Out of Avalon

July 23rd, 2007 by Ascelyn

I enter now into a brave new world, a world into which until now I have only caught shadows and brief reflections.  I’ve studied the maps and read the manuals, but I haven’t been here.  Where countless others have been before me, I now go.  Laughter and tears, joy and sorrow lay before me.  I will emerge a new person, and a new person will emerge with me.

A year from now, I hope to hold my child in my arms.  There will be no one like her, and no one will be able to care for her like I can.  I hope she will be beautiful and brilliant, strong and sweet, but regardless of all else, she will be mine.  Mine and Jason’s, for he will have half the making of her.

It’s funny to think that that part of her is here with me already.  My baby is only a “she” now.  Only one little X chromosome with no partner.  Jason will have to decide whether to add in another X, keeping “her,” or to give a Y, creating our son.  No matter how many Xs there might be, we won’t have a son without that Y.

I can think like that, seeing it all through the years I’ve spent playing biologist, knowing which cells do what and how they interact and change and work together to create a viable human being.  I can sketch out the way her genes will come together to make the unique code, can detail the way that code will produce all the myriad components of the body.  I can tell you a lot of things, but in the end I don’t know anything.  Why do the cells want to do this?  Because the organelles work in a certain way.  Why them?  Because the chemistry demands it.  Why?  Because of how the physics orders the particles.  But why?

We don’t know.

I know how the human body is supposed to develop from that first fertilized ovum.  I can understand what causes many of the things that can go wrong.  What I don’t know, what I can’t know, is the smallest, tiniest why.  We don’t know how the soul arrives in the body.  Orson Scott Card’s books “discover” the answer in the philotes, but that’s only fiction.  The truth of the matter is that we don’t know, and I don’t think we ever will.  I hope we won’t, because as much as the beauty is in the knowing, it’s also in the mystery.

There are some unknowns with which I can live and even love.  What bothers me is not knowing if my child will be healthy and have a bright future ahead of her.  What bothers me is not knowing if she’ll be happy.  I don’t want to bring–to force–a child into this world and have her realizing later that she never wanted to be here.  It scares me, and I was determined for quite some time never to have children of my own because of it.  I considered it the ultimate act of selfishness, very similar to that of taking life from a person who is not willing.  I loved children, and I wanted to raise children, but I would not impose life on another person if I had a choice in the matter.  My decision has changed, but the fear has not gone away competely.  I hope and I pray, but mostly I try not to think about.  Selfish it may well be, but perhaps I’m just a very selfish person.

I stopped taking my pills for longer than the requisite week as of Friday, July 20th.  That is, I should have began taking the active pills again then, and we chose not to do so.  I’m taking my temperature in the mornings, playing around–I like to know how things work–but I’m not actively doing anything about it.  I’m not preventing, but I’m not trying, either.

It’s a new world for me.  I have much to learn, and I think there’s a lot I won’t be able to learn from outside myself.  It’s strange for me to know that I can’t control things and fix anything that might go wrong simply by trying to understand the problem more completely.  I’ve spent too much of my life in a lab or with my head in a book.

“How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in it!”  (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

May my child soon be among them.