Oh Shit, Am I Ready For This?
Can I hit "snooze" on giving birth?
Time to issue my first correction: The other week, I said that I was ready to no longer be pregnant, ergo, I must be ready to have a newborn as a roommate. After quite a bit of thought and an extremely Mercury Retrograde week, I must amend that stance. I think I want to be pregnant for awhile longer, because I definitely am not ready to be irreversibly a parent, forever, for the rest of my life. At least not right this second. Ask me again in three weeks.
The problem is that I've done so many things to get ready for this baby that I fear I'm running out of things, and now all I have is contemplative silence that I'm filling with a bullet pointed list of known unknowns, haunted by the spectre of thousands of unknowable unknowns. There are things left on our to-do list that I can't bring myself to do, because, subconsciously, I believe that I can't go into labor if the crib is still in the box; my hospital bag isn't even packed, so there's no way what I'm feeling could be a real contraction.
Health concerns during pregnancy have deprived me of three of my typical coping mechanisms-- intense exercise, drinking, and marijuana gummies-- and so I've leaned into my fourth typical adult coping mechanism in the face of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation: gorging myself on information. In the last 9 months, we have amassed a miniature library of books on pregnancy and childbirth, ranging from what one might call woo-woo-California-hippie ruminations to bone-dry medical information involving anatomical charts. I've forgotten more about pregnancy than I thought I'd ever know. (I even bought a bunch of books for dads because I wanted to see for myself how much the books sucked.)
Will I use most of this information? Absolutely not. This is mental hoarding behavior. I don't need to know about twin delivery, and by the time I got to the part in one book about amniocentesis, I had already taken other tests that showed that there's no reason I would need it. But I read it anyway. I appreciated the noise.
Planning, for me, is avoidant behavior. When I was planning my wedding last year, it occurred to me that perhaps some of the reason of wedding planning can take over the lives of otherwise well-adjusted brides (because, let's be honest, it's more often brides) is that the wedding planning industry was built around getting people to spend money to avoid thinking about the actual marriage. Weddings are much more fun than marriage. At a wedding, the bride gets to be the glamorous center of attention, in the most beautiful dress she could find, in the best shape of her life, and all of her friends and family gather to also look great and have a good time. I've only just passed my first wedding anniversary this weekend, but judging from what I've observed in other people's relationships, functional long-term marriage seems to involve a lot more maintenance than glamour and a lot fewer people--despite what Instagram's terrifying army of Mormon momfluencers would lead you to believe. Planning a wedding is hard. Marriage is vastly harder. In marriage, there is no scheduled-in end date when you get to hop on a plane to Hawaii.
In a similar way, all the info-binging I've done for the pregnancy and childbirth has drowned out the difficult reality of being a parent. Once the baby gets here, I have to take care of it for at least 18 years, and if I mess up enough in trying to take care of it, the kid could get hurt, or grow into a terrible person who makes other people's lives worse and also I could go to jail.
Once I am a parent, I will never not be a parent. I will never go to bed again, for the rest of my life, and not worry about my kid, no matter how old they are. I knew this intuitively before I got pregnant-- like, yes, of course, parenting is an emotionally encompassing role--but now I am trying to stretch my brain out enough that I can wrap my mind around it, and it's bigger than I'd thought. From now on, I will fully empathize with why my parents cry when they drop me off at the airport rather than trying to awkwardly react with stoicism and assurances that we'll all be together again soon. I will be the one crying at the airport. For the rest of my life. Did I think this through? Does anybody?
The way that people see me is about to change. Strangers love to coo over and congratulate a visibly pregnant woman, but the congratulations vanish when that woman has a whole-ass toddler that is crying next to them on an airplane due to factors that are mostly beyond the woman's or the toddler's control. When I was younger and a bigger asshole, I used to feel bad for people seated next to small children on airplanes and judgmental of parents who couldn't keep their kids in line. Now, having given it some actual thought, I feel the worst for the parents dealing with assholes who have no idea what they're dealing with judging them as human beings over the actions of a toddler.
Then there's the whole physical reality of sharing space with a newborn, which I've sorta vaguely thought through but now, as my due date grows nigh, I'm feeling I am ill prepared for. It's like I got a text from arriving party guests that reads "Outside!" and I've just now realized that I have not cleaned the bathroom in weeks. In addition to the crib being in a box, the changing pad is still in a box, the diaper genie is in the garage, and we still haven't taken the dog on a walk with the stroller to help him get used to it. We have a girl name picked out, but we don't have a boy name picked out yet. I'm going to end up being one of those moms who names their son after a baseball player that happens to be on TV right after she gives birth because she put off picking a name and at that moment she's too exhausted to think. (If I have a boy and name him Cody Bellinger, you'll know why.)
Which brings me back to where I started: with a baby that is definitely exiting my body and entering the world at some point over the next five weeks, a to-do list that I've stalled on completing because I feel like I'm not ready emotionally for said baby, and those emotions flowing nicely into more paralysis around physical preparations, which in turn flows into my emotional terror. New parent anxiety as a perpetual motion machine.
Maybe the solution is to accept uncertainty as something that cannot be remedied, especially when it comes to being a parent. Or, if my instincts are correct, maybe the solution instead is to spend the next four hours reading about what birth was like in Europe during the middle ages, or placental abnormalities from which I know I am not suffering. Or perhaps organizing the baby books alphabetically by author.
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