Trying to be Cool

Pregnancy makes you tired. It makes you tired because you have to carry an extra couple of stone around your waist all day. It makes you tired because your body uses all its energy on baby-building and doesn't leave much over for you. It makes you tired because babies hog all the space in your middle and squish your lungs into a smaller space, leaving you out of breath all the time. It makes you tired when it gets you so ill you spend three months in a rocking chair and get really unfit and then can't get back in shape again because pregnancy makes all your body-bits vulnerable in a way which renders all but the lightest exercise inadvisable.

But despite all this, today I found myself in a playground with my son, at the top of a climbing frame and rather pleased with myself and my rediscovered monkeydom.

"You used to like being cool, didn't you?" says Felix.

"Why, am I not cool any more?" says me.

"No, you're too old!"

"Oh."

"Emma* used to like being cool, as well."

"Is she old too then?"

"Oh yes. Anyway she says she stopped trying to be cool cos every time she did, bad things happened to her."

Me: "Oh."

And then I fell off the climbing frame.



*Emma = a friend of ours, who I always think of as young, because she was only 18 when we met her. But that was 13 years ago.


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