From the category archives:

Meeting Your New Baby

To My Sister’s Gorgeous, Clueless Friends

A snippet of conversation between a group of childless, twenty-something girls at my sister’s bachelorette party…

Gorgeous Girl #1: I saw a birth on Lifetime Health. So gross. The baby is covered in nasty slime when it comes out.

Gorgeous Girl #2: I know. I can’t believe people take pictures of babies right out of the box like that. Hello? No one wants to see your baby until it’s cuted up and washed.
Gorgeous Girls #1-5: [Laughter.]

Gorgeous Girl #1: When I have a baby, I don’t even want to hold it until they’ve cleaned it up.

Gorgeous Girl #3: Yeah, I’m with you. Why do they put it right onto the mom’s stomach like that?

Gorgeous Girl #1: That’s exactly what they did on this show. Put it right on her all smeary and gross.

Gorgeous Girls #1-5: [Noises indicating general nastiness of newborns.]

Dear Gorgeous, Clueless Friends of My Sister:

I kept quiet at the party when you talked about how gross newborns are, but I had a good laugh inside. I was just like you ten years ago. Before Matt and I had children, if birth came up, I would wax eloquent with the same beautiful, brazen, blind ignorance. No one would flop a slimy newborn baby up on my stomach. Gross. I didn’t want to hold it until it was clean and wrapped neatly in a soft snuggly blanket of appropriate color. (That was when I wasn’t claiming that I never wanted children at all because they were loud and annoying and because they could not be put in a kennel when I wanted to travel.)

I know this won’t mean anything to you now, but you’re wrong. No, really, you are. When you give birth (and oh, beautiful girls, I wish that for you, effortless conception, easy pregnancies and births without trouble, without loss, so that you will never know how lucky you really are), you won’t care. You will scream and cry and struggle and fear. You will labor and come out the other side a changed woman. They call it childbirth, but it is also motherbirth. When that slimy baby finally emerges, covered in blood and mucus and ooze, you won’t hesitate. Your only thoughts as you reach for it (him or her now, but we won’t know for years), like Bilbo stretching for the ring, will be “Give him to me. He’s mine. MY PRECIOUS. I want to hold him close. I want to feel his heartbeat and touch his face and keep him warm and safe with me forever.”

You will wrap your arms around him and kiss his slippery head and snap your teeth like a cornered badger at the nurses trying to wipe him down because you will never, ever have loved anything the way you love that tiny child. You will love him covered in ooze at birth and covered in poop at one and covered in mud at five. You will love him when he spits venom at you at ten and when he refuses to speak to you at sixteen. With a love that transcends gross and that is blind to ooze, no matter how nasty.

You call me in ten years. I’ll sell my children if it’s not true.

Love, Any Mommy

Around the web

The Reality of Newborn Babies

Because every mom-to-be should know what real newborn babies look like…

{Thank you to my good humored Facebook friends! More ugly baby pictures on my wall.}

Around the web

Damn, That’s an Ugly Baby

I didn’t want to have an ugly baby. Having an ugly baby was definitely not in my Birthing Master Plan. In fact, I was confident that my baby was going to be luminously beautiful–hybrid babies always are.

Doubt the beauty of hybrid babies? Two words for you: Halle Berry. Two more words: Lenny Kravitz. Yeah.

That genetic cocktail brewing in my belly? Killer. Genius, even. Would my magnificent creation come out wearing Elie Saab, I wondered?

The first indication that something might be amiss happened after I gave the final push (yelling “Motherfucker!” in my husband’s general direction) and the first word out of the nurse’s mouth was, “Whoa.”

I waited for it. I waited for, “Look at that beautiful baby girl!” I waited for them to place her stunning little body on my chest so I could admire her.

Instead, the nurse hustled her to the weighing station and hissed at the obstetrician, “I thought you said this baby was term.”

So I’m waiting, spread-eagled.

Then the attending nurse exclaims, “Awww. She’s got a Mongolian spot on her butt……boy, that’s a whopper.”

Hello! Waiting here and where the Hell is my champagne?

Curious, my husband ambles over. And then I hear the sonorous sound of his laughter. “Okay, that puppy needed at least another month in there,” he says.

Give. Me. Alcohol. And while you’re at it, can you fork over my dang kid?

“The Apgar’s good,” the head nurse chirps helpfully.

My mother decides to get in on the action. “What’s this Mongolian thinga–?” Damned if she doesn’t giggle, too. “Ronald,” she calls to my father (who is out of the room, terrorized by the birthing process), “The baby has your belly.”

My father oozes into the room. He doesn’t laugh.

“Is it because she came out so fast?” he whispers.

“Like a West German on the luge,” my husband snorts.

The obystetrician is still hunkered between my splayed legs, waiting for whatever gunk needs to come out, and suddenly, I’m royally pissed off.

“Give me my champagne and my baby, you morons!” I holler.

So they do.

It’s a good thing I demanded alcohol, because damn, that’s an ugly baby.

But then I look into those big eyes and that little monkey face, and it’s not so bad and…she shits all over my chest.

Welcome to the world, ugly baby. I vow to love you anyway.