Welcome to Rumblestrip Vermont. This show is called Big Job, an hour of stories and interviews about parenting.

You remember there was an old lady and she followed a fly in the animals. When I was pregnant for the first and only time I remember thinking that the birth of the baby would be some kind of grand finale.

I mean I had a crib ready and diapers and all of that but I didn't really think I'd have a baby

My powers of imagination did not extend that far and all, I didn't have any training.

But the baby was born, and I was in love and astonished,

and everything was different. And they let me take him home.

For the last nine years I've been learning how to be a mother.

This is an hour about parenting.

In this show you'll hear two stories and you'll hear

from two mothers at very different stages of motherhood. First a story.

Stay still. Don't move.

Don't go, I don't like that.

The other night my son Henry came home from a weekend with his father.

Henry is eight.

He told me they'd been hunting and they'd shot a bird.

This wasn't surprising, his father's taken him hunting before, but it was the first time Henry had been with him when he actually shot something.

He told me, matter-of-factly, in the car on the drive home, and we didn't talk much more about it. But that night I lay on his

bed with him for a few minutes in the dark and he said more. This is generally

when Henry will talk if he's going to talk. We'll lie on his bed looking up at those fake plastic sticky

stars on his ceiling and it's really quiet and sometimes he talks. And I think that here in the dark

in the night when he talks, it's not exactly like talking. There are none of the

visual cues or gestures or glances of daylight conversation that he finds so

...