Skip to main content

Popping Babies

J's best buddy Ryan has given her a crash course on human reproduction. J was gracious enough to share her new found knowledge with me last evening as I cleaned up in the kitchen after dinner.

"Mommy, they took Ryan's Mommy to the emergency room and popped out the two babies stuck in her tummy" she said to me in the course of recounting the events of the day.

"I wonder how they popped those babies out" I asked her in all seriousness.

"Well, the doctor opened her tummy, popped the babies out and put her tummy back in " she says making Ryan's Mommy sound like one of those egg laying clockwork toy hens. I burst out laughing.

"Do you think it hurt a lot when they popped the two babies out ?" I ask her.

Obviously Ryan did not have anything to say on the subject of pain fascinated as he has been with the fact that his Mommy popped out two live babies from her tummy. J had not even thought about pain.

"How do you think the babies got into her tummy ?" I ask J

"Oh, they just got into her tummy and Ryan's Dad had to take her to the emergency room to pop them out" J declares confidently making it sound like a minor and easily fixable glitch. J had been to the emergency room once when she got a bead stuck up her nose and the doctor had to "pop" it out in the manner of the said babies. I am not surprised that J is able to make the "pop" connection.

Now that is the best description I have heard of an accidental pregnancy brought about by carelessness, broken rubber, forgotten morning after pill or combination. I could not stop laughing and J looked at me quizzically unable to see anything funny about it.

When these kids notice Mommies all around "popping" babies Ryan's Mommy will cease to be exclusive but until then she has them quite enthralled. I am relieved J does not want me start popping babies myself to equal her accomplishment. Kids tend to be very competitive.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...