Our Iron Blogging topic is: Friends having babies. Ready go!
It's only recently that I have had friends who were having babies, and that was a thing to be excited and happy about. It's a weird cognitive shift. I think it's because for the last fifteen years at least, any of my peers getting pregnant was a tragic event, the absolute worst-case scenario. Pregnancy was like an infectious disease. Everyone utilized preventative measures. Girls pre-emptively took pills to avid this tragic fate. You stockpiled condoms in your house just in case, like people buying Cipro during the Anthrax scare. I've been conditioned to feel like choosing to have a baby would be on par with willingly infecting yourself with the bird flu.
The threat of having a baby was a deterrent to sex-having and irresponsibility. Having baby meant you couldn't finish school, you had to go work a menial job, your future was over. I remember my dad playing Bruce Springsteen's "The River" for me and explaining how screwed the guy in the song was. In that song, your fate as a young parent was to abandon your dreams, which became either a lie or "something worse". Of course, even when many of my peers were willingly choosing not to finish school and I met plenty of classmates who had kids, that picture of baby-having remained.
Luckily, there's an easy factor that helps me reconcile my mixed feelings about friends having babies. Babies are really goddamn cute.
And time!
