The Plan Goes Out The Window

The plan has always been as follows:

• My mother will arrive three days after the baby is born. She will stay for five days. This is the maximum amount of time that she and I can co-exist in the same county without killing each other.
• When she leaves Steven's parents will arrive. They will stay for a week.
• My father will arrive around the same time, but he will be working and will mostly stay out of the way. After my inlaws leave my father will stick around for another few weeks.

This has been my plan and Steven's plan and we have shared it with our parents, all of whom have been making noises recently that their plans are to completely ignore us.

Last night I mentioned to Steven that I was getting a vibe from my mother that she wanted to get on a plane, like, yesterday. "I don't think she's going to be able to control herself from driving to O'Hare the second I go into labor," I believe is what I said. This means that if I don't want my mother standing next to the OB in the hospital being hysterical about why the labor is taking so long or stressing out the anesthesiologist as he preps me for an epidural, I will have to not tell her when I go into labor.

This morning my mother called and informed me that she was having a hard time preventing herself from getting on a plane right this second. Let me point out, for the record, that my due date is still MORE THAN A WEEK AWAY.

Steven's parents, too, are beginning to lose control. Steven spoke to them on Sunday. When he said goodbye they said, "Maybe we'll see you later this week!" Did they not understand the plan?

And then my father called, bright and early, to inform me that his house had taken a direct hit from Hurricane Wilma. He's without power or, even worse, internet access. "I don't know what to do with myself," he complained. "I was thinking about driving to New York. Maybe by the time I get there you'll have had the baby."

Never, in the history of time, has there been this much media attention on the birth of a child. And oddly, I'm having a little bit of a hard time understanding it. I mean, yes, I'm excited. And yes, I understand that this is everyone's first grandchild and omigod how great!! But I personally am not a big one for babies. They're sort of boring, no? They cry, they poop, they eat .... am I missing something?

Yeah, yeah, I imagine that I will find my own child to be completely and utterly fascinating, and I am fully anticipating spending weeks doing nothing but watching him breathe and kvelling as he smiles for the first time. But our parents have all had this experience already. With their own children. So what's with the almost primal need to lay eyes on the baby the second he comes into the world?

And why is it that suddenly no one can understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? We have a plan. Why is no one listening? Aren't I the mother? Don't I get to do motherly things like ban people from seeing the baby until I'm ready for them to see him? My understanding was that people would want to do things to make my life easier, that this was the whole point of them offering to come stay and "help." Having four grandparents battling over who gets to hold the baby is not "help" as I understand the term. I would describe it more as "creating the perfect circumstances under which Hana might have a nervous breakdown."

And in the mean time, Baby Schank Shaklan shows no signs of exiting the womb any time soon, causing me to refer to him this morning, in a fit of total discomfort, as a "slow-assed chickenshit baby who is afraid of the world." Yes, I've progressed to berating a fetus. You be 39 weeks pregnant and see how well you do.