Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Schrodinger's Baby

Total steps yesterday:  14,044
Exercise for today:  three mile run

I should never write blog posts until after I exercise for the day, since the little mind adventures my brain takes during workouts lately are totally hilarious.  And every once in a while they're profound.

As any physicist / viewer of Big Bang Theory knows, Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment related to tortuously putting a cat in a box with some poison.  Or maybe you poison it and then put it in a box?  From what I've gathered, the actual theory is much more complicated, but the dumbed down version is that, until you open the box, you don't know if the cat is dead or alive.  And because you don't know, as long as the box is closed the cat can be considered both dead AND alive.  Because science.  Or something.

Classic: Didn't Even Know What Schrodinger's Cat Was! 

Anyway.  On my run today, I was thinking about  how next week we will hopefully find out if Lil W is Lil Boy W or Lil Girl W.  I'm starting to get really excited about that, but as I ran along this afternoon, I also felt sad.  Right now I feel like there are kind of two Lil Ws existing at the same time, one male and one female, and when I think of the future I can imagine both of them.  George Orwell would call this "doublethink".  Sort of.  Apparently this blog post is going to contain vaguely incorrect explanations of both science AND literature.
The point is, I got unnecessarily sad thinking  about how one of my Lil Ws is going to cease to exist after next Friday.  Which is silly, because obviously there is already only one baby and they are the only baby who does exist, so my imagination-baby isn't an actual thing that can be missed.  It's all just in my head and I have no control over it.

Which was, I think, the first moment of pregnancy when I realized how little control I will have over this person who I'm making.  Right now Lil W is all mine.  Well, s/he is 4/7 mine, and 2/7 James', and 1/7 our friends' and families'.  But from the moment of birth, Lil W belongs only to himself or herself.  Oh, sure, I'll still be responsible for feeding and caring for him/her, but s/he will be the one who lets me know when something is needed.

Right now I can imagine Lil W as anything - boy or girl, writer or physicist, angel or hellion, dog lover or cat lover.  It feels like I have control over the mental image, but in reality I have zero.  There is my image of Lil W, which will forever stay in a little box, neither alive nor dead, and then there's the reality of the small child currently inside me.  It is both humbling and awe-inspiring to realize how little control I will have over this life that I'm bringing in to the world.

And those thoughts, dear reader, got me through the last mile of my run today.  Thanks, Schrodinger!  Now go rescue that poor cat.

No comments:

Post a Comment