It is mildly terrifying to be a mammal. Sometimes I think it would be way easier to be a robot. Or a paramecium. But then again, this whole ability to create another sentient life form is pretty great. In the sense of continuation, I mean. The scariness is in the mechanics. Now, more than ever, my wife is an animal. A thriving, primal, essential member of the cohort Placentalia. I guess I am too, but right now that seems utterly irrelevant.
I am amazed on a daily basis by what she is going through. Yes, I am a dude, so I have no real grasp of this experience, but I am with it enough to understand those fearful mechanics and realize that any fear is irrational here. Granted, one can apply as much or as little internal distress as they want to the situation based on a little research or a lot of hearsay regarding potential unpleasantness, but I have a mind in part inspired by certain heroes. In this case I'll take a page from the great cosmologist Carl Sagan. All else being equal, just look at the numbers. The odds are well in our favor that my wife and our baby will pass through this transition without harm. When the reasons for fear are demonstrated to be irrational, the fear is made distant and meaningless, like a Christmas snow globe for sale in July.
We have chosen to have a natural birth, away from the hospital, away from doctors, away from needless pharmaceutical interventions. I am perplexed by the increasingly common practice of choosing those other options. As if it were a simple decision, chocolate versus vanilla. Sure, the option is there for us should complications arise, but I know we will not go down that path. My wife is an animal. So am I. Our Class have been doing it this way for countless eons. So long, in fact, that we have refined our engineering to the point that we can completely bypass the natural way of things and use wholly unnatural techniques to deliver our progeny into the world. Yes, this is necessary at times. But I can't rationalize the choice to do so without a reasonable attempt at the old school style. Neither can my love. This is her choice, after all.
All I can say is that the choice to schedule unnecessary surgery to extract your baby from your body with drugs and knives is baffling to this dude. It also seems terribly selfish, if you look at what is really happening to your baby, who is another human and not a tumor, after all. This egocentricity would be in keeping with the mode that American's seem to have chosen, if you read the numbers, but I don't believe that is what we really want as a nation of individuals. I believe that we are much more alike than the town criers would have us think. Again, all things being equal... Events that drastically alter the state of the world are not likely to happen to you in your life time. Unless you have a child. Now this is mere speculation on my part. I have a strange feeling that my life is about to change in a very profound way. Parents, you just might understand.
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