I remember it so vividly, probably because it happened all the time. It all started the minute my stomach started to stick out, more than usual that is. It happened everywhere — at Target, at parties, at the bookstore, at Lowe’s, at Taco Bell, and even while having coffee with a friend. Invariably, a total stranger would sidle up to me, asking, “Is this your first?” When I would respond in the affirmative, she would trumpet, “Your life is about to CHANGE!”
What can you say back to that, other than put on the best deer-in-the headlights look that you can muster? Isn’t that the response these smug people want? To know that they have succeeded in frightening you with the vast unknown? God, I hated that. At first I’d listen and try to be polite. In my head I’d be thinking a diatribe like this, “Yeah, right. Whatever, lady. Maybe your life changed, but that doesn’t mean that mine has to. I refuse to let a tiny baby who weighs less than my cat change my life. He’ll adjust to OUR lifestyle, not the other way around.”
As the encounters multiplied in proportion to my rapidly increasing girth, my thoughts got darker, like “Just get way from me, you annoying freak! Did I ask for your ‘advice’?” By the end of my third trimester, I tried to avoid eye contact out in public altogether, but it still happened. It was all I could do not to yell, “JUST SHUT UP! ENOUGH ALREADY!” right there in the customer service line at Babies R Us. (I developed a pattern of buying something and returning it. Then I would change my mind and re-buy it again, which I blamed on a strain of the nesting syndrome.)
Let’s just say that I gained a good 20 pounds eating those unspoken words, over and over again in just the first few weeks of motherhood. What an understatement that wimpy warning was. My life didn’t just “change.” My old life was gone. Gone, I tell you! Wave goodbye! I was ready to take out a full page ad in the New York Times and publicly apologize for silently judging all of these well-meaning (?) people, as well as all mothers in general for that matter.
I sit here am racking my brains to figure out what HASN’T changed since June 23, 2005. Nothing, that’s what. Among other things, I have a different body now. I’ll spare you the nitty gritty, but it’s ranges from my hair having a natural curl for the first time in my life to having a wider rib cage. My relationship with my husband is different, not necessarily better or worse, but different. The same goes for everyone else in my life — parents, siblings, and friends. For those friends who already had kids, all of a sudden I had a lot more in common with them, as well as a newfound admiration for what they had gone through and survived. (And why didn’t I offer to help them more, or at all?)
For my friends without kids, things changed whether I wanted them to or not. As much as I wanted to be, I wasn’t available for a matinee at the drop of a hat. Dinner out at Stony Point on a Saturday night now involved a unique centerpiece, my gurgling baby in his car carrier. As for my lifestyle, it was gone, gone, gone. I had never tried that exercise in which you carry around a bag of flour for a week without ever leaving it unattended. Let’s just say I should have. Oh, so THIS is what everyone is talking about! I was petrified to be home alone with the baby and even more terrified to take him out somewhere. Even when I did get up the gumption to venture out the door, it took me all day to get ready.
If I had to pick the most radical change it is probably my perspective. Heath Ledger was a superb actor, one of my absolute favorites. He seemed like a great guy, someone whom I would have loved to have known. But I didn’t know him at all, not even a little bit. Boy, did I cry when he died. Sure, it’s so sad that he was only 28-years-old and such a talented actor, but I was sobbing for his adorable two-year-old daughter who no longer has her doting daddy. Here I go again tearing up, envisioning the now famous paparazzi shot of him walking around SoHo with her riding up on his shoulders, both of them beaming.
Yesterday I was reading a feature story in the paper, something I would have found sad Before Sam (“BS”), but I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it. The article was about how a family was coping with a brain-damaged child, five years after their toddler landed on his head in the driveway after pushing out the screen on the window of their playroom upstairs. I literally cannot even fathom how horrendous an experience that was (and still is) for his long-suffering parents. As I laid the paper down, I prayed for them, something that never would have occurred to me BS. There but for the grace of God go I — and my family.
So watch out for me at Target. I’ll be the one scouring the baby aisle looking for a first-time mother overwhelmed with the process of registering. “Your life is about to change,” I will say, wagging my finger for emphasis, as if I hadn’t scared the poor hormonal woman enough. However, I promise to add the caveat, “But it’s so worth it. Try to enjoy the ride and ignore people like me.”
LibbY