You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
How conservative new parents are regarding pregnancy and birth. I realize this is the biggest moment in a new families life, outside the 45 seconds it took to conceive. But really, are parents just a bit uptight now a days?
The Christ Child wasn’t this guarded. A donkey, a manger, a bright star in a clear sky. That’s all Joseph and Mary needed for their immaculate moment. Wrap the kid in some swaddling clothes and get on with changing the world.
Even though babies still get made the same way, and born the same way, 2000 years has changed everything.
With another birth in my work place I have had 8 months or so to observe the role of new mom in the new millennium.
Some things don’t change. The belly rubbing and the slow Donald Duck waddle and the jokes about birthing a basketball. The hormone over load, the doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde personality disorder. The cravings for mud mixed with coffee mate.
But there is a new cautiousness that has enveloped the new mothers in my work place. The pregnant women pass this cautiousness onto the un-pregnant women. It’s like a maternal right of passage that I have been watching unfold before my very eyes.
The pregnant women become like the shamans of birth describing every molecular change they are experiencing. The empty-wombers, though they don’t realize it, are inhaling this knowledge and storing it in a cerebral file that was created at the dawn of man. And in that moment, when sperm meets egg, and the wondrous nuclear fission moment of life begins again, these moms to be retrieve that data from this DNA storehouse and push the edge of conservative birthing rituals yet farther to the right.
For my generation, it was much simpler. Not nearly so cautious, not nearly so many pre-birth rules. It was kind of like the sign hanging on the YMCA door. No drinking. No smoking. No MSG in your Chinese food. No knife fights, no dice games, no tequila shooters, no dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly, at least not in the third trimester.
Back in the day, the conservative baby movement was only just sparking up. NASCAR three point harness car seats and NASA endorsed vacuum breast pumps and strollers made by VOLVO were innovative inventions that had to catch on.
Now a days; New Millennium Moms are gearing up for mother hood with a break it you buy it mentality. They tip toe through the birthing process afraid that the tiny gestational sac of goo inside them will break if they so much as burp up a burrito.
CHILLAX new moms. Women have been birthing babies since the dawn of man. Prehistoric mom was out-racing T-Rex to squat in bat guano to crank out a hairy armed kid. If prehistoric mom dilly dallies, the monkey like new born is fondue for some ravenous carnivore with big ass teeth.
Birth is a combat sport ladies. You are not going to break if you bump into something. You think pregnant women crossing the great divide in a wagon were bitching about seat belts. You think moms back in the days of Bravehart were anxious because William Wallace was guzzling mead? Back then the birthing hut was only as sanitary as the dogs who were lapping up the placenta before the cord was even cut. Birth has never been clean. Just deal with it.
From prehistoric moms to Moms birthing on the Mayflower to kids being birthed on the back of a camel in 135 degree heat, babies get born. That’s just the way it is. Wipe them down with a towel, hook up em to a milk spigot and keep moving.
I am a product of the sixties. My mom smoked. My mom drank. I don’t remember seat belts till I was taking my driving test when I was 16 years old.
When I was a tyke, I use to stand in my dad’s lap while we drove down the highway. He would let me steer while he worked the foot pedals. It turns out he needed both hands to light up his pipe which he smoked like a chimney.
Prehistoric mom is running from terradactyls. 1960’s mom is smoking and drinking and grooving to purple haze. New Millennium Mom is stressed the F out.
If 1960’s mom showed up in our workplace today, WATCH OUT! Eyes would roll and disgust would be displayed.
It’s just a different time for today’s parents. Free Love and dirty Woodstock babies have been replaced by antiseptic, handle the child with a packing peanuts mentality.
That brings me to a story of my first pregnancy. It was the early 90’s. We didn’t have a covered wagon mentality, but we weren’t yet so paranoid that the birthing police were watching our every move.
We had just completed birthing classes and we had our Lamaze Queen seal of approval. Like a punch drunk fighter, this Neo-Natal expert had beaten me senseless with Uteruses, and appesiotomies, and effacement intervals. I was so ready to never think about these terms again I need a stiff drink.
