To a Land Where the River Runs Free...

So, I've made precious little progress on my to-do list these past two weeks, but Mr. Newt and I did have some time to kill between my doctor's appointment and our Prepared Childbirth class on Monday, so we stopped by a bookstore to look for baby care books. Well, I looked at baby care books. Mr. Newt was looking at porn or something, I don't know.

OK, that's actually a joke. Mr. Newt reads my blog intermittently, because he likes to know what's going through my mind, but he also wants to give me a little privacy with my thoughts. So every few months he catches up on what I've been writing about, and when he does, he inevitably tells me that I am welcome to complain about him more, if I have things I would like to get off my chest. He wouldn't mind.

Actually, I think it makes Mr. Newt a little self-conscious that I'm always talking about how great he is. Poor guy, he's a lot to live up to, even though he's actually himself. He sets a ridiculously high standard.

So instead of telling you about how Mr. Newt came outside in the freezing morning cold wearing only a sweater, jeans, and slippers to scrape the frost off the car windows for me on Tuesday (true story), I'm going to make up bad stuff about him for the next few entries. Take the pressure off him a little.

OK, so back at the bookstore: I was looking at baby books, trying not to despair at the state of my marriage (how am I doing here, honey?), and they all looked kind of the same, to tell you the truth. I ended up buying What to Expect the First Year because it was nice and hefty, and seemed encyclopedic, and...honestly, I couldn't look through the whole baby section because I had to pee.

I won't get into the dainty particulars, but I can tell you the biological mandate that no activity can take more than 30 uninterrupted minutes has streamlined a lot more of my life than one would ever expect. Mostly in good ways--I can get off the phone anytime I want to, meetings in my department have gotten delightfully efficient, and I always get the aisle seat at basketball games. But once in a while, the necessary rapidity of my choices has led to an error made in haste.

Alas, this seems to have been one of those times. I've been reading this book this week, and while I find it a little condescending, I was toodling along mostly happily until I came to the following passage (on page 43, if you're following along at home):

If you haven't learned the gender of your baby through prenatal testing, don't buy everything in yellow or green (unless you're crazy about those colors), particularly since many infants don't have the complexion to carry off these shades. Both boys and girls can wear reds, blues, navys, whites, and creams. If you wait on some purchases until baby arrives, you'll be able to indulge in some dainty pinks for a daughter or some more distinctly boy styles for a son.

Really, baby book? For serious? My baby is expected to "carry off" his outfits? What the hell does that even mean?

Great. Now on top of everything else, I guess I have to take Wiley to our local Avon lady or something, and get him a color consultation. Even though we do know the sex of our baby (and it is only with great effort that I'm resisting the urge to go into a whole tangential rant about the misuse of the word "gender" to mean "sex," but that's not the point) I have indeed been stocking up on yellow and green outfits.

Maybe that's because I'm "crazy about" those colors (and is the subtext here that you would have to be a little abnormal to like the color green? Apparently I'm a freak all around). But also, I don't want to load the child up with possessions that say "You're a boy!" all the time. Can he just be a baby for a while? Even if it makes his skin look a little sallow?

Wandering through the baby section at Target, I am consistently amazed at how so many of the little outfits have some kind of gender-related slogan plastered across the front: "Princess" or "Daddy's Girl" or "Slugger." Babies can't read, and alas, the difficulty of complementing their waxy skin tones can hardly be to blame, so I can only assume that grown-up anxieties are responsible for this trend of plastering baby clothes with inspid labels.

I always figured that the reason baby clothes are strictly segregated into blue and pink, dump trucks and ruffles, "I'm a Cutie" and "Little Sport" was that if you don't put some kind of identifying mark on your baby, then strangers will be forever asking "Is it a boy or a girl?" And in addition to the ways this forces repetitious conversations with nosey strangers, it's also probably disconcerting to hear your child referred to as "it" all the time.

So I get that. And I might someday rue the decision to register for a closet full of little ducky and puppy outfits, when I'm telling the ten gajillionth stranger that Wiley is a boy. I might even buy him a hat that says "Hi! I have a penis!" or something equally unambiguous (and then strangers will avert their eyes in horror, relieving me of the necessity of answering questions about the baby's genetalia or anything else, no doubt). (Actually, that might be a really smart idea, now that I think of it).

But anyway, from my current position of prenatal optimism, I guess I'm still harboring some kind of Free to Be...You and Me fantasy--narrated in my head by the dulcet voice of Marlo Thomas--that there is something oppressive about smothering the child in dump trucks and footballs before he's out of diapers.

Mr. Newt and I are not intending to conduct a radical experiment in sex-blind parenting or anything, but...geez. How exactly is What to Expect The First Year using the baby's fucking complexion as an excuse to tell me to go out and buy him some "distinctly boy styles" that he can "carry off" better? Do they not know how completely gay that is?