Sara Michas-Martin

Issue No. 10 •  November 2013 

 

Because I have expressed my strong desire to forgo a baby shower, my mother-in-law, visiting from California, takes me to Target when I am five months pregnant. I stand at the edge of the displays clutching the handle of the red cart. I want the granola bar in my pocket, but we have just come from lunch. Faces of cartoon teddy bears, monkeys and ducks loom around me. I don’t ask how much stuff is really necessary or how I’ll learn what it’s for, let alone keep it organized when I can barely keep my own closet from evolving into a mountain of clothes. My mother-in-law sensing my hesitation, starts to pull pastel colored merchandise off the shelves. She moves with purpose, adding to the cart pacifiers, onsies, wipes, infant-sized diapers, walky talkies, a changing pad and a special tube-shaped pillow called a boppy she says I’ll wear on my waist to nurse. Watching the pile grow, like rising bad luck, I don’t say I am afraid. Afraid this child, like the first won’t arrive despite being this far along.

***  

If this were the 16th century someone might say I hit on the master vein. If this were the 17th century, I’d be in the straw. I am apron-up and in a family way in the 18th century. I have a dumpling on in the 19th century or one in the box. I could also be in trouble, cut in the back, full in the belly. 20th century through today, I’ve burned one’s foot. I am on the hill, in the club, pudding club, in the spud line, in bloom, infanticipating, in for it, with a cookie in the oven, egg in the nest, trout in the well, joey in the pouch, up the pole, up the poke, up the guts, knocked up, breeded up, clucky, prego, preggers, storked, kidded, clubbed.  

***

Lucille Ball was the first pregnant woman to appear on American television. It was 1952. The episode where she learns of her “condition” is called “Lucy is Enceinte.” Enceinte is the French word for pregnant.

Lucy says: I need a tonic or something. I’ve been feeling real dauncy.
Ethel, puzzled, looks at her: Dauncy?
Yeah, Lucy says, that’s a word my grandmother made up for when you’re not really sick but you just feel lousy.

Getting the sponsors to agree to this story line was conditional upon hiring a priest, a rabbi and a minister to “approve each of the ‘baby show’ scripts.” And Lucy wasn’t “pregnant” she was “expecting” because the mention of the word on air would be obscene.

***  

The Spanish word embarazada is a false cognate for the English embarrassed and actually means pregnant.   

***

I have spent many afternoons on my best behavior in the company of mothers, sisters, co-workers and friends—all of us orbiting awkwardly around a mother-to-be in a room filled with ridiculous balloons. The guest of honor in her new baby-doll top, face puffy under a mask of make-up, most likely resisting the release of gas build up in her already taut midsection. Topped with curled ribbons and cheerful cards, I have added my gifts to the towers of boxes. I have eaten cucumber sandwiches and cakes shaped like rattles and ducks from ornately decorated tables. I have participated in games where the object is to guess the circumference of the mother’s belly, or to “pin the baby on the uterus.” For the prize of a scented candle, I have stuck my nose inside a diaper to identify a brand of melted candy bar. Grown women play these games. Grown women in their smart blouses and pressed slacks, many of who are already parents. For hundreds of years, this same circle of women held sacred places at the bedside of a woman in labor. Women pooled their collective fund of knowledge. They came together to initiate the mother, but also to help deliver a baby. “Before childbirth belonged to medicine, it belonged to women,” writes biologist Valerie Fildes.

***

The Hindu woman, five months pregnant, sits in a soft chair to the west of the ceremonial fire. Her husband stands behind her combing her hair, a gesture of support and affection. The “Simantonnaya” or Hair-Parting ceremony, the third of sixteen sacraments, is performed in the fifth month because the fetus develops consciousness around this time. Beginning from the front of the head, the husband gently parts her hair three times with a porcupine quill to signify the hope of sharp intellect for the child. Tied to the quill to represent fertility and humility are unripe figs filled with many seeds and three pieces of darbha grass. He chants three mantras, which roughly translate:

Parting the hair of my wife, I pray that our progeny live to old age.
I praise the mother-to-be as beautiful as a full moon night. I pray for the impending birth to be smooth and as free of pain as the movement of a needle through a cloth being sewn.

