Why Do Today What You Can Totally Freak Out About Tomorrow: Baby Edition

One of my Toronto coworkers is pregnant, and from time to time we exchange emails, inquiring how the other is doing. It’s a sisterhood, this pregnancy thing, a bond between women who will also be squirting a baby out of their vagina. I have noticed a lot of pregnant women giving me head nods lately. It’s like the fetal equivalent of the head-nod that Jeep drivers give each other when they pass on the street. I know you know what I’m talking about.

Baby bump? Oh hell ya. *headnod* Look at all the glorious proof that other people have sex. Ain’t life grand? Anyway. My coworker, who is just sliding into her second trimester, (I’m hitting my 3^rd next week), emails me today that her and her husband are furniture shopping this weekend. What? Mavrick literally JUST PAINTED our nursery, and our shopping for baby thus far consists of two outfits I picked up at Old Navy. We are officially more prepared for a nuclear holocaust (we maintain a large supply of canned foods) than we are to have a baby.

Simply put – little Mavbling has two chronic procrastinators for a mommy and a daddy. Mavrick and I put off everything to the last minute. Including, in one memorable instance, my IUD appointment, which is the whole reason we have a Mavbling coming in three short months, so there’s that.

Pregnancy time isn’t like regular time. I have had to explain pregnancy math to Mavrick on numerous occasions. It’s like you take your last menstrual period, divide it by how many drinks you had the day you *think* you got pregnant, subtract that by how many heartbeats you skipped when you took the PG test, extrapolate out how many drinks you can consume in 9 months that you will no longer be consuming, add that to the gross national debt, and WHAM. You’re pregnant for 875 months. Or so it seems.

Until one day you wake up and realize you have 100 days left, IF you go to your due date. Jr. was 2 days early, so really, we could be looking at 98. That’s not a lot of fucking days. You realize you haven’t signed up for your classes, your nursery looks like a dumping ground for wayward boxes of crap, you haven’t toured your hospital, you don’t have a stitch of clothing for the baby, you haven’t picked out a nursery theme .. you are, in essence, the worst parents in the world.

Galvanized now, you spring into action. You call The Midwife Center to sign up for your natural childbirth classes. They have one session left, in July, that you can take before you’re due. BUT IT’S FULL. You are on the waiting list. Because I am sure this class has a high drop out rate, except for not at all. Road block number one!

You set up your tour for your hospital, which we will call St. Scare. You show up at said tour to discover a room packed with 40 other pregnant women. It reminds you of a cow farm, an impression that not only remains but grows stronger as you continue your ‘tour’. They don’t like birthing plans, skin-to-skin bonding is horseshit, their doctors have tee times to make, thankyouverymuch, so can you please just get your epidural and/or c-section and shut the fuck up already? Also, no videotaping the birth. Which they say is for safety purposes, if by safety purposes they mean making them safe from malpractice lawsuits. Mavrick and I RAN out of there, not entirely sure where in the hell we would be birthing this baby. Road block number two!

At this point, you get panicky. You start yelling at your partner to please get the goddamned boxes out of the goddamn nursery, does he want his son to live in a goddamn pigsty? And for fuck’s sake, giraffe or frog. Pick a goddamn theme before my head starts doing 360’s, and order the blankets. Did you order the blankets? You ordered a goddamn mother-effing pineapple corer and a bread basket, but you can’t order your son’s nursery bedding? And why did you let me wait till the last goddamn minute to do everything?

Oh, hai! Im in yer nursuree, licking yer babee.

Or course you are panicking for no reason. While you are screaming your head off and scaring small children, your partner has cleaned and painted the entire nursery, and called Western Psych to see about bringing you in for an eval. You calm down enough to call The Midwife Center and make arrangements to go in and see if maybe that is where you want to birth your baby.

Turns out, it totally is. As soon as you walk in the door, you know, this is it. You wonder when you turned into one of those granola-crunching Earth Mother’s, the type that want to go all natural and trust their bodies to do this, considering you walked into Mercy back first with jr, saying “Hook a sister up! To her epidural!” You laugh to yourself at how time changes everything. Ha ha. Ooooo. Self.

You and your partner smile gleefully as you envision the happy day, Mavrick with 27 video cameras set up in various locations around the room, including the one strapped to his head, making sure that not one moment is missed. You ohh-and ahh over the squat bars and birthing chairs, knowing that when the time comes, you will make that chair your bitch and shoot this baby out like it’s nothing. Because you are a powerful woman who has read WAY TOO MANY books on natural childbirth and you have deluded yourself into thinking that this is going to be a cakewalk.

Whew. Maybe everything will be okay. Maybe we do have plenty of time to get this stuff under control. You pat your belly – “It’s okay little Mavbling! Mommy and daddy got this! You will be fine!” Little Mavbling kicks back. A little chop, right to the kidneys. It’s like he knows. It’s like he’s saying, “We shall see woman, we shall see. Now. About my pediatrician….”