3 Pre-Pregnancy Conversations No One Warns You About
Now that we’re both solidly in our 30’s and somehow neither of us has become a massive movie star, my wife and I are talking about having a baby. We were eating donuts in our undies at 11pm and one of us brought it up as a joke and the next morning we woke up and were both like, “Yeah, we’re ready to be parents!” Over the next few weeks we had lots of talks I was expecting — the “How Are We Paying For This” talk…the “How Will We Deal Without Sleep” talk…but our research led to some insan-er, more terrifying conversations that I guess everyone has, but no one warns you about. Here are 3 doozies you can look forward to.
1. The “How Many Diapers?” talk.
Babies, especially newborns need A LOT of diapers. Way, way, way, way more than I thought. Until recently, I was under the impression that you change a diaper like three times a day. Turns out, that’s how many times you change a diaper before 9am. With a newborn, I now know you can expect to change a diaper up to TWELVE TIMES before that miracle-poop-machine goes to sleep at night. You can expect that to continue until about the second month or so, at which point the number of diapers-per-day mercifully decreases to a more civilized, but still absurd, 8–10. For those counting at home, that’s roughly 2,960 diapers in the baby’s first year alone. The second year, you can expect that number to be between 1500 and 1800 diapers, for a total of nearly 5,000 diapers in the first two years. (2000 lbs)
I told my wife this statistic, and after she soiled her pants, she said “well at least they make biodegradable diapers now.” And I was like “totally, totally, totally, totally” and I googled “biodegradable diapers” only to find that THEY TOTALLY DON’T MAKE BIODEGRADABLE DIAPERS. It turns out, there’s really no answer for why there aren’t biodegradable diapers I can find on the internet, though misinformation is rampant. An informative article in Wired espouses the benefits of using eco-friendly or biodegradable diapers such as 7th Generation. Except that these aren’t biodegradable either. It says so here on the 7th Generation website. What’s more, one disposable diaper takes roughly 500 years to break down in a landfill.
Then I soiled my pants, realizing that our child’s first impact on the world would be a metric ton of dirty diapers that would be around until the year 2519. This website has lots of completely disturbing and unnecessarily gross statistics about the evils of disposable diapers like how many times you could fill Yankees Stadium with America’s baby poop every year.
SO, CLOTH DIAPERS IT IS! We live in Brooklyn, and nothing says “Williamsburg” like cute, woodsy, organic, cloth diapers. They have services that come and pick up your dirty ones and bring fresh pre-folds every week and it only costs a million bazillion dollars but it looks like we’re going to try it for a while. The lady at the laundromat down the street who glares at me for trying to over-fill the washers (because those machines aren’t cheap and I’m not a Saudi Prince for Christ’s sake) is really going to hate me when I start bringing ten pounds of seething booty-bonnets every three days, but at least we aren’t creating our own garbage patch.
This talk was the first where, when we got to the end of it, I was 100% sure having a kid would make our lives way, way less enjoyable than they are now, and for some reason, I was still 100% sure I wanted one.
2. The “What If There’s More Than One?” Talk.
Pretty much immediately when we started talking about having a baby, my wife and I were binging all the parenthood documentaries we could find and the first one we watched was 9 Months That Made You from PBS. It’s on Netflix and it’s fascinating but the very first family featured in the very first episode is this adorable British couple and their QUADRUPLETS. We got to the end of the segment and I turned to my wife and took this picture of her:
Now, the chances of this are so slim, it’s almost meaningless to talk about. According to Multiples Of America, the odds of having triplets or more in the U.S. are a tiny 0.005%, but seeing those four identical humans running around like adorable 3-D photocopies spawned a fully insane conversation: what if?
Before we knew it, we had a back-up plan that included moving home to Minnesota, two full career changes, and a minivan, and the thought occurred to me: there is no actual way of ensuring with 100% certainty that my wife won’t give birth to what I can only describe as a legion of babies. We got to the end of the conversation, and realized we hadn’t really solved this hypothetical “what if?” We literally can’t comprehend the sort of life-changes four infant children would require. It’s something you forget: when you say, “We should have a baby,” there’s an outside chance you’re saying, “We should start our own preschool.” Though, the Halloween possibilities are pretty terrific…
3. The “Stuff We Have To Accomplish First” talk.
My wife and I are both actors. We’ve enjoyed moderately successful stage careers — we make most of our living in the theater, and we’re very lucky. But theater isn’t lucrative except for like six people and neither of us is one of them. So, when we decided we wanted a kid, all the unaccomplished dreams that were still technically achievable suddenly became a million times more urgent. You know that feeling when you’re watching a professional sporting event, say, a baseball game, and the announcer offhandedly refers to Bryce Harper as “the 26-year-old,” and you realize that beautiful man-baby on TV would have been too young to watch Spongebob? You’re old, is what it means — too old to play professional baseball. RIP dreams.
That’s basically what all our aspirations started to feel like. So we had to have a talk about whether we were OK not having been on Broadway, or not having climbed Everest, or spent a summer WWOOFING, because those probably wouldn’t happen. But even after (sort of) making peace with those things, we came up with a whole to-do list we HAD to complete before anyone started growing an infant in our apartment.
- Learn Another Language. It’s 2019. By 2043, there won’t be an ethnic majority in America and I’ll be damned if we’re going to raise a kid in that glorious ‘plurality nation’ who only speaks English. Problem is, we only speak English. So we went to Rosettastone.com and now our home-life is all:
- Baby-ready our place. This one may seem obvious, but we live in an eensy-beensy New York City 1-bedroom, and we have a dog and a cat. All of a sudden, we were HGTV-ing all over the apartment, talking about “storage solutions” and “functional furniture” and I felt so old, my T-shirt magically tucked itself into my underpants.
- Educate Ourselves. I thought I knew how stuff generally worked when it came to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. But there’s nothing like a little research to make you say, “Boy howdy, I sure am a big dumb idiot.” We bought this book, What To Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, and we’ve been reading it together a little at a time. It’s an informative and uplifting romp about every possible thing that could and honestly, probably will go wrong during pregnancy. From things like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia to crippling psychosis, it’s a riot. I haven’t been this confused since first grade when I learned babies don’t emerge from the belly-button.
The stuff we have to accomplish isn’t all for the baby. I want to run a marathon this year (my wife already has, that overachiever). She wants to record an album of original music. We have a fire under our butts about those things now because pretty soon, we might forget those dreams for other ones. That’s not a bad thing, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a little sad, and talking about it isn’t easy. You kind of stop in the middle of the conversation sometimes and go, “what in the butt are we talking about?” I’ve had certain goals my whole life — many are career oriented — and all of a sudden I’m seriously considering throwing those things into a corner, maybe forever. It’s a weird re-alignment of priorities and I can’t imagine it gets easier. But I am excited to finally find out what that guy is yelling about in “La Bamba,” and I never met a rocking chair I didn’t like.
