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Before our pregnancy, I planned on going back to graduate school to earn my PhD. Those plans are on the back burner for now, but I wonder if they’ll ever be pulled back to the front of the stove. I know how plans can collect dust, growing old and outdated, sometimes even rancid, without us noticing. I don’t want that to happen, but there’s that part of me that says, “Hey, this is the time to focus on the baby. This is not the time for professional upheaval.” So I let it go, and tell myself that in a year or two, I’ll come back to it. Maybe.


And that makes me think of how I catch myself telling people how I’m glad Linda and I didn’t get pregnant until now; how we weren’t ready to have kids when we got together in our early twenties. I have to wonder how accurate that statement is. Remember being 23? Who doesn’t? We feel like “real” adults at the beginning of everything – we just know it’s inevitable that great things will come to us. I don’t remember analyzing things so much back then. Now, I can analyze myself into inaction, and that worries me. My kid’s going to ask me what’s for breakfast and, an hour later, we’ll still be discussing the benefits of oatmeal vs. a green smoothie. I’m exaggerating, of course, but it keeps bringing me back to a great refrain from a Bob Dylan song:

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

I imagine that the truth of that line will only increase as I get older.

46 days until baby.