Day 12. Standing in the Supermarket Queue Behind April and Destiny.

Day 12. Standing in the Supermarket Queue Behind April and Destiny.

You know, the public really lets me down every time. I've been trying lately, of course, to open myself up. I find myself staring at parents, mothers, fathers my age, old couples, little children, babies going by in strollers and bjorns, etc. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I figure if there's something I need, I'll recognize it. I get a lot of empty smiles in return and sometimes I lock horns with the little devils and there's a moment. That happened the other day at the Jons market, standing in the line behind10 month old twins. One of them, the one blithely referred to as April, was stuffing her fat cheeks full of her stubby hands, while clinging to the bosom of her mother or her aunt I couldn't tell the two women apart. The other one - and I'm using their real names here that I overheard - Destiny, could barely hold her head up. Something was clearly wrong. Her eyes were dull and nothing grabbed her attention. She wasn't nursing or sleeping, she just hung there, suspended on the shelf of the other woman's breasts, neither smiling or crying. I looked at her caretakers, whose eyes were also dull and limned with heavy eyeliner. Each of them was very overweight, dangerously so for such young women I would think and in neither case was it child rearing fat. I listened to them speak about the prepackaged, salt laden food substitutes they were buying. Then they talked about the soap opera that afternoon while they swayed in the line like lowing cattle. I wandered into the future with them: bad health, bad habits, bad TV, bad diet, bad grammar, kids with bad porn actress names and bad boyfriends and suddenly I found myself having to hold back a tear because they were so beautiful, so stupidly unaware and beautiful, that I almost couldn't help myself.

I didn't say these moments had to make sense. I have emotions after all. What gets me down are the bad choices being made in the name of the child but surely, almost always, they are the vicarious sins of the parent.

I've been watching old couples lately too. Some of them still hold hands, some of them have frozen smiles, some of them still wear wedding bands. I'm looking for signs of course that they have not been left in the dust by their children because this is a big part of her argument - to not get old alone. It's hard to tell. I want to run up and ask: now that it's done, what do you say? It's silly obviously because their lives would be meaningless if they were to denounce what they did and who's gonna cop to that? But I see them, and often I see the same people, on the same tread of life, tired, slow, neither joyous, nor sad, but rather ghostlike, walking up and down in it and I don't know if the answer is there either.

We talked on the phone last night. It was about as calm and thorough as we've been in a while and I still can't tell you that we accomplished anything. She did give a run down, a list of her good points and bad points. The bad ones mostly coincided with what I've been saying all this while: her frenetic life, her moods, her finances, the extra difficulty of going it alone, having perhaps to hang up her art for a time, or for good, not having the freedom and flexibility to change gears in her life as she's wont to do, and so on.

The good points mostly hinged on the ephemeral: She wants to grow a child in the Old German sense of kinder gartner or child gardener; teach a child, love a child, participate in a community based around children, ie, klatching and kibbutzing with like-minded parents in similar straits; she wants to start another generation to continue the legacy of her family, and lastly, she wants to create that buffer between her and loneliness. I mention that she can get all of these from being a Big Sister volunteer, all except the one about her lineage, but then presumably she'll be an on-the-premises aunt one day.

But if that's what she wants - fine. They're all good reasons, if not a little self-indulgent and she admitted so, but then what is life? If this is what it's going to take to fulfill her then she should work toward this, but I don't think it's fair to capitalize on an unfortunate and untimely mistake and make someone else, a reluctant someone else especially, pay with their freedom for what you have discovered and decided is lacking in your life. In other words, get to work, find the right person and do it right because I don't want to have to fight back the tears when I see you in the queue at the supermarket.

And that's harsh too because I do care and I do love her but I can't help where I'm at this early in our relationship. We were building and we had something really good going and this has upended us. I don't want to be selfish but I liked where we were and how we were progressing. Who's to say where that ends? There's never any guarantee of course, but I was willing to give it a go and now that this has come between us and caused a lot of hurt, it's not as clear. We may have done, or I may have done, irreparable damage.