I don’t want to sound unpatriotic, and I realize that this is not a wildly original point, but there is something creepy about how risk aversion has become a kind of unofficial American creed.Meghan Cox Gurdon has lived in several countries, indeed has given birth in different countries. Much of this particular column takes a look at how different it was being pregnant and going to doctors in Japan, England, Canada, and then the United States. In the U.S., she says, there seems to be a unique and grim focus on what might go wrong.
It’s creepy in the way that it has crept stealthily into our national life, and creepier still in its sinister, innumerate, fear-fanning, joy-squashing effects. There have been days lately when I have caught myself wondering aloud, “Can we really be the people who settled the Great Plains?”...
While we are more or less on the subject, I'd like to add a salute to a nurse whose name I never knew, up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
I was up visiting with a friend who was about to have her first baby, and she got nervous and had me drive her to the hospital (it was a false alarm, not that it matters as far as this story goes). She left a note for her husband. I don't know what she wrote in the note, but he panicked. To be fair, he probably panicked before he even read the note - the way his nerves were right then I suspect just seeing his wife gone and a note left for him would have been enough to knock him to his knees. But, in any case, he dove for the phone and called the hospital and asked for the nurses' desk in the OB wing. Getting a nurse, he babbled something frightened and frantic at her.
This nurse, bless her, said something along the lines of "Your wife is just fine, sir. Just fine. Nothing to worry about at all." Once she had him calmed down, then she said, "Now, tell me, what is her name? Or yours?" Now, that's a cool-headed nurse who's used to dealing with expectant fathers.
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I remember a vacation in my air-conditioned car through Southern Utah. We got to this hot, desert valley where the pioneers had carved graffiti on the walls as they passed through more than 100 years ago. Many of the graffiti posts were also memorials to those who died along the way. As I imagined these hardy people going through the desert, I kept babbling to my husband that it was impossible to imagine that these pioneers were the ancestors of people on Jerry Springer and Oprah, and all the other trash TV, whining about the intense hardships of "my Mom cut my hair wrong," or "my boyfriend went out with my best friend." Those shows seem to have died away a bit, but the mentality still lives on with that ridiculous women in the DC area whimpering and shrieking about the stress of being an upper middle class mother. Feh!
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