But if you can make out the whale-like creature through the toothpaste and hairspray spatters you'll be looking at a very pregnant me. 38 weeks and 4 days. If I don't go into labor naturally in the next couple of days I'll be induced Thursday evening. Hopefully the herbal tincture takes and I'll be in labor early afternoon on Wednesday. I asked my magic 8 ball if I'd give birth on Thursday and it said "Looks Promising," so I'm pretty excited about that. :] Never doubt a magic 8 ball.
Wednesday is 3 days away. Wow.
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I'd like to take a little time for a brain spew. Lately I've been thinking a lot about time. From a very young age we learn that we have to wait for things. Like waiting for mommy to feed me or get off the telephone or for a playdate with one of our best friends. I've heard time described as the great equalizer. But I'm not so sure if there is anything equal about it. When we're young waiting five minutes can seem like days and a couple of hours like years. But the same child can completely lose himself in a couple of hours of make-believe play. Time really has no meaning to a child. It is an intangible subject and no matter how long a toddler needs to wait for something, whether it be 5 minutes or 5 days, it really only translates to "not now." Hm. Well maybe it is the great equalizer. I guess what I meant was that time translates differently depending on the situation and, I believe, the experience of the individual. Something that seems forever to one person can feel like no time at all to another. Time is relative. But time waits for no man. It goes marching on no matter the circumstance. Then how in the heck is it able to be translated so differently from person to person? How can a six hour labor and delivery shift, composed of thousands of the most incomprehensibly important and valuable moments to dozens of young couples, translate to just another work day for a busy nurse? I suppose it would be exhausting to nurses if they felt the same magnitude of emotion for every birth they attended, but my point is still valid. A labor and delivery nurse may not remember every birth they attend, but for the new young mother it's a moment she will never, ever forget. In literally a matter of moments, two selfish lives can create another. And after 9 months (which sometimes feel like years, but often pass far too quickly) in the separate, yet uniquely intimate act of birth a perfect child will take its first breath. He will never take another first breath. That moment is sacred and it belongs to only those who were there.
Age is very much related to time. Although personally I feel that experience is a better way of talking about age rather than simply the number of years one has lived. This reminds me of the lyrics of a couple of songs. "I remember someone old once said to me, that lies will lock you up with truth the only key." -missy higgins. Was the significance of the statement related simply to the fact that the person who said them had lived a long time? No, it was the experiences that person had that rendered them credibility. Someone just as old could easily have not learned the same profound lesson. Another quote is "It's hard to believe that I'm getting older, when my heart still believes I'll always be young." Another universal theme. I haven't been able to get this one off my mind. I've been told since I was 17 that I look a lot older than I am. I've finally reached an age that isn't considered ridiculously young for where I am in life. But again, it's not the age that matters. I'm moving on to a completely new stage of life. Normally, marriage is a step to this stage. When you're single or even dating, time is all yours. You can do whatever you want with it and for the most part, you still have more to spare. Take a break from school and whats the big deal? It's your time, to do with what you please and it really doesn't affect anyone else. In marriage, you share time. In parenting, you don't own any time. I'm making a jump from all time to no time. Even in a long working day, you can come home and have it be your time. Not company time, but your time for which you are the sole person responsible. Parenting is a completely different schedule that requires instant unselfishness. I think many times people don't pay enough attention to the moments that create this existence of borrowed time we call life. The moments matter. We can't go back and collect the ones we missed. Our hearts can stay young while our bodies age, depending on how we treat the moments we are given. Time is such a valuable commodity. I could go on and on about it, but every once in a while I have to give my brain a rest. It's a common thing; time is given to everyone. But somehow I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
People often talk about the perception of time seems to speed up as we age. There years just seem to start going by faster and faster. I read a great article that does a good thing explaining this. When we are really young, almost everything we perceive is new. We seem to record every little bit in our memories. As we get older, certain things start to become routine. The mind often dumps that routine information after the first couple times of experiencing it, because it hasn't changed much. Think about driving to work. If you try to remember what exactly happened on your trip too or from work, you usually can't recall much. As we become adults, we have already experience quite a bit. A majority of the things we experience aren't new. Since our brain is automatically forgetting these daily things, time seems to get shorter. Before we know it, we're old :) The funny thing is, a lot of older people spend have found ways to stretch out time. They go on vacations a lot, and visit different places. This increases their experiences of new things and so seems to slow down their perception of time.
ReplyDeleteThat makes total sense to me. Explains why a new mothers perception of time would slow down during labor and delivery while a nurse who's seen hundreds of births would view the time going by much faster. It's amazing how things as constant as time or as seemingly reliable as pain are really all about perception and how our brains sort information.
ReplyDeleteMe thinks you have become quite a wise young woman through this course of time.
ReplyDeleteThanks :)
ReplyDelete