It Doesn't Matter Anymore

Dooce has an incredible series of posts up about her natural labor and childbirth with her second daughter. She writes a good story and this story is amazing indeed. It makes me wonder when I am ever going to get over my non-birth of a birth with the twins, and how much ambivalence and sadness I still feel about it. I spent most of my pregnancy seriously preparing for a natural birth only to get sidelined at the end by a stubbornly breech Milo. It felt deeply wrong to go into the hospital without a single labor pain and get gutted like a fish so quickly that I was suddenly a mother before I even knew what happened. I am grateful for the c-section because of the outcome. I am grateful that Nora & Milo were born healthy and alive. Of course I am grateful for that, of course. But I am also sad about the way it happened, even as I recognize how lucky we all were that everything turned out fine.

It gets better and better as the kids get older and I no longer have to rely on my body to do stuff. My body is now irrelevant, and my crappy pregnancy and my crappy milk production skills don't matter anymore. I can use my brain now to parent, and slowly forget how my body kept letting us all down. 

Today was a nice day. After the kids went down for their morning nap I walked to work, and finished the methods section of a paper I'm writing. On to results on Thursday.  This is the first of my two "signature pieces" for tenure.  I have to write those papers this year and get them accepted. Before that happens, I won't be ready to go up for tenure.  (So it might take a while). I came home early, getting home at around 4. It was hot today, finally, and we decided to turn on a mini sprinkler and let the kids play with the water. Milo and Nora had a blast playing with the water. Milo especially loved it, putting his face in the water, trying to drink it, getting his belly wet, and then shivering and shivering but not wanting to come away from the sprinkler. I got a towel and wrapped him up and held him, and the kid was icy!

Then we noticed that our neighbors with a toddler close to M & N's age have now returned from their year in Japan! They were in the park with their daughter, so Nora and I walked over to talk to them and catch up. We all wandered back to our house and their daughter took off her clothes and ran through the sprinkler with Nora and Milo while we chatted about Japan and tenure stuff (they are also professors). Then another neighbor I know came by with her 2 kids, and they started running through the sprinkler as we all sat around and talked. The next thing I knew it was dinner time and we had magically avoided the typical late afternoon crankiness that often plagues our house. Instead the kids had had a great time running around outside with their friends and I thought once again how terrific this neighborhood is.