***

From the many pregnancy guides recommended to me, I learn the size of the fetus at five months is comparable to a big carrot or a delicious, cold, frothy bottle of root beer. How big is your baby? About the size of a large banana...

***

After WWII, the modern American baby shower evolved with the consumer ideology of the 1950s and 1960s. During the baby boom, showers provided the mother-to-be with material goods that lessened the family’s financial burden. The commodities associated with pregnancy and birth also served to construct the identity of the woman as mother and the fetus as social being.

***

In China it is considered unlucky to have an empty stroller or crib in the home before the baby arrives. Gifts are showered on the family during the “Mun Yet” or Full Moon banquet, one month after the child’s birth.

***

A woman’s water breaks in Colonial America, or perhaps the onset of serious cramping begins. She instructs her husband to let the others know “it’s time.” He most likely alerts the midwife first, then continues to scurry around the village, knocking on the chosen women’s doors. Although this was the only role the husband played, the activity was given a name: nidgeting.

The cohort of women who gather in the home are called gossips. The term evolved from God’s siblings or God sibs to mean the woman’s “sisters in God.” The women stay bedside for hours, which gives them a chance to “discuss matters of mutual interest,” say Richard and Dorothy Wertz, authors of Lying-In, A History of Childbirth in America. Birth is a social affair; women eat groaning cake, and drink groaning beer from the carefully assembled groaning table. “The event of birth provided an important, perhaps the primary, occasion for female solidarity.”

***

My friend and veteran parent reminds me I still need stuff, lots of it. She meets me in the feeding aisle at the front of Babies R’ Us. We begin at the wall of bottles—glass, plastic, stainless steel, silicon, air reducing, angle-neck, natural flow, 4 ounce, 8 ounce, Gerber, Nuby, Advent, Similac, Born Free, Dr. Brown’s—. “Just tell me what to buy,” I say. The store is massive, the stroller display alone larger than Target’s entire baby section. Bathtubs, bassinets, Bumbos, breast pads, these are just the B’s. I need two kinds of holsters to wear the baby, a thing that rolls the floor and spins, maybe a Petunia Pickle Bottom bag and definitely a Pack n’ Play. With a straight face, my friend—super mom, environmental advocate, recipient of an Ivy League MBA—recommends I buy a Wubanub and a Hooter Hider.

***

Ovum, uterus, cervix—the elegant language of female anatomy stands in sharp contrast. Gabriel Fallopius identified the fallopian tubes in the mid-1500s. He called them the trumpets of the uterus. He didn’t know what they were for, but he knew they were different from male anatomy, which challenged the “single sex model” established by Galen in 2nd century A.D. who said, "Turn outward the woman's, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man's, and you will find the same in both in every respect."

***

The popular pregnancy tome, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, says “No pregnancy proceeds without guidance from the big kahuna of hormones: estrogen. In early pregnancy, estrogen promotes the growth of your impressively bountiful — and tender— breasts; later on, it helps develop their milk-making machinery.”

***

The word estrogen means producer of estrus. The term estrus is used to describe “sexual receptivity in female mammals,” the period of time when she can conceive. To put it plainly, when she is in heat, which is often signaled by “unusual, possibly erratic behavior.”

Scientists co-opted this word from the Greek oistros, meaning gadfly or frenzy. Picture a herd of cows grazing a green field in summer. Trees rustle softly, although the breeze isn’t strong enough to keep the flies from announcing their persistent whirring buzz. The cows fling and swoosh their tails and stomp intermittently as they dip their heads to the grass.  The flies, common name gadfly, a member of the family Oestridea, plant their eggs in tidy rows along the cows’ legs, between hairs. When the cow later grooms herself, she laps up the eggs with her large, pink tongue. Thriving as parasites, the eggs hatch and the larvae needle their way north to her back just below the skin. An abscess forms and when it ruptures the larvae spill to the ground. The usually slow and heavy cows are said to “run riot and gad about.”

