February 25, 2009

I just got back from another FFW meeting. John still doesn't like them, I still see his point, I still attend from time to time. More and more often, if I am honest.
Today, we talked about babies.
It often, in fact it almost always, feels like we have been living in this brave new world forever and ever and ever, but in actuality it hasn't really been all that long. The first compromised person was diagnosed in June of 2005 (if you can call it that. I mean, that sounds so reasonable and clinical, and in reality, obviously, there was a long stretch of no doctor knowing what the hell was happening, and then an even longer stretch where every doctor in Bala Plata did elaborate dances around each other because no one wanted to be the first one to say what had become obvious but still seemed absurd, and then an even yet longer stretch where the doctors were tentatively offering their opinion that it seemed very much like --, and then a relatively short but extremely fraught stretch where we were all looking around for the Candid Camera because ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT?, which pretty much brings us to the present, but for the sake of brevity, let's say "diagnosed" and pretend like we're talking about something normal). Within a week, twelve cases had been reported, all of them within City limits, none of them bearing any direct relationship to any other. As far as we know, as far as we can tell, our Epidemic (I like to say 'epidemic'. I feel all living-in-an-action-movie when I say it) remains entirely local. No one has, as of yet, been able to figure out the exact means by which it spreads. The old get-bitten-and-then-whoops-you're-the-biter thing does not seem to be true, or not 100% true. Sometimes victims of bites become compromised, sometimes they simply die, sometimes they slap some Neosporin and a bandage on and a week later they're fine. Sometimes bodily fluids seem to be a factor, but most often not. There is no genetic or physical or lifestyle-related characteristic that seems to make one type of person more susceptible than another. This is why most of us have stayed. After long and elaborate City Council meetings and Church Rallies and Soul Searching, most of us agreed that to go elsewhere, when we have no idea how or why this is happening to us and therefore how or why we might avoid spreading it to wherever we might flee to, would be unconscionable. So we stay, and more and more, as the months flow into years, we become a highly tightly intensely isolated ecosystem. Our doctors, our lawyers and judges, our general contractors who build our customized basement dens, are increasingly specialized in injuries, in laws and regulations, in silver-based chain-mounts and reinforced garage doors. How can we possibly reach outside, even to the next city over, when they could not possibly help even if they could be made to believe?
What does all of this have to do with babies? There have been very few babies born who were conceived after the beginning of the Epidemic. (Action Movie! Ah, I am easily amused.) Our own youngest, Pearl, was conceived (as best as I can figure) shortly after the first diagnosed case, and born about six months after her father was compromised. (She was not, thank God, born on or near the full moon.) Of the babies (maybe two dozen?) born in the last year or two to compromised individuals, five have been compromised from birth. One died of unknown causes. The rest are, so far at least, fine.
It is generally agreed, and it was stressed again in much of today's FFW meeting, that curbing population growth is prudent at this time, in this place, for pretty much everyone, for pretty obvious reasons. John and I have never, since his first (and, in many ways, scariest) cycle, discussed birth control or additions to our family or anything reproductive at all, but we both know that we are both throwing every available contraceptive at our sex life any time there is any kind of sex life to throw things at. Because to do otherwise would be dangerously, irresponsibly stupid.
And yet.
I always imagined myself with three. When we got pregnant with Pearl, I never braced myself for her being my last baby, my last chance to ripen like a melon and feel in amazing wonder another person kick and turn and dance within me, my last time to touch the benign and everyday magic that babies are.
I want another one.
I am 31 years old, a long way from too old to have a baby, but old enough to hear the clock ticking. There is no way of knowing how long all of this will go on, how long it will take for us to figure out what is causing it, what might stop it, or whether it can be stopped at all. My chances to complete my family in the way that I always imagined it being completed are waning with every cycle. Do I really want to bring another helpless person into this, another person whose safety I will lie awake nights wondering if I am protecting enough, another person that I have to try to take with me on the elaborate tip-toe dance around each and every month in the life we now lead? Even setting aside the question of whether it is safe or fair to even try to create a life that might begin itself already contaminated? Of course not. No mother that loves her children, even the not-yet-conceived children that exist only in her imagination, no mother could willingly bring those children into this place under these circumstances. But that is my brain talking, ticking away with it's implacable logical lists of reasons not to, not to, not to. My body, however, my heart, has its own agenda, John is not the only one with a basic animal inside that howls at the moon, and there is an empty place in our house in our heart in our family that howls to create life because life is hope and if we can't hope if we can't create hope for ourselves then we aren't alive we aren't really in touch with life at all and survival without hope, without vitality, is nothing but ashes barely warm.
I want another baby. I want to be in a place where we could welcome another baby without dread. I am without the means to make anything different enough to make that happen. But I am not without hope. Life solves itself, and all prayers are answered. One way or another.