The following is about baby showers but features some adult content. If you are easily offended, in particular by references to genitalia, PLEASE don’t read it.
My 7-year-old daughter recently got married. It was a tasteful, understated affair that took place at recess. The groom is a sweet young man who recently moved to the States from India. He talks very little. She talks all the time. They make it work.
While they’ve yet to sort out living arrangements, I have already met the in-laws and even attended a baby shower for the groom’s mother, who is expecting another son in late May.
The shower was beautiful and full of tradition. The mother is one of those women who actually glows during pregnancy, unlike those of us who spend all nine months either vaguely or violently nauseated and craving forbidden deli meats.
The men and women wore traditional dress, music played, flowers perfumed the air and a feast was served up buffet style. There was a ceremony during which guests conferred blessings on the expectant mother and not once did someone microwave a fun-size candy bar in a diaper and make everyone guess what kind it was.
I couldn’t help to contrast this with a baby shower I recently helped organize. Although most of the women showed Southern flair and ingenuity in terms of decorations and food, my own contributions were less than stellar.
The following is an approximation of the group chat I was involved in to determine dessert offerings:
Cupcakes or cake?
Cupcakes.
Since she is having a boy, we should make her cupcakes with little penises on them. (Okay, that was me.)
Yes!! But make them uncircumcised. (This from a mama who really, really, really hates circumcision and was trying to dissuade our friend from making the snip.)
How about some of each? That way she can have a visual.
Then the woman doing the actual baking sensibly interrupted our musings:
I can’t make penis cupcakes. That’s a little too hard.
That’s what she said! (Okay, that was me again.)
I could probably make a large penis-shaped cake.
Wait a minute, you can’t make cupcakes with penises on them but you can make a penis cake?
Yeah, I have this cake mold shaped like a penis.
Do I want to know why?
One of my friends is obsessed with penises. She says she’s a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. So for her birthday I made her a penis-shaped cake.
Riiiggghtt.
In the end, the party featured a cake with blue frosting and a marzipan teddy bear on top. We played silly shower games, such as tasting baby food and trying to figure out which kind it was. Then we drew encouraging messages in Sharpie on a pack of newborn disposable diapers. Of course, by then we had drunk some prosecco on the mom-to-be’s behalf and, since she is originally from Ukraine, we looked up obscene exclamations in Russian on our phones and copied the Cyrillic letters across the bewildered faces of Elmo and Big Bird.
Look, I’m not saying there’s one “right” way to do a baby shower. I just really hope my daughter’s in-laws don’t read this blog entry or she could end up divorced by her eighth birthday.
unexceptionalparenting 