A simile

...in which Edith features in the first half, which is the only plausible justification for including it on her blog.

When Tom and I went to the hospital for what we hoped would be Edith's birth, the wonderfully friendly nurse who checked me into the room where I would both stay and deliver (though not necessarily stand and deliver) explained to us that the nursing staff would not wheel the plastic bassinet for the baby into the room until the last few minutes before birth, because it took up so much space.

Seven hours later I was in the middle of what seemed to me like significant labor but what all the staff had until then told me was just the early stages. At the time they were sitting chatting with Tom and each other around the bed, while continuing to hold my hand and encourage me now and then. Then I saw someone wheel the bassinet into the room. I was surprised and thrilled, taking the arrival of the bassinet as official confirmation of my own secret hope that we were, in fact, much closer to the culmination than anyone had yet confirmed. As indeed proved to be the case.

***

Yesterday I met with my advisor to update him on my dissertation progress. I talked with him about my current chapter and about my plans for the last chapter, and how far I'd thought through all the pieces. Never one for false encouragement, my advisor listened, offered some thoughts on the material, then said that it was time to line up an outside reader for my dissertation defense.

For those unfamiliar with the process, the outside reader is a professor at an institution other than one's own, who reads the dissertation in its final incarnation as a check on the potential biases of one's own faculty toward their student, then pronounces yay or nay and offers comments at the final oral defense.

But if all that's rather dry, suffice it to say that when my advisor declared it time to find an outsider reader, I felt like someone had just wheeled a bassinet into our corner of the coffee shop.