Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman

Author:Catherine Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-09T14:45:49+00:00

There’s something so incredibly humbling about a baby shower. Perhaps there are lots of women out there who unwrap gift after gift, nibbling home-baked lemon bars and feeling cradled in the tremendous blessing of community and friendship, and they think, “Yeah, I deserve this! In fact, this is the least they could do!” I don’t seem to be one of them. At my baby shower last weekend, I wavered between the sublime pleasure of tremendous friendship and lavish attention, the kind words and hilarity of friends, and abject horror at the amount of effort that had gone into the lovely event: a table buckling under the weight of homemade treats, gifts so lovingly created or chosen that they made your heart ache. And me, having brought only my regular complaining self and hemorrhoids. Perhaps everyone had mistakenly thought that it was a shower for somebody else. There is picture after picture of me opening gifts, a gigantic smile practically cracking my face in half. I look a little like a glad zombie.

When I lay in bed that night, dreamily recounting the details to Michael, I was half asleep. “Where was Ben during our California baby shower?” I asked. “I can’t picture him there.” “Uh, Cath?” Michael said, and I laughed. Oh, right—the whole not-born-yet thing. It’s so hard to imagine a time before he was in our lives. It seems so strange.

And now it’s that after-the-baby-shower moment—the moment you can’t imagine early in the pregnancy—when all that’s left between you and the birth is a week or two of work (by “work” I mean, of course, zinging around the Internet doing Google searches like “C-section complications”) and, maybe, packing a little satchel to take to the hospital. I’ll be more conservative this time—fewer aromatherapy oils, no maxipads (they actually have supplies right there at the hospital!), more candy, and maybe a nice, bright shade of lip gloss. When Ben was born, Michael, in a clueless fit of optimism, had brought his guitar to the hospital—you know, in case we felt like singing during the birth: Hang on, let me just finish this last twenty hours of uninterrupted back labor, and then maybe we can squeeze in a few rounds of Kumbaya.

It seems so businesslike to be having a scheduled C-section. March third. I wrote it right into my day planner: “Meeting about September craft piece,” “Dentist,” “Birdy’s birth.” At least we don’t know Birdy’s sex, so we’ll have something to tell people besides “The baby, whose sex and name you already know, was born on the date we told you it would be born on.” For weeks before Ben’s birth, I would think—and now this seems almost tragically wrong—“Maybe today will be the day!” I’d lie in bed, imagining the story we’d tell the child one day: “Well, we had eaten a delicious chickpea and potato curry for dinner and argued over a load of laundry, and we were just lying down to sleep when my water broke. . . .

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