Well, today was why. Here's how someone raised in America's Europe could fall in love with a lousy Rust Belt town:
Today, Sam & I took our buddy Jim to scope out an apartment for him to consider leasing. He found a place on the Southern outskirts of town, in a neighborhood overlooking both horse stables and old abandoned warehouses. The flatness was distinct to the two of us who hadn't grown up with it--and the neighborhood itself was the kind of community where people had cars & campers rusting in their yards, but well-trimmed trees and maintained lawns. It screamed Rust Belt real loud into your ear. It screamed Fucking Muncie.
The place itself ended up being well-maintained and Jim decided to look into it, but I couldn't get over how delightfully sad-novel the setting was. I said, "This is the kind of place where I'd climb onto the roof, get drunk, and write a bunch of sad Rust Belt novels," and then Sam made fun of me, and we went to my doctor's appointment for this week.
Siren and my snatch have been very business-as-usual. Apparently, when you're as far along as I am, you start losing fluid weight though your baby continues growing rapidly. Debbie the Nurse Practitioner put her fingers up my birth canal and thanked me for being an easy patient. People have conniptions about vaginal exams in the days leading up to them giving birth? She & I then discussed my options for anesthesia.
On my mother's side, there has only been one woman in my family who received any anesthetic--local, general, or otherwise--during childbirth: my niece weighed over eight-and-a-half pounds at birth and her mother required a c-section. Following that tradition, I've been practicing Bradley techniques at home and am thus far determined to do this Childbirth Thing medication-free. Debbie reminded me that, good health permitting (and likely), I'd be allowed to practice positioning & movement methods, use birthing tubs & showers, and eat light foods during labor. Moreover, being Baby Friendly, the hospital adheres to WHO standards to encourage breastfeeding, unlike so many other hospitals servicing low-income communities.
In Madison, this wouldn't be an uncommon childbirth--but, in Madison, the cost-of-living is twice what Muncie is. Women who've given birth in Indy & Louisville have told me their birth stories: systematic, clinical, and not without encouraged epidurals. For a woman living around the poverty line, intervention-free childbirth planning can be almost unheard of. In Muncie, it's welcomed by Ball Memorial with open arms.
I thanked Debbie and the nurses and the secretaries, and Sam & Jim for putting up with me. (You thank a lot of people when you're pregnant.) And the three of us headed to Pop's Junk N' Stuff, where crackheads can sell broken electronics for fifteen cents a chewed-through cord and Jim can buy a television for twenty-five bucks.
My question stands: where the hell else can a punk kid live that overlooks rust and warehouses and horses, buy a pawned-off crackhead television, and receive some of the highest-quality progressive prenatal care in the country? Where? What other community manages to not equate poverty with being impoverished?
No, I can't buy artisan bread at every stoplight--I can think of only one stoplight, and this might be the whitest sentence interruption ever--and I can't go to a punk show every other night of the week, but I can live simply with the love of my life and our daughter in a way that is both low-cost and low-stress. Someday, I might get real bored and want to leave. (I probably will get real bored and want to leave.) But will I resent Muncie for it? No, and I haven't been able to say that of any other place I've been.
I also learned a new parenting skill today.
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