Australia Post is responsible for many bungles including but not limited to missing parcels, Christmas presents that arrive a year late, and these unapologetically deranged uniforms from the 1960s:
It’s not a dress, it’s a tunic
Kill me
What they’re not responsible for is your missing baby shower invite. I wouldn’t subject my enemies to the indignity of sitting in a room full of women talking about booster seats, let alone my nearest and dearest. It’s particularly criminal to inflict this on the childless who were doing just fine despite not knowing the ideal weight and hue of a full-term placenta. (For the record, it’s around 500 grams and the colour of fresh roadkill.)
Hold on, you’re thinking, didn’t she come to my baby shower? And didn’t she seem to be enjoying herself? Not if I could’ve helped it, and of course I did – I’m a coward, not a sociopath.
There’s a groundswell, though, of people just like me. Women who feel about baby showers the way they might if being forced to sink their teeth into Styrofoam or dwell on the fact that, despite all our supposed advances, cargo pants are back.
I suspect that many of us, upon opening a shower invite (digital or otherwise) encounter a panoply of emotions ranging from a brief malaise to the blind panic of a cornered lab rat. I’m in the latter category, and doubly so if the invite has arrived well in advance. It’s odd for me to know in June, for example, that mid-October will find me in the grip of full-blown gastro. Ditto the time of death of an elderly relative. And prior plans? No one’s going to believe that.
The new breed of showers isn’t all people eating poo-coloured substances off Huggies or clipping pegs onto the pants of passersby for no apparent reason (I’m sure there was one, but I was too depressed to listen.) The method of torture is far more sophisticated, and thus particularly insidious. “This isn’t that kind of shower,” someone will say, “it’s just a group of us getting together.” To that person I ask:
– Are we at any point going to talk about babies or topics related to children?
– Is there going to be a cake for a baby that, while technically in the room, isn’t able to see, smell or taste it?
– Are we going to give gifts to the baby even though the baby has not requested any and would much rather his incubator be home enjoying herself than flooding his system with unprecedented levels of cortisol.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if the answer to any of these is yes, you didn’t have a gathering with friends that also happened to be a baby shower. You had a baby shower.
And what of the present circle? There’s a reason we left this behind in childhood. Probably around the same time we stopped eating glue and soiling ourselves. Not every gift is a winner, and that’s ok. Hell, I’ve given some stinkers in my time, and I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of just as many.
What’s not ok is having to open said presents in front of a big group of people, gifter and giftee alike subjected to intense scrutiny and the rest of us watching on, hoping our romper set isn’t opened directly after the Thermomix or Tiffany & Co piggy bank. There are so few words, too, that can replace “cute” which means that by the end you’re resorting to more archaic numbers like “bonny,” “winsome” and “darling” (all technically synonyms, but a bit of a stretch for a pack of diapers.)
My friend once organised for a baby shower a pinata in the shape of a nappy. Cotton-stuffed pantyhose comprised the baby’s lower half and the traditional stick was replaced by a wooden spoon. It’s in keeping with the theme, so reads well on paper, but once the blindfolded mother-to-be took her first swing, my friend reassessed the tastefulness of her decision. Considering diaper pinatas are readily available online, I imagine the problematic element was the legs which, while crudely constructed, suggested an occupant. There’s a fine line between good old fashioned fun and perceived child abuse and as lollies rained down from its tattered undercarriage, it was clear that line had been transgressed.
Sadly I heard about this all secondhand. If I’d attended, I’d have hailed her as the trailblazer she was. Now this is the kind of shower I can get behind, I’d say, stuffing my pockets full of lollies and offering leftovers to dazed onlookers. Not because I’m a sadist, but because there’s something real about it that’s lacking at your average baby shower. What do I mean by real? I’m not entirely sure. I just get the sense that many of us aren’t being completely honest with each other when it comes to these pastel-hued rites of passage. Even its most fervent devotees.
Some instinct tells us – must tell us – that they are deeply boring. But a deeper, atavistic part of us (the same part that wishes kidney stones on people that say “adulting”) knows that we once had our Saturday wrested off us, were forced to relinquish a perfectly good weekend to say to someone having a baby, “you’re having a baby.”
Isn’t it possible that baby showers are just a pass-the-parcel of collective revenge? The symbolic equivalent of the Panettone, wrapped in a veneer of festivity, but barely edible, never enjoyed but circulated endlessly in the macabre ritual that is the Christmas hand over.
In an ideal world, baby showers will go the way of the kitchen tea. At some point, we must have decided that discussing stain removal and exchanging tea-towels might not make for the most riveting Saturday afternoon. Let’s do the same with the baby shower and break the cycle, one missing invite at a time.
megsjessie 