Preparing for the onslaught

I'm sure le enfant will be cute as hell, fun, exciting, crazy, amazing, intriguing, and totally weird. Ten days to go and I'm ready because I'm pretty sure you're never really ready.

The "onslaught" I refer to in my headline actually is the odd arrangement of people who already have started creeping more deeply into my life because of the baby. Back in the day, before I had a vested interest in things fetal or knew what a "onesie" was--you know, about 8 months ago--I tended not to have conversations with people who could locate their own placenta.

I admit it, I probably avoided them if they could only speak "Baby." (Luckily, some of my good Baby friends had lots of other things to talk about.)

Now I'm one of the Baby People, trying not to make my non-baby friends yawn incessently or avoid me. Talk of breast pumps and cradles is just painful unless you own one or are shopping for one.

Of course, I now think childbirth is simply the most fascinating thing to ever happen to anyone ever--or in plainer terms: "it's all about me." Now I am far more social with people I have nothing otherwise in common with. Because on the face of it, producing offspring gives us something in common, right?

In a word: Nuh-uh.

Totally the opposite, it seems. All the baby-in-common thing does is further expose when two people have evidently incompatible natures, values, personalities, and approaches to life.

Those people who like to talk about how other people "should" do things--well, they now seem to hallucinate you've paid them a fat consulting fee to blather on about how *you* should be doing things...with your baby.

People who think they have earned some sort of privilege to interfere in other people's decisions and plans, become far more vocal....about your decisions and plans.

And people who need to feel better about their own weird decisions by spewing about how that's the *only* and *best* way to do it--and thus criticizing all other ways--well, they are at least the most transparent.

In summary: Name your kid what you want, live where you want, let your kid sleep where you want, and make them go to sleep however you want. But try not to sound like you run the World Organization for Names, Sleep and Housing Configurations. Exercise polite restraint and do what I do when other people explain their plans or decisions: say "really? great!" and move on. Courtesy, mommies.

I have opinions, too. I frequently have nothing but opinions. But in Babyland, I'm open to most anything, and we're playing it by ear. And my follow-up to that is "And I think Lyric will be better off for our flexibility."

No single decision we make--calling her Sarah or Moon Unit, living in a city flat or in the 'burbs, sleeping with her on my belly or in her own little princess mansion--is going to create Lyric The Adult.

Although being an example of a chronic Know It All...well that kind of personality shit rolls down like genetics.

Sure, we're interested in hearing different approaches, but soon as someone starts to intimate that their way is *the* way, chances are, I've stopped listening.

It's funny to me that anyone would go that route in a conversation, but I suppose it exemplifies the core difference between my friends and my acquaintances. Friends support what you do and recognize it as separate--not necessarily better or worse--from what they do. Acquantainces, well, they don't get to hear what I do, want, think or believe.

From what I hear, having a kid means bumping into these people left and right from now until...forever. Sigh. And I thought I wasn't a people-person before...

End rant. Lyric is swimming around like she's in training for a synchonized swimming meet, so I need to poke her a little.