from the mouths of...childless whores?

Planning for a baby is, so far at least, a lot like planning a wedding. When you find out about the "big day", if you're like me at least, you read just about everything you can get your hands on (until you feel exhausted and overwhelmed and you take a break...only to start up again a bit later). Pregnancy's been no different for me; I even have a pregnancy journal and organizer. I don't use it as much as I thought I would (not like my wedding organizer, which I carried around with me everywhere during the nine months it took for that event to gestate), but I love the idea of it. I remember being really disappointed, for example, when I couldn't find an organizer for our cross-country move a few years ago.

Anyway, in addition to the standards, like What To Expect When You're Expecting and it's related website and message boards, lately I've been enjoying antidotes, if you will, to the soft focus, best-thing-ever tone of much of what's written about pregnancy and motherhood. Like Stefanie Wilder-Taylor's Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, which a friend loaned to me right after Christmas. And today I started going back through some of Heather Havrilesky's writing on the topic of being pregnant and "manufacturing brand new human beings." I have taken the liberty of sorting through and listing here the blog posts specifically about being pregnant, beginning with this confession. When I re-read it just now, I laughed almost as hard as I do when I'm catching up on new LOL cat posts. This post is basically a pointer to this article she wrote for Salon about her impending motherhood, at that time just four weeks away. In this final pre-delivery post, just five days away from her due date, she writes about feeling "dumb and spaced out," and redirects her readers to this article, a review of said book above. And finally, this post, a couple of months after delivery.

I don't think she's lost her "stupid edge" at all.