Buy buy baby

Molly Whitehead-Jones - 25 Jun 15

I’m two and a half weeks into my maternity leave and my inbox is currently bulging with order confirmations and receipts for various bits of baby-related paraphernalia. We sorted out all the stuff you actually need (prams, cots, basic baby grows, etc.) ages ago; I confess that my recent purchases are much more on the gratuitous side.

In one of my early NCT classes, we did an exercise where we had to group various commonly purchased baby items into ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ categories. It all made perfect sense to me at the time: no baby actually needs a Moses basket, baby bath or even a designated nappy bin… But all that common sense has gone firmly out the window now.

My mother (who, no word of a lie, slept in a drawer rather than a cot for the first three months of her life) is flabbergasted by the amount of gadgets and gimmicks currently piled high in our baby’s nursery. My husband is likewise perplexed by the fact that the usually frugal woman he married is now spending wildly on unnecessaries for our little person who hasn’t even been born yet.

Us mums-to-be, particularly first timers, are a captive audience for retailers because we are, naturally, scared rigid of the great unknown that’s just around the corner. Drowning in dogma, our heads swim with unanswerable ‘what if’s’. Any products that promise to act as a solution to one of the many problems we might encounter when our little stranger arrives – make our newly fraught lives a little easier – feels, at the very least, worthy of further investigation.

Reassuring statistics, a bit of research-related jargon, ‘five-star’ reviews and industry awards quickly win you over. Suddenly, you find yourself convinced that you and your baby can’t possibly live without a nasal aspirator or Ewan the Dream Sheep.

I’m not exactly a risk taker, but literally buying into so much hype on such a grand scale isn’t like me – especially at a time when I’m not technically earning so every last penny counts. Let’s just call my recent spending sprees what they are, then: an (expensive) symptom of my hardly contained panic over impending motherhood.

As labour approaches and I find myself with an awful lot of empty hours on my hands, I naturally spend more and more time thinking (or more precisely worrying) about what’s in store. As someone who always likes to know what they’re getting, the endless question marks that hang over almost every aspect of childbirth, looking after a tiny baby and, let’s face it, the next 18 years of my life/forever, sets me on edge.

Expectant mums have to ‘wait and see’ about so much; in my case, even the sex of our unborn child remains unknown. The fact is that in the instant I click the ‘buy’ button on a newborn “must have”, I get a much-needed millisecond of relief from the unending fug of uncertainty. And it feels totally worth it.

I know deep down that inevitably the vast majority of baby-related issues and disasters that I’m planning for will most likely never come, and many of my random bits and bobs will go unused.

But at best, I’ve bought myself a spot of reassurance at a time when I’m desperately in need of it. And at worst, I’ll have a hell of a lot of pristine baby aids to pass on to my friends or slap on Ebay in a few months’ time.

Molly Whitehead-Jones

Molly Whitehead-Jones is a first-time mum living in Manchester and founder of Mamas Collective, a mums group that offers meetups, workshops & events for savvy, super-cool mamas who love their kids but won’t let motherhood hold them back.

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