November 24, 2003~~11:56 a.m.
Time Marches On
I told Omar that it had happened: my youth had officially ended. I knew it was not long for this world when I gave birth a few months ago, but I thought I could hang onto it a bit longer--you know, kind of fake it out for awhile by singing "My Milkshake Brings all the Boys to the Yard" and watching �The Real World.� But yesterday I had to go to the grocery store and I didn�t want to push Elizabeth in her stroller, so I packed her into her �Snugli.� For all of you young �uns out there who might not know what a �Snugli� is, it�s a sort of front-pack for carrying a baby. The baby can either face forward or face you and off you go into the wild blue yonder. Well, Omar and I strapped Elizabeth into the Snugli and as I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, I knew what had transpired. It is one thing to push a stroller around with an infant inside it. After all, it could be ANYONE�S child in a stroller. For all the public might know, I could be a nanny! But when you have a baby in a Snugli, on your person, there is no doubt about who�s child that is. And I knew I could never go back. Don�t get me wrong--I love being a mommy. It just sort of HIT me that my life had changed. I might still be a part of that 18-30 age group of target consumers, but I also do some consuming at Babies �R Us, now. The Snugli incident happened only a few weeks after another revelation I had about my old stomping grounds, Abercrombie and Fitch. I discovered that A&F is decidedly not equipped for mommies shopping with strollers. I learned this in a futile attempt at getting to the jeans wall with Elizabeth in a stroller. After hitting roadblocks in the form of clothes racks on both sides of the table in front of the jeans wall, it became blatantly apparent that if I was going to get anywhere, I would have to leave Elizabeth behind. She was only about 3 feet away from me, but in that nanosecond, it seemed like miles. I knew that the only way to bridge this new gap in my life was to sally forth, low-rise jeans in hand and park my daughter inside the dressing room with me. And later, as I retrieved my credit card from the depths of the stroller, I felt a little victorious over the skinny naked girl in the wall-sized poster behind the cash register. �See?� I thought to myself (and her), I can still wear these jeans AND be a Mommy! I am still learning how to make the transition between being young and unattached to going to bed at 10 p.m. and nursing an infant. It is unexpectedly difficult at times and undeniably joyful at others, but with my Visa card in hand, I feel confident that I will master this change with little or no psychological trauma.
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