I used to think that the most idiotic tradition ever invented was the playing of dorky parlor games at baby showers. But recently I’ve changed my mind. A few weeks ago I was invited to a baby shower for Anna, a young woman I work with. After swigging a couple glasses of extra sweet fruit punch and wolfing down about eight of those tiny triangle shaped cucumber sandwiches, I prepared to make a discreet exit. I started toward Anna rehearsing an excuse in my head about how our dog needed her meds exactly at . But just as I reached Anna, a stunning blond with huge teeth stepped right out in front of me. “Time for games!” she announced and shooed me along with the rest of the guests into a wide living room where chairs were arranged in a large semi-circle. Anna and her swollen ankles took the seat at the center of the room facing the rest of us. As the guests all tried to balance little cocktail plates on their laps, daintily grasping crystal punch cups and dabbing their lips with blue and pink lacy napkins; I dropped grumpily into a chair thinking, “Dang-it! I was almost out the door…just a couple more feet and I would have been home free.”
Hostess Big Teeth rapped a tiny cocktail fork against her punch glass. “Instead of playing a traditional parlor game, I thought we’d try something different.” She announced. “Since this is Anna’s first child, she’s a little apprehensive about labor and about the first weeks of caring for a baby. So, I’d like to go around the room and ask each of you to answer one question that I will read off of a card. Each question is created to give you a chance to share a short story about your experience with pregnancy, raising a child or about being a new mom.”
“All right! Now this is something I could get into!” I thought eagerly. I have always loved a good story. What I would have given to have a story game at one of my showers. Instead, I was blindfolded and forced to pin a diaper on a doll. What a pointless game. How many moms do you know that have had to diaper a baby in the dark? Now if they had made me tie a hand behind my back and pin the diaper one-handed, that may have been a skill I could have used.
“Do I have any volunteers that would like to go first?” Big Teeth asked.
My hand shot into the air.
“Great!” She beamed. “Here is the first question: ‘What is the one thing you wish someone would have told you about being pregnant?’”
Immediately I thought about my Financial Advisor who just told me a few days ago that the average family spends a quarter of a million dollars raising a child. But I figured that probably wasn’t the best tidbit to share at the time. I’d save that one for later.
Then it came to me. I knew the perfect story to share with the group. I took a breath, looked slowly around the circle at each guest, waited for the room to quiet and began my tale:
It all started the night I went into labor. So there I was in my hospital room, alone and giggling with anticipation. My husband was in a plane somewhere overhead rushing back home to try and make it before the baby arrived. It was late at night and quiet. I really didn’t mind being alone. It was kind of nice to have a little time to myself. In just a few hours, I would be a “mom.” I sat there in that hospital bed thinking about the little person I’d meet soon, and waited for the next contraction. The pains felt like rippling waves of pressure. Each contraction only lasted about ten seconds and would come and go about every twenty minutes or so. The doctor told me to get comfortable because he didn’t expect me to go into full labor until the next day. So I settled in for the night and tried to get some sleep. After about an hour of gentle contractions, I felt the need to use the restroom. But earlier, the nurse had made some modifications to my in-room toilet. See, as a precaution, she was measuring all of the liquid I was consuming, and therefore she wanted to also measure all of the liquid leaving my body. She had warned me that I would have to pee into what looked like an inverted clear plastic top-hat. I was not looking forward to that experience. But with an eight pound baby sitting on my bladder, I opted to test out the plastic potty hat and stumbled to the bathroom. Holding onto the handy metal bars on the side of the commode, I lowered myself down over the little hat. I relaxed and let out a sigh. But that’s the only thing that came out. Puzzled, I peeked into the little hat. Nope. There was no liquid. “What the heck?” I thought. It felt like I was peeing, but there was no pee. I had just started to lift myself up off of the commode to investigate further when a giant glob “plopped” down into the hat! Horrified I stared at what looked like a huge ball of snot! It was the size of a grapefruit, was the consistency of grape jelly with strands of gooey white ooze and blood dripping off of it. It really did look like it just came out of a giant nose. I reached out with an index finger to poke at it. It jiggled like my Aunt Martha’s Jell-o salad. All I could think of was that black and white movie I saw in the second grade about a giant Blob from space that roamed the earth eating people. “My Lord, I’m not having a baby, I’m giving birth to an alien!”
Panicked I yanked on the emergency cord in the bathroom. I pulled again and again as fast as I could. The nightshift nurse (who, of course, was male) raced into the bathroom to find me cringing against the wall with my undies around my ankles, my face white as a sheet, trembling and pointing at the alien blob, and screaming “What is that? What is that?!”
The nurse leaned over the toilet and inspected the glob. After a few seconds he came over to me and gently placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. Speaking very slowly, he reassured me over and over that I was fine and the baby was fine. “It’s okay Mrs. Waldron, you are going to be fine.”
“Just tell me what that is. What is wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you. You just passed your “Plug.”
“What the hell is a Plug?”
“Think of a bottle of wine. The cork keeps the wine in and the bacteria out. The plug does the same thing. It keeps the baby inside, but the bacteria out. This is a good sign, it means your body is preparing for birth.”
“Oh.”
It was at that moment that I became acutely aware that my panties were around my ankles and I was plastered against the bathroom wall in what had to be a fairly exposed and un-ladylike stance. I tried to gather what little dignity I had and crawl back in bed. I wanted to pull the covers over my head.
And that is how I learned what the Mucus Plug was. I guess it is usually a topic covered in Lamaze class, but I must have missed that week. In my defense, the Plug isn’t usually that large, but still you should be prepared. I wish someone had told me that there was a chance I’d piss out a giant ball of bloody snot.
***
Satisfied, I looked around at all the guests who were speechless after my tale. I’m not really sure if it was something in the sandwiches, or perhaps an episode of that third trimester heartburn, but after listening to my story, Anna looked quite pale and had to lay down for a while. Unfortunately we didn’t get to finish the game or hear any other stories, which was really a shame. I was so looking forward to hearing some good stories, and I wanted to share another tale about how a pizza delivery guy accidentally walked into the delivery room at the exact moment my son was squirting out. Apparently the mix-up was due to a case of bad handwriting. The pizza guy thought he was supposed to deliver the large pepperoni to OB (obstetrics) but it was really supposed to go to a couple of doctors in OR (the operating room). Oops! You should have seen that pizza guy turn green. But next month another co-worker of mine is having a shower and I think Big Teeth is hosting that one too. I can share my pizza story then. I still haven’t received my invitation yet, but I’m sure it will be coming any day.
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