100 degree heat in sticky punk houses; friends sniff glue and use dope; mixing and matching drugs with alcohol, getting unfathomably fucked up. Lots of people leave town, heading out to exotic places like Minnesota and California to harvest pot, beets or fight fires or do jail support for locked up activist friends.
Others stream into town, joining the annual summer punk festival downtown. Our house is practically empty every day; everyone is gone, busy with lovers or dope, while I spend sweaty days sorting old love notes, school work, clothes and books and boots.
People snap at each other because of the heat; my roommates go out to pick blackberries in an alley and have the cops called on them for unexplicable reasons.
I court ideas; activism, journalism, starting my own doula business, getting pregnant on purpose using a friend's sperm to start raising a little radical of my own...
My friend and I giggle like uncontrollably like school girls practicing blow jobs on bananas in our kitchen. We sip homemade meade and talk about the possiblities of our baby. The opposet of a love-child, this would be a baby made by plutonic friends, friends who have almost exactly the same values and goals in life, but no romantic interest in each other. We note that if we got me pregnant now, I'd be giving birth in May, giving birth to a little Gemini I'd probably name Kit, regardless of it's gender.
Later that night, in bed, I think more about the possiblity of making a baby; I check my cervical mucus to see if I'm as fertile as I think I am; and it is thick and sticky, waiting for sperm to suck into my womb....
Earlier that evening, that same friend and I talked about the fate of another baby, a little four-yr old whose daddy is doing herione and sniffing glue...we joked semi-seriously about stealing the kid to raise in the woods in Canada, away from the influence of junky parents...we are both madly in love with this kid...we see the inevitable coming, the years of foster care, the sexual abuse from older foster siblings or care providers, the young introduction to drugs and alcohol, the whole fucking cycle starting over again....
Love ya,
Carrot
The lesbian farmers I'm working alongside talk occasionally about finding a turkey baster and a man with good energy to produce another land-loving, vegetable grower...Kristin asked me what my plans for having children are, which was rather suggestive, I thought, after she had explained the couple's dilemna. I told her not having kids is the greatest gift to the Earth I could ever make...that my compassion for the planet is greater than any dream I could ever have of raising an organic steward of the Earth.
Consciousness tells me not to kill myself--that I'm just one person in a sea of many, that my contributions to the Earth more than make up for my faults. But can that be true and is giving birth worth the probability that a country kid would just move away from the farming lifestyle, the land, the Earth?
What do you think about that?
my documentary...
"some folks say that a hippie won't steal,
but I caught three in my corn field"
--John Hartford
I think I've written numerous blog posts about how overpopulated we are; one of which is entitled Why I won't even have a baby (poorly titled, probably written in the middle of the night.)
As a midwifery student, I struggle daily with this dilemma, my driving desire to have a little one, mixed with the knowledge that the best thing I can do for the earth is probably get my tubes cauterized.
I just went on a trip to the coast with a friend of mine (not the one who has been joking with me about giving me some of his sperm, but the friend who already has a four-yr old and is struggling with drug and alcohol problems.) While hitchhiking, we where picked up by a woman with a baby named Magnolia. The woman was a single mom who was only twenty-three, but she was so amazingly in tune with her own body and her baby that the baby didn't wear diapers; rather the mom could tell by the cries the baby made when to pull the car over and hold the baby naked bottomed on the side of the road to pee or poop. She also was absolutely loving breastfeeding, had had an all natural home birth and was just madly in love with her beautiful daughter.
When I see the way parents love their kids, something huge stirs in my soul; when I play with Andrew (the four yr old who lives with us,) when I help with a birth, all of these things leave a great desire in me to reproduce.
And then, I scold myself. We are currently at seven billion people, are clearly at an unsustainable level, as we can witness (global climate change, huge floating masses of plastic in the ocean the size of Texas, hundreds of species dying daily, starving people all over the world,) and I know that I could love someone else's babe as much as my own bio-babe.
I guess the answer for me may be adoption? I just don't have the 20+ thousand dollars to shell out for a kid...I'd love to be Angie Jolie, running around the world picking up cute kids, but I can't...
Love ya,
Carrot