bradley

i love winter in Ohio. i'm not being sarcastic, sardonic, ironic, paradoxical, etc. just think of it: three whole months without buzzing insects; the air is super-dry so sweat comes right off, in fact there's no need to sweat at all because it's 15 degrees; it's not like Buffalo where you have 324587" of snow a year...but there's a chance you will have some snow; you get to wear really fuzzy baggy clothes that you wouldn't be caught dead in during the summer; nights are longer so you don't feel guilty about sleeping longer; people don't want to hang around outside so they come in to play board games and drink hot-chocolate; if you're lucky and live by a moderately large pond, you'll be able to walk on water for a week or two; our basketball teams aren't very good, so you can watch without the agonizing pressure to not screw up lest they be booted from a tournament or the right bowl game; there's no smog; girls on campus are wearing clothes; pets have that faint glazed look about them when they come in from outside and really want you to pet them to warm them up; you can feel the bone-chilling cold like the very elderly do constantly but then it goes away (why is this a good thing? i dunno, some metaphysical desire, i guess); you can set things on fire inside your house without being called an arsonist. This list is getting weird. Anyway, it was 9 degrees last night when we drove to Reynoldsburg to go to our first Bradley class. Before we even signed up for the class, I think I really believed there would be some sort of kooky ceremony with people holding hands and dancing around in a circle, praying to the fertility goddess or something. There wasn't. Then I thought that everyone would be very granola and we wouldn't fit in. They weren't. Then I was sure that all of the women would be super-feminists and we'd sit around and male-bash for two hours. We didn't. Everyone was normal (even the instructor) except that we all believed that the husbands (and they were all husbands...no "partners" or "sperm donors") could help make the process of pregnancy and birth easier. So I won't tell you that we just bonded for two hours--there was lots of "I have no idea what I'm doing" from part of the group and some "our first birth experience really sucked" from others--but it was affirming in some way to know that we aren't the only clueless about-to-be parents in Columbus and not the only ones who are somewhat suspicious about the automated/industrialized/pre-packaged way that medicine is practiced in so many hospitals. We want an alternative but, not being professionals, don't know what a viable alternative would look like. We sat around and practiced exercises for a couple of hours, talked about our fears, made some jokes, and that was it. On the way home, i flipped out about our lack of vegetables in our diet. i don't know why i get this fear that our baby's going to turn out with a massive vitamin deficiency and its teeth won't come in so we'll have to chew its food for it and spit it into its mouth...but i do. it took me all day to finish this. it's 4:30p now and snowing like crazy. ah, winter!