Rebecca Conroy, mom of Trixie Owl age 3.5 and the expectant mother of a boy due any day now, and we get to have a front row seat for all of her adventures with her expanding family in Rebecca’s ongoing series. There will be wisdom and joy, and there will be puke. Lots of puke.
Here I am, many days past the due date of my second child. My three year old daughter asks impatiently where her brother is at least a few times a day. She makes up names for him now that include, “Cutie Winter Baby,” “Snowflake,” and “Bruno.” I seriously consider all suggestions, as I don’t even have a definite name chosen for him. My cell phone explodes with nice people wondering about his arrival, wanting to meet him. He’s taking his time, and, as Lou Reed sang, “I’m waiting for my man.” I’m kind of flattered that he wants to hang out with me a little longer. The practicalities are rough though: sitting is a splayed-legged struggle that holds the impending task for my lower back of getting up, laying down on the couch or in bed is crampish and suffocating, and walking around on our New York City streets just makes me feel like a circus freak with super sore hips. Yet, to be honest, I am still not formally ready for this kid to come. Not in the way that adults get to feel ready for any other endeavor that they may attempt. Each night that I get to put my daughter to bed with stories and songs, candles and sweet talks makes me nervous about how I will do it with a bubbling newborn right next to us. Each subway ride surrounded by sneezing, coughing, winter crowds without a baby and diaper bag strapped to me reminds me of how hard it was with one, shielding my infant from it all. Watching mothers of babies lug heavy strollers up stairs with the help of kind strangers scares the bejezzus out of me, I blocked that all out after it ended. Being ready for a baby is something I have always reserved for the type As of the world, the smoothed out, together ladies with perfectly folded laundry, incredible vacations planned a year ahead, and maybe a brownstone on a shady cobblestone street or new waterfront Williamsburg condo as their pied-a-terre.
What I do find interesting though, is how everyone else out there expects any pregnant woman to be so ready. To be on top of it all. To have it all figured out. I don’t blame them. It must be a subconscious communal human hope that those of us procreating are the most driven, together, and functional. Oops, that’s not me. I slipped through those cracks. Gulp. I am having this second child so that my daughter will have a sibling. That’s as far as my plan went. I, myself, am an only child. The whole thing is just as shocking to me as my first pregnancy. I don’t have as much time to check in with myself this time around, to talk with my friends about every little emotion attached to being an expectant mom, or to write poetry. I am a mother now, who also works, but that doesn’t make any vulnerability go away. It just brushes it off somewhere, for consideration at a later date, in a different place (maybe when I’m 70 and have a free minute?). I don’t know. I’ll deal with it all sometime in the future. That’s my motto right now, as I wait for my man.
Rebecca Conroy is an artist and stylist from New York City. She has an MFA from Columbia University in screenwriting, and often finds herself on film and photography sets making things run or look better. She is the mom of Trixie, who is 3.5 years old.