Thinking more about effort and luck...

This thoughtful comment from the lovely & talented Lil Jimmi sparked off some additional ranting on the subject of luck and achievements:

It's true that luck plays a huge part in how all this having a baby stuff turns out, but when it comes to trying to have a "natural" birth in a US hospital it's also a lot of work.

You've get a big fight ahead of you if you want to have a low-intervention birth. Here in Philly there is just one center city hospital that does L&D because it is not profitable. They don't want you to take up a room laboring naturally. They want you in and out. You have to go in with a plan and a team to fight for you.

So yeah I feel like we were the luckiest dykes on the planet being able to get the birth experience we wanted in a hospital, but it wasn't just luck it was work too.

BF too...there's probably 10% of people who have a blissfully easy time BF, but for the other people who are lucky enough to pull it off it's a Hella lot of work.

(please note that below is inspired by but not addressed to Li'l Jimmi, who I absolutely do not believe should be slapped in any way, ever)

Excellent point! I'm in no way saying that it was easy for those who conceived without medical intervention/had their desired unmedicated birth/breast fed/etc. My darling wandered by and looked over my shoulder and, as she is wont to do, dropped a pearl of wisdom:

Lucky doesn't mean you get it for nothing. Lucky means it is within your power to get it.

See, for every person who had to work really really hard for their unmedicated birth etc, there's at least one other person who worked just as hard and still didn't get it. And there might be someone else who worked harder, and still didn't get it.

So should you be proud of your hard work? Yes, of course, just as people should be proud of their hard work no matter the outcome (although they rarely are, unless the outcome is the desired one). But the fact that the ultimate outcome went your way, well, there's a good whack of luck in there, and I think it behooves all of us who have been lucky to be grateful for our luck. My particular rant was about people who are smug about situations that required a large helping of luck, and then think that they got what they got because they're clever, never crediting their luck. En passant they often throw out a few judgey statements that make some less-lucky people feel shitty about their medical interventions/failure to breast feed/etc.

In a broader way, the physical "luck" involved in the reproductive arena is somewhat like the "luck" of social advantage and the whole myth of meritocracy. It's another arena in which people constantly attribute to virtue something that required a whack of luck.

Example: I have a couple of degrees. I had to work hard for them, yeah. But there are plenty of people out there who've worked just as hard and because they didn't have some of my luck, they don't have those degrees. Can I be proud of the work I put into my degrees? Sure! But should I be smug about them, and assert that anyone can have these degrees if they just work as hard as I did? Should I turn up my nose at the degree-less, and make remarks about how I'm just not sure it's right for all those people to be running around out there without degrees? I can, but I should be slapped. My achievements are a blend of my work and my luck, my effort + unearned advantages, and all I can do is acknowledge both sides of the equation, and be grateful for the part I got for free.

In other news, cannot stop thinking about the 15 embryos in a dish, a dozen blocks from where I am sitting right now.

Maybe the reason I'm so engaged with this topic right now is because I am willing to trade not being praised if I get pregnant for not being blamed if I don't.

Two weeks from now it'll be over, one way or another. Two weeks from now I will be very grateful or very cranky.

Holy crap.