editor's note: This post is a shout out to my girls from Wenatchee. Thanks for teaching me something new."You are so 1980's," says a friend of mine after I confess my undying love for Jon Bon Jovi.
He intended the comment as a slam, but 1) how can you not love Jon Bon Jovi? and 2) this is the same guy who had just minutes earlier told me "I always smile when I talk" and I can only remember seeing him smile like once. Ever. And he wasn't talking at the time.
Needless to say, I didn't pay him much mind.
However.
He is right. The 1980's shaped a lot of things about me. During this one short decade a lot happened in my world. First kiss and first broken heart. I learned to drive and got my first new car. Graduated high school, left for college, and lost my virginity (not necessarily in that order). I learned to drink, how to do laundry, and that not everyone in the world is a Republican. I voted for the first time, got married, and got my first job. On New Year's Eve 1989, sushi became my favorite food. I would still eat it everyday if I could afford to do so.
The 1980's was a decade when I was positive I knew way more than I actually did.
The 1990's took care of that character flaw.
And now, it is 2010. Unbelievable. I know intellectually that I am not in my twenties or even my thirties any longer. It's just that I don't feel any different than I did when I was twenty-five. I know a lot more things. But, I still view myself as young.
This is not a vanity thing either. Although I wouldn't mind having my twenty-one year old tits and ass back, I honestly feel more attractive now than I ever did when I was younger. Perhaps it is a confidence thing, but more likely I think it is that I have grown more comfortable in my own skin. I like myself more and have figured out what makes me happy.
One of the things that really keeps me balanced is having an open mind. I like to learn new things. I'm determined to not turn into an old person who is afraid of new experiences. Whatever the post web 2.0 world has in store, I'm ready. I'm positive science is going to provide a way for me to live to be one hundred twenty. When we land on Mars, I'll be watching. When we discover we are not alone in the universe and the gene responsible for homosexuality, I want to be there.
You get it - I may tip toe carefully into the future, but I'm usually ready to embrace whatever it holds.
Or so I thought.
Earlier this week I was perusing Facebook when I saw an unusual status update from one of my Facebook friends. Unusual in the sense that I had no freaking idea what it meant. I have a pretty damned good vocabulary and I have been known to actually read a medical text book for fun. So when I saw
placental encapsulation
as a Facebook status, it caught my attention.
I was aware that this friend was pregnant so my first thought was "oh no, I hope that is not serious."
Then someone commented "Are you going to do it?"
"Do it?" That made no sense. I started dissecting the status in my head. Placental meant placenta. No mystery there. Encapsulation could mean that the placenta was some how confined, but that didn't help me decipher the "do it" comment.
Then someone commented with this link and said something like "I'm your friend that freaks your other friends out." Somewhere in the back of my mind a thought of which I wanted no part was beginning to form. Just as I was debating about whether or not I really wanted to click the link someone posted the following:
SNL killed a skit years ago in the '70's... it was called, placenta helper.. (think hamburger helper...)
And just like that, the thought I had been trying to suppress was fully formed and there was no going back.
OMG.
I'm fairly certain that if I could have seen my face at this moment it would have looked eerily similar to my own mother's face when I told her I was going to breast feed and that my husband was going to be in the delivery room.
Had I turned into my mother? Was I now so old and out of touch that all the hip, progressive, young mom's were eating their own placentas and I was totally clueless? Oh lord... and am I not going to live to be one hundred twenty because no one told me I was supposed to eat mine? Is it not bad enough that I didn't have the option to store my children's cord blood? I mean, really. If only that had become available two or three years earlier. But, noooooo. As I sat there wondering, cute young faces were commenting with things like "that is so flipping cool" and "that rocks".
I was feeling pretty damned unprogressive.
I checked my gmail chat box. A young, pregnant friend who I have known for seven years was online. I im'd her with "OMG." She replied with "what up?" I typed, "placental encapsulation". She said, "It's okay. I'll send you an article."
Good god, even she knows about it. I wanted to ask if she was eating hers, but didn't really want to know.
The article she sent was awesome. It was written by a writer I have long admired, which only made my dilemma worse. The article totally took the gross out factor out of ingesting one's own placenta, made it hysterically funny, and it was written by The Joel Stein. And yes, his wife ate hers.
I guess it is inevitable. No matter how hard you fight it, the torch does eventually get passed from you to the next generation. It's just that I feel so damned cheated. What I wouldn't give to be able to tell my mom that I was intending to not only hire a postpartum dula (which I did), but that she would be serving my placenta for dinner.
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