The Lessons That Can Only Be Learned After

When you're pregnant, many (many!) people will give you all sorts of advice. Old women will stop you in the mall, new, sleep-deprived moms will corner you work, and middle-aged women will sit beside you at the lab, holding you hostage until the lab attendant calls your name and your released into the relief of getting your blood drawn.

The problem is (besides the fact that the advice is unsolicited in the first place) that a lot of the lessons they try to teach you are not things you can learn until after.

1. You will love your baby more than anything else in the entire universe. There is no way you can feel this feeling unless you've felt it. Even if you have a pet or a nephew.

2. Enjoy them while they're young. Sure. No problem. Except I'm a little too busy raising them to be respectful and successful adults right now. And then one day, you look back on all that you missed because you were too busy raising them and realize that maybe you might like to sit on the floor and play blocks with them now but they're too busy playing violent video games in the basement with their friends.

3. Sleep while you can. Right up until all you're doing is sleeping and diapering and feeding a baby. Forget the housework; don't worry about seeing any other adults ever; let the bills pile up; your husband just thinks he's being ignored. At least you'll be well rested. Until years from now when you look back and think "was it all really that important?"

4. Teenage boys eat a lot. Holy Shit! This is true. And people can (and will) tell you over and over again how much they eat, but there really is no way to understand just how much they eat until you've experienced it. I went grocery shopping yesterday (yesterday!) and my fruit bowl now consists of only two apples, two bananas, and an orange. My mom invited us for dinner one night last week, but we, of course, had basketball, so instead she sent my dad over with a Tupperware bowl of roast beef. He went home with an empty container. The meat didn't even make it into sandwiches. It was gobbled up while he was standing at the back door asking about our day.

If you're pregnant right now or planning to become pregnant in the future, I apologize for this post. Take my advice: do the best you can; you'll be awesome.

--