Babyzilla Attacks!
Pregnancy turned me into a micromanaging monster.
by Kim Brooks
November 19, 2007
Before becoming pregnant, I never considered myself a "baby person." Similarly, before I got engaged, I never anticipated becoming a radiant bride. I know plenty of women who claim that the siren song of motherhood has been serenading them since the day they swaddled their first Cabbage Patch Kid, that they married off their baby dolls daily, but I wasn't one of them. And in terms of pregnancy, my assumption was that nature would take care of the planning for me. But when preparing for my wedding, I found myself on a slow descent into wedding-planning madness that hit rock bottom two days before the big day when I set out to make (that is, with paper and glue and calligraphy ink) one hundred and thirty place settings that stood up like little chairs. After the wedding, I attributed this domestic mania to a bout of temporary insanity, but I knew the urge to plan was back at some point during my first trimester when I found myself standing inside a baby boutique, paralyzed before an array of sleep sacks and caps, unable to decide which one I wanted my baby to wear home from the hospital.
I eventually made a decision, but soon after began wondering what I was going to wear to the hospital — standard gown or home-brought outfit — and who did I want in the hospital with me, and did I need to go to a hospital in the first place?
The number of choices pregnant women are presented with today is dizzying for some, intoxicating for others. As we've all heard from mothers and grandmothers, it didn't used to be this way. Not only was my own grandmother not presented with an overwhelming menu of labor choices, the few she did make — going to a hospital to deliver, for example — were almost completely erased from her memory by the cocktail of drugs commonly used at the time to induce twilight sleep. I certainly don't envy her this labor experience, the passivity and imposed submissiveness of it. But I do The number of choices pregnant women are presented with today is dizzying for some, intoxicating for others.sometimes wonder if I've allowed my own birthing preparation to drift too far in the opposite direction, reaching the point where it seems more like a grand orchestration than a natural life-process.
The madness began early on with my quest for the right pregnancy book. Heading to the bookstore during my second month, I naively assumed there would be a few choices, that I'd browse through them and probably end up going with the book that had the cutest fetal development pictures. Instead I was greeted with an entire section of prenatal literature, a section so big it required subsections on natural childbirth and unplanned pregnancies, pregnancy over forty and professional women's pregnancy, books written by M.D.s and nurses, doulas and hypnotists, humorists and feminists. Apparently, I was going to have to do some research before I began my research.
©2007 Kim Brooks and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Kim Brooks has written for Glimmer Train, One Story, Epoch
and the Missouri Review. She also writes non-fiction for
The Crier. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. |
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