KEY POINTS:
For all things there is a season, according to the Bible. A time to reap, a time to sow, a time to shower.
I've attended, on average, one baby shower per month since Christmas. Not because I have any special desire to sip a desultory glass of champagne while watching heavily pregnant women unwrapping baby-related gifts ("ooh a playmat! For playing on!"), it's a question of timing.
Being a fabulous, social sort of a person I have many friends. Many of those friends possess wombs, which by one means or another they have managed to tenant over the past eight or nine months. Now that tenancy is drawing to a close, hence the baby showers.
I can add attending showers to the list of things I've never done before I came to New Zealand, along with discussing flightless birds, pronouncing "wh" as "f" and waiting two hours for a Link Bus.
Attending these afternoons is far more emotionally demanding than any of the other three. I was reminded of this last Saturday, as I slipped through the side entrance of a beautiful old house on the Balmoral side of Mt Eden.
In I crept, like a thief in the night, if thieves ever descend on a house bearing bags of extravagantly wrapped cot blankets and a balloon. I clumped across the lawn, best red shoes sinking into the loam. My heart joined them when I looked up at the kitchen windows, liberally festooned with bibs pronouncing "It's a boy".
Using bibs as an interior design feature isn't common practice obviously, but my experiences so far have taught me there's nothing like a baby shower for bringing out the nutter in women. Who else but a loon, a crazy, could possibly think it's fun to spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon trying to guess the girth of another lady using sparkly bits of twine, fortified by nothing more than orange juice drunk out of glasses with prams on them?
Or, in the case of one particularly gruesome parlour game, I endured, smearing bars of chocolate all over nappies and encouraging other women to guess the flavour.
You haven't lived till you've sat in a room with 10 other women inspecting Huggies covered with a range of of chocolate-flavoured excrement. Bitter experience has taught me to be prepared for anything and expect the worse when it comes to these things.
I mounted the steps to the kitchen with firm resolve and a heavy heart to be confronted with a scene out of Brueghel. That's if, rather than energetically cavorting serfs, the great painter had concerned himself with pregnant, lactating and hormone-addled women and their broods.
There were babies everywhere. Tiny babies, screaming babies, handsome babies, dirty babies. A little toddler with jet black hair and a dangerously short attention span. A comically large young fella, nestling in the arms of his exhausted mother who was herself the size of a small 13-year-old and wearing the beatific, distant smile of a statesman.
These babies were presided over by a great band of mothers, terrifyingly capable in their ability to wrangle their children while simultaneously laughing, talking, pointing and consuming enormous quantities of orange juice and asparagus rolls.
I stood transfixed by this scene of roiling, seething infancy and parenthood, seriously considering making a run for it there and then. But the hosts are two of the loveliest, most gracious people I know. Their daughter, the mother-to-be, is one of my best friends. Retreat was not an option. And what the hell would I do with the cot blankets? I made for the mimosa table and made the best of it.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of baby colours, baby noises, baby smells, baby brains. At one point a little child actually jumped into my lap. She seemed possessed of a personality however, and was very nicely dressed so I suppose it could have been worse.
At home later I wondered what it is about these baby showers that disturbs me so. I love my friends very much, and although I have no desire for a baby of my own, I am happy for them in their pregnancies.
I'm excited about the change that is coming into their lives, and looking forward to making room in our world for the new people they've created. Yesterday one of my dear friends became the father of twins.
I'm still reeling with the wonder of it. Women having babies is a natural and joyful thing and I like feeling connected to that fundamental aspect of our humanity And yet, come the pink invite and those deadly Saturday afternoons I find myself crouching in the corner, bug-eyed with awkwardness as all around me rages the fire of baby talk.
It's not that it's particularly graphic; a few mentions of mastitis and the epidural window is about as anatomical as things get. After all it doesn't do to scare the horses, a successful shower is not one which ends with the mama-to-be in a state of hysterical blindness brought on by the fear of giving birth.
No it isn't the gory details, nor is it the company - I love my friends after all. It is rather the awkwardness and resentment which comes with the role these showers give me to play.
Being a single childless woman immediately casts one in the part of the Scarlet Lady. The fabulous feckless singleton, unencumbered by dependents who breezes through life with all the cares and concerns of the average 10-year-old.
How many times have I arrived at these afternoons to be greeted by a bunch of women who assume that just because I'm not visibly pregnant I must be living a life of wanton pleasures and gay abandon? That I've just rolled into this afternoon tea fresh from a Friday night full of rails of cocaine and energetic sex with hordes of 18-year-old boys?
That is not to say that I object to such pursuits per se - who would? - it is simply that I do not fill my waking moments with them simply because I'm not ready to get up the pole.
But there will always be people who will assume such things, no matter how many cups of tea I make, or how loudly I coo when the baby kimonos are being unwrapped.
Always an auntie or an elderly neighbour or some other lovely lady ready with the nudge-nudge wink wink and-how-was-your-night-professor.
It's the lot of the single girl at the baby shower, no matter how many beautifully-wrapped cot blankets you lay at the altar of motherhood.
The cupcakes are usually great though, and thank God for mimosas at least.
