I saw a used pregnancy indicator in the flower bed in front of my building. Just lying there. Discarded. It had spoken its message and been tossed aside.
A pregnancy test does not deliver petty gossip.
It comes bearing news. Real news.
Did the woman who used it want a child? Had she been praying and hoping that this time, THIS time, it would come out positive? Is she jumping up and down and kissing her husband?
Or is she reeling, is her throat dry and knotted? Did she miss that menstrual cycle and think "oh shit, oh shit shit shit," and hoped against hopes that it was just because of midterms stress, but now everything is so fucking real that it doesn't feel real at all?
I can't imagine it's possible to pee on one of those little sticks without strong feelings. Hope, joy, apprehension, delight, disappointment, fear, horror, disgust... the seeds for all of these are contained in this disposable electronic instrument. Based on a simple PREGNANT or NOT PREGNANT her life could change for better or for worse (usually both, I would imagine) or could stay, sadly - or blessedly - exactly as it was. So rarely is there such an intense binary in all of the human experience.
Dear woman, whoever you are, wherever you are, and maybe even the potential child whom your blood will nourish, my heart goes out to you.
4 comments:
I don't have anything to add, just that I read this post and I liked it. (Also I hope my sister isn't pregnant.)
Thanks, Rach. I hope so too...
I have found it from my own rumination about this particular subject and passages which allude to children, that women definitely do or should worry more about the consequences than men. Obviously the consequences fall on them more strongly. For woman, not only does having a child change her, in some way, a child becomes her life.
Because the consequences fall greatly more on her is why they should be more careful in choosing a husband. I have heard all of the rhetoric from some lefties about the institution of marriage being backwards and irrational. And that you don't need to get marry to have children or that a woman doesn't need a man because she is independent. Yet I somewhat agree with the independent part,but if she decides to have children a father,nevertheless, is necessary, especially if she has a boy.
Boys need father figures and I haven been lucky enough to have a father who has been marry for quite a while now;thus,I understand the conservative view points on fathers. What is it that they say: if you have fathers you have a families, if you have a families you have households, if you have households you have a society, if you have a society then you have a Democratic civilization. So whenever they talk about nuclei families I tend to agree from my own experience. Boys will always look for a father figure either being someone that would teach them some real values or the local thug, if he didn't have a father of his own. Actually, I can't phantom growing up with a father.
Yet I seen teenage girls having kids without marriage or any kind of vows too many times. The kids are going to grow up without a father figure, without discipline, and subsequently their life might not be the best.
Similarly, men should be careful in choosing a wife; someone who will be a good mother and a good wife. And uphold the duties to the family and the Society and all of the responsibility which it entails.
The Institution of marriage is a spontaneous solution, mostly promoted by religions, to the problem of women wanting a man around that can provide for the children and a man's desire to have a home to come to at end of the struggle, like they say: a man's home is his castle. That is why the vows have arisen in just about every culture.
However, marriage has been challenged by our brightest thinkers. As some kind of oppressive arrangement. While disregarding the obvious. That it is more of a compromise and a complementary arrangement to raise children and achieve salvation.
Nevertheless, our thinkers challenge it, of course, they themselves being stuck in the ivory tower and not seeing that their thoughts have real consequences, don't see the local girls that listen and have children out of wedlock.
So, what I am saying is that marriage is necessary when two individuals come together that love each (or even then, I have meet arrange marriage Indians that seem not to have the slights problem with that other form of procreating, although I prefer the love-child-marriage system myself better). And want children, indeed, this arraignment is the core of the bourgeois values of thriftiness, education, savings, investment, work, and so on. No wonder the Victorian novels seem to talk about all it of the time.
Anyway that is my two cents on the subject or what I thought was the subject.
D.L.
D.L. - it wasn't meant to be a commentary on marriage at all, actually. It was more just me noting how such a tiny thing could hold such a range of significance depending upon the situation.
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