So I spent the morning at the clinic with The Girl and then we cheerfully walked home together in the cold rain, her new diagnosis a small dark cloud over us.
It turns out that she’s asthmatic. We suspected as much, but now it’s been verified and they’re trying to figure out what sort of medications her fragile 48 pound self can handle. It’s not very bad news but it’s not very good news, either. It reminds me again how precarious parenting is, this lesson that we learn over and over again, how this huge love is bourn by these tiny mortal people when they should be made out of something guaranteed and death-proof.
Sometimes, in that middle-of-the-night-and-sleepless kind of way, I imagine what my life would have been like if I had never had children. Would I be happier without this terrifying burden of love for them? I read a letter in Chatelaine magainze – I think the November issue – by a woman who had delayed child-bearing to travel around the world for decades, apparently, and then given up on fertility treatments. She was glad, she wrote, that she had travelled and would never have given up that experience just for a child. I sat there blinking in disbelief that this was her cheerful conclusion and not "I wasted my freaking LIFE wandering around the world like some shiftless hippy and now I’ve been deprived of having a baby in my arms because of it." Which I guess firmly settles where I am on the whole "Happier without kids?" question that occurs to me occasionally – yes, travel is all well and nice, but I would, if given the choice, pick a walk home in the cold rain with my pale laughing child any day over standing on some sandy beach in the South Pacific without her.
Grey clouds call for blue cheese, I think, and so tonight I’m going to make potato-leek soup with blue cheese (if it’s any good, I’ll post the recipe tomorrow) and homemade bread and toast myself with a glass of white wine for another long day over again and hopefully for clear skies tomorrow.