***

In the fifth month, when a Japanese woman is certain her pregnancy is healthy, her friends and family perform a ritual called “Obi Iwai” (or Belt Celebration). The mother presents the “fukutai,” a white cotton sash passed down from generation to generation. Often it is the midwife who ceremoniously wraps the cloth around the woman’s belly, meant to keep the fetus warm and shielded from harm for the duration of pregnancy. A friend or relative might obtain a charm from a temple to tuck inside the belt against the skin for added protection. Sometimes the charm is dissolvable in water and the woman will drink it when labor begins. Guests recite blessings and prayers for an uncomplicated birth. Because dogs are believed to have easy labors, the celebration is held on the auspicious day of the dog.

***

Judith Martin, author of Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior writes, “Gentle Reader: A shower is held for the purpose of showering a novice (at marrying or mothering) with the equipment she did not need in her previous state (of spinsterhood or childlessness) but which is essential in the life she is about to enter. That is why Miss Manners and her friends at college always gave lingerie showers; in those days, no nice girl needed pretty underwear before marriage.”

***

The word vanilla evolved from the Latin word vagina. In ancient Rome vagina meant sheath or scabbard, “the protective casing from which a sword was drawn when danger threatened.” The Spanish adopted the word as vaina, which was later elongated to vainilla and assigned to the aromatic plant with “sheath-like pods.” At the end of the 17th century English anatomists “returned to the Latin they learned as school boys,” writes Mark Mortin, author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities, and applied the word vagina to the female organ. “The introduction of this learned term allowed the older word cunt, which had a long history as a bona fide medical term to degenerate into mere profanity.”

***

“Throughout history slang words refer to the vagina as a store for, or a source of wealth,” says Peter Silverton, author of When And What Of Everyday Swearing. A modern Australian street prostitute has a hairychequebook and the word money itself shows up for vagina in the 1811 edition of Grose’s slang dictionary—which carries a citation of small girls being told to be careful about the way they moved, ‘Take care, Miss, or you will shew your money.’”

***

Two colleagues from the marketing department approach Andrew Pole’s desk. Pole is a gifted statistician who started working for Target in 2002. “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?” They explained how “new parents are a retailer’s holy grail.” The question was how to get vulnerable women into the store early enough to establish loyalty before the competition. Pole began collecting data on the spending habits of expectant mothers using gift registries which consumers “willingly disclose.” He compiled this information with the mountain of data Target collects “on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.” (Every credit card purchase, mail in refund, visit to the website or coupon used is apparently linked to what’s called a “Guest ID number.”) Pole noticed that “sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc.” His team also found women shifted from their usual lotion products to large quantities of unscented brands. “As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a ‘pregnancy prediction’ score,” writes Charles Duhigg, the reporter who broke the story for the New York Times Magazine. “He could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.”

***

Some synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words for Gossip: account, ace, amigo, blah-blah, buzz, cackle, chronicle, chum, conversation, crony, gam, gas, go on, gush, hearsay, inquisitor, insinuate, jabber, newsmonger, palaver, poop, pour forth, prattle, pry, rubberneck, rumor, snoop, spout, suggest, talk away, teammate, visit, voyeur, waffle, whisper, yak, yokefellow.

***

Similar to the American baby shower, Northern Indian women have a "Godh Bharai," or Lap Filling celebration, an all-female occasion with the purpose of honoring the woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Attendants slide bangles over her hands and tie flowers in her hair; her mother provides the ornate sari she wears. Prayers and traditional songs fill the room, while guests place fruit, oils, sweets and jewelry in the mother’s lap. Gifts for the child are withheld until after the birth. Traditionally, the sister-in-law ties a yellow piece of string around the mother-to-be’s wrist. The bracelet protects the mother and child and is removed after a safe delivery.

