Hospitality and Babies
If you want to have a baby, work in hospitality.
Everything you need to know and get used to about having a baby happens in hospitality. Especially bars. Babies, after all, are just tiny drunks, incapable of expressing their needs, prone to crying inconsolably for no reason, and you desperately want to throw them out the door at 2am but you can’t because now that you’ve been watching them cry for hours you feel some sort of responsibility for them.
Something that I see come up over and over again about the troubles of motherhood is that you never again get to have a warm cup of coffee all the way through, or have a meal that isn’t cold. This has not been an issue I have had to deal with. Why? Because I’m already used to eating and drinking like an angry raccoon behind the dumpsters. That’s not even much of a metaphor, because anyone in hospitality knows that horking down a cold chunk of steak over the trash can in a fashion that would impress a pelican is the way that civilized people eat.
When you work in hospitality, you are incredibly used to having your downtime interrupted. Did you just make a cup of coffee and have decided to have your first sip? That means ten people just walked into the bar and they all want some sort of drink that is on fire. Did you just ring in some food because the bar has been dead for three hours and you might get to eat hot food for once? LIES. The minute your food hits the line, ten people will walk into the bar and they will want a drink that is on fire and also has fifteen ingredients in it that they heard from another bar in Cincinatti one time.
Working in hospitality means being absolutely used to being interrupted at any moment and having to pivot to being interested in someone else’s needs and even anticipating what they need before they know what it is. The only trade off is at the bar I get paid, and outside of exploiting my child for social media, I don’t think there is any way to get paid to raise a child.
But the other trade off is I very much like the customer I am constantly having to serve, even if he won’t try any of the wine I’ve offered him because he’s a fucking philistine.