Last night we went shopping. At the toy store. For a few last-minute “essentials”. Like mattress covers for the crib I will probably never use, and hand-held breast pump for those occassions when I am away from the baby for more than two hours. While she insisted this last was essential for relief of engorgement and to allow me to go back to my tutoring job ASAP, I think she really wants to be able to feed her grandchild herself. She’s already invited us to drop the baby off and go to the movies any time we want an evening to ourselves. More than once.
Baby stuff has been a subject of weird contention between us for some time, the superficial subject of many a crying fit from both parties. She vacillates between bragging about the time she delivered a baby in a tipi at a Rainbow Gathering with no running water or medical supervision (not her baby, she was acting as midwife), to freaking out because I don’t have a jogging stroller, or a monitor, or little safety tabs for the cabinets or whatever it is. I actually do have most of the standard baby crap at this point, thanks to her diligent hand-me-down acquisitions and a generous shower. The only things I myself have purchased for the baby are a wooden name train, a pointy black velvet Witch’s cap, and a two-year supply of cloth diapers.
Until last night. When I did succumb and buy the manual pump (highly reccomended to me by an entire bulletin board of crunchy mamas), a mattress for the changing table, a little hairbrush and comb, a weird scrubby thing to scrub out the bottles I am supposedly going to “need”, a baby monitor, and some funky fabulous heating pads for my miserable breasts.
I also bought The Pool. Since we never got our bathroom remodeled (next year? maybe?), we went for the cheap DIY plan – we’ll buy a kiddie pool, fill it up with warm water, and I can labor in that. Expense for this is $20 vs. the $200 I’d spend renting a “birth tub”, and I can use the pool all summer in the yard.
My mother thinks this is the Worst Idea Ever. We’ve been spoiling for a fight about it for weeks. Her basic premise is that if I submerge my lower body in water after my waters have broken but before I give birth, I will contract an infection potentially fatal to both myself and my baby. My basic premise is that she’s mistaken about this. I believe that women give birth in water all the time with no ill efffects to self or infant, and that my midwife has enough experience with this to advise about doing it in a safe manner. She thought the inflatable tub was a fine idea, but advised me to have a patch kit on hand because she tried this once herself and the pool sprang an air leak and was unusable.
I’ve been imagining a long, difficult battle over the Water Issue, where Mom and I send each other lots of carefully patient e-mails with lots of medical data and archly worded arguments. A chilly politeness that will one day give way to a screaming crying fight ending with tears and ice cream.
Instead, we’re in the store when I announce I intend to buy this thing. She follows me around the kiddie pool section, trying to talk me out of it on any grounds she can think of: it’s unsafe, it’s ugly, it’s expensive, that will never work, your midwife won’t allow it, you’ll hate it, you don’t want to be in water during labor…meanwhile I calmly explain what I’m looking for and she, still trying to talk me out of it, helps me locate the deepest tub in the store with the thickest walls.
Then we get to the heart of things, very quickly and suddenly:
“Women give birth in water all the time!”
“Not in little plastic inflatable pools they don’t!”
“Yes, they do!”
“This is so awful, I can’t believe you’re even thinking about it. Don’t even mention it to me, I can’t bear the thought.”
And she stalks off to the baby clothes department while I’m left standing there with a boxed up swimming pool in my hands, shouting across a thankfully deserted aisle of sand toys, “It is not! It’s a fine idea!” before running to catch up with her.
We don’t say another word about it. When we get back to my house and unload the baby loot to show off to M, it’s my mother who proudly lifts the pool onto the kitchen counter and explains to M how we looked through the whole store and bought this one because it was the deepest and had the best sidewalls, and how it will fit perfectly in the tiled area of the large room we’re planning to use for labor, and…
*shaking head*
I think at least one of us is completely gonzo. Not in any condition to hazard a guess as to who though.
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