“How old is your first?” another question that keeps coming up. This time (at the dog park again- I take my furbaby there almost daily) it was from an older woman making very nice small talk. I know her only as Luna’s mom. Luna is an older, somewhat toothless dog that has an affinity for puppies. Luna and her mom are regulars, as Muppet and I have become. It’s funny because our talk usually centers around our dogs or the weather, but on that day it ventured into family life.
“She would have been fourte…fifteen months,” I stumbled. She was so appropriately sympathetic- not ignoring the odd tense I used, responding how hard this pregnancy must be. I think the responses from the slightly older generation have often been most gentle- I’m unsure if it’s a maturity thing or a generational thing.
But I was horrified. I can tell you exactly how old my puppy is, but I stumbled over the age of my daughter. I was brought back to a month after Mabel was born and the seamstress asked how old the baby was, after spying my post-baby pooch and first asking incorrectly if I was pregnant. I stumbled then too and was horrified that I could say off the tip of my tongue how many weeks old my baby would have been. On this day at the dog park, I was thrown right back there, making me feel like a bad mom. I know I am not- and it was just a passing feeling, one that was totally self imposed, but do you ever feel that way? How old would your baby have been?
Expecting the Unexpected 