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Ally's avatar

I did not feel strongly about having a baby shower at all, and my MIL felt very strongly, so this meant there were only 2 people at my shower under the age of 65 – all the guests were her friends, which was honestly extremely sweet in its way. And they did do a little book where everyone got a page to write some advice! AND one of the pieces of advice was literally something I thought back to, and relied on, and even still rely on now, with 10- and 7- year olds, and impart in my turn to new parents!!

That advice was: do whatever works, until it doesn’t. That was it. That was the whole page.

I have thought a lot about it over the years. How so, so much of the pressure we put on ourselves as parents – especially parents of infants and toddlers – comes from feeling like the things that “work” in our situation are actually BAD, because they are “crutches” or something. Pacifiers. Nursing to sleep. Rocking to sleep. Co-sleeping. Putting the baby in a separate room and shutting the door. Bouncing the baby on a yoga ball for hours a day. Stroller naps. Car naps. Giving M&Ms for pooping in the potty. Laying on the floor of your toddler’s bedroom until you army-crawl out once they are finally asleep. Propping an iPad up to watch YouTube for all meals because distracted eating is the only eating your kid does. Whatever. I did many (all?) of these things, between my two kids, and there was always this pervasive sense that, like, “am I going to do this forever? If not, aren’t I making my life worse down the road, creating a situation I will need to wean this kid off of eventually?”

NO. You are making your life BETTER by doing whatever works now. We use all kinds of “crutches” that we do not weight with this weird guilt. Diapers! You will need to eventually transition a kid away from diapers, and maybe it will be hard, maybe it won’t – but it will in no way be worse than just not using diapers on a 3-month old. Diapers work in a given stage, and when they stop working for you/your kid, you will move on from them. “This isn’t working anymore” can also just mean “this isn’t working FOR ME anymore,” as was the case for me for, say, laying on the floor of my 4-year old’s bedroom for 2 hours a night. But up until it just stopped working, it was our best solution, and so? I DID IT. Without apology.

Do whatever works, until it doesn’t. The freedom of that – freeing myself from weighting the present down with imagined future baggage, just knowing I could always change things once change became the thing that worked better, whatever “better” meant – was such a gift. I wish I had any idea who the old lady was who wrote that. I feel like I would have liked to actually know her.

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Kate S's avatar

My actual baby shower was, as requested, full of both dudes and women and was mostly just gay men drinking mimosas. It was just a lovely hour of “I’m pregnant but still a human.” (The host’s one year old spent 30 minutes spinning an empty beer bottle on the floor which was also a great “this will be fine” moment.) Also there was a cake with Kermit the Frog on it.

But because my in laws never honor my choices, we got a second awkward suburban shower full of “relatives” I had never met before complete with mandatory gift opening.

My advice is always “somethings will be easy for you that are hard for others, some things will be hard for you that are easy for others, you won’t know which is which until you get there and you can’t predict it so take the wins and realize the losses are temporary.”

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