(no subject)
The drive to reproduce is not in me that I can tell, but maybe there is a thing akin to it, bent but hopeful. Maybe at 34 I am overripe with it, my hormonal manifest destiny. It's been intensifying lately. I've been personifying inanimate objects like a child. I carry bugs outside now, I don't kill. Or I name them and attempt cohabitation.
I wonder what I might mother. I used to always daydream about building a safe house, my own Island of Misfit Toys, for all the people I’ve cared for who due to some grave dispositional error have landed irrefutably in an inconsolable space, or who aren't exactly well-armed for their particular world. Folks with whom I found some undeniable commonality, who through some chemical or circumstantial fluke or whatever might find a curative property in my attention, in any attention. Of course it’s foolish, it's fantasy. To pull someone out of time and offer them all your consolation. And it takes hard labor, or some miracle of mutual recognition, rare enough in itself, and seldom fed.
I’m no fool. I am a Reenactor, like most of us, just more baldly obvious. It’s an impulse I approve of, even with its futility and its hint of codependency. The pressure’s just too great, though, being someone’s only solace, and it cures nothing; I have tried it already, and failed. Hence we have professionals, I suppose.
If I simply must nurture something, I could always attempt the commonplace, a far more radical act in some ways, and willfully get knocked up. A pregnancy scare last May could have left me with a 7-week old baby now. I remember being stunned at how easily I would have welcomed it. The eerie confusion of watching one of your possible lives suddenly making a beeline for you. How to tell the helpless fellow who might have just fertilized you that your heart rate might be better explained by excitement than by fear.
But what I really really want: some curiously cobbled together surrogate family, my very own Idiots, culled from all the beautiful odd birds I know. A whole riotous flock of them, I would love it so.
I wonder what I might mother. I used to always daydream about building a safe house, my own Island of Misfit Toys, for all the people I’ve cared for who due to some grave dispositional error have landed irrefutably in an inconsolable space, or who aren't exactly well-armed for their particular world. Folks with whom I found some undeniable commonality, who through some chemical or circumstantial fluke or whatever might find a curative property in my attention, in any attention. Of course it’s foolish, it's fantasy. To pull someone out of time and offer them all your consolation. And it takes hard labor, or some miracle of mutual recognition, rare enough in itself, and seldom fed.
I’m no fool. I am a Reenactor, like most of us, just more baldly obvious. It’s an impulse I approve of, even with its futility and its hint of codependency. The pressure’s just too great, though, being someone’s only solace, and it cures nothing; I have tried it already, and failed. Hence we have professionals, I suppose.
If I simply must nurture something, I could always attempt the commonplace, a far more radical act in some ways, and willfully get knocked up. A pregnancy scare last May could have left me with a 7-week old baby now. I remember being stunned at how easily I would have welcomed it. The eerie confusion of watching one of your possible lives suddenly making a beeline for you. How to tell the helpless fellow who might have just fertilized you that your heart rate might be better explained by excitement than by fear.
But what I really really want: some curiously cobbled together surrogate family, my very own Idiots, culled from all the beautiful odd birds I know. A whole riotous flock of them, I would love it so.