“Okay, where do I aim the gun?” Mare asks. I am holding the clipboard, she has the scanner, and we are looking at a bright pink Boppy pillow.
We are standing in the very same store where I came — just about this pregnant — to register for all the doodads, gizmos, gadgets and trappings of my first baby.
Her.
“We don’t need that,” I say, remembering the first Boppy, the big red one I dragged to the hospital that never proved as helpful as a regular old pillow. I think I gave it away to some dew-eyed new mother a few months later.
“We totally do,” Mare says, plopping down on the linoleum with that thing around her waist, cradling her arms. “When Renny and I hold her, it will help us not drop her.”
Oh. Kedokee then.
Mare zaps it and we move on to bathing.
“I LOVE this!” Mare breathes, aiming at a large blue plastic tub with all kinda slings and harnesses and stuff.
“Now that I know we don’t need,” I say. After a few weeks of dutifully filling one of those for her I discovered the magic of a Kitchen Sink and a Towel.
I find a $3 spongy designed to hold a newborn in a sink, we zap that and make our way toward Feeding.
“Does it really hurt a lot, Momma?” she asks. It has started to hit her. Someone will take a knife to her mother. It will take days for her mother to walk normally again. And there will be a new baby. Nothing will ever be the same.
“Yes, it really hurts a lot,” I say. “But I don’t mind.”
“How can you not mind?”
“I get a prize at the end,” I smile.
She has found a wall of bibs. She zaps a bunch that say things like, “Princess … just give me a credit card!”
“You wanted me that badly?” she asks.
The orange glow of the operating room. The pain that wouldn’t end. The ripping ache in my belly.
“That was when I really understood how much I wanted you. That it could hurt that much and still seem so small compared to you. I realized after that that pain isn’t very important. It goes away. Who cares how much it hurts as long as we’re together?”
She zaps a pink Bundle Me, and I suggest the one for warmer weather, too, and she insists on the dark pink and zaps it.
We come to the cribs, and I tell her we don’t have the space for those and steer her toward Pack-and-Plays.
“What happened to Ren’s?” she asks.
“Oh, she smeared it in poop. She was a very angry napper.”
“Ah,” she nods. She examines each Pack-and-Play, checking it for softness, for height (to be sure she can lift the baby out herself) and for storage convenience.
Then she picks the pink one.
She zaps some pink sheets, and a blue gingham one that struck her for no apparent reason.
“Do you think Eden will be annoying?” she asks
“Oh, I am sure of it. Everyone is annoying, particularly if you have to live with them. Have you noticed Daddy, lately?”
“Have you noticed YOU lately?” she giggles. “You’re pregnant!” We both laugh and I can’t believe that’s the little milky-sweet baby I kissed that night so long ago.
“There is good and bad to everything, Mare,” I say. “Nothing worth having is easy. Eden won’t be perfect.”
“She’ll cry a lot.”
“Yeah. And she’ll take your stuff. And she’ll pester. But — here’s great news — she’s going to annoy the heck out of Ren, too.”
“Hehe,” Mare says.
“She’s going to love you so much,” I say. “Just like Ren does. And the love you three have for each other will be just for the three of you, forever. It is very special.”
We’re at high chairs.
“Did Ren smear poop on that, too?” Mare asks.
“No, she was a happy eater. I don’t actually know what happened to the high chair,” I say. I just can’t find it.
We zap a nice-looking booster that promises to do everything the big chairs can do.
We turn our zapper in at the counter, where they print out a list of what Mare has selected. It is all pink, poufy, covered in bows. Nowhere on it is a single gizmo that promises to entertain, enlighten, or bestow musical talent and higher earning capacity. Eden will play on the floor with her sisters, with Barbies and stray blocks. She’ll nap at gymnastics and I will spend absolutely zero time contemplating her wardrobe.
Hard to say which kid had it better. There is good and bad to everything.
Before we go, Mare asks if she can buy an outfit for Eden. I take her over to the discount rack and grandly gesture that she should take her pick. She manages to assemble an outfit entirely of boutique pieces in varying shades of pink.
“She’s going to love the bonnet!” she gushes. “And the tutu and the slippers! She will be a ballerina like her sister!”
It costs $50. D’oh!
We head out to the parking lot, holding hands. I think that Mare also is noticing that Spring is coming. The days are longer, the sky is bluer, and the air is losing its bite.
“Are you scared?” she asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “Only a little of the pain. I know that’ll be bad for a week or two and then I will be my old self. But I am scared about how hard it will be to have three kids. I am afraid of failing you.”
“You could never fail us, Momma,” she says.
“No one is perfect,” I answer.
“Yeah, but you’re a great Momma. You always figure it out.” I turn my head so she will not know that she has undone me, will not guess how much her mother doubts sometimes.
I promise to take her to the pet store to hold the puppies if she promises to be patient through a Starbucks run. She agrees, I put the Loser Cruiser in gear, and we head for home.
