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Before I was pregnant I couldn’t imagine why anyone would watch those weird TV shows about people having a baby. You know those TLC babyfests, “A Baby Story” and “Bringing Home Baby,” where the couple is so excited to have a baby, they cry of joy when the baby arrives, and then they seem slightly desperate and anxious when they have to care for the baby at home. My brief summary would work for any one of the episodes in either series. The shows are all the same and totally boring! Or so I thought.

Then one day I was pregnant and everything took on a new light. What was the mom eating while pregnant? How did she look in her maternity clothes? What crib would they buy? Is she going to nurse? Was her husband more or less involved than my husband? Would they use the dresser as a changing table or buy a separate one? It was like all of sudden I saw the details in the story. And every parent’s choice was different.

By my second trimester I was addicted. I DVR’d both series. By month eight I had seen every episode and I know this because every one was a repeat beyond that point. I begged my husband to watch some of the best episodes with me. He forced himself to oblige. Perhaps he knew that anything could happen if he refused.

I started looking for more baby shows on other channels. I found some about riskier births, others about natural birth. I even turned to YouTube, and this is hard to admit, to watch videos women had taken of their own labor and birth. When my husband saw me watching these bizarre videos he was shocked, not just that I would choose to see this stuff, but that these videos even existed. “You have no idea what’s out there,” I replied. “I really don’t want to know,” he said and left the room.

I watched every baby show and video with a keen eye for new information. I wanted to learn what would happen to me in labor and delivery. Being ridiculously eager for the birth of my child, my addiction gave me an outlet to analyze all aspects of the impending event.

On her blog, dooce.com, Heather Armstrong writes about watching those baby shows, especially the documentary on Discovery Health called Freebirthing about giving birth at home with no nurses, doctors, midwifes or ANY trained professional. Her husband came…

“this close to activating the parental controls on our DirecTV so that I can no longer watch anything on Discovery Health Channel or TLC.”

Heather also suffered from my addiction to “A Baby Story.”

“And then, of course, there’s that loathsome show “A Baby Story” on TLC that follows real couples through the last few weeks of pregnancy. I cannot stop watching it, even though it makes me violently angry. I just cannot believe the bedside manner of some of the doctors on that show, and I’m not even kidding, twice in the last week I have watched a doctor wave the arm of the newborn infant at its mother AS IT IS BEING PULLED FROM THE WOMB.”

One day after my due date, I had my son. It was actually a pretty calm and relatively easy experience, thanks to the epidural. After the baby arrived, a funny thing happened. It didn’t even occur to me to watch one of the baby shows. I had no free time and I had my own story now, 24/7 and no re-runs. My addiction disappeared as fast as it had arrived. I haven’t seen a baby show since. And my husband is delighted.

How about you? Have you found yourself addicted to baby shows?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Baby Prep, Life-Style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.