Editor's Note: It Takes a Village (To Judge You)
When I was pregnant, people didn't just say, "Congratulations."
by Ada Calhoun
December 11, 2006
At a gay bar in the East Village before a friend's show, an acquaintance who was working that night handed me a couple of drink tickets. "Thanks," I said, "but I'm afraid you'd be wasting them on me." "Why?" he asked. I pointed at my stomach. "I'm six months pregnant." "Oh!" he said, and snatched back the tickets, then offered no further comment.
Two friends said congratulations, then immediately launched into stories about their miscarriages, one of which was at twenty weeks. I'd had no idea such a thing regularly happened, and it condemned me to spend eight more weeks than the usual twelve feeling like losing the baby was still a possibility.
"You're not finding out the sex, I hope," said Robin, a former landlord, when I told her about the baby-to-be. "I guess we will," I said. "It's harder not to find out. I don't think I'd be able to look away from the sonogram." "But you must!" she said. "It's terrible to know. You start projecting things onto the baby right away. You shouldn't name the baby until after he or she is born for the same reason."
It turned out people who have kids themselves often have very strong feelings about whether or not to find out the sex, and how to balance work with parenthood, and every other topic imaginable.
"When are you starting maternity leave?" asked a family friend when I was seven months pregnant. "I guess when my water breaks," I said, feeling chipper. "Oh, you should take at least two months off before the baby is born," she said. "But I love my job," I said, "and I feel fine." "You won't feel like working at eight months," she said, "believe me." That wound up not being true, but for weeks I did wonder whenever I woke up feeling less than 100% if it was the beginning of the end.
Finally, my friend Stephen, a gay painter, won the award for most appalling reaction. We hadn't spoken in a few months — he lives in Indiana and works as an electrician; we used to work together at a dating-service photo lab in Texas — so I was very excited to catch him up. "We're having a baby!" I said, happily. After a long pause, he said, "Wow. I just never pictured you as a mother."
Stephen later said he did not in fact consider me unfit, but was shocked that someone he still thought of as the town tramp could be a parent. "I still think of you as single and kind of crazy. I can't see you wearing anything but heels," he said, sadly. "Why would I stop wearing heels?" I asked. "I just don't know any mothers who do," he said. I told him that women in New York did actually have babies and still behave in a trashy fashion, which he found comforting.
Having a kid means so many things to so many people. If you live a frustrated life in the suburbs, like Stephen, it symbolizes the death of cool. For city-dwellers who rely on each other as family substitutes, their friends turning nuclear can seem like a betrayal. For people who already have kids, their friends' procreating can be a threat to the way they themselves chose to do things, as if working through the fortieth week or finding out what the sex is somehow challenges the validity of the choices they made.
Luckily, everyone gets nine months to get used to the idea of a new baby. By the time my due date came around, everyone seemed excited. "We have some boy clothes for you," Robin emailed me, having reconciled herself to the fact that we went ahead and looked at the sonogram screen.
What we're hoping to create with Babble is a forum for all the experiences that make having and raising kids in the city so fraught. But we also hope to channel the spirit of all those non-neurotic strangers on the street who greet new parents with nothing but the purest delight.
photo courtesy Sarah Forbes Keough
©2006 Ada Calhoun andNerve Media
About the Author
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Ada Calhoun was Babble's founding editor-in-chief. She has been a theater critic at New York magazine, an AOL News blogger and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She has written for Time, Salon.com and The New York Times Arts & Leisure. Her first book, Instinctive Parenting, will be published by Simon Spotlight in 2010. Visit adacalhoun.com. |
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