I’m doing the dishes, passively gazing out the window at the dusty driveway and the heavy clouds ready to rupture with the April rain, and quietly singing a song I don’t quite know, “Paddy’s Lamentation”. But this story doesn’t start here. It starts a few weeks ago, when I reached my 24th birthday. While I was musing over martinis with the couple of friends I cornered at my birthday party as I entered the stage of inebriation that my husband comically refers to as ‘Professor Hanna’, I discovered that I had reached a milestone. As I elucidated at the party – less eloquently then, than I am remembering now, I’m sure – “now that I am 24, if I get pregnant, everyone will assume it was intentional.” The combination of this revelation, this comic and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women got me thinking about the perceptions of life, love and pregnancy in my own small hometown. Continue reading
Baby
Alberta’s Top Baby Names of 2011
The decision of what to name a child is not one made lightly by any parent (I’ve been thinking of the perfect name for years, and I’ve got a few more years to go before I need to decide). Consequently, the new parents of Albert came up with some pretty interesting names last year, as the Edmonton Journal’s Brent Wittmeier discovered in “My name is Moo, how do you do?” I wonder how unique it is to be named Unique when you are not the only one.
Family Pressure
I’ve been married for just over a month now and the baby badgering has already begun. It was bad before with comments like “you know, you don’t have to be married to have a baby these days,” coming from all directions but as I expected, it has gotten even worse now that I am married. A family member, who, every Christmas, is socked that I’m not pregnant yet, even asked me at my wedding how much longer they were going to have to wait. It seems now that I can’t do anything out of the ordinary without getting people’s hopes up. Continue reading
Study on Women who have Children in Rapid Succession
As an as-of-yet childless woman in my childbearing years, I have often looked at my culture and wondered why so many couples are having children in such rapid succession, by which I mean, having two or more children in as many years; announcing the expectation of the second child at the party for the first birthday of the first child. Continue reading