Growing a Do-Over by Teresa Strasser on Creators.com

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Growing a Do-Over

I'd like to go to my senior prom again, but not be blackout drunk with a 26-year-old date.

For a brief period during which I hosted a basic cable decorating show, I was kind of famous. I wish I could be famous again, without having to emotionally implode from the cognitive dissonance of thinking I was a nobody while the world was thinking I was somebody. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't glower at people who shouted my name at airports. I would wave and smile — like I deserved it.

If I could be pregnant, give birth and care for a baby again... Oh, wait. I can.

For once, life has given me a do-over. Of all the major life-cycle events, the big moments, the passages and transitions, the ceremonies, the beginnings and endings, of all the big deals I have screwed up just by being terrified of failing, I never got a chance to try again with the full knowledge of how I will look back at it.

However, as I sit here four-months pregnant with my second child, all I can think is: This certainly is different when I don't spend the day Googling "miscarriage causes" or "chromosomal abnormalities of Ashkenazi Jews" or "the dangers of eating soft cheese during pregnancy." Finally, a do-over.

The kid is just fine, my 2-year-old. What I couldn't have predicted is that my love for him would give birth to some kind of ever-multiplying fear monster, that instead of just experiencing him growing in my stomach, or instead of just watching his tiny face sleeping, I would spend most of his early days on a maternal death watch. If he slept for too long, my heart would race, something was wrong. If he had the hiccups, a rash, a fever or a crying fit, I knew the end was coming.

I have to admit that my love for this creature, before he was born and after, made caring for him a perpetual shift on the front lines of a little war I was losing against my own anxiety.

Bad things happen. Terrible things happen. Those things still might happen to me, to this new baby, but I can tell you this: I truly don't think my contemplation of doom either manifests or protects against it.

And another thing about the first-born: You don't know anything about anything. Or at least I didn't.

Now I can tell you how a Braxton Hicks contraction feels as opposed to real labor. I can school you on when to take away a pacifier or how to pack a diaper bag. I already have a pediatrician; I even know the parking drill over there, and it won't panic me. I have a day care. I have hand-me-downs. I can tell you which bookstores have changing tables in the bathroom. I got this.

The first time around, I could tell you exactly how many weeks and days pregnant I was, whether my fetus was the size of a plum or a kiwi. This time, I lose track. Sometimes, at least until someone offers me a cocktail, I even forget.

The most prominent symptom I had the first time around wasn't morning sickness or bloating, though I had those. The most pronounced side effect of carrying a baby was acute self-absorption. It's not that I was self-involved out of some sense of my own importance or awesomeness. I was just so scared something would go wrong that I somehow became convinced, despite lots of evidence to the contrary, that no one had ever carried a baby to term before. I was the only pregnant person on the planet. It was all about me, my swelling ankles, my ultrasounds, my due date, me.

The thing about this second time is that I'm finding it almost impossible to focus on myself, on all the bad things that could happen, while simultaneously caring for a 2-year-old who needs me to play garbage trucks and spray OxiClean on butter stains.

So, here's to do-overs. Oh, wait, I can't drink. Just pass the Camembert.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer, a two-time Los Angeles Press Club Columnist of the Year and a multimedia personality. She is the author of a new book, "Exploiting My Baby," the rights to which have been optioned by Sony Pictures. To find out more about Teresa Strasser and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.