Grateful to not be a cavewoman

Dear Jack,

Someday, when you read this, you will find this note to be very sweet and uplifting, or just plain morbid.

This will depend largely on which one of your parents you take after the most.

Earlier today, your father and I were talking about my impending return to work next month and I was expressing some sadness that I wouldn't be able to nurse you all day long as I had been. To which your father replied, "Because you aren't a cavewoman."

This is true, I think, because I am not a cavewoman and a cavewoman would nurse her offspring daily through to the age of two or so, I think, but wouldn't "stay at home mom" or "1950's housewife" fit better in the context?

No, because your father has farther to travel on this thought-train (and has apparently ridden it before), "And if you were a cavewoman, you would be dead..."

At first, I resent the implication that I would make a bad cavewoman. I mean, of course I would make a terrible cavewoman, but it's only because I was born in the 20th century and don't have the proper training. Surely if I had been born in cavewoman times, I would be fine.

Except that's not the point at all (continuing to the next trainstop), "...because Jack was breech and you would have died in childbirth."

This is where you will either feel a sense of sweet joy that your mother was not, in fact, a cavewoman, or a twisting of your gut that death came so very close (in a weird theoretical sort of way).

Your father, apparently, stops to think this several times a day, to savor the fact that he didn't lose either of us. (He even has, in his head, a timeline that details at which point in history both of us would have died in childbirth and at what point - say, 1900 - you could have survived being breech and I would have bled out on some turn of the century operating table, or from post-surgical infections.)

His point, of course, is that we should be eternally grateful for living in this modern age when you being breech turned out to be a minor inconvenience and not a death sentence.

He's right, of course. But I still think it's morbid.

So, here's to your mother, not being a cavewoman. And here's to your dad, who had the sense not to say any of this in the operating room when you were born, even though I'm certain he was thinking it at the time.

Love,
Mom