Thursday, January 24, 2013

Overthinking Accomplishment

I don't know if it's a result of my being a writer, or being overly introspective (INFJ remember?), but I have a tendency to way overthink the meaning of the words I use, and the words others use to describe life experiences. For example, I always roll my eyes at people who say,"My greatest accomplishment was having my child" if they don't have a specific reason to make that claim.

The biological reality of growing a child and giving birth to it does not indicate an accomplishment. An accomplishment is something you have worked at over time, like successfully raising that child to adulthood. Carrying and giving birth to a child is not the same as graduating from college, writing and publishing a book, raising that child. I find it weird when people refer to pregnancy and childbirth as an accomplishment.

I don't consider my 41 weeks of pregnancy and 14 hours of labor an accomplishment, just my body successfully doing something it is biologically designed to do. I didn't accomplish more through childbirth than someone who had to have a c-section for whatever reason simply because my body was able to push out my son, any more than I consider someone who gave birth without an epidural to have accomplished more than me because I demanded drugs at 4cm.

Accomplishment implies that I did something better than someone else. If degrees of success exist in childbirth, which I don't believe they do, my successful pregnancy, labor, and delivery had almost zero to do with my own efforts and everything to do with dumb luck. I say "almost zero" because I suppose I could have done crack every day that I was pregnant, and not having done so makes me more successful at pregnancy than a drug addict. But was that an accomplishment of which I am proud? No,  because it didn't require any effort on my part to refrain from crack use.

I will admit that my situation is far different than others might have had simply because my pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding experiences have been remarkably easy and free of complications. If someone went into pre-term labor at 22 weeks and managed to carry the child to 35 weeks by staying on strict bedrest -- that is an accomplishment. A friend who spent months struggling to exclusively breastfeed her child and succeeding after much effort -- that is an accomplishment. Simply having things happen to you is not an accomplishment.

I will gladly say that meeting my son was one of the greatest moments of my life, but I would never say that giving birth to Lucas was an accomplishment. Giving birth is not an accomplishment in my book, though I will qualify that statement with a "usually" because I acknowledge that this is not true for everyone. I can't really say what qualifies me to judge what others claim as accomplishments, other than the fact that this is my blog and assholes can say whatever they want on the internet.

If you disagree with me, and it is likely that some of you do, what is your definition of accomplishment? Why do you feel that having a child or [fill-in-the-blank, childless readers] was your greatest accomplishment?

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