Fun Sometimes Has To Be Forced

I attended a baby shower this weekend. I haven’t been to one in a while and I was dreading the games they always make you play. Using pieces of yarn to represent how big around a pregnant woman’s body is just seems mean. Inevitably, there is the one guest who has no spatial awareness and ends up cutting their yarn to fit around the guest of honor three times or more. How demoralizing to be in your eighth month of pregnancy and have some moron say you look as big as a baby whale.

I recall one baby shower I attended where the hosts melted different chocolate candy bars into diapers and you had to go down the line sniffing, what looked like diapers from a kid with a dysfunctional bowel, to guess the type of candy. Come to think of it, that may have been my baby shower. Suffice it to say, it was gross.

I was pleasantly surprised at this past shower I attended. There were no cutesy games, just a group of woman sitting and chatting while cutting out woodland creatures from felt for a baby book. I made a fox. I also added an extra flourish and did some pink stitching. I got crafty, and I think I may have had fun.

I am ions (almost two decades) from my child-bearing years, so it’s not as exciting to talk about vaginal birth, cervical massage, and mucus plugs as it once was. I can appreciate the experience these younger women are going through though, and admire anyone who endures nine months growing another human and then 18+ years teaching them to be decent. It’s not easy. In fact, it is hard and sometimes it really sucks.

So let’s hear it for the mothers and the mothers-to-be. Tell a mom you think she’s great—it doesn’t have to be your own—although that would be nice.

Young Mother in the Grotto - originally modeled in clay by Auguste Rodin, carved in marble by Jean Escoula.