I've realized lately that there are a lot of parallels between awaiting your baby and awaiting your wedding day. There are entire bookcases full of guides and advice on what to do to prepare for The Big Day. There are tons of plans to be made. You get parties and lots of gifts for both of them. And once The Big Day actually arrives, you realize all the planning was for naught, because nothing can prepare you for the reality of the event.
The other similarity is that everyone talks about the preparations, but hardly anyone talks about what happens after. Buy this stuff, make this plan, blah blah blah...but what happens when you get home from the honeymoon and realize, "Holy crap, I'm going to be looking at your face for the rest of one of our lives. You're going to be in my bed, in my space; your stuff and my stuff are gonna get all mixed up together; I don't get to think of just myself EVER AGAIN."
I have a feeling it'll be the same with the baby. We'll get this helpless little mini-us home and set it in the crib and stare at it in total and complete terror. "Holy crap, I'm going to be looking at this face for the rest of one of our lives. You're going to be in my arms, in my space; your stuff is gonna get all mixed up with my stuff, and I won't get to think of just myself EVER AGAIN." I'll be a mother, a role for which there is no real preparation, other than a lot of theory and "Well, this is how it was for me..." which, as we all know, often proves pointless for us.
Obviously people have been raising babies for many, many years now, and since I fancy myself to be at least as intelligent, if not more so, than the average bear, I'm sure I can handle it. But I know there are going to be nights when I stare down into the crib at this little tiny person who somehow managed to get put together INSIDE ME (my gosh) and, even more miraculously, managed to come OUT of me (which I'm not nearly as worried about as one might think) and wonder to myself, "What exactly am I suppose to do with you?"
3 comments:
LOL, for several years I always used "smarter than the average bear" at the bottom of my resume. Great minds... :)
OK, I am going to disagree... in a completely friendly and making-conversation way, so I hope that's OK! :)
I agree that weddings and births are similar in that you plan and plan, and you get a lot of gifts, and that it's a bigbigbig deal. But I think the similarity ends there.
Because you plan and plan and plan for a wedding, and when The Day arrives, you know pretty much how it's going to go down. You've got it scheduled on a big grid, and down to probably 1/2 hour increments you know essentially what will be happening where, and you KNOW that no matter what happens with the photos and the flowers, you'll be married by the end of that day. It's not that the planning is for naught (in my opinion), it's just... peripheral, maybe, to the important thing: you're getting married.
Babies, on the other hand... well, for one thing, you're looking at a range of an entire MONTH when it's going to show up. There's no planning where you'll be when you decide it's time to head to the hospital... or whether your water will break... or if you'll be in labor for 3 hours or 3 days. All you can do toward the end is just pack your bag and wait.
Of course, I'm coming from the experience of having shared an apartment with my husband for 1.5 years before we got married. So our CDs and t-shirts were already mixed up, and we'd been through many, many "getting to know your new roomie" flare-ups already. Basically the only thing that changed post-wedding was this blanketing feeling of peace that we were *really* in it together for the long haul now.
Now, perhaps because I'm a bit of a fatalist*, I was terrified it would be bad luck to think about the baby growing up and integrating into our everyday lives. Now, a marriage: there's something you have control over, something you can work on. But I was so terrified that our baby would not be healthy (so far 100% unfounded), I couldn't manage to see beyond the birth toward the baby crawling, walking, riding a bike, driving... this is one of my weird quirks, I realize.
So the main difference, I think, is the control issue: with the wedding you have control over everything, including whether or not the big event does actually happen. With the baby, once it's set in motion, that's it: it IS HAPPENING, whether or not you change your mind about what a good idea it might be.
But I'm, you know, open for discussion! And maybe the way I'm looking at things explains why this motherhood thing is SO HARD for me... so maybe I need to change my tune.
*Fatalist, it turns out, is not the right word. Maybe pessimist or negativist is more like it -- what I mean is, if I imagine the worst possible outcome, then things never seem to turn out quite that bad.
You're right, Allison, those first few weeks, you'll gaze at the baby as it sleeps with bewilderment. And then sometime around week three, he will wake up and morph into this totally different baby, and you'll be blown away again (the good news is that you'll be too tired to freak out about it by then!) You're right, though, often we spend so much time and effort planning the wedding that we barely remember that it will be followed by a marriage, and we think about the birth, and showers, and strollers and high chairs so often that when the baby is really here, we can barely breathe, it is so astounding! I wish I could tell you otherwise, but the reality is that you simply can't really know how you'll feel then, so until it is "then" take this time to enjoy it, soak it up, and fill the pregnancy journal, because there is no guarantee that you'll ever get around to a baby book, or a journal for your subsequent babies! (just make photocopies of this one, they'll never know!)
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