Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Stranger anxiety for moms

If you are pregnant with your first child or are a new mom (and by new mom, I mean "a mom with less than my whopping 13 months of mom experience"), I am about to let you in on a little secret: complete strangers know more about caring for your child than you do.


I have no idea what I'm doing.
It sounds weird, I know, but it's absolutely true. You're the woman who grew the child in her uterus from a microscopic little blob to a full grown baby whose presence caused your stomach to break out in purple stretch marks that faintly resembled a road map of the United States. Since you first saw two pink lines on a pregnancy test, you've likely spent every waking moment (and many sleeping ones) worrying that you weren't doing EXACTLY the right thing for your child and googling a million variations of "can I use hair spray while I'm pregnant?" And of course that worrying only intensified when your baby was brought, wrinkled and crying, into the world. Or perhaps you adopted your child, and before you ever even learned of her existence, you were spending hours researching the very best way to care for her every need so that you would be ready to be the best mommy humanly possible at a moment's notice. You are probably the only person in the world for whom a description of the color of your baby's eyes requires a minimum of three adjectives.* You've spent literally hundreds of hours just staring at your baby (or you will once your baby is born), and just from the pitch and volume of your baby's cry, you can often tell exactly why he is crying in under 30 seconds. But none of that matters. Because complete strangers - people who have never so much as laid eyes on your child until right this second - are the ones who are the experts on what your baby needs.

How do I know? Because they will approach out of the blue you and tell you exactly what you should be doing for a baby that they may mistakenly think is a girl even if he is wearing a onesie that says "Mommy's little man." Or, even worse, they will loudly criticize your parenting within earshot.

Here's an example: Last September, I was taking a walk around our neighborhood with L in the ErgoBaby carrier. It was 64 degrees (I know this because I checked as soon as I got home.) In addition to being pressed up against my torso, L was wearing fleece pajamas, a sweatshirt, and a hat. I had been walking for about five minutes when I passed a 30-something man and a woman who were walking together in the opposite direction. As soon as we had passed each other, the woman said loudly, "It is WAY too cold to have a baby out here!" Imagine how grateful I was to have overheard her! See, up until that point, I thought that the fact that I can tell whether L is cold simply by listening to him breathe** was a sufficient indication of whether or not I was mistreating my child by bringing him out into frigid mid-60's weather, but it turns out that the only one who is capable of determining if my son is warm enough is a woman I've only ever seen that one time who may or may not have children of her own. You'd be a fool to ignore that kind of expertise!

He's freezing.
So here is my advice for new moms: Go to a crowded place. A grocery store or shopping mall will work fine. Then just stand there with your baby. It helps if your baby is only wearing one sock (or better yet, no socks at all.) Before you know it, helpful people will be swarming all over you to tell you what you're doing wrong.

Or you can save yourself the trouble of knowing how very little you know about your own child and remain in blissful ignorance by buying this onesie:




*For the record, L's eyes are a beautiful hazel-y greenish gray, darker toward the outside of his iris and lighter in the middle, with little brown flecks. They're kind of a mix of my eyes and Dan's eyes.
**When he is cold, L will periodically breathe in a quick little gasp. Just so you know. Apparently that's not helpful information, though.


Disclaimer - I am often genuinely appreciative of advice from people I know in real life, even if I don't follow it. Criticism from complete strangers? Not so much.

Monday, March 25, 2013

"Married to Medicine"

Many of you saw this post on my Facebook page about a month ago:
Well after I got over the fact that Bravo shunned me, I decided that I could still capitalize on the reality show material that is my life. After all, I'm almost exactly as glamorous as the women on the show. Take Friday for example - I started off the day with an oatmeal hair mask designed to make my hair silky and shiny for my next social event. I mean, if you want to get technical about it, it wasn't so much an "oatmeal hair mask" as it was Gerber oatmeal spit out by my son. And my next social event involved a play date for two one-year-old boys. But still. Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe. 

In case you want to see the trailer, you can see it here. But really, you don't need to watch the trailer, because you can get a sneak peek into the life of a real doctor's wife right here on this very blog! Sure, I spend more time reading "How Loud is a Lion?" than sipping champagne while wearing diamonds and a fur coat. And yes, I typically wear yoga pants and slippers instead of an evening gown and stilettos. But the point is that we doctors' wives are a glamorous bunch. And as evidenced on the show's trailer, it's our style to use the phrase "doctor's wife" at least once every three sentences. Otherwise, how would anyone ever know how glamorous and sophisticated we truly are? I'm so glad that someone finally made a show about doctor's wives so that they could perpetuate the idea that doctors are raking money in hand over fist and don't owe a quarter of a million dollars in medical school loans.*

In conclusion, I would just like to say - "doctor's wife."


*When Dan was applying to medical schools, a financial representative at one of the schools said, "We prefer to call it '$250,000 in debt' instead of 'a quarter of a million in debt' because it sounds better." And he's right, when you put it that way, it gives you the warm, fuzzy feeling that you'll be paying off debt for the rest of your natural life.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Sleep and Other Mommy Fairy Tales

Well, here it is. I'm blogging again.

(I'll pause here so that you can applaud and then wipe the tears of joy from your eyes.)

I almost always have something to say, and since L still hasn't learned to appreciate my random stories (we're working on it), I'm sharing them with you fine folks! You're welcome.

In case anyone was wondering about the title of my blog (if you weren't, pretend you were), here's the scoop: while I was pregnant and after L was first born, I (like every other mom in the world, I'm sure) was constantly told "Make sure you sleep when the baby sleeps!" And at 4am, I (like every other mom in the world, I'm sure) often found myself wondering "And when exactly is the baby going to sleep???" Added to that was the fact that for months, L would only nap while I held him, bounced up and down vigorously, patted his back nonstop, and made ridiculously loud shushing noises*. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep for a very long time, and I still feel like someone owes me some naps.

Stay tuned for random stories from my life. But only if you want to. I promise I won't demand to know whether you've read my latest post next time I see you. I'm polite like that.




*This is only a slight exaggeration. 

Credit for the title of this post goes to my brilliant mom. She suggested it as a title for the blog, but thankfully, sleep is no longer a fairy tale for me. I got 10 hours of it last night! It was glorious.