Here’s a fascinating story from Orange County, California – illustrating yet another way that babies can come as a total surprise.

In early March, a 39 year old woman named April Branum learned she was having a baby less than two days before his birth. Her obesity and various other factors had coincided to keep her unaware of her pregnancy until a visit to the emergency room necessitated an X-ray for stomach pain.

Of particular interest to me were the reader comments in reaction to this news item. As is par for the course when talking about other people’s pregnancies, some people were supportive and encouraging, while others were vicious in their condemnation of what kind of parents the Branums will be. (People really pull out all the stops when commenting on others’ fitness to parent; this seems to be one area where most of us feel completely free to be more than a little judgmental. Here, the nastiness centered around Branum's obesity.)

That’s why I was encouraged to see that some readers took a softer view:

“Life throws us curves sometimes and we just have to go with the flow.”

“I think not having the nine months to prepare is somewhat of a blessing in disguise because you never had the time to worry about how the baby would be and ‘can we afford this’ and ‘are we ready for this,’ etc.”

Before I surrendered, I was in the camp of people who believed that no one should be happy about a pregnancy unless all the stars were properly aligned and all parties were 100% prepared. But now I count myself with the gentler folk who accept that parents have been delivering children into less-than-ideal lives since the beginning of time, and a little bit of uncertainty or surprise doesn’t equal unfitness to parent. These days, I feel amazed that we think we can have so much control over life, which doesn’t always provide the perfect circumstances for anything, including bringing a baby into the world.