Recently I attended my very first baby shower if you can believe it and it was a pretty nice experience. Warmhearted, instructional and illuminating. It’s astonishing I’ve managed never to have been to any of these previously since it seems like everyone on my friends list recently had a baby or is having a baby, my Facebook news feed is almost exclusively an ongoing stream of intelligence and reports about all these mothers and their babies, the trials and joys, the suffering and the ecstasy, I think I’m the last female standing not to have kids and husbands and cars, paying mortgages on houses, being a wife and mother, worker and lover, aside from maybe four others, it’s down literally to me.
At the shower, there were all these wonderful women, most of them business professionals, married with one or two kids. The house was full of women, there were only two men there, I marveled at all the women and remarked to one of them about the head count.
“I don’t think I even know this many women,” she said. Her name was Jennifer. “Even if I did, I don’t think they’d all come to my baby shower.” I felt the same. The turnout was impressive. I was enraptured and entranced as I hovered abashedly around the finger foods and kept myself close to the bolstering bottles of champagne and wine. I was worried I’d be very much the obvious left field freak of nature Strange Woman Present but thankfully I wasn’t. The experience like I said was enjoyable and got my brain (and heart and womb) to ruminating.
On entering and before meeting Jennifer, a basket brimming with diapers was pointed out to me. I was instructed to write something waggish and whimsical on one of the diapers so that the diaper changes of the future for the new parents would be vivacious and engaging and not merely just gross and disturbing. This liveliness seemed lifted out of a list of possible activities from a page one might come across if you googled the key phrases “Baby shower” and “Cheerful doings.”
The two beautiful hosts of the night each don’t themselves have children, which added irony and humour and some nice subtle touches of free-spirited nihilism and anarchy to the evening. During a quiet stolen moment after Danielle, the resplendent mother-to-be, made her way through her incredible hull of cards and gifts with spirited efficiency, I confided with one of the few other childless women present, her name is Alison, she’s one of Danielle’s best friends and was one of the hosts of the evening.
“So!” I said, “Motherhood.”
“Right,” said Alison.
“Pregnancy. Oof,” I said, “Wow. Children. You?”
I offered wide unblinking eyes as I said these words, brought an intensity to my stare and made that strange blowing air through loosely pressed lips sound, an audible action that somehow always does with a certain unmatched accuracy sufficiently convey the “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” rock and a hard place viewpoint, position, manner of thinking and philosophy.
“I don’t know,” Alison said, “I don’t know.”
Her eyes glassed over as she deliberated.
“Me neither,” I said, “I mean. How does one decide such a thing. How do you ‘know.’ When is the best time to even consider having a kid, is your man the right man, does he want kids, do you want kids, will he make a good father, will you make a good mother, what about careers and costs and all the things that are expensive and hard and draining and time-consuming and depressing, the very opposite of adorable moments and endless fun. Right? Shit.” I said.
“Right,” said Alison, “Shit.”
“Also, it’s so easy to romanticize such things. Like your own kid’s gonna be so gorgeous and smart and cute and fun when maybe it won’t be, maybe the kid will be ugly or stupid or shitty in all kinds of very miserable, irreparable, super wretched ways. It could get into dealing drugs or be a liar or make bad friends, get into gangs and violence, drop out of school, be a horror and a nightmare, all kinds of things. Plus the tantrums and the shouting, and kids fucking touch everything too, break things, they can be holy shit so cute but also oh my God wow annoying and exhausting, asking ‘why’ all the time, constantly needing and wanting things, screaming or crying and maybe never stopping with that shit, driving you actually insane while you’re trying to remember the last time you slept or had some time to yourself or how to maintain your relationship with your partner, you could spend years not remembering the last time you had any kind of freedom or fun, or who you even are or what your goddamned name is. All kinds of difficulty in the coordination of it, the timing of things, fielding all the problems as they come in, trying to make it work when maybe actually it’s just too much or it’s not what you thought it would be or it sucks much more than it doesn’t. And the womb too. The womb’s like a goddamned ticking clock time bomb, you only have ‘so long’ to bandy about and fuck around.”
“Right,” said Alison.
“Decisions, decisions,” I said, and we both fell to another silent moment’s shared solemnity. It was like we were expressing a hushed and honouring respect for fallen comrades, the fallen comrades were our friends with kids or were ourselves for not having any.
“So,” I continued, “On one hand right, ‘it’s not for everyone.’ It’s a lot harder and more work and not always this relentless bed of adorableness and joy. Like I said, what if the kid just the pits. Also all those other things. Fucking the kid up bad by not always being the best parent, fucking shit up for yourself or for them, feelings of resentment, second guessing everything, especially if the kid sucks, or if your life does once the kid is there, other shit too, like postpartum depression and gaining weight, ruining your body from the pregnancy, not sleeping and feeling ugly and tired, no more romance with the husband, fighting with the kid or yourself or the husband, or maybe the husband feels like shit because you feel like shit, or you lavish all your love and thought and attention and time on the kid and the dad is clueless or doesn’t help or just gets in the way. Or the husband runs off with a twenty year old because you’re no longer so great to hang out with, or you aren’t meeting his needs anymore, or you just seem to now prefer the kid to him, or whatever goddamned else. Also some women are just sad and tired and miserable, they no longer prefer anything, not the husband or the kid or themselves even, they resent the whole thing, they’re sad, they feel like they missed something, they lost out, they might’ve replaced good career possibilities with motherhood and the motherhood thing isn’t always all sunshine and diamonds so like. Yeah. Christ. How to decide. How does one ‘know’. Because on the other hand… we’re kind of here because we’re alive. We live and we can create more life. We come outfitted ‘for the job.’ We’re born to love and nurture and take care of things, we’re maybe here most of all to make life and to give love. It might be the great regret of any woman’s life not to do that one Great Miracle Thing we are all so incredibly very specially designed to very beautifully do…”
Alison listened to my words with a Zen Queen’s patient calm.
