Here comes our son in a little while

Our son is about to be born, probably within the hour. The most exciting thing in my life is about to happen. But it's not happening now. Right now I'm nervous and excited. I don't know what this is going to be like. Right now, I'm just sitting on the Dad bed a few feet away from my wife's bed in Labor and Delivery room 9. It's weird when things are just ordinary before something extraordinary is about to happen. At this very moment, nothing is happening, nothing at all. I'm just sitting here typing, trying to convey what's going through my head.  I'm excited to meet my son, but the getting to know him is not going to start happening until after the extraordinary event of the birth. So all that is going through my head right now is that something that I have no experience with or preparation for is about to happen, very soon; but, at the same time, nothing at all is happening right now.

"Are you asleep?" {no response} Maybe I need an epidural too.  She's very peaceful right now. Beautiful. She's about to do something amazing for the second time. Something that I will never in my life do no matter what.

It's 8:30am.

The waiting is broken up by a visit from the nurse and then by my wife's parents. Talking with them helps. They tell us how excited big sister was this morning to wake up to seeing them and finding out that her brother would be arriving today. We wrote her a letter this morning explaining that we were going to the hospital to bring her brother into the world. We also wrote in the note what her brother's name was, that she was the first to find out, and that she was allowed to tell Grammy and Golf-Cart Grandpa but no one else.

It's 9am and they started a pitocin drip because my wife has been been stuck at 8.5cm for the last 2 hours. The event that we've all been waiting for but isn't happening yet is about to happen. I'm signing off.

Our Children Owe Us Nothing

My wife works in a skilled nursing facility and deals with many elderly people, many of whom depend on their children for various things: transportation, moving, emotional support, even financial support. She see very large differences in how willing the children are to help out their parents in their later years and says that people should be good to their children if they want to expect help from them later on.

What???

Be good to your children?  You mean other than give them life, feed them, shelter them, and wipe their nasty asses? You mean other than deal with all of their meltdowns and their complaints all while raising them to be good, successful human beings? Isn't that enough? Why should we have to be nice to them as well? Make them like us? Don't they just automatically owe us for everything we've already done for them raising them? If we changed their diapers when they were babies, shouldn't they be happy to change our diapers when we are old and decrepit? Isn't that part of the deal?

There was no deal.

Our children did not choose to be born. We chose to have them. We chose to have the pleasure and responsibility of being a parent. If we didn't want the hardships that come with parenting, then we shouldn't have made the choices that led to having children. While we may hope to have great relationships with our children after we raise them, we are not owed this. We have to earn it by going above and beyond what we committed to doing by bringing them into the world. And even if we do "earn" it, they don't owe us. We can only hope for reciprocation of the love we give them just as we can only hope for the reciprocation of the love we give anyone else.