Danny ChaiWe attended our first childbirthing class last night, and I was kind of reminded why I distrust medicine. Sorry all you doctors out there. But she spent the first portion basically saying how everything they thought about childbirthing a few decades ago was wrong: that women should not be active, their position in labor, that loved ones should be separated from them, how much and how they should be drugged, etc. Just all wrong.
It all makes sense now, why it was wrong, both from an intuitive and scientific standpoint. The thing is, at the time, I’m sure what medicine taught about childbirthing made intuitive and scientific sense to them also. And I’m certain that many years from now, medicine will look back on what we believe about childbirthing now and see it as quaint, provincial, and misguided. In other words, I think it’s somewhat arrogant to think that we’ve addressed all the wrong thinking of the past and have finally arrived at the final, ultimate medical truth on this. Based on medicine’s long history, there’s no basis for that trust.
So yeah, I’m pretty confident that the old ways were, in fact, wrong, but I’m also confident that the current ways aren’t quite right either. What I always wonder then, is how to figure out what’s right. In the end, just need to trust God to work things out.
I’ve also (understandably, I suppose) become fascinated with parenting. I mean specific things related to it. For example, at church on Sunday, a kid was circling around a pole with one hand on it. The the kid’s sibling came up and tried to circle around the pole also. Which precipitated a conflict, with the first kid saying “I want to do it myself” and the other saying “I want to do it also”. The parents, used to this thing I guess, pretty much just let them fight about it.
Me, not being used to this, and being extremely conflict-averse, was really uncomfortable with this. Thing is, I have no idea how I would intervene. One value I strongly want to instill in my child(ren) is sharing, to an extreme degree. Like, I’m not sure I want them to have any sense of “mine” at all. Or at least as much as realistic. In any case, I want to teach them to share everything they have. So in this situation, my gut instinct is that the first should share the pole with the second.
But I talked to another parent later and she said, if intervention is necessary, maybe one could suggest giving each of them exclusive time on the pole. Deferring to her experience, maybe kids do need exlusive time or things of their own. I just don’t know. Anyway, yeah, little things like this fascinate me.