Postmaturity

"Postmature" is what they call babies who stick around in the womb too long and are born past their due date. While it would seem good and healthy for a baby to stay in that kind of protected environment for as long as possible, it's actually not--babies who are postmature can have trouble breathing, hypoglycemia, lots of scalp hair, and something called "meconium staining" on the skin which means that the baby has pooped all over itself and the poop had nowhere to go. Babies that are postmature can also be too big to deliver vaginally.

I was born three weeks late. It was a relief to my parents that I was at least born two days before I would no longer qualify them for a tax write-off for 1968. Unlike, many postmature babies, I was a normal weight (6 lbs) but I had a ton of hair. My father's first remarks upon seeing me were than I resembled Phyllis Diller, and if you ever saw her, you would know that it's not exactly a compliment. And once I arrived, I wondered if my parents wished I'd stayed in there a bit longer: I was a colicky, constantly screaming, and overall unpleasant baby, at least in the first year.

They rarely let babies reach postmaturity now before a planned C-section is done. For that reason, babies are much more likely to be premature than postmature.

I have read a lot of student writing recently about the idea of maturity (growing up too fast, over-scheduled children, suggestive clothing for young girls) and often hear 22-year-olds referring to themselves as "kids" and people over 30 as "grown ups," although many are paying on their own for college and are much more independent than I was at that age. I have been thinking a lot of how we define adulthood, especially since I just read a study that said that most people over 60 see themselves as much younger than they are (and feel much younger, genuinely, which is pretty good news, right?).

It really struck me,though, when I read a nonfiction piece aloud to my class about a babysitting experience I had when I was 13. I wrote of riding bikes on the weekends with neighborhood kids, and my students thought I should take that part out: "It makes you sound like you were much younger than 13." But I did ride bikes then! They know enough about nonfiction writing to have a ready answer to my protest, though.

All of this made me think of things my mother never would have done at 40--things I regularly engage in that she would never have dreamed of doing:

1. Playing a Nancy Drew video game for three hours straight. Also, owning all of the Nancy Drew games.

2. Blogging and Facebooking--yes, they didn't exist then. But even so.

3. Wearing my hair long (her rule: over 30, cut your hair short)

4. Eating freezy pops. Also, calling them freezy pops.

5. Spending a whole day off reading and catching up on movies and my soap opera (to be fair, she had two kids and was busy all the time...)