Bawling with Random Strangers

The fact that I'm having another baby five years after my first, is in a way a mixed blessing.  I keep trying to remember my last trimester with Ava and the following blur of months spent lactating, hardly sleeping, and getting used to zero muscle tone.  I remember it was hard, but there are things I've forgotten.  And that's what is a mixed blessing, because it's been a few years and those days seem very distant so in a way I am looking forward to them.  That's how I know I'm crazy.  If I had just come out of those years and my baby was, well, still a baby I'm pretty sure I'd be scared witless because I'd have a much clearer memory. 

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday and as I sat observing all the other expectant mothers in various stages of pregnancy I couldn't help but question the news that the birthrate is the lowest it's been since the last slump, which was 1981.  The year I was born, and there were plenty of us for me to question if that really was a low birthrate year as well.  Maybe it just doesn't apply to Utah.  Maybe if I lived in Washington I'd stick out like a sore thumb, but around here I blend right in...er...so to speak.  *Side Note* One time I told my husband that a friend of a friend I had met at one of his flag football games the week before acted as if she didn't know me when I checked her out at Lowe's.  I didn't know her well and I wasn't too hurt, I just found it odd.  Later he told me he had mentioned it to our mutual friend and Brig's exact words were, "Well, you know, Denise is pretty unique looking.  It's not like you forget someone that looks like Denise."  I remember wondering vaguely if "unique looking" was meant as a positive or negative thing.

Anyway, while I sat there reading my self-help book a woman came in dressed in a sweat suit.  Her hair was in a disheveled ponytail and she sat down at the check-in desk and promptly burst into tears.  Of course I kept re-reading the same sentence over and over again.  In the end curiosity won out over courtesy so I kept my eyes down and did the rational thing...I eavesdropped. 

Front Desk Girl:  "What's the matter?  Can I help you?"

Bawling Stranger:  "Nothing's wrong.  I just....sob..."

Front Desk Girl:  "Well something's the matter.  Here's some tissues."

Bawling Stranger:  "I'm sorry...sniff, sniff...I...sob...just...had....a...baby."

I imagined the whole waiting room nodding their heads collectively.  Of course.   You just had a baby.  You're bawling your eyes out to a stranger.  And that's when I started to get apprehensive.  I by no means had full on postpartum depression, but I was definitely a bit of a basket case for a few weeks.  I remember crying to the nurse on Thanksgiving because everyone was at home with their families having turkey and pie and I was in the hospital exhausted and overcome with all sorts of emotions trying to get my baby to latch on and having absolutely no success. 

At one point I sobbed, "It's just my grandma's banana cream pie is the best (cue a cascade of tears) and there isn't any pie here at all!"  I'm pretty sure the same nurse a while later upon asking her if she had any children replied, "No, not yet.  It's pretty good birth control working here."  I remember feeling slightly insulted but feeling too sad to really care.

And here I am with a baby due around Christmas.  I wonder what I'll be bawling to the nurse about this time.  My grandma's Christmas ham or my mom's homemade sweets.  Probably both.