"Excuse me, do you have children?"
I still can't get used to that question. I whip my head both sides until I remember that one child is no longer mine* and the other is safely at preschool, and then answer, "yes."
I am in the aisle at SuperPharm, Israel's version of CVS / Walgreen's/whatever it's called out West. A woman thrusts two different boxes of pacifiers at me, and much as I am programmed to heel and froth whenever a woman thrusts two of anything at me, I shut my mouth and look up. She's twenty-something, and looks way too alert to be a mother. Something about getting enough sleep in the night.
"I need your help. A two-day old little boy. What's better?"
She's gotta be kidding me. Two days old and she looks like that? My eyebrows nudge my hairline out of existence. She apparently picks up on this, and shakes her head: "it's not for me. It's for a friend." (Silly me, I thought the "friend" excuse in drugstores was only for condoms or vaginal suppositories. )
I point out the box in her left hand, saying "those are really good for infants who are also breastfeeding." Then I get a look at the box in her right, and say: "those are the kind my children used."
And that about sums it up: there are no answers, but people will never stop asking. Once something's shot out of your vagina and sucked your boobs dry, you apparently become an undisputed authority on child-rearing, especially if you are trolling the store alone and nobody can witness how you smack your kid around in the candy aisles. As if there's a great divide of wisdom you cross once you go into labor. As I discovered during my own pregnancy, if there is any change in your brain, it's for the worse. IQ points trickle out with every hormone-tear, culminating in that final deluge of your water breaking, when you lose them by the liter and are overcome with babbling idiocy for one to three months**.
Having a baby is a huge experience in trial and error. No two babies are the same, even when they come from the same gene pool. The learning curve is huge, and when you take into account the fact that in the first few weeks of parenthood, you are learning about thirty different skill sets you'd never thought you'd need (or more, if you live in Tel Aviv and also need to navigate sidewalks with a Bug-a-Boo), it's understandable that you are desperate enough to ask advice from a total stranger. Even if that stranger is someone so disheveled and worse-for-wear from lack of sleep that you'd think twice about asking them the time, not to mention what's best for your child. But remember, there's no correct answer. Just trial and error. You eventually figure it out, buying three types of everything until one works or none do. I have never asked strangers for advice. But then again, I have only recently started sleeping the nights through and my 22-month old decides what we watch on TV.
I smile sympathetically at the young woman and turn to leave, when I hear her call out: "How are you on breastfeeding?"
*Lesbian divorce sucks.
**This depends, to a great extent, on your partner, your initial status, and your penchant for self-medication.
