l'exposition

It was Thursday night, and the time had come to expose myself.

No, unfortunately for my husband, this was not going to be sexy. It was going to be tedious. 

Halloween night at 8:30 pm Kaitlyn gave birth to her first baby, Ryan, who arrived perfectly lovely and healthy. Having done the exciting thing and gone to bed shortly trick-or-treating ended, I didn’t hear the news until the next day at work. I knew a couple of things inherently: when your friend has a baby, you should go to visit them in the hospital, you should bring them some kind of a present (Liquor? Sedatives?), and you should look excited to be there. The other thing I knew was that this was an opportunity for exposure therapy that I couldn’t pass up/avoid. 

In order to work through my tocophobia (and other things with fun Greek language origins), I see a cognitive behavioral therapist. Mostly we talk, rationalize, and cry (that’s just me, not her), but with something like tocophobia it became necessary to take things a step further and carry out some exposure therapies. As I’m informed, the idea behind exposure therapy is to get me used to and eventually comfortable with the things that now frighten me; it is not a test of how quickly I can devolve into a panic attack. So off to the maternity ward I went. 

You might not be able to believe this, but not only have I never been to a  maternity ward or been face to face with a legitimately “new mom”, but I’ve never actually held a baby. Never. The youngest child I’ve ever picked up was over 18 months old; you have to get pretty lucky as a babysitter to score jobs where every child is old enough to walk themselves places. So that was the plan: go to a maternity ward, see someone who had just given birth, and hold a baby. 

So many questions and so many new potential phobias. Would I walk past rooms where women were actively delivering babies? Would I see that room full of newborns they always show on TV? What exactly does a newborn baby look like? What do I do with it once I’m faced with one?

As usual, my preconceptions were skewed and inaccurate. Walking through the maternity ward it was eerily quiet—no screaming, no talking, and almost no people present at all. We walked past the “nursery”, but there was only one baby in there and you couldn’t really see it from the window. Approaching Kaitlyn’s room, I was completely thrown off by finding her in-laws out in the hallway with baby Ryan. Oh, now I was definitely going to have to hold a baby. Sure enough, they tried to hand him to me first, but I managed to dodge and have my husband, Joe, go first. The only problem with that was that he knew I was supposed to hold a baby, so over to me he went. 

I was shaky, and nervous, and holding my breath. My mind was racing: What if I accidently drop him? What if I don’t support the neck and cause early stage brain damage? What if I breathe on him and compromise his tiny new immune system? And now that I’m holding him, what do I do?? 

It turns out I didn’t have to do much. Just stand there and look at him. It was weird, but kind of nice too. He was really warm and quiet, and much lighter than I was expecting. Joe was right, they are pretty tiny. He was just pretty and I was just nervous. I don’t know how long I held him, but his grandma wanted him back and I didn’t feel guilty about breathing again. Since I haven’t gotten any messages from Kaitlyn that I owe them for that visit to the neurologist or the epidemiologist, I can safely presume I didn’t do any lasting damage to the little guy. 

I succeeded! I went to a maternity ward, was supportive and pleasant, and held a baby without breaking it! I wasn’t able to see what a new mom looks like, but one battle at a time I suppose. For now, I’m going to relish in this success until the next opportunity for exposure therapy presents itself.