Come to me, mommy superpowers!

Posted by E-George on August 26, 2008

I don’t like holding someone else’s newborn.  The pressure is too great.  The parents are too paranoid.  The mother is watching.  Judging.  The baby is too little.

Last night I held (more accurately, I was passed the baby from another classmate who made it look like the easiest thing in the world to hold a curled up wad of baby.) the newborn of a fellow classmate in our birthing class and felt completely inadequate and dangerous.  I was relieved after only a couple of minutes they reclaimed the infant to feed.   The varmint was only 6.5 lbs and less than 48 hours old.  I realize he probably fussed with me because I was projecting a very clear “I’d rather not be holding this baby” vibe, but it was true.  I didn’t really want to hold the baby.  I was watching the newborn’s mother very closely, and other than looking a little dog-eared, she seemed relaxed when she was holding her baby, and considerably more tense when someone else was.  I didn’t want her shooting laser beams of disgust through my body because I may have been holding her baby incorrectly.

The littlest baby I’ve ever held was my sister’s baby and she was (I think) 3 or 4 weeks old at the time.  I also held my best friend’s baby when he was about a month old.  Both of those times, I felt normal.  Relatively competent.  At least, feeling like if the baby erupted into pukes or shits or tears I could pass it back to its mother knowing I couldn’t possibly make anything worse.  But, after the brief interlude with an actual newborn yesterday, I started to think about my own baby.  It’s supposed to show up here in the next 5-6 weeks (hopefully closer to 5 than 6).  How will I feel about passing my newborn infant around to other people?  Am I going to be OK with that?  Am I going to prefer everyone keep their damn mitts to themselves?  Am I going to barter services for baby time (leave your casserole in the kitchen, and you can hold the baby for 5 minutes.  Leave an entire cooler of food and you can hold the baby for 10 minutes.)?  How am I going to feel about holding my own newborn infant?  Competent? Natural? Normal? At the moment of birth, is that when the great mom superpowers kick in, and I can gratefully kiss my klutzy past farewell?  Or, will a heightened sense of awareness carefully descend from on high protecting both of us from tripping, dropping, slipping, or worst of all, forgetting?

These questions (among many, many others) swirl in my head with great number, variation, and frequency lately.  Sometimes having the baby kick and jab me in the bladder and lungs simultaneously so that I cough and nearly pee myself has a certain comforting factor.  Because the baby is in there, fully supported and cared for.  But, one can’t stay pregnant for ever.  Pretty soon my baby will be released upon the world and I’ll be fully responsible and it will be fully dependent.  And when that happens, I fully intend to stand over the crib, holding a bottle of baby powder to the sky and calling upon the powers of Greyskull to aid me.  Hopefully, that won’t turn Matthew into Battle Cat.

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