17 August 2017 "Baby Shower"

A few weeks ago I went to a baby shower with my mom, for a girl who had inadvertently become pregnant while in her senior year of high school with a guy who was almost twice her age. It wasn’t something I necessarily wanted anything to do with, but my mom guilted me into going with her, and so I found myself on a Thursday afternoon under an old white tent at the health and fitness club where I used to lifeguard, sitting at a picnic table and wishing I hadn’t come so hungry to a place serving only things like chips and potato salad.

The baby shower went on normally, with cutesy awkward games, and a ceremonial gift unwrapping, and me furiously texting my boyfriend that if we ever were to get pregnant together, it would be his responsibility to prevent any kind of awkward baby shower being thrown in my honor.

We had actually had kind of a pregnancy scare not too long before then, I had gotten a letter in the mail telling me about how my birth control had been recalled because a mess-up in the packaging had caused it to be ineffective for some patients. We were supposed to have gone out with his friends in Baltimore that night, and we ended up going anyway, after I bought a pregnancy test and stared at it while sitting in my bed and taking long, pitiful looking sips from the remainder of a bottle of wine I had. I cried in the car with Max for a while after my mom told me that it would be okay if I wanted to get an abortion, so long as I never told her about it. It’s kind of funny how alone you can feel at what one person says even while you’re sitting next to someone else.

I ended up not having to fear the worst anyway, as my birth control wasn’t affected by the recall, and the pregnancy test was a comfortingly quick negative. But it was nice to consider for a while that despite my greatest fears, I could still have fun with my boyfriend’s friends under pressure, and to remember that at the end of the night as we stood outside ready to go home, several people complimented us as being a great looking couple. I wrote in my journal about how he told me later that two of his friends had suggested to him that we run away together, and about how I realized in a certain instance of glances Max really did love me and felt confident in that moment that he would be willing to do whatever it took to support that.

Anyway, at the baby shower with my mom on a Thursday afternoon in July, when I brought up what I had said to Max, she told me comfortingly that there was no way to get out of the awkwardness of baby showers, that things like them are just a part of life. And even when my boyfriend finally responded with his sympathies for my awkward afternoon, I realized just how right she was. I’ll take a baby shower the way any woman does—as an opportunity for free diapers and to receive ample recognition of the quick end to what I’m sure will have been an interesting nine months.