How to Avoid Baby Showers

Hadara Bar-Nadav

Say, I am sick. Say,_ My car died_, or My dog died (even if you do not have a dog). Or say, I died (you often feel like you are dead, so this is not much of a stretch).

Send a gift card. Keep a safe distance between you and any pregnant thing.

Send a how-dare-you-get-pregnant-whenI’m-not-pregnant card.

Send a fuck-you-to-you-and-your-happyuterus card.

Send a I-wish-I-could-be-pregnant-I’mso-sad-I-want-to-die card.

Send a plain, blank card, and inside it write Congratulations! Keep it abstract. Do not have a melt-down in CVS, weeping in front of the baby shower cards with pictures of baby hands and baby toes and embossed bunnies and rattles. The cards with tulips or roses or elaborate watercolor paintings of flowers on the front only make you think of death.

Do not think about how no one is buying you a card for the baby shower you will never have.

Boycott baby showers. Any good friend would never invite you.

Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and award-winning author of several books of poetry, among them The New Nudity and Lullaby (with Exit Sign), She is also co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. She is Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.