Dahlia Lithwick, journalist and mother-to-be. - By Dahlia Lithwick

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Entry 3

Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 2:17 PM ET

Dahlia Lithwick is Slate's Supreme Court and legal correspondent. She is expecting her first baby in three weeks.

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There are two distinct shopping periods in a normal pregnancy: There's first trimester shopping, which is wholly outward-focused and social; and then the last trimester shopping, which is totally inward and neurotic. First trimester shopping serves only one purpose: Telling as many total strangers as possible you are pregnant. Especially in those first fraught weeks when the chances of miscarriage are so high, you're too afraid to tell your friends and grandparents and co-workers. But after about three days, all this secrecy begins to slowly destroy you, until happily you discover great numbers of people you can actually tell since you're never going to see them again. Amazingly, all of them work at the mall. So, around Week 8, you find yourself browsing stores you've never even considered entering and striking up conversations with any salesperson foolish enough to make eye contact. And you do all this just so you can tell people you have no connection with that you cannot possibly buy their blouses, Homer Simpson mugs, or perfumes ... because you're pregnant! In this first shopping era you may find yourself buying one or two maternity outfits, a pregnancy book, and maybe some itty bitty socks. But mostly, you're there to pat your belly, appear nauseous, and lord it over the Victoria's Secret ladies.

Last trimester shopping is a wholly different animal. Born of fear, panic, and the dozens of baby books you purchased during the second trimester, this is about maniacal sprints through Babies R Us; wildly sweeping whole racks of onesies and hooded towels and bibs into your cart without method or purpose. You print up lists that correlate to nothing—based on baby books in which no two lists are the same. And since you don't know where or how to begin, you tend to begin with onesies and end with onesies. This is the kind of shopping that is planned at 2 a.m., when you can't sleep and realize in the most profound and poignant way that you are just not ready. This is the kind of shopping I do almost daily now.

Yesterday I noticed that I am at the point in this pregnancy where cashiers look at me warily as soon as I enter the store. Many actually articulate the look on their faces, although the look itself is unambiguous: "You're not gonna have that thing in here are you?" I'm not certain how many women actually give birth in the Gap each year, but from the discomfort of their employees, there must be loads of them. I am officially past the aw-cute-mommy stage and well into the "please-see-that-your-water-breaks-out-on-the-sidewalk" stage.

Since neither Aaron nor I are very adept consumers under the best of circumstances, our baby shopping has been a hit-or-miss enterprise. We have, for instance, adorable stuffed animals, but no place for the Wee Bald Stranger to sleep. We have the soothing Ocean Sounds CD for its womblike comfort. But we still haven't quite sorted out where this alleged child is to be bathed. Or changed. Or where to warehouse its 10,000 onesies. We are blessed in that we have organized friends who are loaning us things, and dear, generous friends who throw showers. But the rock-bottom truth is simply this: I spend hours looking at bassinets, but am still too scared to buy one. Because that would mean I'm having a baby in three weeks.

Last night I had my first breastfeeding class. Mostly, it is terrifying, in all the ways that imagining milk suddenly springing from your body is bound to terrify. I find myself gazing at my thumbs, wondering if grape juice will magically begin to spray out of them, and checking to see whether peanut butter is dripping from my wrists. Because I can't even begin to imagine how any of this is going to work, I spend much of the class giggling as the lactation consultant alternately squeezes and pinches a huge stuffed foam breast and nipple. I briefly imagine that I am watching Miss Piggy in Deep Throat. But mainly I am fighting back another wave of panic: This is too damn crazy. How can they just hand me a little baby and expect me to know all this? What do you mean they're not sending a baby SWAT team home with me to protect this infant? Don't these people realize what's happening to the gardenia in my kitchen window?

The newspaper comprises the final wall in the Chamber of Panic I've constructed for myself of late. War, anthrax, terrorists, smallpox, sleeper cells, France, protesters, killer flus, reconstituted nuclear weapons, rape rooms, and kidnappers. This may be an astonishing confession from a journalist, but reading the paper has become a nearly crippling enterprise. It's as if, suddenly, there is no membrane between me and the rest of the world. Or perhaps more accurately, it's that I am the only membrane between my baby and the world. It is not enough.

I need to go shopping right now.

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