All the Horrible Girliness

Last night, I told Mister Aran that I didn't think I loved the baby yet, that mostly I was scared of him.

I was hoping he'd argue, tell me I was in love with the baby, or maybe that when I had the baby, then all the emotion would come crashing in and I'd get it. I've been told this, by women.

Mister Aran didn't say anything.

***

Nothing pisses me off more than a single, working woman in her forties going through thousands of dollars worth of fertility treatments and donor sperm so she can experience childbirth. I say childbirth, not motherhood, because putting a newborn in day care when you don't have to is not motherhood.

Maybe it pisses me off worse, to know there are women who leave their small children behind so they can go live in other states with their internet boyfriends. You'll never convince them that they aren't heroes. That they haven't been victimized at every turn.

***

Nothing confuses me more than a nurse working in an infant's intensive care ward who injects the babies with heparin, so that they'll have baby-sized heart attacks and cardiac arrests.

So everyone can come watch her save them.

Every once in awhile, of course, she wouldn't be able to save them. Blood would come out of every little needle prick that had been made in the baby's skin, and he'd die. It sounds like a horror story, to me, but it happened. If the woman had been just an inch smarter, she'd be working today. But it must get addictive. After she injected the first baby, maybe there was a rush from all the doctors and nurses telling her what a hero she was for saving him. If she'd been able to do it only every once in awhile, maybe she would never have gotten caught.

In her next job, working with a pediatrician, she switched to an injected muscle relaxant that made all the muscles go instantly soft. The babies would go limp in her arms.

When the muscle relaxant started to wear off, the muscles would twitch involuntarily. She called these seizures. She saved them from these, too.

In such a small town, people must want to trust others. They must want it bad. After half a dozen babies went limp while alone with this nurse, then suffered seizures, shouldn't people have questioned it? Instead, she became a local hero.

Until a baby girl died.

***

It occurred to me two nights ago that my baby boy might look like me. I realize I'm doing this all backward. Most people have babies because they want someone around who looks like them. I've daydreamed about a boy who looks like Mister Aran - the thought of it breaks my heart - but I never considered that the kid might resemble me.

I think of myself now as his mother. I belong to him, now. I've been ready to kill or die for him since I first imagined I might be pregnant.

I am only today thinking of him as my baby. My son.

***

He moves around pretty fiercely these days. Big, strong movements, annoyed kinds of movements. Like beating your fists into hard pillows; like thrashing around in bed on a hot night. Like banging on a door.

***

The first time I got pregnant, it didn't work. There's a scientific explanation for it, but I think I wasn't ready. The world wasn't ready. Things needed to happen. Maybe fate isn't all that secure and reliable. Maybe it tries things out and then fails.

Back then, the night before the surgery that would end it for good, I held my hand over the lowest part of my belly, where nothing was living, and whispered, "Come back again. I'll be ready next time."

At six weeks this time, when I went to the hospital to get my first ultrasound, I was ready. I'd been there before, in that same ultrasound room, so I didn't know things worked out okay in that room sometimes. I laid there, not even worried, not even tense, just ready for the technician to call in the radiologist to tell me that it wasn't going to work out, again.

Instead, there was the boy. My son. Looking like a tiny bean, or shrimp, with his heart going wild. You see that for the first time, it just looks hard. It looks like more work than you'd be willing to put in. You've never seen something more determined than a microscopic shrimp with a bang bang heartbeat who is damn ready to become a human being.

***

When I was a kid, I went to a church where the adults were sometimes known to have sex with the kids. None of the adults in my family did this, but some of them had suffered at the other end of it when they were kids, themselves. My mother was one of them.

Why we still went there, that's a story for another time.

But my mother, she was afraid this would happen to her kids. So she taught us something I can't shake now, in my own adulthood: respect is earned.

That meant, if an adult wanted you to get naked for them, or wanted you to do something that made you feel uncomfortable, you didn't have to do it just because you respect your elders.

Now, I don't respect anyone right off the bat. And since, for my personality type, respect and love are so close, I don't just love at first sight either. There has to be evidence; people have to prove themselves. It's a way of thinking that has saved me from a lot of evil.

***

When people talk about having a psychic connection to someone else, part of me wants to roll my eyes. I used to get this talk from a fruity, patchouli-stink hippie girl in college. Pretty much everything she said back then makes me roll my eyes now.

***

The babies come out still attached to you, and not breathing. Until then, they've been a fish. Then they suffocate until they decide to breathe, then someone gets in there with the scissors and cuts you two apart for the first time.

It's too tough to think about, so I'm going to stop.

posted by Samus @ 3:22 PM