The Meh List

The Meh List

The Sunday NY times is an occasional luxury even if I don't get to it until a couple of weeks later. I save the magazine section insert and cram it in my pack when I travel. Concentrated, quality writing in a thin package. I leave a trail in airports that are snatched up by the next person taking my seat. 

Reading glasses on for the small print, I make my little noises of approval, acknowledging tidbits of interest, and snorts of disgust at something I disagree with. I was on the plane from Charlotte to Indianapolis when I spluttered out a new one and almost whacked my neighbor's arm to exclaim, "Can you believe this?!" 

On the top of the The One Page Magazine page is a tiny box titled The Meh List. Not Hot, Not Not, Just Meh. This one was submitted by a Susan Good to Samantha Henig. She listed Zumba, Simple Syrup, 10 percent discounts, Sidewalk seating…..so okay. These are thing she just ain't that impressed with. They aren’t hot, they aren't not hot, just Meh. 

It was #6 that blew me away. "Mom and Baby are doing great." 

Holy Cow. "Mom and baby are doing great" are some of the sweetest words in the entire universe. I can only imagine that the writer has never carried a precious child or fallen in love with a baby before it was born. She has never got teary watching the miracle of a heart beat on an ultrasound. She's never longed for a child and been heartbroken by a miscarriage. She's never felt an umbilical cord slide in front of a baby's head during childbirth, or pumped oxygen into a wee one's lungs. She has surely never reached down to welcome a slippery infant to her breast. I guarantee she has never been the resident crying in the delivery room while a beautiful young woman died or the nurse wrapping a stillborn baby in a hand knit blanket to carry it down the hall to the family. I can't imagine that she has even been an anxious family member or friend spending endless hours in a waiting room when doors burst open to a flushed and beaming new father announcing that "Mom and baby are doing great."

Who is this writer who can shrug off mothers and babies doing great? Get thee to a birth. Find some way to get invited to a real MEH - a Miraculously Extraordinary Happening.

Seriously. You don't know what you are Mehsing. Disclosure: I have two kids. I am an old labor and delivery nurse. I didn't have many meh moments in the years I spent helping mothers and babies and that is a lovely thing.