I should have seen it coming. I should have known. I should
have emotionally prepared myself for *gulp* the baby shower. Dun, Dun, Dun!
I mean it when I say I’m totally thrilled for this
soon-to-be-mama – I loved picking out baby books for her new arrival and
celebrating with oh-dear-god-why-do-i-insist-on-being-sober-I’m-so-not-pregnant (virgin) bellinis. What
I didn’t expect is that, duh, baby showers tend to also be full of the-already-born-variety of baby.
There. Were. Babies. Everywhere. A 17 month old dancing in
circles like a drunken sailor, chanting “car, car, CARRRR!”; a two and a half
year old covered in cupcake frosting; a three week old so tiny it did not
appear to be able to open it’s eyes. And those were just the ones I saw. (In
addition to the one who permanently attached herself to me and gnawed on my
fingers for about two hours, every minute of which was kind of like heaven.)
To say I was green with envy isn’t entirely accurate – I
don’t begrudge them their adorable snotty babbling babes or resent their
fertility (because, um, that would be clinically insane and it’s also entirely possible that I was in the midst of
babies-conceived-with-Clomid, a reality far more prevalent than I ever knew.).
It’s more that I just, like, want one. Like, yesterday <naturally talk of
babies lapses into, like, talking like a valley girl. That’s a thing, right? >.
We’ve always known we wanted kids – secret shame: C and I had
a baby girl’s name picked out by our junior year in college – but I never
really knew quite how much. There’s
something totally intangible about this feeling – and lest you think I’m going
down some ultra-weird-maternal-biological-impulse road, C has it too. We both
get emotional thinking about how bad we want this – how bad I too want to
suffer through nine months of unceasing nausea, how bad C wants to suffer
through nine months of I’m-too-nauseous
to look at you let alone have sex with you treatment. We’re just dying to sleep
three hours a night, in 8-minute increments, and find that all of our clothes
are covered in spit-up, snot or both (that’s basically parenthood in a
nutshell, right?).
Anyway. One emotional rollercoaster of a baby shower later and
here I am, at home. Mindlessly perusing pictures of baby rooms on Apartment Therapy ("Emerson's Vintage Nursery"; "Juniper's Whimsical Abode" - seriously, I could not make this stuff up) because, err, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Okay fine, so I probably need better distractions – this, this and rigorous house cleaning
(why yes, I will vacuum the
baseboards!) should suffice, for now. Only *cough* 72 hours until we find out
whether this cycle worked…
