Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Pipelined motherhood

Not long ago a friend, referring to my second child (who just turned 1), asked me how my second round of motherhood was treating me. He tried to use a computer metaphor for it, so he put it as "how is serial motherhood going?" Then he immediately admitted that this metaphor was inaccurate. It's not really serial, because I'm raising two children, not one at a time. You could say it's parallel, but that doesn't convey the idea of going from one child to two. So, pausing for a bit, he decided it could be called pipelined motherhood. Since I haven't heard about pipelined architecture, which (as a very oversimplified explanation) lets computers run tasks in parallel by starting them at different times, I thought about it in UNIX pipe terms. So I asked: "Do you think I feed one child the output of the other?"