We were down to the wire. We were killing time. Rubbing our belly and waddling and peeing a lot. It was New Year’s Eve and I was praying that my child would be born in the next three hours because I needed a tax deduction.
The new year came and went without so much as a contraction. They say the waiting is the hardest part.
A few days past and still no child. We were going crazy. That’s when we opted for a move that would make most new millennium moms blow a gasket. We did something so old school, it might now be illegal in Utah.
I took my bursting at the seems bride out for a night on the town. My sister and her boyfriend Jeff went with us.
We discarded the emotional baggage that had been anchoring us to the home front for the last several months. With renewed vigor and spring in our step we headed out into the winter darkness; down to a local quaffing hole called the Sports Pad.
We pulled open the plexi-glass front door to the bar where the bouncer was checking I.D’s. We were immediately enveloped by a cigarette smoke cloud. It hovered in the air like a dense fog rolling over the Golden Gate Bridge. The blasts of 80’s rock was blaring from the bar within.
I felt my head throbbing from the inside out. How will my pregnant wife tolerate this environment I mused to myself. I wonder if the unborn child likes AC/DC?
I grabbed hold of my wife’s hand. The bouncer was checking her license. “You gonna be O.K. in here?” I asked.
She smiled, nodding affirmatively as the bouncer held up her I.D. card. He looked right through it gazing at her cascading belly. He smiled and waved us through as if to say, “I guess you’ve been through enough, go on in and enjoy.”
We entered the bar, filled with biker scum and black leather clad wenches.
There was a rough crowd recreating at the “Pad” this evening. I swaggered up to the bar pushing my way through long hair, bandanna’s and grease.
I got my elbows up on the top of the bar triumphantly like some kind of dog territorially marking his spot.
A young bar maid wearing dolphin short-shorts approached me with a smile on her face.
“4 Coors Lights,” I screamed over a Bon Jovi song.
She spun around with temerity sending a dozen male hearts into a slight flutter.
I gazed back at my pregnant bride. Guys were checking her out even though her belly was as obtrusive as police lights in the dark.
Here’s something prehistoric moms to New Millennium moms all ready know. Guys are pigs. Give them a beer and they start thinking with their special place.
I continue to watch as a couple of losers ogle this pregnant girl. Their eyes moved up and down her form from calf to butt to long blond dancing hair. How drunk do you have to be to want to hit that? I think to myself. They either don’t realize she’s pregnant, or worse, they don’t care.
While waiting for my beers I ponder the pluses and minuses of taking their lives with a beer opener.
“That’ll be Five Fifty sir.”
The voice cut through the heavy metal jamboree of sight and sound like a syringe piercing a swollen bladder.
“Five Fifty.” She stood there with four bottles waiting patiently.
I paid her, then lowered a shoulder ramming my way through the slimy crowd two and three deep behind me. Like oozing sludge, as I moved forward the sea of filthy human flesh closed into the space I had just vacated.
I clutched the frothing bottles of liquid refreshment tightly. I maneuvered around a hairy underarm and around a monstrous pair of breasts. That’s when I caught a glimpse of my group. They looked like an island of purity in a jungle of wretched disease. Using my shoulder like a machete, I sliced my way through the scum.
Finally I made contact with the group’s inner circle. “Dr. Livingston I presume,” I said wisely towards Jeff. “Huh,” he sputtered looking at me over his shoulder. “Never mind,” I said as I started passing out the bottles.
One for Sis. One for Jeff. One for the wife. One for the WIFE? Oh crap; with all the ancillary stimuli frolicking around me, I forgot she was pregnant. She picked up on this anomaly and laughed. Seeing her glowing face relaxed me. It took the edge off the incredible trek I had just embarked on from bar to here.
I took a deep refreshing swig off the golden nectar letting it slide coolly down the back of my pallet. It burned and clawed as smoke and alcohol washed down my throat into my waiting stomach.
As the night wore on, the D.J. kept the hair on the back of our necks standing straight up with song after scratchy song.
The smoke undulated on random air currents created by a passing cocktail waitress as our ears sizzled from a constant blast of Guns and Roses from the coffin sized speakers that hung arbitrarily from the ceiling.
