Children.  A word gargantuan enough to swallow me whole.

A blessing if I am able.

A plague if I am not.

In every book I have read, I am not certain there is an author adept enough to portray the necessary changes which must occur when bringing another life into the world.  Parents vehemently tell me that nothing can prepare me, that nothing comes close.  And so I necessarily must concur because I see a shaky conviction in their eyes, a weightiness to their statement that infers a knowing which cannot be expressed through any method but sheer knowing.  Through feeling the thing plopped down into your arms some odd Tuesday having never held a baby before let alone changed a diaper.

And it is this silence, this beyond words nature of children that truly terrifies me.  There is an old adage that to read many books is to live many lives.  I feel--having read like a psychotically ill loner--that I have lived many, many times over.  And yet, I feel parenthood is not something I can really touch.  It is not something I can understand.

And so I stand on the precipice of this decision an utterly blind person.  If I do then it "changes you forever in so many wonderful and indescribable ways (big fake, condescending smile)" and if I don't, then I am selfish and one of the losers in Darwin's survival of the fittest model.

I am so, so torn about the entire topic.  I want children because I think little humans are lovely and have so much to teach us about the world.  But on the other hand, I don't want to bring another, stinking human into the planet.  I feel like I do okay as far as humans are concerned and, even so, about 80% of the time I'm not very proud of my environmental or socioeconomic consciousness.  

And so I am at a crossroads of defying social convention by being the loner infertile womb or doing it and rushing head first into an adventure for which I am not certain I'm prepared.

I have never had warm, maternal feelings.  I doubt I ever will.  I am much too neural.  Much too close to insanity.

If only there was something to do about all the missing.  Because this now is truly something remarkable.  And trust me when I tell you that I find joy here, too.

But to turn my mind's eye back and to see us as younger versions of ourselves before we discovered the outside world...that is truly something to behold.  Imagine us then, before the Frodo and Bilbo had been proven impossible, before the choosing of what we do for a living (which inevitably and heartbreakingly becomes us), and before we moved (or were carried, perhaps) so far from one another.

There is a house, too, that I think of often.  With old, creaking floors and a wildwood directly behind. There are baths of oatmeal for the poison ivy and cardboard swords and a world I would not have the courage or audacity to create any longer.

And we are there.  All together.  Playing night games with skinned knees in the late summer twilight. Or cuddled together with the old piano hammering Christmas tunes to our off key renditions of hymns. And we are there, certainly, on the nights of feet of snow, snuggled as close as possible to the wood-burning cast iron stove.

And even though so much of that youth was filled with unknowing - the unfamiliarity of this body and this heart, of where I was headed, of who I would become - there was so much beauty in the wandering.  So much beauty in the long, drawn out, and often boring summer days.  Because at least, then, being together was not simply reserved for holidays and weddings and the off chance of running into one another on some distant, distant weekend.

There is missing interminably behind me.  In every moment that has passed and every person whose heart no longer beats close to mine.  There is beauty in time's passage and there is normalcy there, but to be together again, locked in singular moments of grace and loveliness would be quite a gift.  To see you go off, then, my old friend and find your own place in this world gives me such great joy.

Joy beyond joy.  But sadness, too.  Because you are there without me.  And, inevitably, we will grow old apart.  Apart.  Such a wicked, awful word.  Because there is no you in it.  None at all.