Girl Walks Into a Bar (25 page)

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage,
Then
Comes the Baby in the Baby Carriage

When I was
in my late thirties, I felt somewhat ashamed that I wasn’t married. I had always imagined myself married. Everyone I had grown up with was married. All my friends from college, with the exception of some gay men, were married. I felt I had somehow missed the boat. Then my baby worries took precedence over marriage worries. When I realized I had cheated the whole system and would have a baby without a marriage, I no longer cared about marriage. This great anxiety lifted from me. I didn’t have a time clock and I was going to have a baby and if love were meant to happen, it could happen whenever on its own time. Marriage started to seem like a silly social convention to me. Then I found myself in the position
where the man I had been casually dating was going to be seeing me attached to a breast pump on a regular basis. At this point, marriage made a lot more sense to me. If you have any desire to have a man stay by your side and he’s going to see you hooked up to a breast pump, you should probably be bound by a legal contract.

This brings me to the point of trying to be in any way seductive postbirth. Now, some women may go on and on about the natural beauty of womanhood and the lush femininity of their wonderful life-giving bodies, blah blah blah. I could see that idea maybe applying when you are with someone with whom you have a history: your passionate years, your romantic getaways, your deep and soulful conversations by candlelight, your seeing each other through some hard times—all adding up to a beautiful tapestry that culminates in the creation of a new being who is a testament to your love for each other. When that man looks at the body of that lady, it is a reflection of all the love and shared times. Then there is getting knocked up by the guy you have known for six months, and trying to still be in any kind of flirtation phase when you are hooked up to a breast pump that makes you look like the Titty Monster from Outer Space.

Let me elaborate. If you have never seen a breast pump, to say that it is “not sexy” would be a gross understatement. There are two plastic funnels that go over the nipples. Each funnel is connected to a bottle to collect the milk. The funnel also has a tube connected to it that leads to the mechanism that creates the vacuum pump that works your nipple, stretching it long into the funnel with each pump. Are you turned on yet?

In addition, there is also a hands-free bra so you can go about your business, a bra with holes cut out where the nipples are, so the whole kit and caboodle is attached to your body through this medieval device. Now imagine that you didn’t already have a big romantic phase on which your husband can draw if he cares to block out your current status. And you are in your current status for a large portion of the day. In spite of my aforementioned huge jugs, I wasn’t producing a lot of milk. The solution to this problem is that you are supposed to pump eight times a day for fifteen minutes. That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that is TWO HOURS out of your day, on top of the time you are feeding the baby, which is already occupying much of your day. Eight times a day of pumping when you are operating on no sleep, and as soon as the baby goes to sleep, you just want to sleep too but instead, there you are, hooked up like Ol’ Bessie.

During the pregnancy too, I had to let go of all vanity—what little I had—and was just glad I was having a baby. In the third trimester, I developed the only really negative pregnancy symptom that I got the whole time, and that was wicked heartburn. I’d never had heartburn and didn’t know what it really even was, but now I was saddled with it. There were so many foods I couldn’t eat that I was eating healthier than I ever had—no pizza, no sugar, nothing greasy—and even if I wanted to have a glass of wine on occasion, I couldn’t because of the heartburn. On a nightly basis, I’d bolt up from bed, tapping myself on the sternum to try to relieve the pain. I would create odd burps and squiggly noises, the kind that should be saved for after an exchange of
I love you
s and planning for a future
together. Because of the squawks emanating from me, John started calling me The Pterodactyl. Not Lambkins, not Cuddlebuns, not Snuggie-wuggie, but Pterodactyl. One night, the second after I turned the lights off, I let out a huge burp. I started laughing uncontrollably. I didn’t mean to do it. That became the Shot in the Dark. I don’t even want to tell you about the Axis of Evil. That was the time I burped and farted at the same time. I’m not a public farter, lifting a leg and saying, “Get a loada this one!” I was mortified.

Once Eli was born, there were days when I was so busy with baby care that I wouldn’t even go outside or have any contact with society. One day around three
P.M.
, I was finally venturing out of the apartment to go for a walk with John. On the elevator, John happened to glance down and said, “Are your pants on backward?”

“Huh?”

I looked down and realized that in my haste in the morning, I had slipped my maternity jeans on backward at six
A.M.
and hadn’t noticed all day long. The moment vanity officially leaves your life is when you look down to discover an asslike configuration living where your front pockets should be.

I know new moms aren’t thinking about how they look, caring for a baby 24/7. I was no exception, but remember, I still had one foot in an odd courtship phase. My worst moment in this regard was one day when I stumbled out of the bedroom, hair wild and unkempt, completely naked except for a My Breast Friend nursing pillow, which is sort of a foam flying saucer that straps around your waist. Half asleep, I stumbled out to go to the bathroom. I looked up and saw John sitting in
the living room. I think he must have felt the way the guy did who took that famous picture of Bigfoot frozen mid-stride. I looked like a feral child who had emerged from the forest.

We silently met eyes and I went on my way, back into the woods, having just had an odd encounter with civilization.

It’s not easy to keep any mystique alive, caring for a baby in the midst of the courtship phase. In an instant, the makeup comes off, the pants are on backward, and you find that on a daily basis, you are walking the Earth in the form of your inner Sasquatch.

