Exploiting My Baby

Listen, expecting girls, all I want to do is talk to you, find out how many weeks pregnant you are and maybe talk some shop—you know, where you’re delivering, what you take for heartburn, what you think of cord blood banking and the new iPhone app that times contractions. I just want to be friends, Pregnant Strangers.

At first, I wanted to make sure you knew that I wasn’t just carrying my weight in a very unfortunate manner, that I was really pregnant rather than just someone who binged on scones and cans of frosting. I would rub my stomach in the gingerly way only pregnant women do, try to catch your eye, but no dice. To be honest, I’ve been a social disaster most of my life, so I’m not unfamiliar with the sensation of being snubbed—I just can’t figure out why this dismissal is so pronounced.

I’m always hoping we’re going to see each other and, you know, have a moment. I mean, if we ran into each other carrying the same L.L. Bean tote bag, we would probably at least chuckle and say, “Nice purse.” A richly hued and hilarious interaction it would not be, but a human connection, yes.

If I were walking a beagle and so were you, wouldn’t we stop and have a chat about our beagles? Arguably, an entire friendship could spring forth from this one shared characteristic. If we were both wearing Phillies hats, or driving Mini Coopers, or reading Eat, Pray, Love at the Coffee Bean, there would likely be warm dealings, but both heading into childbirth (big deal) and motherhood (biggest deal ever) and nada. Nada?

I need some home girls. Sometimes I’m euphoric and sometimes I’m sweating pit stains through my muumuu. I have vivid dreams about epidurals and blinding surgical lights. When you’re lost on the subway in a foreign country, you look for anyone else who speaks your language, because either they can help you or you can be lost together.

Maybe this is insane, but it’s almost like I represent a threat, another mother bear that might somehow compromise your safety or shrink your available resources. Is there something evolutionary going on, as in, That lady better not get more shelter, berries, attention, or protection from strong males in the tribe?

Alternatively, this could be peculiar to the Hollywood area, where I live and write in various coffee shops and drop off dry cleaning and wander. I’m told the Midwest, the South, heck, even the Valley—those are great places for pregnant bonding.

Or, both of these theories could be bogus. In the classic horror movie When a Stranger Calls, the most chilling scene is when cops tell the terrorized babysitter, “The call is coming from inside the house.” There is a decent chance that this call is coming from inside my own haunted mind. Either I am unknowingly giving off a frosty vibe that turns off the strange women I’m hoping to befriend or I’m reading into this parade of pregnant girls some animosity that doesn’t exist.

In any case, this could all be solved with an ice-breaking secret handshake. Or if that’s too intimate, maybe we just throw up a sign, one finger per trimester, sideways, OG-style, and know for a sly, passing moment that we’re in the same crew.

One afternoon, I’m meeting one of my girlfriends for a movie, standing outside the theater. There is one other woman waiting there, who is also visibly pregnant. I’m pretty sure we’re even wearing the same black Gap maternity leggings. I try to make eye contact, but she looks away.

As people walk in and out of the movie theater, they notice us, a matched set, standing a few feet apart, and I can swear they are thinking, “Maybe you two should chat.” But we don’t. It’s a bizarre standoff, and when my pregnant friend Christy arrives, there are three of us and I’m sure this lady is going to make contact, maybe joke about how between the three of us, there are six trimesters. Or maybe she’ll say something about how we’ll all be spending the entire movie running to the bathroom, or eating buckets of popcorn. At the very least, can this woman eke out a “When are you guys due?”

This is why I’m thankful I’ve latched onto my new crew. I have now made three new friends, simply because we are all pregnant at the same time. Hanging out with them feels both right and comfortable.

Christy is a friend of my friend Ben. Both are movie critics. She is a month behind me, heard about me from Ben, asked for my number and invited me out on a blind date for coffee, where we proceeded to talk for hours about vaginal tearing and finding day care. When you’re pregnant, you think almost exclusively about your condition, and desperately want to talk to other people who are right there with you, find out what’s on their registries or how much alcohol their doctor allows. You’ll want to commiserate about the time-consuming gestational diabetes test that involves drinking a cup of syrupy cola-type stuff and waiting an hour before having your blood drawn. You’ll want to compare pounds gained and appointments forgotten due to “baby brain.” You’ll get over any social phobias you may have had just to have someone to text about every doctor visit and symptom.

