What To Expect When Someone Else is Expecting
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must make the obligatory gesture and attend someone’s baby shower. Some friend, some shoe-string relative, gets pregnant and will expect you to waste a perfectly good Saturday afternoon celebrating the fact that she has chosen to reproduce.
This Saturday, my number is up.
Blue and pink ribbons decorate the double doors of the church annex that whip around aimlessly in the February wind. I take a seat among the pastel-clad socialites and wait. Wait for what? I don’t know. Nobody ever seems to know what’s going on at these blessed events.
“Ohmigod!” my very pregnant niece yells as she bounces down the aisle made between twenty folding tables covered with pink and blue stuff. “I can’t believe you came!”
“Me either.” I try to mimic the same sing-song cadence in her voice, but it’s just not in me.
“Have you met my other grandmother, Eunice?”
An old woman seated next to the door looks up at me and says in growling voice, “You Jimmy’s sister?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“What?”
“I said, yes ma’am. I am Jimmy’s sister.”
“Ya don’t look nothin’ like’im.” She glares at me as if I have, evidently, fallen desperately short of the good looks standard set by my brother.
“Well, we’re not twins ma’am. He is fourteen years older than I am and then there’s the point of my being adopted and all.”
“I know that.”
* * * * * * *
Once all the guests arrive, the mother-to-be announces that she will be opening gifts first, and then there will be games, then food. She hates me. I just want to have some tuna tarts and hit the road. But no, that’s never the way of it. It’s ceremonial. Things have to be done in a ritualistic manner or the baby might be born with two heads or something. I sneak a few tarts in a napkin and reclaim my seat in the ooh and ahh circle.
I look around the room as my girthy niece tears into one bowtastic gift after another. Everyone waits patiently for the train of onesies, bootlets, blankets and bottles to get in their hands so they can force out the mandatory “oh my goodness, that’s so adorable / cute / tiny.” I especially like the way they all say diaper with that little country-fried stress on the first syllable. Die-per. After a while, I start doing it myself. “What the hell’s a die-per genie? Who the hell uses die-per pins?” The prissy gray-haired woman sitting next to me leans over and whispers, “Could you please refrain from using profanity in the house of the Lord?”
The first baby product handed to me is a tiny pair of socks and running shoes. Weeboks. “Where in the hell is this kid running to that it needs a $60 pair of tennis shoes for the trip?,” I wonder out loud.
My mother leans over again and hisses, “One more time and I’m moving to another seat.”
* * * * * * *
The worst thing about a baby shower is other babies at the shower. Who are the mothers of these scene-stealing rugrats? Every photograph of the mother-to-be holding up a bib or a bottle has the back of some kid’s head in the bottom of the frame. Do these mothers automatically assume that celebrating the birth of one woman’s first born is an open arena to trot out the best of their brood as well? This woman has created a person in her stomach! She doesn’t need random toddlers helping her get tissue out of a gift bag.
If I were looking down the barrel of having to raise a child until it was old enough to support itself, the only thing I would want to see coming through the door is food. Babies can’t eat sterling silver rattles or Peter Rabbit bowls and matching spoons. For the first couple of years, all they need is something to eat and something to poop in. They can’t read, they can’t run and they can’t even appreciate a good bath toy. Just give me the Sam’s Club membership so I can buy the die-pers by the caseload.
I’m not the only one who feels out of place at this event. The bloated mother-to-be doesn't have a clue about many of her “gifts” either. She thinks the breast pump is some kind of asthma inhaler. It is a strange looking contraption. I always thought one placed the round part over the baby’s mouth and pumped the milk in.
A hush falls over the crowd when she finally pulls my gift from the “Happy Birthday” bag I’ve recycled from my last birthday. The mother-to-be holds up the little white T-shirt with black lettering that reads: Cereal Killer. I laugh again like I did the first time I saw it and I can feel my mother cursing me with her eyes- that slicing, how-could-this-be-my-child blasphemous way that only mothers can.
“Somebody! Get me some cake!” the mother-to-be yells over the head of everyone in the food line.
“I gotta go.” I kiss my niece on the cheek, wish her luck, then slide back out into the world of normalcy—where tuna fish sandwiches are whole and babies are an urban myth.