Mommy Anxiety: Having a Baby When You’re Not a Baby Person
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George Doyle/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Tracy Moore is a doting mom to her three-and-a-half year old daughter, Edie, but that wasn’t always the case.
Moore, a blogger at Jezebel.com, found out she was pregnant with her first child just two months after she and her husband were married.
“Words I can’t repeat now,” Moore said of what went through her mind when she found out she was pregnant.
“I mostly went to rock shows or hung out in bars approximately four nights a week,” she said of her then-lifestyle. “I smoked a lot of cigarettes [and] ate a lot of fast food.”
Though Moore was not a baby person, she says she felt pressure to become a model mom, in part thanks to images of adoring Hollywood moms like Angelina Jolie, a mother of six, and Jennifer Garner, a mother of three.
“There’s also this assumption that you know everything to do and how to comfort a baby,” Moore told ABC News’ Aditi Roy.
When Moore saw unexpected pregnancy depicted in Hollywood movies like Knocked Up— starring Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen as an unlikely couple who accidentally end up pregnant — it was the male character, in this case Rogen’s, to whom she could relate.
“I was the person that needed to read the baby books,” said Moore, who was 33 when she became pregnant.
When Moore delivered her daughter, Edie, nine months later, however, she says it was love at first sight.
“I did all this stuff that wasn’t natural,” she said. “The sing-songy stuff, the reading [and] doing funny voices when you read the stories.”
“And then, you know, it was just a matter of weeks before that was really natural,” said Moore.
Moore has turned her surprise pregnancy experience into a book — Oops! How to Rock the Mother of All Surprises: A Positive Guide to Your Unexpected Pregnancy — in hopes it will ease other hesitant moms into motherhood.
“It was like my life was cracked open and just bombarded with light,” Moore said. “I grew in so many ways that were unimaginable to me.”
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