Stage I: Childless Parenting Expert
You don’t have kids of your own, but you are an expert on how other people should raise theirs.
You give advice to your friends on how to get their kids to sleep through the night or cure their colic. You sit in smug judgment of moms whose kids are screaming bloody murder in aisle 6.
You determine with conviction that you will only breast-feed. Or you know that you will exclusively bottle-feed. You will never use television as a babysitter.
You will never co-sleep. Or you will co-sleep until your kids are teenagers, if that’s what they want.
You will spank your kids, dammit, because that’s what our parents did and look how good we turned out! Or, you vow never to spank because that’s what our parents did, and despite it, we turned out OK.
You know whether you will use cloth diapers or Pampers®.
You will get an epidural, because — hell’s bells — why wouldn’t you?!?!
You will deliver naturally and peacefully, in a tub at home, with calming music, a capable doula and/or midwife, and a well-prepared and helpful husband.
Your child will be brilliant, of course, because you will read to her every day and spend hours doing enriching activities.
Your child will be well-mannered, polite, capable, and will never interrupt when adults are talking.
Stage II: Expecting Parent
After you freak out when you see the blue line, you purchase approximately 493 pregnancy, birth, breast-feeding, and child-rearing books — all of which scare the ever-loving hell out of you.
You are terrified that anything you do, or don’t do, will cause a glitch, mutation, or miscarriage.
You refuse any kind of genetic testing and amniocentesis. (Or maybe you don’t.)
You vow not to Google anything.
You Google, anyway.
Your spouse spends hours talking you off the ledge.
You fill your baby registry with items you will never actually use, but you don’t know that yet, because the books you bought said you need at least 12 of these and so you register for and get them.
When you get to the baby section of the store in which you register, you stare at the wall of bottle-feeding, breast-pumping, and nipple care products and weep.
You buy special laundry detergent, hypoallergenic bed sheets, safety equipment for appliances you’ve never even heard of, and clothes made only of organic cotton.
You research diaper services.
You register for childbirth classes at the hospital.
You close your eyes during the forceps, vacuum, and cesarean section of the movie.
You stop Googling.
No, you don’t.
You get so used to being probed, prodded, and assessed, you don’t even mind it when your doctor has three residents also feel how your cervix is starting to efface.
You kind of like it when people fall all over themselves to make you comfortable.
You hate it when people think they can just touch your protruding belly. Yes, it is wonderful; take your stinking paws off of me, you damned, dirty ape!
Oh, wait — did I just say that out loud? It must be all these hormones.
Seriously, though. Don’t. Effing. Touch. Me.
Stage III: Shit’s Gettin’ Real
Your water breaks!
You are in bed watching South Park and, suddenly, a tiny gush and a puddle. You tell your spouse, who immediately starts packing his bag. You say, no, I was just at the doctor today, and it must just be all that gel leaking out. You ask your husband to get you some more pineapple.
He starts yelling at you because you are in labor and must get to the hospital immediately! You get up to pee, tell him you see nothing and are not in pain. He keeps yelling and throwing things that he will never need at the hospital — a can opener, some dryer sheets, a rubber band — into his bag. You keep watching South Park.
Your husband wants to know why aren’t you in the car?!?! You start asking him where in the world is that pineapple?!
You feel another bit of a gush, but you want that pineapple so bad, you ignore it. Finally, you agree to at least call the doctor, and you happily munch pineapple while finishing the South Park episode that you now missed half of.
Twenty-three minutes later, the doctor calls and tells you to go to the hospital. Your husband is smug, but has enough sense not to say I told you so. Fine, you say, but I’m driving.
As you walk into the hospital to check-in, there is no denying that amniotic fluid is actually running down your leg, and you are glad when they make you sit in a wheelchair. You basically “sleep” all night on a hospital bed approximately the size of a park bench, while nurses and doctors — and possibly janitors, for all you know — constantly come and go and peer into your vagina.
The next morning, you don’t even have a cramp, so they put you on a Pitocin® drip, otherwise known by its street name: “torture juice.” Within one hour, you are in severe pain; within five hours, you really do want to kill everyone; within eight hours, you begin puking into a basin while sitting on a birthing ball with your doula holding your hair and rubbing your back.
You look up and say to your husband, “Go get someone now.” He looks relieved to have an excuse to leave the room because he can’t wait to get the hell out of there. Fifty-three hours later (or maybe it’s 32 minutes), the anesthesiologist comes in and actually asks you to stay perfectly still while he injects a three-inch needle directly into your spinal cord. Two minutes later, you relax into a blissful heap, and that’s when you notice all of the blood.
I mean, real blood. Lots and lots of real blood. And it’s yours.
But everyone seems cool about it, so you proceed to the pushing stage, and three hours go by and no kid. The doctor says into your ear that you can go 30 minutes more, but if you can’t get that baby out, they’ll have to do a cesarean.
Oh, my god! you think; you closed your eyes during that part of the movie and look where that got you! How could you have been so stupid?!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Stage IV: The Delivery
They ask you if you want to watch. You say no.
They don’t even bother asking your husband, because they can tell by the look on his face that he’s already seen more than one human being ever should.
Ba-da-bing, there’s the baby. There might be tears. Everyone’s fine, and you’re off to recovery.
Stage V: Recovery
You are shaking so hard from the aftereffects of the epidural that it’s a few minutes before the nurse lets you hold your own child. Then you look into her perfect little face and can’t believe you ever thought you knew what love was.
Stage VI: Hospital Stay
You try to get comfortable on your hospital-issued park bench. You can’t.
It’s too hot in your room. The IV site on your hand is starting to swell. You are wearing a huge ice pack/diaper thing, and you are lying in a pool of your own blood. There are pressure boots on your legs that inflate and deflate every 15 minutes so you don’t throw an embolism and die.
Someone comes in every 10 minutes to monitor your vitals, check your blood puddle, and ask if you need pain meds. You do.
After a few days, you are sent home with your new little bundle.
Stage VII: Going Home
Wait, what? What did you say? Going home? Alone? No, I know I take the baby, but who will come with me?
No, I don’t mean my husband, I mean someone who knows what’s going on!
This baby is so small!! What if [insert every horrible scenario that can be thought of] happens?!?!
They send you home anyway.
On the ride home, you hover protectively over your offspring while berating every crazy f*@#ing driver on the road. You also tell your husband to quit making the ride so bumpy — this seat belt is killing my incision and, seriously, are you trying to hit every pothole in the road?!
Stage VIII: At Home
Fates be praised, you made it home alive! It certainly wasn’t because of your husband’s “expert” driving.
You hobble up the stairs to your glider rocker (where you will spend most of the next six months) and finally look into the face of your very own child in your very own home.
You begin to sob. This is a stranger! You don’t know this person! How will you know what to do? How will you know what she wants? How will you get to know her — she can’t even talk for god’s sake!
You cry harder. You look at your husband and tell him to call Child Protective Services.
What on earth were you thinking? You can’t possibly do this!
Your baby is staring peacefully at you. She doesn’t seem a bit worried. You stop weeping long enough to gaze into her precious face.
Then, suddenly, the mothers of millennia are behind you. Their wisdom is inside you.
You tell your husband to cancel that call to CPS. You can do this. You can parent this perfect, little stranger.
Or, maybe that’s just me.