Special: Technically Sterile

The first doctor appointment after I turned eighteen, my doctor spent the time I was paying her for to carefully and painstakingly inform me that if I am pregnant before my diabetes is perfect, and I give birth to a baby, not only is it likely that that baby will have diabetes, but that it will be threatening to both of our lives.

In short, she told me it was a person risk for me to ever bare children.

Of course, I managed to repress that--until we watched a video today on Communism, specifically the power of Mao and the Great Leap that ended in famine. You know what was in the video? Tiny children. Women smiling at their babies and holding the hand of the innocent chinese young. The hope for China.

In America, babies are a staple product. They produce them for the fun and pleasure and expectation of it. To reproduce is like a social more here, and I can't do it.

I started crying in that video. There were opera singers dedicating ballads to the Greatness of Mao, who swam across the Xiangxe river, one of the four dragon-rivers of China, and I cried; because that will never be me. That will never be my baby without severe threat to me in my body, and even if I live, I'll be spooning the poison of a diabetic life into a tiny, helpless body. I picture me recovering from a long birth and holding a lifeless, small body... breathless.... dead.

Picture my tears, clear, running over the body that never felt sun... never tasted food.... never heard my voice, my lullabies to them... never met their Father--can picture Finley, originally tall and strong, happy and fearless, to weeping.... his face contorted in an anguish from the shame I've brought him....

My children. My children.

I have never appreciated the honor, that honor God gives us; that I may bring life into the world. I have always wanted a son, a daughter.... always wanted to sit through the crying, share my stories, share the world. Always wanted to continue Finley's line... and I remembered today I can't, remembered today that there's one more thing in which I am a fuck up. I picture my mother and Grandmother laughing at me, the silly girl who can't make children--no such warning was given to Taylor--and my heart... hurts.

To keep my nerves, I started to hum a disney song. The people in the back row mocked me. After that, we read articles and answered questions, people laughing all the while, pushing one another, pretending to care about wireless internet.

No one notices me, crying silently, trying not to cause trouble.

Something the world will never know:

My children.