Spring Showers

A few weeks ago, I found myself eagerly looking forward to our neighbors' baby shower. This fact is notable for several reasons.

First of all, I was looking forward to a baby shower. Those who know me well probably noticed that something odd about this long before I did. Traditionally, I am not exactly to be found in the front lines of enthusiastic shower-goers.

My curmudgeonliness, I hasten to make clear, is not directed against the joy of childbearing. My antipathy toward showers goes all the way back to the first bridal shower I had the joy of not being able to attend. As I prepared to graduate from college, a dear friend from high school regaled me with stories about gifts of tacky lingerie, insipid guessing games designed to pry into a young couple's most intimate plans about how many children they wanted (none in her case), and lots of girlie squeals and blushing. (Actually, I added this last detail myself, as I wriggled out of ever viewing pictures of the event.) Even though I was her maid of honor, I was proud to have missed the bridal shower.

As bridal showers morphed into baby showers, I managed to work my vagabond life to my advantage. Move every two to four years, and you have a good shot at being on the wrong coast when a dear friend's friends send you the flower-adorned invitation in the pink envelope. "So sorry," I would grin into the phone as I RSVP'd. "I won't be able to make it."

The first baby shower I finally attended actually seemed promising enough. Two friends in St. Louis -- a cardiac surgeon and a physician's assistant -- adopted a son from Belarus. They asked that all gifts be made in the form of donations to the orphanage. No icky/cutsie clothing to trill over, professional women in attendance, and an honoree who was more likely to be spotted mowing the lawn with a hand mower than hanging little blue lambs in the nursery. It seemed a safe bet.

To this day, I have not figured out how putting a bunch of women with impressive graduate degrees into one room with quiche and piles of diapers could so fully transform them into something so deeply disturbing. Fruitlessly, I wandered from couch to chair to table in search of conversation that didn't revolve around the conversationalists' children. Not only did I have no children of my own at that point, but I didn't have much of a prospect for fathering them and was toying with the notion of using an anonymous donor once the university granted me tenure. I could easily imagine thumbing my single-and-artificially-inseminated nose at the Jesuits who employed me, but no part of me wanted to face the prospect of being reduced to the heated discussions surrounding me about whether a stop sign ought to be installed at the end of the block to make the street safe for play time.

As I made my get-away, I called my best and also-single friend. "I am never going to a baby shower again," I vowed.

And I meant it. Until I hosted one myself.

I'm not really sure why I decided I needed to host a shower for a friend who lived 1,500 miles away and was already being feted with two other showers, other than that she was very, very dear to me. Perhaps I also had some twisted notion that it made sense, since she and I had become pregnant within weeks of each other and I had soon thereafter miscarried. Surely, I must have thought somewhere in my hormone-addled brain, if I act like I'm okay I will be.

It is, I can now report with authority, hard to act okay when you have to dash out of the party and find a bathroom upstairs in which to sob without any real notion of what set you off. In fact, it's kind of embarrassing, having your grief come at you like a firehose when you're busy being happy for your friend.

So I stayed away from the showers until they were my own. Even then, I complicated the same friend's efforts to throw me a St. Louis shower by insisting there be "no games, no quiche, nothing pink or blue or too cute." She did her best, but I take full responsibility for initiating the traditional chorus of "oohhs!" that accompanies every tiny cute outfit. They are, I assure you, so much cuter when they are going on the being growing inside your own uterus.

Hubby and I had a shower in LA as well, our home at the time. I discovered that even men will say "oohh!" when presented with a cute baby outfit at a co-ed baby shower.

And now here I was, excited to be going to a baby shower. Convinced by my own experiences that baby showers needn't be icky? Perhaps. Transformed by motherhood into someone who no longer recognizes icky things? Only if the ickiness involves bodily fluids. So starved for a social life in my new home that anything will do? If so, Hubby and I had better get on those plans for a Vernal Equinox party.

No, I have to conclude, it has nothing to do with my growing tolerance for all things shower-related. I was just really, really happy for my neighbors and excited to spend time with them and their friends and, okay, ruined by my own pregnancy into really enjoying buying tiny little nightgowns and caps with a knit pea pod on top.

My happiness for my neighbors and for my invitation to their shower was also notable because not so long before I hadn't been sure about how happy I'd feel once they had their baby.

That sounds terrible. Let me explain.

In October, I had been looking forward to my own babies following theirs by a few months. By December, I found out those babies weren't happening. An ultrasound showed two empty egg sacs and one big explanation of why I hadn't been feeling nearly as sick as I had with The Boy. There would be no neighborhood baby showers for me.

I'm happy to say I didn't give those egg sacs a single thought at the shower (except maybe to tell myself one more time that come June I'll be mighty glad we aren't parents to newborn twins and a neglected 18-month-old). What I did think was how interesting and welcoming the women at the shower were, from the publicity director of the local Habitat for Humanity to the pediatric hospitalist whose eight-month-old goes to preschool with The Boy, to the hostess who lives one house to our south and the soon-to-be parents who live one house to the north.

Okay, we talked about our kids, but not obsessively. And I had The Boy with me as an instant, "Isn't he cute?" conversation-starter. But I am not and was not icky and there was nothing pink to be found because they didn't know the sex of the baby (although an errant ultrasonographer had more than suggested it might be a boy).

Seeing little Bodhi for the first time yesterday, I was struck not only by his beauty, but by the beauty of adulthood as well. His mother laughed about how strange it was to have "my children" in the car with her, and I knew exactly what she meant. With just The Boy, Hubby and I can take him out to restaurants and buy ourselves moments to read snippets of the Sunday Times by telling him to bring the basketball to the other parent. Once we have two -- or even the three that might be in our plan -- we will be real grown-ups, not some young couple with a baby. All the youth stuff will officially belong to the next generation.

And therein lies the beauty. I imagine watching The Boy playing with Bodhi and his siblings riding their bicycles down the block to play with the other kids living here. I feel a little bit too giddy at the notion of rereading the children's books my children read and refreshing my recollection of algebra by trying my hand at their homework assignments. It's as if the whole idea of youth is bigger than anything I can do or any way I can look. It's an energy that comes from the young but doesn't belong exclusively to them.

So maybe, just maybe, when they start having showers of their own, I'll be both old enough and young enough to feel as excited as I did about the neighbors' shower. And maybe I won't even mind a little tacky lingerie and a few pink bows.