“This is it,” she said finally, “This is what you do.”
I gave Alison my full attention. She produced a quarter from somewhere. The quarter was total in its look of innocence.
“Okay,” she said, “So. Heads is ‘Baby,’ Tails is ‘No Baby’ or you can decide what is what. You call it as the coin is flipping and you do the flipping. Then the moment the result is in, you see how the result makes you feel. You see how you feel inside, regardless of what the result happens to be.”
“Oh,” I said pointlessly and resisted the urge to glare at the quarter. Its former innocence had disappeared. I took a deep breath and focused for a moment, like I was about to attempt a gold medal vault at the Olympics or some totally different but equally life or death comparable in importance seeming thing.
“Okay,” I said, “Tails Baby. Heads No baby.”
“Alright,” said Alison.
We flipped the coin.
It was Heads.
No baby.
I felt annoyed. I also felt I should hide that annoyance by a mask of good sportsmanship and neutrality. I wasn’t immediately ready to express how I felt in words. We moved onto Alison. She said Heads Baby, Tails No baby.
It was Tails.
No baby.
We both gazed at the quarter. It offered no comment. There was another shared silence uniting us. A pregnant pause if you will. Then we looked fiendishly at each other, our eyes mutinous and flashing.
“Twins! Twins! Twins!” we shouted, clasping each other’s hands in compressed excitement as we jumped up and down like a couple of meth-addicted school kids. We grinned and laughed and huddlingly shared a delirium of defiance and delight, like we were already triumphantly popping out perfect, gorgeous, flawless, incredible, brilliant sets of twins unstoppably, all over the place, with no figures misshapened and no beats missed.
Alison and I had simultaneously given the finger to Providence and coins and fate. What did that fucking quarter think it was that it could with such implacable presumptuous inanimate importance decide the combined fates of both our marvelous wombs “just like that.” Fuck that quarter. Fuck fate. We both responded to the situation in this same exact immediate fired up way. We had agreed to leave the decision of our lives and wombs up to the coin of fate and then immediately rejected what fate had to say. And not only did we spurn fate’s decision, we both sailed right past “No baby” straight ecstatically through to “Twins! Twins! Twins!”
“Ladies, ladies,” said a nearby woman. She frowned at us. This had an instantly admonishing effect. We quieted down in a laudable attempt to veer nicely toward better public behaviour defined by elegance of sound and action and a poetry of restraint. None of this jumping up and down and shouting “Twins! Twins! Twins!” thing. There came an eventual “That’s better” expression onto the intervening schoolmasterish woman’s face. “Besides,” said this woman, “You don’t want twins.”
“Yeah we do,” Alison and I said together, trying our best to not sound like reprimanded schoolgirls.
“No you don’t,” said the immovable woman. “Just think about the logistics of twins. Imagine a kid crying all through the night and needing all kinds of things, needing to be watched 24-7 and being totally dependent on you at every moment, at all hours, for days, months, years. Now multiply that by two.” The woman paused to let the somberness of the cold hard truth of her knowledge and words sink deep, fast in, and through. “Also, breastfeeding. What are you going to do? Breastfeed both kids? Two crying babies at the same time.” The woman didn’t even wait to see whether we agreed with her reasoning, or if we had any worthwhile comebacks that could in any way legitimately argue some opposing side to the basically irrefutable points she made. There was no challenging the cold austerity of all her inarguable truths.
“Hm,” said Alison and I in diminished tones, “Guess not.” The lady gave us her “That’s right, girls” face.
The know-it-all lady gazed abstractedly. She’d said all that was necessary and then some. Alison and I were chastened and deflated, but the rebelliousness in our hearts remained. I think we both just come a certain way, fate and Providence and logistics and practicality and quarters be damned, what really matters is how cute and wonderful and adorable and fun and perfect and awesome our motherfucking twins will be, no matter what, despite whatever the goddamned “odds” were, fuck the odds, fuck everything that might dampen or damage the romanticization and the dream.
“Twins,” I stage whispered to Alison, the moment the voice of reason woman moved off. I gave Alison a nimble conspiratorial jab with one of my elbows.
“Twins,” she agreed in a medium volume stage whisper back. She smirked. I grinned. Our eyes contained evil sparks and luscious gleams. Life is all about these evil sparks and luscious gleams.
“Twins! Twins! Twins!” we chanted again later in a delayed reaction extension of our stage whispering. We were like two braindead teenaged cheerleaders in church who can’t stop cheering even during the endless sermon and all the praying.
Afterward on exiting I saw the diaper basket and remembered I hadn’t yet written something funny and fun for the parents-to-be to enjoy while changing the baby. I grabbed a couple of the tiny diaper things.
On one diaper I wrote:
What time does Sean Connery arrive at Wimbledon?
Tennish
On a second diaper I wrote:
What did Diplo say to the stripper?
Get T’werk.