***

The English word for bagel was adopted from the Yiddish beygel in 1932. The Yiddish word was borrowed from the German beugel, a diminutive of boug, meaning bracelet. In 17th century Poland it was customary to bring bagels to a woman who had just given birth. The bagel satisfied post-labor hunger but also the shape of the dough may have symbolized the cycle of life newly shared by mother and child.

***

Before Jonah is born, boxes of clothes arrive from Amman, Jordan, more than 7,000 miles away where my friend and fellow mother is stationed with her husband and infant son. Christina, my-sister-in-law, sends a baby carrier at Christmas. We discover its magical powers over a crying baby in April. Almost every day I open the front door to find a package. Gifts arrive from Canada, Australia, Rhode Island, Vermont, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte, San Francisco, Fresno, Portland, Bradenton, Providence, Boulder, Sacramento, Boston, Oakland and Los Angeles.

***

A man stomps angrily into his local Target store, demanding to see whoever is in charge. He shakes a handful of coupons in the manager’s face. “My daughter got these in the mail!” he shouts. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” The manager has no answer for him, attempts to diffuse the situation with apologies and an even tone. When the manager calls the customer later to once again apologize, the man offers him an apology: “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August.” Jonah sleeps with his arm curled around a stuffed frog that arrived three days after I told my sister I was pregnant. Above his crib is the framed illustration from Good Night Moon my Aunt Jo hung above my cousin Kelly’s crib. When Jonah can’t sleep we put him in the swing Aunt Barbara sent. We give him his first bath in the soft blue tub the Aylward cousins ship from Michigan. So Andreas can feed Jonah, I use the breast pump my friend Ashleigh, someone I’ve known since elementary school, sends from Portsmouth. Nights Andreas works, the baby sleeps in a wicker bassinet next to me, the same bassinet my sisters-in-law used. We know to sanitize bottles because Aunt Susan sent special bags to make the process easier. We use everything. Even things that baffle us at first, like the hand-painted clip with a string we learn keeps track of pacifiers. Upon the first fever, we bring out the bulb syringe. We fire up the humidifier from Betsy and unwrap the digital thermometer from Heather and August, our friends of fifteen years. Jaime, a kindergarten classmate, who stood up for me in my wedding, sends a rubber giraffe named Sophie that looks like a dog toy and becomes indispensable four months in.

When I start reading to Jonah, I discover arty and academic friends sent books prized for illustrations and progressive themes. My friend Val, who I met on Martha’s Vineyard twelve years ago, both of us solo, reading poems on our beach towels, sent “Mr. Seahorse,” a book about how the father seahorse carries the babies. I find inscriptions I had missed: This is a classic. My mother read this to me. Happy bedtime reading with love.

***

A feminist definition of gossip: “a way of talking between women, intimate in style, personal and domestic in scope and setting, a female cultural event which springs from and perpetuates the  restrictions of  the  female  role,  but  also  gives  the  comfort  of validation.”

***

My mother-in-law sends a collection of books that belonged to my husband. I recognize these books by their cracked and weathered spines, the yellowing pages and the graphic, monochromatic pictures of the 1970s. Many books show bite marks and the wear of what must have been hours of bedtime ritual. I open one book to find under This book belongs to: my husband’s name written with a pink marker in the large, unsteady letters of a toddler. The S, endearingly, is written backwards. There is an orange, hardcover copy of The Little Engine that Could. The inside reads: “From Donna. Liberia. 1965.” This must have been a gift to my mother-in-law when she served in the Peace Corps when she was twenty-two years old. I open a book that reads “To Andreas, love Dee Dee Da, 1981.” Dee Dee was his maternal grandmother. She was a piano teacher and the first grandchild named her Dee Dee Da upon hearing her tap the piano with a student.

***

Once a child arrived in Colonial America, support for the mother continued during the period of lying-in. For at least four weeks, the mother was to recuperate and nurse her new child in the borning room, a small room behind the central chimney chosen for its warmth and distance from the noise. Gossips cleaned, cooked and attended to the other children, taking turns orchestrating the mother’s household to give her and her child a chance to rest and regain strength.

