Baby Blues

About a year ago my neighbor Sophie called me up.

“I’m pregnant!” she announced excitedly. Before I could congratulate her she rushed on.

“You call your husband right now and tell him to come home. I want you pregnant by tomorrow morning.”

She has always been a take-charge kind of woman, but this was pushing it just a little bit.

“Uh–”

She had no time for my excuses. “I’m not going through this whole thing alone. I want someone in the neighborhood pregnant with me. I’m hanging up. You call your man. Now!”

If this sounds impossible to any human Franklin Planners out there who are so together they know what they’re having for dinner tonight, well, tough. It’s truly a feminine tradition that goes way back.

Believe it or not, in the old days Dad was a small factor in the child-bearing equation. It was the women who had the real reproductive power in the neighborhood. In fact, a friend of mine swears she overheard this conversation at a Tupperware party in the early 60s:

“I want a baby. Who wants to get pregnant with me?”

“Oh, I will, Helen! Junior needs a sister.”

“How ’bout you, Martha?”

“Count me in, girls. Say, put me down for a set of those tumblers,
too.”

(There’s a reason Tupperware was big during the Baby Boom, and it wasn’t those hostess gifts.)

But those were the days that our moms could leave us toddlers napping at home while they went to a coffee klatch down the street–and nobody ever called Child Protective Services.

As a matter of fact, when my in-laws wanted to go out for dinner, they phoned the Peter Pan Baby Sitting Service and ordered a babysitter delivered, just like a pizza.

When the sitter arrived, my in-laws never felt the need to ask pertinent questions like, “have you been convicted of a felony recently?” Nope. They just waved goodbye.

Nowadays you can’t do that. With fewer children per family, higher incomes and at least a hundred more TV channels, we are less free than any of our mothers were.

Our kids live in a world filled with pedophiles, school shootings, tainted hamburgers and Beanie Babies with kid-choking tags you are supposed to leave on.

They make nooses out of mini-blind cords and cocktails out whatever they find under the sink. They put their heads in the mouth of the neighbors’ pit bull and they try their hardest to become the hood ornament of the nearest passing car.

The very minute they enter this world they begin a quest to put themselves in danger. We follow them around in a desperate effort to prevent them from succeeding.

Another baby? Please. I don’t have the guts.

Besides, I get fat.

When I’m pregnant, Baskin & Robbins becomes my favorite food group. And I won’t even start on the topic of sleep deprivation. Oh, and don’t forget the baby blues–I cried more than either of my babies did.

Then there are the diapers, the nursing, the midnight calls to the pediatrician…

Let’s just say that Sophie is now the proud mother of a baby girl, a beautiful, angelic insomniac who billows and coos and then lets loose with a cry that can pierce any eardrum within 100 yards. She’s a crying, nursing, pooping machine who looks a vision in pink.

I go over there when I can to get my baby fix.

But know this: if you ever see me running down the middle of the cul-de-sac, screaming, you’ll know the stick turned blue.

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