a different time
When the plane descended, the first thing on my list was a changing table. Is this what a nesting instinct is? It’s not about buying stuff, it’s about trying to imagine what it will be like to have a baby, and looking to other people with babies, and seeing their changing tables and feeling inadequate and terrified and totally unprepared. How do babies survive? Reading this book about babies and all the rules — what kind of laundry detergent so the baby’s skin doesn’t develop a terrible-terrible rash, where to put the crib so that a baby isn’t strangled by curtains and window blinds, whether or not to have a crib bumper lest the baby suffocate and die or conversely get caught in the rails and die, when to nurse and how long on each side so that the baby gets enough protein and carbohydrate and fat and how that changes depending on how long the baby’s nursed and how to tell if the baby is getting any milk at all lest the baby starve and die — it’s amazing so many babies live!
Babies live!
We were at the soul-crushing Babies-R-Us buying our changing table (there weren’t any good ones on craigslist for a price any cheaper than the one I found that I liked at the store), and Steve was kindly and dutifully pushing the cart behind me while I darted around trying to decide if we needed an additional changing pad (we didn’t, I have to return it), and what waterproof mat to put underneath the fitted sheet in the crib (I bought one and washed it and hate it and can’t return it), and suddenly I turned to Steve and asked him if he’d ever had a changing table.
Nope, he’d never had one. He wasn’t sure why we needed one, but he was happy to buy one if I felt I needed it so badly. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Rosie even had a crib. He looked handsome and obliging and there I was dizzy in one of those moments where I felt my world shift a little bit. It’s not that I’ve been spending a lot of money on baby stuff, I truly haven’t, though yikes it adds up. But something about preparing for a baby makes me look to models who aren’t me. And suddenly I pictured Steve, 21 years old with a new baby in a tiny apartment in a low-income apartment complex with his girlfriend and his brand new Rosie, and no changing table. And they didn’t love her any less, certainly. No one ever died by just changing a baby on the bed or the floor, slipping in a waterproof changing pad if it was messy. And Rosie didn’t have the Einstein playmat, nor the Jungle Jumparoo, nor the BOB Revolution stroller, and they were all fine.
It made me so grateful for this time, that Steve and I get to buy baby items that make our lives easier — certainly with dogs it will be safer to have a designated place for diaper changes that isn’t the floor. And it also made me realize that truly, truly, as I’ve heard a million times and could only know by living through this, the baby needs nothing but us.
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:44 pm
oh i’m right there with you–i think about six months into alex’s life I finally got to the point (maybe it was sooner?) where I just had to lock the baby books away as they were making me insane–this one saying do this (or the baby will suffer harm) while the next book said terrible harm will happen if I do exactly what book one said TO DO. Since then I’ve taken a deep breath, thought about me and Alex–thought given what I know of him right now, what do I think (as his mom) is the best for him…and slowly, surely we’ve figured it out together–in a patch work kind of way. (Here’s the part where I confess I put Alex on his belly to sleep at about 6 weeks–at mom’s urging, because it was the ONLY way he’d sleep, lied sweetly to my pediatrician about it, and Alex has been a champion sleeper ever since…not that I’m recommending that to you, but it’s a good example.)
You are going to be an amazing mom–you just are.