Expectations: great and otherwise

Mimi does not subscribe to avant-garde ideas, and so it was no surprise that she was on the fence when I decided to have a baby without the benefit of a husband… a boyfriend… or even a one-night-stand.  Of course, Papa was on board, but Papa is usually on board, especially when there’s cause to celebrate (5 p.m. is a daily celebration for Papa, and some days he moves it up to 4:30).  But when you make life-altering decisions in the Bean family, you want Mimi on your side.  It makes life easier.

Mimi did not exactly slide off the fence when I got pregnant either. 

“I just want to make it clear that I am not retiring so that I can babysit for you,” she said.  Mimi was a school teacher whose withering look and tongue lashing could scare the Pope into exile.

Mimi melted fast and furious.

Bell and Zoro and I always knew where we stood with Mimi.  We knew that she loved us and whatever harebrained ideas we pursued or whatever transgressions we committed, she would be there for us.  Mimi is a rock.  She is dependable, and you could depend on her picking you up and reading you the riot act again… and again… and again.  Mimi did not let you forget stupid.

Stupid would be like getting hacked off at Mimi while you were away at college and blasting off an angry letter.  That would be stupid because you could be rest assured that the letter would haunt you for the rest of your days, lucid or catatonic, to the extent that you might have nightmares of being Mimi’s caregiver when she is 95 and living in an Alzheimer’s time warp in which she has just received the offending correspondence and hearing ad infinitum what an ingrate you are and how she didn’t raise her daughters to display such flagrante disrespect for their elders or make such poor decisions, especially in writing.

But that would be stupid, and I was smarter than that.  And I planned better.  Except for all of my great plans, the lure of a beautiful harvest moon brought my pregnancy to an end two weeks early when Mimi was out of town at a family reunion, so that she had to drive home at breakneck speed to meet her first grandchild on his birthday.

When Mimi came into the hospital room, she looked first at the new Bean snug and swaddled, sleeping soundly in the steel bassinet.  Then she looked at me and she started crying.  She melted fast and furious, and we never saw it coming.

Full tummy = sleepy baby

It’s not that I didn’t expect her to love Baby Bean—I did.  I just did not realize that she was going to go jumping-off-of-buildings gaga over him and that he would replace me and my sisters in her affections… to the point where I sometimes wondered if she remembered my name. I never expected that she would cost me a fortune in Huggies because every time the baby’s facial expression changed, so too—if Mimi had anything to do with it—did his diaper. 

I did not expect her to buy the little appliquéd seersucker john-johns from elegant [read: expensive] baby boutiques that I had to wash with delicates and line dry or to spend so much money on baby toys that Bell, Zoro, and I not only feared that our inheritance would be non-existent, we feared that there wouldn’t be any money left to bury her. 

Duck butt!

I did not expect her to volunteer for afternoon duty, picking him up every day from the Wee School and taking him to her house where she fed him organic apple sauce that she’d spent the morning making.  I did not expect her to tirelessly entertain him or to demand a morning update of all that had transpired in the evening and morning when she wasn’t around. 

I did not expect her to delight in everything from the first time he laughed to his first words.  I did not expect her to browbeat me into going to checkups armed with a list of insane questions like what was the doctor’s theory on tickling or did he think that Baby Bean had too many chins, and I did not expect her to demand that I take him to be examined for frivolous reasons, like a bruise or a mosquito bite, or to question in a way that implied negligence how he got said bruise or mosquito bite.  (“It happened on Papa’s watch,” I would say.)

Do I have too many chins?!

And I never, never in a million years, especially after I’d been a raving fruitcake jacked up on hormones for the 8.5 months of my pregnancy, expected her to ask, “When are you having another one?”

If Papa endorses something, there’s always a 50-50 chance of disaster.  With Mimi, who is much more conservative with her endorsements, success is almost guaranteed.  And so it was with the Mimi Seal of Approval that I decided to embark on another IVF.