The other day I was at the park with my kids and got to chatting with another mom. She had a tiny baby in a stroller and a toddler-age girl she was pushing on the swing. The toddler was her niece and the baby was hers, so she was pretty freshly postpartum while also babysitting for her sister. I asked her how new motherhood was going and how she was feeling, which was when we got to talking about the fun little things your brain does to you when you have a baby and you’re in the throes of postpartum anxiety.
She starts opening up to me about how she constantly has these intrusive thoughts about her baby’s stroller rolling into the street or something else happening that a hormonally balanced brain that didn’t just completely recalibrate itself to manage the hypervigilance needed to keep a baby alive might see as irrational. She asked me if I ever experienced this because when she brought it up to her sister, her response was “that’s insane why would you worry about that?”
(My opinions on that response from her sister will be reserved for another blog post).
I was like girl…. Let me tell you what my brain did the first time I took my child to this park.
My son was probably 6-8 months old at the time, so while we had taken plenty of walks around the park, we hadn’t gone to the playground because there’s not a whole lot for sentient potatoes to do at a playground. I decided to take him on the swings to see how he liked it. While pushing him on the swing, watching him giggle and kick his legs, casually strategizing how quickly I’d get him out of the swing if an off-leash dog charged at us or a man showed up with a gun, I spotted a port-o-potty across the park.
I started to think about what would happen if I suddenly had to poop REALLY bad, to the point where I was like “I gotta get into that port-o-potty”. I’d have to bring the baby in with me because obviously I’m not going to leave him in his stroller outside of it. So what if I’m trying to manage pooping in a port-o-john with a baby and he….falls into the hole? Of the port-o-potty? And the hole is too narrow for me to fit through and rescue him? What then?
“So yeah, I’m probably not the best person to ask about this because my brain does the same thing to me all the time”, I told her.
This at least made her laugh and feel better because to her it sounded like something her brain would totally do, which made me feel like I had at least done one good deed for the day.
When I told my husband about my port-o-potty paranoia after it happened, he reminded me that there was no way I’d actually go into the port-o-potty in this circumstance, which is absolutely correct. I’d poop my pants on the walk home before bringing a baby into a park port-o-potty with me.
And to ease my concerns even further, he pointed out that most port-o-potties are probably full of toilet paper and solids, so it’s pretty dense down there and it’s more likely that the baby would just… plop… onto it and I could fish him out pretty easily.
PLOP.
While gross, that did make me feel better about the whole thing.
I still recommend therapy, though.
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