Roots?

I move.  That’s what I do: always have, always will.

Or will I?

In the back of my mind I always believed that I would eventually settle somewhere.  In the back of my mind I also realized that I never knew where that somewhere would be or when it would actually take place. So since it was in the back of mind, I never cared much about the outcome of that question. This, of course, was all before I was expecting a child.

Moving yourself is easy; but have you ever moved a pregnant woman?  I don’t mean picking her up off the couch (though that does tend to happen quite a bit more now).  I mean actually moving her, hundreds of miles away from everything and everyone she knows  to somewhere completely new.  The first move is usually pretty easy because the world can’t tell she’s pregnant. The second move however, when it looks like she’s smuggling a basketball under her shirt, is definitely an experience.  If you’ve ever been pregnant or been with a woman who’s pregnant then you know that everyone else in the world is an expert at pregnancy and you know absolutely nothing.  These ‘experts’ will provide their sage wisdom to you, wisdom that you mustn’t ignore – even if they themselves are still pregnant with their first child.

I’ve learned that in our modern society where so much of our daily interactions are based on instant gratification, others can’t fathom why anyone would not want to know the sex of their child.  “How will you decorate the nursery or have everything ready for the baby when it gets here?”, is a line that I’ve heard more than a few times.  While I appreciate the “concern” these people show, to me this merely translates to, “aren’t you worried that you won’t have enough stuff for your new baby so that it instantly realizes how much you love it because you spent so much money on that brand new, state of the art, French designed changing table?”  I have a colleague who spent the first few weeks of his life sleeping in a dresser drawer and he turned out alright, so I’m not too worried.

While telling others you don’t know the sex of your soon-to-be child is an experience unto itself, if you really want to blow their minds tell them that you don’t have a doctor or even know where the baby is going to be born even though the due date is weeks away. I’ve seen jaws hit the floor when I’ve told people that my wife is 9 months pregnant and,  no, we don’t know where the baby will be born because we don’t know where we’ll be living yet when the baby is born.

While I never expect others to embrace my nomadic lifestyle, I’ve always been able to find those who at least accepted it.  However, with my impending fatherhood the number of times I’ve been told, “you can’t keep moving once you have children” or “you’ll have to put roots down once your child is here” are too numerous to mention.  So now I have begun to more seriously contemplate this concept of “roots”.  What are they? What do they really mean? And most importantly, is the traditional definition of “roots” important in today’s society when so much of our connectedness is virtual and passive?

Photo by AnyaLogic via Flickr

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