Whenever I approached my
husband, I would have to think of the right way to phrase things.
Rehearsing in my head, I’d stumble again and again on the word
“want.” I might have been saying “I want a new sweater.” Or “I want
to have pizza for dinner.” But I was almost 40, and I was saying,
“I want to have another baby.”
I felt petty and
pedestrian, like I was making a to-do list. But it kept coming up
— get the kids new gym shoes, dust the top of the fridge,
have a third baby.
Everything I’d ever been taught about
population genetics, every war and famine I’d ever seen on
television, every news story about consumption of resources, energy
crisis, and global warming — the whole glob of messy behavior
of human beings — especially my selfish self, weighed on me.
This was the terrain of my dear and personal neurosis, and even
with years of familiarity with the map, I wasn’t navigating well.
I didn’t feel justified in having a third child. It would
be indulging in more than my share, like sneaking an extra slice of
the pie from the kitchen after dinner. But for three years, the
feeling refused to go away. Finally, I thought I would die of grief
if I didn’t have another child.
“That actually sounds
healthy,” a friend said on the phone.
He’s a biologist
and a professor who taught me 20 years ago. He was in Washington,
D.C., getting ready for a meeting. In Colorado, I was staring out
the window at our chickens picking at the morning’s compost.
“No, no,” I said. I’m 40 years old and have two kids. You
must know there are more than 6 billion people in the world
already. Haven’t you seen what’s happening in Niger? And besides
that, our roof leaks and we haven’t been able to fix it.”
“Well,” he said, “maybe you need to accept that things don’t make
sense.” It’s a Jungian idea, the notion that there is accuracy to
what we feel, that we should submit to the movement of life rather
than trying to control everything and always relying on thinking.
But I always want to steer my emotions into compatibility with
statistics about the world. And it turns out, intellect and
instinct aren’t always the best of pals; that’s the problem with
being an animal but also being human.
I’m not saying that
everyone should go ahead and have a big bunch of kids. This
business of children is terribly dangerous. People bow freely to
the tyranny of a newborn. Then the child grows. Maybe he does
something weird and enchanting, like trying to put his sneakers on
backwards, shoving his toes into the heel part of the shoe with the
kind of concentration that makes him stick his tongue out the side
of his mouth and cross his eyes. After that, your heart becomes
large and utterly captive. It’s a little humiliating, and totally
undignified; people don’t talk about it much.
I know my
third child will be part of population growth and almost every
other problem faced by humanity. But being paranoid isn’t helping
anything, and logic has long since jumped my ship.
Maybe
I’ve taken the fate of the world into my own hands, but that seems
easier to me than trying to graph, say, the effects of fossil fuel
emissions or polar ice cap melt against the weight of dumb,
knee-buckling love. I’m going to have a baby. Eight months into
pregnancy, I sway with every step, my belly round and vulnerable,
its own little aching, uncertain planet.
Kate Krautkramer
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in
Yampa, Colorado.
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