Our ETA is just that, an estimate, someone's best guess. Any one of us could arrive a day late and a dollar short, while any number of us could arrive far ahead of when our hosts expected us. In either case, I doubt our mothers were no more or less for the wear-and-tear; after all, after eight months any woman has got to feel the physical effects of pregnancy, and one day either way won't make all that much difference in the remaining days of the expectancy. I'm not a woman, so I can't say with any authority, but it would seem that once the physical pain has begun, it's all just a matter of whether the mother expects the birth sooner or later, and how easily she copes with the pain for any length of time. Pain is pain, unquantifiable...
... at least until the final moments. The actual birth hurt like hell. I remember it clearly, though at the time I did not realize the actual physiological aspects of it. Elastic or not, having my skull squashed so much that it fit through an orifice only half the size of the solid matter that it passed into the cold, blinding light... damn that was painful. And my shoulders... holy cow. If I was to try that again at my age, my bones would shatter—or the woman giving birth to me would split into a few hundred pieces.
Just getting into this world is traumatic, on all accounts. I don't know, because I have not yet gotten that far into the final chapter, but getting out of this world doesn't seem much better. Physical or mental, pain is pain. And this business of killing time until we're laid into another hole... well, it ain't a walk in the park by any definition.
We struggle with ourselves, we struggle with others, and we get caught up in all kinds of things that turn out not to be worth the effort we put into it. And through it all, we forget that we're just killing time, getting from one hole to another.
Most flabbergasting, I think, is how seriously some of us take ourselves, even though we're just killing time between our arrivals and departures. I look at the roster of folks who are running for the next U.S. presidential election, and I am stunned. Fifty to sixty years ago, twenty-four women tolerated excruciating pain to bring twenty-four 2012 political candidates into this world. What were those ladies thinking. All that pain, and for what?
Equally perplexing is that all twenty-four candidates think they can make a difference. A difference in what? Can any one of the twenty-four presidential hopefuls make it easier for me to get from that first hole to the second?
Seriously? I read their bios, and I read their statements. In my estimation, this election year is going to be painful... and I'm blaming twenty-four mothers.
Golf balls. One hole to the next. A drive in between. Don't forget to apportion some electoral blame to the 24 dads. The seed planters.
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