Ann and I just got back from our final installment of the condensed Childbirth Education series at Holy Cross Hospital where our babies (Collin Francis and Lilah Paige, FYI) will be delivered.

We learned things like (Dave, skip ahead):
-->How to breathe in ways that make you hyperventilate unless you're actually giving birth.
-->What an amniohook really looks like (not as scary as it sounds, but still scary!).
-->The three E's: epidurals, episiotomies and effacement.
-->How little feminism has actually accomplished in changing mass attitudes about gender roles in new-family training.
-->How much better C-sections are than they used to be.
-->the truly huge variety of pillow-and-blanket styles in the DC metro area.
and
-->BURPP: Breathing, Urination, Relaxation, Praise and Positioning (I am not making this up).

But even though we really did pick up a lot of useful information, it only drove home how very little control either of us will have over not only the way our children will enter the world (although the soundtrack will probably sound something like heh-heh-heh-hooooo) but ultimately how little control we really do have over their ultimate well-being.

Surely this is part of the discourse of expectant parenthood in this country, but there are a million ways your child might die that you may or may not be able to do anything about. And 99% of those impinging baby-killers are only held at bay by the instincts and natural mechanisms that our little creatues already have. Half of the remaining percentage is handled by medical science (one hopes) and it will be up to Ann and I to try to ward off the remaining half-percent of potential infanticides.

And we will run ourselves ragged to do so. Happily, of course.

It is easy, certainly to be flippant about things like Lamaze classes, and it is equally simple to be helpless, weepy, sentimental, or saccharine about two babies coming.

What is harder (for me at least) is to look at the thing head on, and try to be honest about it all. It's excruciating, both for what it might mean about me and because of social pressure, to be really honest about attitudes about becoming a parent. It's hard for me to look at statistics that say that married couples without children generally rate themselves as happier than those with children, It's hard to kiss goodbye a lot of elegant dinners, weekends in central Virginia tasting wine, saturdays sleeping 'til noon and a paycheck-to-paycheck atittude about money.

But those luxuries are going away, just as inexorably as those two little heartbeats get stronger, just as inevitably as those four lungs will strengthen and inflate in a matter of weeks, just as certainly as Ann's body prepares to bear them into the world.

The Lamaze folks work very hard to make childbirth into a mystical experience, what with the new-age relaxation music at the end of every session. And for good reason: human life may be the last sacred thing. But can we be realists about the sacred? Is it even all that desireable?