So I went with a bottle a vodka.

 

A few days ago I posted about not knowing what to buy as a gift for a friend’s baby shower. This was a challenge for two reasons

 

• this woman had once compared a foetus to a cluster of cancer cells
• I like to win the gift-giving prize, which is only existeant in my head. I like to walk around, smug in knowing my gift was by far superior to any garbage any other schmuck presented to the giftee, wrapped poorly, might I add.

 

So when I still had nothing two hours before the shower (weird thing to call an event, if you ask me. I’m certain Aurora’s parents didn’t call that party they had at the start of Sleeping Beauty a baby shower, so why should we?) I was uneasy.

 

I don’t like loosing in the gift stakes, but I knew I had to make a decision. I knew I was never going to buy a gift that would be really thoughtful and helpful, because the whole mothering thing isn’t something I have a lot of experiences with:

So I thought it’d go with the fallback option: the joke gift. It is undoubtedly a risky move when you have a woman housing a growing infant and about 17 million different hormones, but it was the only option I had. I quickly did a lap of the shopping centre, grabbed a colour-neutral gift bag (because when baby genders are concerned, you just can’t take any risks with blues or pinks) and high tailed it to the event. I thought my gift would be useful, but also get a few laughs. Plus, I told myself, my friend is someone who you would assume would get a lot of joke presents. There will probably lots of gifts like this pouring in.

 

Wrong.

 

It turns out that baby showers are for thoughtful, loving and practical gifts. I’m talking nappies. I’m talking hand-made toys. I’m talking nipple pads, for fuck’s sake. I would have never thought of nipple pads in my whole life.

 

And the thing about showers is that the gift opening is done publically. So your gift choices are not only seen by everyone, but you see how everyone sees your gift. You see not only your friends reation to the present, but every other bastard’s in the whole room. And boy was I up against some tough competition.

 

The mother in law had knitted two blankets and two toys, as well as giving two store-bought toys which looked like they came from Kate Middleton’s nursery for crying out loud. They were so beautiful.

 

Then there was the thoughtful mother who had a bag full of hand-me-downs and incontinence pads ready and waiting for all that marvellous after birth action which goes on down there.

 

As the present pile diminished, I realised I was the only one who went with the joke option. As she reached for my brown bag, I braced myself for an awkward silence.

 

But thankfully, the vodka was the last thing to have been pulled from the bag. The first was the card, which I had creatively made by folding a piece of brown cardboard in half and writing “gestation celebrations!” on the front. Then came the book Go The Fuck to Sleep. This was a good order, because it was child-orientated, unlike the rest of the bag. My friend then pulled out a thimble (as an aside, how surprised are you that they still make these little bastards, what a win it was for me being able to find one on such sort notice!) and the mini-bar sized bottle of rum.

 

Me, proclaiming knowingly: “It’s so you can put the baby to sleep!”

 

I’m sure I once heard something about using a thimble full of rum to knock out an infant so you could get on with your life for a few hours. I just can’t recall where I heard it, or if the source I gleamed this information from was a reliable one. The legitimacy of this “old trick” started to melt away and I was beginning to realise that I had told an expectant mother to feed her small baby rum.

 

Me, confidence in mothering tip now wavering: “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

 

*undisclosed chatter and uneasy laughter in the room.

 

Me: “Don’t worry guys, I’m not going to be having the babies any time soon!”

 

Thankfully this acted as a diversion while the vodka was pulled out.

 

I don’t regret my gifting in the slightest, but I do finally understand the fear of judgement from other mothers I hear so much about. I wasn’t scolded or anything, but as my brown paper bag was brought into the spotlight, I suddenly felt weirdly vulnerable. The women weren’t individuals any more, they were The Mother Folk, a powerful fictional force of judgement. And just for a fraction of a second, I found myself understanding what mothers go through.

 

But then I realised that, if this gift competition only existed in my head, I could be in charge of crowing the winner. And while I missed out on the Best Overall Gift prize, I was number on in the Novelty Gift section.