The Natalie Merchant Converse Axiom of Child Care

Let me explain
what it’s like having a baby in New York City. You know that Natalie Merchant song “What’s the Matter Here?” It’s about child abuse and how she sees a woman abusing her child and she wants to speak up about it, but she doesn’t dare say anything. “
And I want … to say… ‘What’s the matter here?’ But I don’t dare saaayyyyy ‘What’s the matter here?’
”

Having a baby in NYC is the opposite of that song in every way…. You are
not
abusing your child and everyone
does
dare say “What’s the matter here?” Complete and utter strangers. Sure, if you were doing something truly bad, everyone would go about their business because of the fear of breaking social convention, but why oh why does every New Yorker—and they are almost always women—feel the need to tell you your child is going to be “TOO COLD!!” I can’t tell you how many times
I’ve had to explain to a complete stranger on my elevator that I bundle Eli up downstairs in the lobby because he fusses too much if I put warm clothes and a hat on him in my apartment. I do a preemptive speech to stop these darn nosy New Yorkers from their oh-so-not-helpful child-care advice. I didn’t start out with the speeches; they developed as a response because every time I would get on the elevator, someone felt it was their civic duty to say “It’s cold out there!” while looking at the baby. I started to develop retorts in my head. “
Oh yeah?
” I would fire back silently in my mind. “
Well, did you know that in Iceland they leave their babies outside in the cold because they think it’s good for their health?!
”

One day when I was particularly fatigued, I got on the elevator and a woman said, “He’s going to be too cold out there!” because I hadn’t put his gear on yet. I just nodded, the postpartum hormones and three hours of sleep filling me with the rage of a grizzly bear. Then she said, “And his
shoe
is coming off!”

First of all, babies don’t need shoes. They don’t walk. Their feet don’t touch the ground. Shoes are just for decoration. Second, he was going to be under a sleeping bag doohickey once I got him in the lobby. When this woman said, “And his
shoe
is coming off!” I almost turned into an active volcano and spewed hot lava from my mouth. I felt the words about to snarl out of me in huge black cartoon letters and pummel her to the ground: “WELL, WHY DON’T YOU CALL CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES?”

I was really glad I didn’t say that, because at the time I didn’t
think she lived in my building, but I saw her the next day on the elevator and that would have been awkward.

The Natalie Merchant Converse Axiom also applies very much to sleep, specifically to a segment of society I came to know as the Sleep Shamers. For some reason, the first question out of everyone’s mouth to ask about your baby is “How’s he sleeping?”

“Ohhh! He’s so cute! IS HE SLEEPING?”

“So you had a baby!
HOW DOES HE SLEEP?
”

“Baby!baby!baby!baby!SLEEP????”

I don’t know how to answer. Um … Lying down with his eyes closed?

Sleep is an area in which moms can really rev up their egos to full mast and feel like they know what you should be doing. I have found that, for some reason, this is particularly true of the whole “Cry it out” School of Moms, or Ferberizers (named for Dr. Ferber, who invented the “Yer on yer own, kid” system of sleep instruction).

I just knew in my heart I was not a Ferberizer. Luckily, in Babyland you can pretty much find any school of thought that matches yours and just say, “I’m going with this guy.” For me, that happened to be Dr. Sears. He’s the “attachment parenting” guy who says, “Don’t cry it out, carry your baby on a sling with you for closeness, and breast-feed whenever they want, and it’s even OK to have them sleep in your bed with proper precautions.” Because I found I was doing much of this anyway, I just thought, “OK, well, Dr. Sears says it’s all right, so I’m down with it.”

If you don’t cry it out, you will find that this is
not
OK with the Ferberizers. I don’t mean it’s not OK for
their
kids, which it’s not, but it’s also not OK with them that someone
else
’s kids, even a complete stranger’s kids, aren’t being Ferberized. They
really really
want you to make your baby cry it out too. It’s important to their souls. If your kid cries it out, they will get enough sleep to be a successful and productive human being, go on to Harvard, and become the CEO of their own company and a generally revered member of the community. If your child doesn’t cry it out or get the requisite eleven hours, they will have ADD and not get into the right preschool, thereby setting them on a path of failing grades, early juvenile delinquency, and a meth addiction culminating in a tristate murder spree.

I find an odd correlation—another converse axiom, if you will. The Ferberizers that
I
have met are not breast-feeders. The same woman who will barrage me with the benefits of the eleven-hours assured sleep and a life of sleep freedom will say about breast-feeding, “Oh, I was not going to do that! Uh-huh! I wanted no part of it!” Now, do
I
turn around and say in a scolding tone, “Well, you gotta take one for the team on this, Judy! I mean, you
have
to breast-feed! Don’t you know that
studies show meow meow meow IQ points meow meow immune system meow meow meow
”? No. I don’t.

All moms secretly think they are doing
something
wrong and there’s
something
that slipped through the cracks, so I guess when some women think they are doing something
right
, they want to shout it at you from the highest mountain. I picture them standing on the playground, holding a megaphone, and proclaiming to all who will listen: