The month we made her --- that is, the month we flipped the calendar pages nine months forward and agreed it was good timing --- I felt as if I were doing something illegal. Wasn't there some tall marble building I had to enter, a bureaucratic line I had to stand in, a form I had to fill out in order to make a new human being? For a car, for a marriage, for a loan, for a degree, for all these and many more I'd had to apply. Why not for a child? For a new being with lungs and wants and wishes, with needs for caloric intake and physical affection and mental stimulation? Where was the rubber stamp marked APPROVED? Where was the bureaucrat to say, "Yes, you can make a human. Yes, you can add another soul to this planet who will scramble over the earth's rocks and shout into its canyons her quest for love, her search for the balms against loneliness; another person who will hurt and be hurt, and who will never ask anyone for the right to do either. Yes, you can make one of those." No one said this, and there she was, twenty weeks in and fluttering below my navel, believing the world was nothing more than a warm red sack of salty fluid that tasted like tears, if only she knew what tears tasted like.
--- Heather Kien Lanier
"Twelve Reasons to Cry"
©2013 The Sun
