Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? Story of my life.
This week has been absolutely jam-packed so far, including many long, long 12+ hour days, not including the billions of errands I've needed to run. Besides making some exchanges at Babies R' Us - we got four of the same thing, etc - I've also had to try to arrange for us to get our money back on our park reservation, since it got rained out (SUCCESS!), and try for the first time in my life to return liquor, which brings me to the title of this blog (Also a success!).
Being a young-ish mom-to-be, I find myself in these semi-awkward positions sometimes, where I want to still be able to hang out with my friends and show them that I, in fact, am not slipping off the radar despite my parent-to-be status, but I find myself invited to places that may be deemed...inappropriate.
Take for example one of my very best friend's going away parties. At a bar. Luckily, this was back in June, so if you didn't know I was pregnant, my belly wasn't going to be ratting me out, but still, I felt a bit...taboo...hanging out in a bar. Not to mention it was the bar where I've gone balls to the wall for the past few years, which made it feel even weirder. Fortunately for me, one of the bartender's there happens to be one of my other very best friends, and I know many of the others quite well, so I didn't even have to ask for a cold bottle of water before I found one in my hands...love those guys. This was probably the least inappropriate-feeling of all these 'incidents'.
Then, a few weeks later, another friend of ours had a birthday party at a bar off West 6th Street, Union Park. It happened to take place the day after my car accident, so I was already feeling like total crap, but I definitely wanted to make an appearance (especially after having missed it the year before due to my brown recluse attack - geez Louise!), so we went anyways. This wouldn't have been a big deal, since half the population of the party was our close friends that all were aware of my pregnancy, but since the other half weren't and we were up on a rooftop balcony area, everyone was smoking. Since I think it's a d-bag move to make a big stink over strangers smoking around me, especially at a bar, I just ended up feeling really uncomfortable and then leaving early as to not expose Baby B to nasty secondhand smoke. Wah. Even then I still wasn't really showing, so no nasty looks from strangers to deal with just yet.
That's changed now. I am obviously pregnant, and not just a few months gone, but my friends (as they should, given that they're all early twenty-somethings) continue to have events at bars, and I continue to struggle with how to handle this scenario. Clearly when I go I'm sitting around drinking water, so it's not like I'm doing anything bad, but is there something inherently messed up about a pregnant woman at a bar? I digress. All I can say for sure is that it makes me uncomfortable, and this extends out of the bar to any event centering around alcohol. A couple weeks back some friends of ours had a back to school party, and seeing as how I managed to stay awake long enough to attend, I was hellbent on going. As I left babysitting, I was telling the mother, who happens to be more of a friend than an 'employer' how awkward I felt going to this keg party, despite it taking place at our friend's apartment and mainly being our close friends. Her response (keep in mind she was more than a little bit tipsy)? "Because you feel fat?" Hahaha...well, now I do.
How do the rest of you handle these situations? I know some of the older moms-to-be probably don't run into this as often, but I have many friends in undergrad and graduate programs, and hang out with a pretty young crowd that I don't want to isolate myself from just because I'm pregnant. I'm going to need all the support I can get from my friends once Baby B is here, ya know?
You'll find that during pregnancy and especially after Baby B is born that you'll lose some friends and gain new ones. Be prepared for this, because not all people in our age bracket are prepared to deal with a buddy who becomes a parent. Baby B will become the center of your life, and it is almost impossible to go out without a ton of planning, no matter how well-behaved your child is. You're probably more used to it than most people, but it's still a transition...there's no more "whim" sort of stuff, like driving past a theatre and deciding to see a movie or passing a favorite restaurant and stopping to have a few drinks.
ReplyDeleteJ and I are homebodies, almost to a fault, so we don't really feel deprived staying home with Marianne, but I admit we're atypical for most people our age.
I, personally, believe that it's what you make of it. While I feel awkward being places like this while pregnant, I do have every intention of making a great effort to keep in touch with the people that D & I both were prior to our baby news! It's important to me to be young and have 'me' time still, especially having seen the miracle it can be for a burnt out mama, so though I know it won't be the same as before, I definitely see myself still having a social life :)
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