Like me, she was never baby crazy, but she seems way more on top of things than I am. She sends me a list of birth doulas. She plans on using cloth diapers and having her placenta cooked and turned into tablets to stave off postpartum depression. I respect her hippie ways, and the fact that she has dedicated herself to learning about the foreign world of baby birthing while I sit around paralyzed like a pregnant fly in hardening amber. Also, she hates being pregnant and has gained fifty pounds, which I am on pace to do, and she makes me feel better about the fact that not every day is joyful or certain. There are moments I ask myself, “What have I gotten myself into?” and that’s a sentiment you can only share with other pregnant girls.

Jen, who has also done a few tours of duty hosting on basic cable, is a woman I met through Christy. She gets bonus points for also having a troubled relationship with her mom and being a few months older than I am.

At camp, in college, at my first newspaper job, at my first television writing job, I always fell in with a small, tight group and thought, “I love these people, and we’ll all be friends for life.” Now I’m lucky if I recognize their photos when they contact me on Facebook. The point is, going from city to city and job to job, I tend to get very close to people quickly and just as quickly move on, but in this case, we’ll all be moms together. We’ll still need each other. And that’s a bond that has to last.

Christy, Jen and I go to lunch together in Burbank one afternoon. The host gives us a special booth in the back with lots of room for our giant stomachs. We discuss baby names and stretch mark creams. It’s dark in that back room and cozy and I never want to leave there, just want to eat melted cheese off French onion soup and discuss baby stuff into the night in our dim womb of a booth. Plus, it’s pretty hard for me to get my unwieldy body back out, so the desire to stay there is both emotional and practical.

What’s amazing is that the rest of the world, they kiss your ass. The cashier at the grocery store smiles at you extra wide, the saleslady at the maternity store asks if you need some water, the receptionist at the chiropractor asks why you didn’t wear a sweater on a cold day.

This is very simple, as far as psychological analyses go. My stepmother spent fifteen straight years convincing everyone that I was a chubby, devious, sloppy, rude, outcast loser who would never amount to anything. I just wanted to prove her wrong, and even though she’s been in the ground for five years now—ground I would tap dance on in a red dress if that wasn’t just a figure of speech and she wasn’t, in fact, cremated—I can’t stop trying to rub her cold, dead nose in her wrongness about me. It’s not a great raison d’être, having to excel in the world because my evil step-monster said I couldn’t. It’s exhausting and often results in failures feeling bigger than they are, and achievements causing a brief high that fades, leaving nothing but a gaping hunger for shinier gold stars.

The world is opening doors for me and holding my bags and rubbing my shoulders not because of anything I accomplished in my career but simply because I’m smack in the middle of this run-of-the-mill human rite of passage that makes people want to take care of you. The relief is like a Tums to my frontal lobe. I can relax and the world won’t forget me.

Biology has taken over. The attention I once chased was contingent on my being excellent, and that gave me everything from writer’s block to crippling stage fright. On my way to speak to two hundred people at a university one Friday night, I got out of a moving car because I was so petrified of performing. I spent twenty minutes on the side of the road reciting affirmations from a book called Stop Obsessing before I could get back in the car. When I used to do live hits for a national news show, I would shake so badly it was hard to hold the mic still while covering a parade or interviewing Brad Pitt. Now, my body is doing something cool without my mind’s help, and everywhere I go the belly is buying me 27 percent more human kindness. Despite the worsening discomfort, this makes me want to be pregnant forever.

When a car doesn’t let me merge, I find myself momentarily shocked at not being given the right of way. I start to feel like I should be allowed my own siren, to snap on top of my car so I can speed home when I have to pee, which is all the time. Some malls have a few parking spots designated for “expecting moms,” which makes me feel like I should have my own space everywhere I go, because my feet are swollen and, c’mon, it’s me, with child. I should be allowed to speed, go through stop signs, park when there’s street cleaning, drive in the carpool lane and forget to signal. Everyone should clear out when I’m trying to exit the clogged parking lot at Trader Joe’s. I’m making a baby, and everyone should make a big deal out of it, and take care of me, and know just by looking at my car that there’s precious cargo inside and thus the rules, like my pants, should have plenty of give. It’s a peculiar mix of entitlement and fragility.

That’s why we need each other, to make sure we aren’t insane. Sure, women have been doing this forever, but that doesn’t matter at all when you’re a rookie. When you’re standing at the plate facing a ninety-mile-an-hour pitch in front of a packed stadium, it doesn’t matter at all that every big leaguer before you has been there. That fastball is still coming at you, and the stakes are painfully high. Even if your dugout is just a booth at a restaurant in Burbank littered with breadstick crumbs, you’ve been drafted, and you better make some friends on the team. At the moment of truth you’re out there alone, but before you step up to the plate, you can get some scouting reports, a pinch of chewing tobacco and an encouraging pat on the butt. They may not help you get on base, but they know exactly how the butterflies feel.