casual conversation

I ran into a woman while visiting one of the local kids furniture stores. She noted how pregnant I was and asked when I was due. She told me about her kids. I mentioned I was in law school.

"So, I take it you're going to work." She was blunt.

"Well," I said, "I'm in law school now, though on a leave of absence. But I'm definitely going back."

"Oh," she said, "then you'll work afterwards?"

I shrugged. "I like law, and nobody is going to pay the bills for us."

"I was a lawyer," she announced, "but I couldn't do it. I quit."

"Mmmmph." I tried to be as non-committal as possible.

She continued on, talking about how involved she was in her children's school, about her daily life, about how she didn't miss law, and about how she didn't know how "those other women," presumably women who did not do exactly as she did, manage.

I eventually extricated myself. There was nothing I could add to the conversation. I don't even have a kid outside the womb yet, just a baby who has apparently decided to hang out in my cervix until he's old enough to get his driver's license.

But I felt sorry for her. I think she was lonely.

I look at my extended group of acquaintances. I see people raised by single, working mothers and people raised with working fathers, stay-at -home mothers, and 1.2 siblings. Some were not allowed to watch television, and some had their own televisions at age four. Some were in daycare from infancy. A few were homeschooled until high school. Some were raised by atheists and some were raised by fundamentalist Christians. Some were spanked with belts, others were rarely disciplined. Some were rich. Some lived off of food stamps. One grew up in a commune.

Some are happy, some are unhappy. Some have great relationships with their families and some dread the two weekends a year in which they are obligated to speak with their parents.

I see no easy correlation in my sample set, no clear formula that, if followed faithfully, yields a happy adult. Reasonably happy, confident parents seem to raise happy kids, more or less, but the mechanism by which they do that seems widely variable.

I don't think at this point we can say with any certainty at all what will work best for us. We'll muddle through, I imagine, just as our parents muddled through.

I can explicitly promise, however, that I won't accost heavily pregnant women in baby furniture stores and interrogate them on their life choices.