I am a fruit person. My year can pretty much be defined by what fruits are in season (seasons which are noticeably shorter since moving away from Sunny San Diego to not-so-sunny 6 months out of the year Anchorage). I live for peaches, and am always a little heartbroken when their season seems too short. I subsist on berries, and then they too start to fade out. In fact, it seems like just as I am facing the sting of not being able to find any good berries, the big cardboard box of pomegranates appear, and all is set right in the world again. I love pomegranates. One of my favorite things about this time of year is being able to find this little bit of fresh yummy goodness at the store:
But, no one can deny what a pain in the ass, time-consuming, messy process it is to open up a pomegranate, separate out the heavenly seeds, and get to the point where you can actually enjoy the fruits of your labor (don’t you just love when a figure of speech can be used so literally!) I’ve known a lot of people who never get pomegranates because they don’t want to deal with the hassle/mess/cleanup for such a small amount of fruit (I have a co-worker who is always bugging me to bring him seeds, because he is far too lazy to take on the task himself!) I personally think those people are crazy. After all, nothing worth having comes easy, right?
So, it was as I was pain-stakingly tackling 3 (probably the last 3 I’ll be able to find this season) new pomegranates (it is so much easier to just take on a few at a time so I can enjoy them for multiple days!) that I realized that getting pregnant for me is going to be just like having a pomegranate! It starts out with this nice pretty picture in your head of how it’s supposed to be. Then, you open the damn thing up, and realize it’s going to be a mess:
(yes, I am fairly certain my insides are slightly more daunting than a quartered pomegranate, but you get the picture!) It is going to be a huge pain in the ass to get there (a pain in the ass that is undoubtedly going to be more trying and painful [emotionally/physically/financially] than I can even imagine before it starts) but once I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, I am going to be able to just sit back and enjoy all my hard work. OK, so maybe not, I have a feeling that babies (unlike pomegranates) continue to be hard work even after you think all the hard work is done, and if the mess created from baby making is even kind of comparable on a larger scale to the mess created by getting to those pomegranate seeds:
Well, yuck. But I’ve heard the whole labor part is kind of yuck anyway (the ex's description for the birth of his children was "smelly"... No joke! [and yes, I am so enamored and mystified by the process of childbearing that I pushed that poor man into sharing intimate details of the day his children came into this world, and the best he could come up with was "smelly"]), so I’m prepared! The point was though (and here’s the part where the metaphor becomes a lesson), that I realized that if I look at it as just putting in a bit of extra effort (and, in the case of a baby, a lot of extra money) to get a really big reward, I might just get through this!
And, that ends our lame metaphor of the day segment. Thank you for tuning in.
