A subsequent baby…

Book by Pat Schweibert, a gift I give often

I once cared for a woman who lost 3 babies (of varying sizes an gestational ages) before she had one to take home with her. She had the expected level of trepidation you might expect going to the end of her 4th pregnancy…so one day I said to her…

“Do you know what you child will be?   Do you KNOW what he will be !?

(My voice had a crescendo of expectiation and then I said )

“A regular guy like everyone else”

And you will be a normal mom like everyone else…you will be tired and grumpy and you will hit his head on the side of the car trying to get him in the car seat. Yes, he will be normal and goofy and as flawed as other people and he may not be in the gifted program.

And I honestly think it was the best thing I could have said.

Even under good circumstances, we seem (we being our goofy society today) to expect babies and moms to be paragons of perfection  even though they are both undergoing huge personal evolutions and learning through trial and error every day. If a mom has a loss in her history,  the difficulty of the expectations dumped on her is even bigger.

Lets stop that.

Each of us has the right to be normal and average…if we find a special skill or ability later then bonus, but we must stop our extreme expectations on ourselves and others.

 

(I did buy the above book for the mom I spoke of. I called her before her shower, told her about it and asked if I should give it to her in private or at the shower. She said she wanted it at the shower to break the ice on the subject with all the other shower guests. When she opened it up, she spoke of the other babies in a way that put everyone at ease. The elephant in the room was gone.)

• Posted in: Uncategorized