I’ve got this rental car counter SMILE routine. I can’t always muster it and it doesn’t always work, but if it catches then I get a free upgrade about half the time. I like to travel and I’m usually in a good mood doing it, at least going. So I’m not in a hurry. Everybody else is grumpy, or in family-travel mode (Junior mooning baby sis and picking his nose while dad stands nearby like a tombstone with a wallet and mom in her good ‘slacks’ tells the rental agent where they’re going like he gives a shit). I go Chinese: SMILE, but leisurely. Last time I got a SUV escapadey thing (I’m always booked for the Rental Flea, of course.) This time I got a Ford Mustang Turbo Coupe in Red (sweeeet). I wouldn’t want it every day, god no, but I definitely have a muscle car for a weekend doing 140 kph with Pearl Jam then Cake then Lenny on WXRT blowing my head off mood. It’s the perfect warm up for the mood named “Welcome to the World Baby Girl”:
Violet (Letty) Annabelle
When we were little, my sister’s nickname was Henny Penny. Making me Chicken Little. My parents had zero parenting skills, and never got any, but they did have love (of a sort) and the one most important thing long haul: a sense of apt dark humor, i.e. wit.
So says Chicken Little, “Um the sky just fell on my sister.”
Here is the context: In the U.S. you have a legal right to 12 weeks off without losing your job, but not with pay. If you have health insurance, which you probably don’t, it will usually cover 80% of medical charges minus anything “optional” like pain medication, bringing the total of something like an emergency C-Section to a good 10k out of pocket. Health care is excellent, but spotty and brutal (for instance the surgeon comes in and says as an aside “ . . . you didn’t need the hysterectomy so that’s good”). Fewer and fewer women in an upper education and income bracket choose to have children at all (fine) and/but if they do, they will be overwhelmed themselves and be no help, might be riddled with snippy competitiveness (make that probably), and will almost certainly be no source of support or information for anything as nostalgic as breastfeeding. God forbid. And god forbid you should fail at that either, so says Oprah whatever. A woman here, in that context, will be half (or more) of her household income (great), and/but given that necessity will re-enter her career environment only to find that everyone expects her now to fail so that she has to be twice as competent in order to break even, and because she now has a whole new reason to neeeeeeed that money, she has to be NICE about it all to boot. Even the best of fathers (I looove my bro-in-law, good guy) will smell bad to the baby and even if he is willing to let the little bugger cry that out, the woman will not be (she can not—brainfry) and so he’ll hand the kid back, useless until it can cavort. At some point, the woman thinks: I need more sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins, anything. And so, though (because?) she’s totally screwed, she’ll not wish the same thing on her own new-beloved and will have another baby, probably quickly, hoping for better and dying into the future. She’s toast.
Add this: She will never, ever, not jump in fright again at a door slam. (AH!) She will (AH!) be fright(AH!)tened of every bus cra(AH!)sh possibility every (AH!) (AH!) tainted water (AH!) supply flu ep(AH!)idemic skin rash stolen (AH!) lunch money humiliati(AH!)on rape car acid(AH!)ident lack of (AHHHH!) God in the uni(AHAH!)verse lack of mercy of (weepysleepless) fate fucking dog bite whatever . . . like a cross between hiccups and a tazer to her testes if she had any left. Not ev(AH!)en a daffo(AH!)dil will be easy to love.
The conceptual framework doesn’t get any better: Losers have babies. White trash idiots. It is beneath a thinking person to stress the planet and foist egotism on existence. Nobody who has the capacity to reflect on it would condescend to do such a thing. I am deliberately not mentioning the matter-of-course insults to the body of pregnancy and whelping (pain, pain, pain [pain] breast infections, lung infections, fractured pelvis . . . just to the hit the highlights). Because if you think adoption gets you out of that conceptual framework in the United States, you are sadly mistaken. Did you miss the upshot of the Golden Pig Year, thinking I was having a Hallmark moment?: Very soon, buttgillions of buyers-remorse children, little girls, are going to hit the Clearance Racks of Asia. But. If you think swooping an unwanted child up will get you the slightest slack for the desire to parent, forget it. In fact, it will add a veil of self-congratulation to the whole thing, as if the egotism weren’t bad enough. Check it. I would bet my left bagel that nearly everyone reading this is currently in possession of an opinion about both Britney and Angelina, and if you were above watching the borderline animal hoarding “freak show” as a pundit, then how would you have that?
In America, you mostly are made to feel like you do not belong here, and you do not belong to the others who do not belong, either.
While we’re all avoiding thus asking ourselves if anyone has ever really loved us for no good reason since our mamas by implicitly condemning her for it, let me note that the welcome to my niece stands. [armscrossy] There are many pleasures of Being, mostly little random stuff like upgrades and processed meats and plotlines and listening to someone else sleep . . . one of my all time favorites: coming to a conclusion finally and thereafter not really caring to discuss it. Along with 40 fingers and toes, I’m sharing that with baby-Violet right now, both of us concertedly embracing that she IS.