***

We bring the baby home and are greeted at the front door by a life-sized balloon of a stork, along with flowers and thoughtful notes Sarah B., long time family friend, and her husband left for us. We discover they have gone room by room and put the house back together after our hours of laboring at home. They picked up the islands of stacked pillows scattered on the floor where I watched sea life documentaries to distract myself in those strange hours. They washed and folded the mound of wet towels they found in the shower and put back the footstool Andreas had sat on to keep me company while I stood and crouched and stood and crouched under the stream of hot water until the tank emptied. They laundered all the sheets, remade the beds, took out the garbage. They moved the kitchen table back in place, put away the giant birth ball floating around the hall. They swept the kitchen floor and scrubbed the counter covered with flour and crumbs because we decided to bake carrot bread at three in the morning, waiting for the time between contractions to narrow. They rounded up water glasses, pieces of paper noting numbers and affirmations, closed and re-shelved books on birth that lay open everywhere.

***

After giving birth, nurtured by the women of their community, Chinese mothers are expected to “do a month.” Vietnamese mothers practice “sitting the month.” Cambodians observe “mother roasting,” a practice of keeping the body and head warm and tightly wrapped to restore humeral balance and the heat lost in birth. A celebration called “dropping the stove” marks the end of confinement and the mother’s return to her community.

***

It takes my mother more than ten hours to make the trip from rural Michigan when Jonah is less than a month old. Her bag is too big to carry on the plane because it is stuffed with gifts. While we are asleep she goes out into an unfamiliar city and returns with a lawn mower and bags full of fancy food she would never buy for herself. Our power goes out and she makes me the BLT I’m craving by candlelight. When she burns the bread, she makes another batch. I snap at her for not washing her hands enough, even though my clothes are stained with spit up and shit. Not once does she roll her eyes at our organic soaps and baby sheets, our petroleum-free diaper cream or the hemp milk I pour on my cereal. She formula-fed her children, but listens with great compassion as I complain of sore nipples, stimulating milk production and feeling chained to the pump. Without hesitation she washes bottle after bottle. She brushes my hair, opens the curtains, scrubs the shelves of the refrigerator and arranges flowers for each room of the house. To give me a break she insists I wake her at 4:30 for each morning feeding. She smiles and begins to sing when I hand her a wet, squalling baby. She carries Jonah in her arms for hours, names him her “little prince.”

***

Sources:

Cano, Librado F. P.E. 2010. “Transformation of an Individual Family Community Nation and the World.” North America. Trafford Publishing.

Clarke, Alison J. 2004. “Maternity and Materiality: Becoming a Mother in Consumer Culture.” In Consuming Motherhood. Eds. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, Danielle F. Wozniak. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Crouch, Mira and Lenore Manderson. 1993. “New Motherhood: Cultural and Personal Transitions in the 1980s.” Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Duhigg, Charles. “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” New York Times Magazine. February 16, 2012.

Fischer, Eileen and Brenda Gainer. 1993. “Baby Showers: A Rite of Passage in
Transition.”Advances in Consumer Research .20:320-324.

Martin, Judith. 2005. “Miss Manners guide to the to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.” New York, NY. W.W. Norton & Company.

Morton, Mark. 2004. “Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities.” Toronto, Canada. Insomniac Press.

Silverton, Peter. 2009. “When And What Of Everyday Swearing.” London. Portobello Books.

Tiwari, Maya. 2007. “Women’s Power to Heal: Through Inner Medicine.” New York. Mother Om Media (ebook).

Tropp, Laura. 2013 “A Womb with a View: America's Growing Public Interest in Pregnancy.” San Diego, Ca and Denver, Co. Preager Publishing.

Wertz, Richard W. Wertz, Dorothy C. 1989. “Lying-in: History of Social Childbirth in America.” Yale University Press.

Wolf, Naomi. 1993. “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood.” New York. Anchor Books “Ritual and Ceremony A History of Baby Showers.” RandomHistory.com. November 1, 2008.