It's time for my baby shower
This is my first birthday, and other musings as we approach one year.
To my mother’s chagrin, I didn’t want a baby shower. She graciously offered to fly out and throw me one, even conspiring with my friends behind my back to ensure I wouldn’t have to plan a thing. But as I’ve written about here ad nauseum (pun intended!), my pregnancy was horrible. I threw up every day. Acid reflux kept me awake at night and I spent my days asleep on the couch with my dog. My relationship with food during pregnancy was tortured, and as I tried to explain to my mom, spending money on a catered spread and a cake that I couldn’t eat added insult to injury—a party that was ostensibly for me that I would not be able to enjoy. But my resistance to a baby shower stemmed from something deeper than my inability to take pleasure in a summer luncheon. The pressure to look beautiful in a maternity dress, to be photographed in a beatific glowing state, was too much on top of the pressure to just. stay. alive. A constant state of physical distress made it so I struggled to feel connected to the baby that I was growing or to the maternal identity that I was preparing to step into. To be lavished with gifts and attention felt both ridiculously extravagant and woefully inadequate, when I all I craved was the simple relief of feeling comfortable in my body.
But the baby shower is never about the mom-to-be. In my case, it would have been about my mom, who wanted her daughter and granddaughter to receive all of the gifts and attention that she has lavished on other moms-to-be over the year. She felt like I was being deprived of a culturally significant experience, and all of the attendant baby gifts, to which I was entitled. Even more so since I had been dealt a rough hand in pregnancy! My husband also wanted a baby shower—a co-ed, all-day barbecue situation in a redwood grove (a very millennial and Bay Area version of what my mother was picturing)—because my husband loves throwing a party and was nostalgic for our wedding the summer before. But as the person carrying our baby, I held veto power over any “all-day barbecue situation” that sounded like it would be more fun for people who were not pregnant and drinking beer (like my husband) than it would be for me. The baby shower for him was like a kind of bachelor party—an
opportunity to revel in our carefree, child-free lives one more time. But as I explained to him, my life already wasn’t exactly carefree or child-free.
Even if I had been feeling up to a party, I resisted the fact that, compared to matrescence rituals in other cultures, the modern American baby shower doesn’t actually center the mother-to-be or the incredible transformation she is undergoing. It does not help her prepare for birth, or for motherhood, in any meaningful way. Rather, the ritual at the heart of the baby shower is gift-giving, a ritual that was in tension with our desire to procure most things for our baby secondhand. It is a party that forces the mom-to-be to be “on” at a point in my pregnancy when I had retreated inward and had ceased to be able to pretend to be okay. .
There are other ways. One of my best friends has two delightfully witchy best friends from another stage of her life. (It should go without saying that I mean “witchy” as a compliment of the highest order.) When she was 36 weeks pregnant, they joined our group of college besties for dinner, and led us through a little ceremony to acknowledge the hugeness of this moment in her life. We tied twine around our wrists, to symbolize that we were holding her through this transition, and promised to light candles while she was in labor, to symbolize the strength we would be sending her. We read some poems. She cried. We held her. We saw her, in all her beauty and strength and vulnerability on the eve of the Greatest Unknown. My daughter was only four months old, and yet, as raw as I felt, I was on the other side of this great threshold, extending a hand.
An Indian-American friend of mine went through another ceremony when she was in her third trimester. Her mother hosted a puja, a Hindu blessing ceremony for her and her husband. My friend sat on the floor in a sari, radiant with her third trimester belly, as her mother led us through a series of rituals. Afterwards, her aunties and uncles, around the world on Zoom, offered them blessings and advice.
I love ritual and ceremony. It’s one reason why I have chosen to embrace the Jewish faith, and why we are raising our daughter with traditions like lighting candles on Friday nights and squeezing more people around our Passover seder table than we can fit. Jewish traditions make me feel connected to my ancestors. The best rituals connect us to both a lineage and to a community, by requiring the participation of others. They refuse to let us be alone. And I felt so profoundly alone in my suffering during pregnancy. What if I had been offered a ritual that actually acknowledged the terrifying precipice on which I stood, the violence to my body to come, and the great unknowns—in the form of a blessing rather than a diaper pail?
My daughter will turn one next month. It will be her birthday, but it also feels like mine. One year since she left my body. One year of feeding her with my body. One year of healing my body. One year closer to returning to myself. It is her face on the invitation, but deep down, I want this to be my day. My cake. My champagne. I want to be toasted! She is my greatest accomplishment! I grew her, I fed her. I suffered for her. My pelvic floor is healing! I don’t need to be celebrated on my own birthday. Her birthday is the date that truly marks my accumulation of wisdom and experience and age. Eleven months ago, there was a person that lived inside of me, for whom I breathed and ate and drank. Today, she can clap and rip off little pieces of pancakes and bang a toy xylophone with mallets. She pats the dog and likes to hold onto one nipple while she sucks on the other one. She is really close to saying “da da.” She loves meatballs. These accomplishments are hers, and she deserves to be celebrated for them. But I crave some acknowledgment, some closure, if closure is even possible during matrescence. My vagina literally ripped open for us to be able to have this party. Don’t I at least deserve my own party, with champagne and cupcakes and a mezze spread? Some new pajamas that don’t have milk stains over the boobs? But what I really wonder is what kind of ritual would help me feel recognized and established in my new status as a mother. Nothing like this exists, and so it’s hard to know what would make me feel connected to a lineage of mothers at this moment. But I’m open to suggestions. The bar is low in our contemporary culture - I would like to just not feel invisible. I’m ready to take up space and take all the credit.