Wannabe

On my 30th birthday I decided that it was time to become more that what I was. Maybe I should first explain who I am (or who I was on my birthday). First, I am a woman who loves being a woman. I am a wife and a mother. I try to be an honest a good person. I enjoy reading more than the average person and I love action movies with lots of violence. I am pro-choice, pro-family and anti-death penalty. I whole-heartedly support gay marriage and believe that you don't have to be straight to be a good parent. I am a breastfeeding advocate who believes that all babies have the right to be breastfed. I am a domestic goddess. I enjoy most domestic activities (I hate cleaning), including but not limited to: cooking, baking, sewing, needlepoint, quilting, knitting, mothering. I love my dog even though she keeps wandering off. And I am a wannabe. So, on my 3oth birthday, I decided to take on 2 big wannabe's on my long list of dreams: I wannabe a writer, and I wannabe a runner.

Writing makes sense for me. Ever since I could read, I have had a voracious appetite for books. In high school I worked in the public library and would normally take home 3 books a week. I earned a Bachelor's degree in Spanish which is a lot of literature work. Writing is just a natural extension and starting to write has been, for the most part, painless. Because of my domestic duties/acts of love (ie mothering my girls), I knew that I would not have the time/energy to devote to writing Great Literature, and I wasn't exactly sure that I wanted to do that anyway. I mean, my favorite writers, while amazing storytellers and talented word weavers, are not known for writing Great Literature. I enjoy the story more than anything, and I appreciate any writer who can draw me in to that story be it Stephen King, Agatha Christie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And I don't want to just do what I call mastubatory writing (writing for my own enjoyment), I want to publish. With that in mind, I decided to target my writing towards a very specific market -- romance. And not just any kind of romance, but steamy, spicy, smutty romance. What I didn't expect was to actually love writing it. Writing romance fiction is fun, it's entertaining. It allows you to use all those little fantasies bouncing around in your head. I never really got into reading romance fiction, I stuck to Dean Koontz, Stephen King and anything else that crossed my path, except romance. So I'm surprised to find that, for now at least, I am a romance writer and loving it!

Running, on the other hand, probably makes a little less sense. For one, I am about 55 lbs overweight and I have enormous breasts that make most physical activities a bit uncomfortable. I have been unable to find a sport's bra in my size (they don't exist). I'm not sure what kind of exercise would make the most sense for me. Most physical trainers would be against such a fatty running, it puts too much strain on your bones, ligaments etc, but nothing else seems to do it. I have also been pleasantly surprised with running. I love it. It's a special time I have for myself when I'm concentrating on making me a better person. I feel strong and healthy when I run. I have been using the training schedule in the Runner's World Women's Guide to Running (or whatever it's called) and it's going pretty well. I can easily run 30 min and and have worked my way up to a 1hr long run. I don't actually get that far, only about 7k in an hour, but it's definitely a start.

I wannabe more than what I am right now. This is my year of becoming.

It's funny that with all the crap that's going on in my life, the one thing that keeps popping into my head, the one thing that's really bothering me, is that I never wrote my 3rd baby's birth story. I mean, she's 8 months old today and it's only bothering me now. I was over on cbirth at yahoogroups reading all the birth stories and I really wanted to share! This one was most likely my last birth and it was my 2nd unassisted birth. Birthing in an of itself is a powerful force of nature. When a woman is allowed to birth how she sees fit, it is awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, birth has been co-opted by the medical profession and is often seen/managed as a disease that needs to be constantly monitored and "cured" via medically managed birth. So many women I know are either pregnant or have recently had a baby. All of them in a hospital and a good chunk of them via cesarean. It makes me so sad that these women could not experience the beauty of birth. And then I just get pissed because it seems like most women don't give a shit about birthing, they don't have any confidence in their bodies or in the natural birth forces. They hand over their bodies, their autonomy to strangers who, at best, corrupt the birthing process, making a natural birth more difficult, and, at worst, confuse and belittle them, using their power by violently ripping babies from holes cut in their mother's wombs. I know, in some cases a c-section is the safest way for a baby to get out, but c-section rates in the US, the last time I checked, were over than 25%. In Japan, they're closer to 7%. Why such a big difference? It seems that Japanese respect the birth process a bit more than Americans do. Anyway, I can't think of a more perfect way for a woman to birth and for a baby to enter this world than in the privacy of the home, between the couple that created the life and the family that supports them. I have not found the need (and I am speaking from my own personal experience) for an outsider to be a part of my births. I only need my husband there to catch the baby, and having my older girls present at my youngest's birth just they way it was. Birth is a natural, normal, every day, cosmic, magical, miraculous happening that needs to be treated with respect. Woman and families who choose to birth outside the box are not braver or crazier that those that choose a medical/medicated birth. They just have a better understanding about what birth is and what it should be.