{"id":1917,"date":"2026-06-17T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1917"},"modified":"2026-07-04T00:37:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T00:37:47","slug":"bavarian-bullh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1917","title":{"rendered":"Bavarian Bull$h!+"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Mandatory bed rest made me 
far too familiar 
with the ends of the Internet.
Still, I stopped mid-scroll on the day 
I encountered a post 
in my Mama2Bee group 
from a woman hailing from Vegas 
who had taken her baby-to-be's 
repellant mass production
infant bucket car seat 
to a vehicle upholstery shop to:
\u201cget the seat redone properly\u201d 
in whole grain Bavarian leather
to match the seashell hue 
of her 2012 Rolls Royce interior. 

She was complaining, 
of course.
\u201cDo you know how hard<\/em> it is\u201d 
she went on, 
\u201cto source a tenth hide\u201d
 from the same batch of scar-free bull skin
\u201cas covers the rest of the Ghost?\u201d

I did not understand 
any of those words 
in that order.
And yet.

Her post garnered 478 notes 
of concern and understanding.
\u201cYou got this, Mama!\u201d
\u201cPraying for you\u201d
\u201cColor matching to an existing Rolly? 
Yikes! That really is so tough<\/em>.\u201d

I glance down at the rough cream hide
of unknown origin, comprising 
the arms and pillows and frame
of my first floor couch 
a\/k\/a my bed prison.

The same sofa 
I'd negotiated 
in response to 
a Craigslist ad.

I\u2019d driven 
to a strange address 
an hour away to collect
without any thought 
of where the cows came from
\u2014 in a wobbly $17 a day
rental moving truck.


(Nor did I pause,
mind you, where did my concern for my own<\/em> safety<\/em> go?)

It dawns on me, 
while I palm 
the sticky second-hand leather
that this custom car seat I\u2019m reading about
owned by this pregnant woman
\u2014 and that might 
be used 
by her future babe 
for all of six months \u2014 
will have a more privileged existence 
than my actual, living human baby.

In this moment
It becomes evident 
That simply sharing a due date
Does not mean we breathe the same air
And does not imply our babies 
would ever be allowed to play together.

In our shared group of hundreds 
of incubating women
sharing glimpses of our pregnancies
I realized how much separated us

and...

I never felt so alone.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cBavarian Bull$h!+,\u201d a memory of the unhinged things I learned while in a shared baby due date group in the 2010s. Written Wednesday, June 17, poem 168 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo by Diana Ludwick (c) 2026. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,262,311,200,4,1438,271,2,5,551],"tags":[889,1027,1549,1550,1553,1546,1547,9,1043,1288,40,10,323,1554,667,1555,11,1548,1551,70,1552],"class_list":["post-1917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-dry-humor","category-generational","category-humor","category-long-form-musings","category-nostalgia","category-petty","category-poems","category-rants","category-unserious","tag-baby","tag-baby-mamas","tag-bavarian-bulls","tag-complaining","tag-craigslist","tag-due-dates","tag-ghost","tag-humor","tag-internet","tag-june","tag-kids","tag-parenting","tag-play","tag-pregnancies","tag-pregnancy","tag-privileged","tag-relationships","tag-rolls-royce","tag-support","tag-women","tag-you-got-this-mama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1957,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions\/1957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}