Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Feb. 21, 2011
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The devil's in the details Men and women think differently. Scientists tell us that this is due to estrogen which backs up in women's bodies and makes them illogical. Every once in a while some little incident occurs which brings the sheer magnitude of the difference into its proper perspective. Not long ago my wife was preparing some steak, and asked me to put three potatoes into three plastic bags, poke some holes in the bags, and put all three in the microwave. “For how long?” I asked, knowing she’d done this hundreds of times before, and foolishly assuming that by now she’d know just exactly how long it took to microwave three potatoes in three plastic bags. “Oh, set it for six minutes, but recheck them occasionally.” “So it usually takes six minutes?” I asked, not particularly wanting to run back and forth to the microwave every thirty seconds. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just keep checking them until they’re done.” If you are a woman, that will probably make perfectly good sense to you. But if you’re a man, directions like that will make you just a little crazy. Here’s another example: Just the other day my wife and I were discussing pregnancy. Actually she’d started the discussion by telling me that a very close and very pregnant relative whose name I will not mention out of fear of retribution, had gone to the doctor and been told she was already dilated to three centimeters. Marilyn told me this with a knowing smile, as though I would immediately see the significance of it and have some definite idea about the progress of the pregnancy in question. I didn’t. “Just how dilated would that be in inches?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. “And it’s not important anyway.” “So why, since we live in the good old US of A, can’t doctors get out their tape measures and give us the results in inches so we know exactly what they’re talking about?” “You are an idiot!” she replied, ignoring my question. “Everybody knows that three centimeters means she doesn’t have to wait very long before the baby is born. We’ve had two children, after all. You act like you don’t remember anything about it.” “That was a very difficult time for me. I had way too much to worry about to be thinking about silly things like centimeters, what with driving you to the hospital and encouraging you not to screech so loudly in the lobby. All I want to know is, if centimeters are all that important, just how long does she have, centimeter-wise?” It was another very logical question which she chose to evade. “That all depends. It could mean a day, or a week, but probably no more than two weeks.” Then she wandered off into a very non-specific description of how at some point the baby had dropped, and no, not all the way, but only into position for something called “effacement.” I thought effacement meant humility, but actually it is a medical term which indicates that childbirth is just around the corner, much like the three centimeter dilation thing, except that something or other flattens out. I decided to attack the problem from another direction. “Okay then, just how many centimeters will she have to dilate in order to have the baby?” When she answered that, then all I’d have to do to figure out when the baby would be born was to compute the dilation rate and count ahead from the three-centimeter date and then, when I got to 15 or 20 centimeters or whatever the required number was, that would be the date. Seemed simple enough to me. “Oh, about ten centimeters,” she said. “And NO, I can’t convert that to inches for you!” “You don’t have to. Just tell me what the rate of cervix dilation in centimeters per hour would be.” When she finished laughing, she said that perhaps I should go check my blood sugar, which might be getting a bit low. She always says that when I’m about to make an important point. I could go on, but I think you get my drift. While she knew all about the three-centimeter rule and droppage and effacement, she was short on specifics. What three centimeters meant was obvious to a woman, but meaningless to a man who had no basis for comparison, and not a single clue as to how long this dilation process was supposed to take. A woman knows things by intuition, and a guy only knows facts. If somebody could give us guys the late stages of pregnancy in the form of an algebra problem, we could do some calculating and come up with a viable prediction: “Unborn Baby X in Toledo, who weighs 8 pounds, and Unborn Baby Y in Cleveland, who also weighs 8 pounds, both enter their respective birth canals at exactly 9:15 A.M. EST, headed south at 15 mph. Both baby’s heads are the regulation 10 centimeters in diameter. Or circumference. Whichever it is, they have heads that match, size wise. Assuming that neither cervix has a toll booth, and taking into account that Cervix X is dilated to 5.2 centimeters, and that Cervix Y is dilated to 6.5 centimeters, how much longer will it take Baby X to see the light at the end of the tunnel than Baby Y? (You may use the International Dilation Rate, IDR, provided in problem 2.)” Even if we didn’t get it right, we’d be close. That is because we’d have some actual numbers to work with. But of course women won’t give us the kinds of details we need to solve either the baffling microwaved potato or the mysteriously dilated cervix problem. They claim those things are unknowable. It never ceases to amaze me that the same woman who can remember exactly what I accidentally said but actually did not mean three months ago in an argument and can describe each and every one of the more than two dozen pairs of shoes in her closet, knows so little about microwaving potatoes or having babies. I won’t even mention balancing checkbooks. |