Today, Dan and I went to Coolidge Corner with SJL. You know, a little shopping, a little sushi lunch, what have you. Really nice day. Anyway, I was in Panera Bread to get a snack and then half an hour later to nurse and change SJL, and I spotted a group of new moms sitting together with their tiny babies (I'm guessing that the babies were 2-3 months or younger), sipping their lattes and talking about... well, you know-- sleep (lack thereof), the temperature their baby likes their bottle, how difficult or easy it is to burp their baby, how often their baby poops, etc.
WHO FREAKING CARES???
OK, OK, I know-- we all get really obsessed with this stuff. How often does your baby need to nurse? Do you feed her on a schedule? How long can she go without nursing? Is she gassy after you eat dairy? How often do you change her diaper? And of course, how long can she sleep at night?
Yes, I think about this stuff a lot. I definitely thought about it and obsessed over it MUCH more with Chickie, but I'll admit that I still think about it now. Not sleeping more than 3 hours at a stretch will definitely motivate you to think about how you can get more sleep, right?
The big question is-- do we as new moms talk about this sleep-poop-nursing stuff because we want to/we enjoy it/it's therapeutic, or do we talk about it because we don't have anything else to talk about? Because, really, what else is there to talk about? I'm not working, so I won't be talking about work. I haven't had a chance to catch up on current events, and when I'm in the car, I don't really want to listen to NPR because I'm tired and don't have the attention span, so I'm stupidly unaware of what's going on in the world. I actually get my news from Facebook-- that's how I found out that Ted Kennedy had died. Come to think of it, I was still pregnant then.
Anyway-- I *can* tell you that the Redsox are in the playoffs, but I can't tell you when the playoffs start or whether Josh Beckett's back is better, and for me, this is a big deal, because I know everything about the Redsox.
I think my issue with this stuff is how much it hijacks our conversations and becomes the ONLY topic of conversation among new moms. I remember when Chickie was tiny, I felt really disconnected from my friends who didn't have kids-- I felt like they couldn't relate to what I was going through and didn't understand what I was struggling with. I also had a vague idea that they didn't want hear about how much Chickie slept or how often he pooped (he didn't do much of either), and seeing as that was all I could talk about, it didn't make for good conversation. (I will say that I relied on my childless friends when I needed an escape from Mommy Talk-- when Chickie would fall asleep in my lap after nursing, I would call one of them up and say, "OK, tell me an R-rated story-- sex, drugs, anything. I don't care if you make it up...")
As I've said before, I found an amazing New Mom's group in JP and made amazing friends that I still see almost weekly. When we met each other, we knew nothing about each other other than we were new moms with babies the same age, so what did we talk about? BABIES. Poop, nursing, sleep, yeah. All.The.Time. When some of us went back to work after our maternity leaves were over, pumping yields were added to the mix. Lovely. Of course, over time, we got to know each other as more than just moms and nursing/diaper changing machines, and was a wonderful day when one of my friends declared, "OK, we're not going to talk about the babies for a few minutes-- can we please talk about sex or something??" I think the babies were about 7 or 8 months old then.
I've blogged and blogged and blogged about how being a mom isn't the only thing I am but is probably the most important and certainly the most prominent part of who I am, and although I've fought and wrestled with all of that stuff over the past couple years, I'm over it now. And, this time around, I know all of this will pass-- the sleeplessness, the projectile vomiting, poopy diapers every 5 minutes, all of it. In the mean time, though, I'll probably still talk about it.
And with that, I'm going to bed. Gotta catch the Z's when I can.
1 comment:
I worry about that even more with Matt. Like, do we have anything to talk about other than the kids? Or how much his mother is annoying me? But then I think, well, the kids are pretty interesting. :) So as long as we can throw in some current events every now and then (and between the two of us, we can usually manage one or two), I think we'll be fine.
I think the thing I struggle with most with new mama friends is how much of myself to reveal. Do I come right out and talk about how I used to work at PP, or do I save that til I've gotten to know them better? I think I revert to baby talk because it's so innocuous, most of the time.
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