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she· verb
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04.07.03 I don't have kids, right? But sometimes my uterus clenches up with rage and indignation and my eyes well up with tears when I see a chubby baby in a terrycloth nightie with ducks on it, or witness an intimate moment between a mother, an Easter basket and child. Hell, sometimes it happens when I see an infant who's not so healthy--in fact, skinny ones on the Discovery channel, the size of my hand, with tubes running out at every angle can set my uterus off. You know what? On day three of the big P even an empty size 1 jumpersuit hanging on the rack at Sears is all it takes. It's entirely biological. It's hormonal. It's the maternal instinct. It's my biological clock telling me, "YOU HAVE ABOUT SIX TO EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE I SEND YOU INTO PREMATURE MENOPAUSE AND PERMANENT REGRET YOU SILLY WOMAN!" I don't have kids for a reason. For a variety of them actually, including economical ones, political ones, personal ones, environmental ones and philosophical ones. All pragmatic and all hold up to close scrutiny (without sounding like I'm of the "child-free" variety) by the harsh light of day. But my uterus pays not one whit to any of them, so I'm going to cut my womb a deal. I will not bear a child, but maybe, just maybe, it will be satiated by the presence of one that is, by default, being helped in some way. Tomorrow I have scheduled a meeting to talk to my boss about letting me have some time off a couple times a month to participate in the Guardian Ad Litem program. It's not a lot of time, but enough to muck up a couple of my days with periodic training and court appearances. I will also ask her to be a reference for me. I'll hold off on mentioning to her my grad school plans until after I ace the GRE. I never mentioned the death of Michael Kelly when it happened, mostly because this isn't that kind of journal. It screwed me up more than hearing about David Bloom yesterday simply because I read and loved the Atlantic and his columns in the Post, and didn't see much NBC. You should know, though, that MSNBC was the station I was tuned into, and a report by David Bloom was the last thing I watched when I officially made the decision to turn off the television completely on this war. For some reason that really does screw me up. I feel guilty right down deep into my bones about that and I don't know why. Within two days, one I loved and one I didn't love so much, are gone. Gone like my dad.
Goddamn, I want to talk to him about this war. Not Bloom or Kelly, but my dad.
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