With countless Hollywood and television tropes, unexpected pregnancy can get a bad reputation. A stigma seems to exist that most unplanned babies are for teenagers and a cultural taboo emphasizes that if a grown woman is surprised by a positive pregnancy test and decides to keep it, she’s not supposed to admit her ambivalent feelings. In today’s parenting culture, despite the fact that it’s extremely common, there seems to be a whole conversation missing on unplanned pregnancy.
Enter Tracy Moore.
Moore is a newspaper journalist and contributing writer to Jezebel.com. She is also a mom–an unexpected one at that. In her hilarious and deeply personal book, Oops! How to Rock the Mother of All Surprises, she discusses what it was like to prepare herself for a baby without any warning.
In her optimistic guide, Moore states that 49 percent of all pregnancies are unexpected. But despite the commonality of the situation, there was a struggle for her to find relevant baby literature. Moore wrote this book to fill a void in women’s lives.
“I feel like when you look for pregnancy books when you’re pregnant, they tend to gloss over [the unexpected] part and just jump to like ‘Oh yay! You’re pregnant, this is so exciting!’” Moore says. “For a lot of women, they have to spend that nine months growing up, getting ready emotionally and psychologically.”
Oops! certainly covers the missing territory. At times it seems more like a candid best friend dishing on her gnarly pregnancy experiences than a formal baby book, which makes it a refreshing break from drier reads.
The book is broken up into manageable sections and chapters. From “Stage One: Shock…Holy S**t You’re Pregnant” all the way to “Stage Five: Rocking It…Your Life With Baby,” Moore’s bite-size essays are a wonderful balance of amusement and information, with just a touch (or maybe firm smack) of vulgarity. Some chapters include realistic concerns, even if they seem trivial, such as: “What Will People Say About Me? (Because I Know They Will Say Things).” Other sections focus on the procedural side of things, like setting up maternity leave at work.
But the main message Moore wanted to get across was, that as impossible as getting prepared for a baby in nine months feels, people do it all the time, which means you can too.
“The point is, a big part of pregnancy and parenting is out of your hands, and that’s not always bad,” Moore writes in her book. “That’s part of the fun, as terrifying as this may sound to you now. And try as we might to control our fates, life creeps in sometimes. Did you hear me? Life creeps in.”
