The Pink

It’s April and I’m about five months pregnant with Lucy, and someone has just sent us our first baby gift. Joel and I lay it out on the kitchen table, and a lot of pink stares at us. We stare back in silence. Pink. For the record, neither of us is actually opposed to pink – Joel has this pink polo shirt that looks great on him, and I have several pink t-shirts and even a pair of pink pants. Even Milo has a pink button-down. But we’re having moment here, with the two lovely pink kimonos wrapped in pink tissue paper and accompanied by a pink envelope, inside of which is a pink card wishing us happiness with our baby girl. We’re realizing that pink is about to take center stage in our lives.
I resisted the Pink for a while. I thought, I don’t need to be that mom who dresses her baby girl all in pink. I thought, baby girls can wear other colors.
It wasn’t like this with my boys. True, I avoided clothes featuring sports themes, bears and trains. But the color blue doesn’t define a baby boy the way Pink does a baby girl. I walk into children’s boutiques and the infant section at Old Navy and I am dazzled by Pink. When I was pregnant I would often walk back out, empty handed and overwhelmed, realizing that I had no idea how to shop for a girl. It became this weird metaphor for me – my resistance to Pink stood in for my bewilderment at becoming a mother to a daughter. Instead of freaking out about this paradigm shift in my life, I freaked out about pink onesies and frilly socks. It got to the point that one of my dearest friends, who is also the mother of three daughters, sent me a box filled with pink clothes, a pink blanket, a pink doll, and the message GET USED TO IT.

Today, Lucy is one day shy of eight weeks old. Two baby showers, four Rubbermaid tubs of hand-me-downs, a few shopping trips, and countless sweet gifts from our loving family and friends later, Lucy has not spent one of her 55 days on earth in an outfit that doesn’t include something Pink (or at least a ruffle or two). I find myself acquiescing to the Pink. And as I do, I also feel myself melting, bit by bit, as I start to define myself as a mother to a daughter as well as sons. When she smiles at me from under her pink hat, or kicks her pink-clad legs at me, it dawns on me that I have my own sweet girl. And I do feel different now, and I’m glad for that. And she does look pretty in Pink.