A Car is NOT a Baby

Is it me or has everyone jumped on the bandwagon and is using babies, kids and mommies as their running theme to push advertise new products? Evidently, no one needs a new deodorant more than a heavily pregnant woman inexplicably sporting high heels (something that I still think defies logic) or a new checking account. I had no idea that pregnancy makes you especially stinky or that some women experience cravings not for food but for a new financial institution – I guess you learn something new every day! And if those seemingly benign ads haven’t already made your stomach turn, then there’s always the ones with the soft, sweet music playing to black and white vignettes of mommy and baby – or some version thereof. Johnson & Johnson, of course, reign supreme in the ram-a-pitchfork-through-my-achy-breaky-heart niche.

It seems that we, of the infertility world, are not the only ones obsessed with babies.

Did I say obsessed? I mean, interested in. Yeah. That’s what I meant. Enthusiastic! About! BABIES!!

(I’m trying not to grit my teeth right now).

So it’s not bad enough that you can’t go to the grocery store without an onslaught of celebrity and pseudo-celebrity “baby bump watch” gossip rag covers assaulting your senses – no, instead, now your damn tv is also in on it! And it’s not just the obvious tv ads – it’s also the sudden infusion of All Things Pregnancy in what seems like EVERY. DAMN. SHOW. ON. EARTH. Because apparently it makes perfect sense to develop a plot line where life is created by combining the genetic material of a werewolf and a vampire (The Vampire Diairies/The Originals). Or derailing a plot line by giving some teeny boppers who haven’t even made it to college yet the enormous responsibility of parenthood, then killing the “dad” which causes the “mom” to have a miscarriage (Revenge). And even when you reach into the past to watch something on DVD, you run into the forgotten episodes involving Andrea Zuckerman of the original Beverly Hills 90120 exclaiming that pregnancy is not at all blissful because morning sickness sucks. Which, in my humble opinion, is why you should wait to have babies until you’re no longer such a baby yourself – but that’s besides the point.

And even though I know all of this stuff is not real life but fiction in so far as none of the aforementioned are “reality tv” (which is also anything but real but falls into a different category of “fiction”), I found myself getting annoyed, for a split second and thinking – wth, I can’t have a baby and they’re trying to sell me on the Immaculate Conception involving something that’s supposed to be DEAD? SERIOUSLY?? Or the fact that, apparently, after losing your bf/baby daddy AND your baby, you still manage to get a flawless blowout and strut around in your best designer duds spouting venom on command. The only thing that I’ve realized from all this is (a) some fiction is BAD fiction; (b) some people really don’t deserve to have babies. Even if they’re fictitious.

But let’s get back to my original point about commercials that variously make me bawl or want to reach through the tv screen like a Poltergeist/Freddie Krueger and strangle whoever is constantly assaulting my raw, wounded heart by reminding me NON-STOP of how, apparently, everyone in the world – including the fictional and, oh yeah, technically dead – can make a baby and I can’t.

My favorite one – and I mean this with a heavy sense of sarcasm – has to be the most recent commercial by insurance company Nationwide. It starts out with a larger-than-life baby sitting in a driveway, being hosed down by a guy…I’ll let you check this out for yourself in case you haven’t seen it already:

Admittedly, if I hadn’t been so taken in my this GINORMOUS (and, fyi, super cute) baby filling my entire screen, I might have clued into the fact that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t about an actual baby at all. But all I could see was the baby – I felt like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. Something inside of me cried because I just wanted to take it and hold it (you know, after I dried it off and flicked the guy with the water hose back to whatever rock he crawled out from under). The physical enormity of the baby suddenly represented, in the most painful way, years of hoping – and feeling my dreams crushed as I lost a little more of my soul with each passing year. The proportion of the baby vs the guy is how I feel about motherhood and infertility at this point – and how something that should’ve been a normal development in our lives, our marriage, has become the biggest “bundle”. Not of joy, but of pain.

Needless to mention, it’s a metaphor: it’s about how this guy’s car is HIS baby – and how Nationwide is going to give him the best deal/protection/peace of mind in case of the inevitable snafu. But I was – I was totally blind-sighted. I actually thought, ok this is about how a baby is a huge responsibility, how it’s part of every living breathing moment of your life, and how you’re going to want the best of everything to protect your little bundle of joy. At the end of the commercial, I was torn between rolling my eyes and wanting to send Russel Dunbar to whoever came up with this to tell them “Someone thinks you’re an a$$face – and ya kinda are.”

Sorry, Nationwide – a car is NOT a baby.