe growing inside me, I'm suddenly heeding things I've never heeded before. Previously, whenever a baby would cry on an airplane, I'd think of it as an annoying noise, like that ambient hissing that happens when Cindy forgets to mute herself on Zoom. Every time.
Like the director of the Zoom room, I've always assumed that the crying kid's mom had the mute power, but now I realize it's a human baby crying. A human adult has to uncover why the baby's going berserk with minimal data and then resolve the berserking before someone [like myself] does something to warrant a high-altitude citizen arrest.
But now, when I pass a stroller on the sidewalk, I don't just say "on your left!" and run by; I slow down to observe the performance of the chariot protecting the little swaddled bean of perfection.
Suddenly I’m taking inventory of which restaurants we frequent offer high chairs and kids’ menus, and I’m noticing tiny baby clothes that I must have; I don’t know, looked past with the same kind of eyesight aversion our husbands, of course, apply to hot women?
I've always desired to have kids. I've just also never given much thought to them. I've always wanted to own a house, but I never routinely thought about septic systems.
When I envisioned "having kids," I saw myself cutting up orange slices for soccer halftime (which I'd hand out while giving my Coach Talia pep-talk to the team), singing happy birthday around an Elmo-themed sheet cake at a bowling alley, and binge eating chocolate covered almonds in bed until the garage door sound indicated that my 17-year old he/she/they made it home from another Saturday night alive.
(Apparently, but not surprisingly, all of my future family visions involved food?)
But notice that nowhere in those mental montages was sheltering my little one in a tent because I know that a baby cannot be in the sun until a certain age. Or buy a little sick bathtub because a baby doesn’t sit in a sink. Or knowing how many weeks pregnancy is…
I never expected what I'd want to learn to expect when I'd be expecting!
The good news—for my ego, not really for our future child—is that my husband is also clueless, thinking you can put a baby in a crib and go out for pizza the same way we put our dog in the mudroom and grab fajitas.
It's like I've been living as a caterpillar, knowing that someday soon I will turn into a butterfly, but only followed caterpillars on Instagram. And maybe muted butterflies trying to #normalize breastfeeding.
It’s vitalizing seeing life from a new vantage point. My old angle was getting pretty stale. It’s like that day I rode a guided tour bus around Manhattan, which had been my home for a decade, and saw, from the double of the deckers, things I couldn't believe I'd never noticed before on feet-level. Like ornate details carved into old buildings, a surprising amount of illegal fire escape patios, and, golly, SO MANY CHASE BANKS!
De-boarding the bus with my polluted-wind-blown hair, I felt like I was in an entirely new city. Or at least, I knew there was so much more in this city than I’d seen at street level.
So now I’ve become a person learning about life through another, living lentil person’s lens, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced anything more extraordinary.
It's stimulating to catch a new view. Not that my life prior was dull or unfulfilling, but I'm treasuring the presence and energy I derive from overseeing a sperm grow into a person struggling to declare a major.