It was several hours later now, and the bar, like a police line-up was filled with a kaleidoscope of humanity. Harley Davidson motorcycle chicks with bleached hair. Muscle bound skin heads with tank tops. Preppy college students with pukka shells and sandals. The bar was a technicolor blast of vomit on a sterile white canvas.
Then suddenly all hell broke loose.
Like a black head being popped on a teenagers oily cheek, a gusher of societal phlegm exploded by the front door. Suddenly there were screams and anger and pushing.
I watched as the bar owner, a balding fat man, rushed throughthe crowd of miscreants. In his hand was a small canister. He moved toward a man dressed entirely in black. The man in black swung wildly at the bar owner who was now accompanied by several large bouncers wearing tight fitting T-shirts reading Sports Pad.
As the violence began to escalate, the bar owner pointed the canister at the man in black and then let loose a deleterious vapor.
The man in black let out a howl, thrusting his hands up in front of his face. He back peddled into the plexi glass door, pushing it open with his back. The bar owner spraying toxins incessantly inched his way toward the man in black .
The crowd around us had swelled together, collectively standing on its tippy toes to see the events transpiring at the other end of the bar.
Meanwhile the man in black, now outside the plexi glass door looked crazed. With the sneer of Charles Manson wiping dried blood from his lips, the man in black began kicking the plexi-glass door with his heavy black boots.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The man in black had a maniacal grimace on his angular unshaven face. He was blasting the front door with powerful kicks. Then, after absorbing as much punishment as any door should, the plex-glass exploded in towards the bar owner. It came undone from it’s moorings floating on the sudden vacuum just created by the violent destruction.
Without hesitation the bar owner continued spraying the chemical spray at the man in black.
In a mist of poisonous vapor, the man in black retreated into the darkness. The crowd cheered as one, thrusting their closed fists into the air. We had just experienced a pogrom between good and evil on a battlefield of booze and linoleum. The bar owner’s triumph was also ours.
The celebration was short lived.
The vacuum created by the plexi glass being kicked out was now now allowing the outside air to whip into the bar. The cold breath of a North Carolina winter began massaging our warm sweaty skin. It’s coolness carried with it a nasty sting that raped our pulmonary systems.
It turns out the bar owner fought off the man in black with a full canister of MACE. The residual chemical was pungent and filling our lungs with noxiousness.
My eyes began to swell as mucous snot, green and thick began to trickle down from my nose. My lungs were burning with every breath. I tried to hold my breath, but my system was hyperventilating into an adrenal gland defense mode. My body craved oxygen to combat this invisible poison. It was a dichotomy of impulses; breathe and fight, hold your breath and survive. As I pulled the front of my shirt up over my mouth and nose, the crowd around me, once rigid and defiant was now weak and retreating. The kaleidoscope of humanity had been reduced to a crying coughing throng.
One biker wench looked at me with swollen tears in her eyes. Her mascara was running down the sides of her cheeks like an Alice Cooper groupie. Her coughing was strident and forced. Her gigantic bra-less breasts vibrated violently with each lung cleansing expulsion.
I was blinking uncontrollably as I pushed my way through the gagging crowd searching for my pregnant wife. Like a scene from dawn of the dead, zombie like scum humans were prowling slowly ahead searching for a zone of fresh air.
After a laborious battle, I spotted my wife holding onto the side of the wall. She was flushed and cupping her hands over her mouth. I grabbed her by the hand and lead her through the paralyzed maze of flesh. The crowd opened before me as if God was our own personal usher moving people aside yelling “outta the way, this woman is with child.”
Way to go God!
We made our way outside. It was cool and the air breathable. I watched as bar patrons hacked their way into the street. Within minutes, the bar was empty. The bar owner has vanquished one bad guy by poisoning an entire crowd.
We pushed open the door to the adjoining night spot.
New vibe, clean air, new party.
“My good man, a round of beer to wash down the mace.” The bartender laughed as the night changed venues and continued on.
And that is a story that the new millennium moms will never be able to tell.