One morning when I was nine months pregnant and on my way to work, two movers put down a dresser and beamed when I walked by.
"You're having a girl!" one said.
"No, a boy," I said.
"Positive?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Then you must be having twins," he said confidently. "The girl's hiding behind the boy!"
I really liked this game. It started when I crossed the line from awfully pregnant into obscenely, hugely, any-second-now pregnant. At least two or three strangers every day, entirely unprompted, would shout out "girl!" or "boy!" and I would call back "wrong!" or "right!"
I never stopped moving, so it added no time to my day. The exchange lasted exactly as long as a conversation on the street should last: the time it takes to pass by at a rapid clip. And it was fun playing quizmaster.
"Nope!" I told a woman behind the counter at a Soho salad place when she said I was having a girl. "Damn!" she said, "I should have known! Everyone's having boys this summer."
"A boy, actually," I told an old woman at the recreation center on Carmine Street. She grabbed my stomach. "Ah, yes, a boy," she said, nodding sagely.
"How did you know?" I asked the ones who got it right. "You go across, not out," said the woman at the deli counter, proudly.
"You're carrying in the hips," said a random woman on the street.
"You're carrying high," said an old guy on my block, boasting from his stoop.
"Because you look pretty," said my friend Pailo at a party. I liked that one until I heard the rest of the prognostication: "In Mexico, we say a pregnant woman who looks bad is having the beauty sucked out of her by her daughter. If the woman glows, like you, it's because she has a penis inside her."
Which brings me to the topic of grossly inappropriate things people said to me in the course of my pregnancy.
My husband and I thought about waiting to tell people for the recommended twelve weeks, but at six weeks we were at a bar one night with some friends after a show of my husband's (he's a performer) and someone asked me what I wanted to drink. "Just a seltzer," I said.
Immediately, twenty well-plucked eyebrows were raised in my direction. "Yes, I'm pregnant," I said when they wouldn't stop staring. Our friend Bridget, a singer, screamed and hugged me. "For some reason, I'm so happy for you, even though I can't stand it when most of my friends have kids!" she said. She was wearing an "Abortion Rocks!" T-shirt.
"You're so brave," said Earl, a producer, looking dour. "I mean, aren't you worried about bringing a child into such a fucked-up world?" Then he tried to get me to write an article about a show he was promoting.
I sent out an email to tell friends I hadn't talked to in a while.
Jesse, a friend from high school, didn't write back at all. When I ran into him a couple of weeks later, he hugged me and said, "I was so excited I didn't know what to say."?"Congratulations?" I suggested.
Seriously, isn't that the default? One of those rules, like Miss Manners's rule that all brides and babies are beautiful?
Apparently not in New York.
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