Jan
26

Dear Simone,

When I was a young girl of six, seven seemed to me to be a terribly sophisticated age. Nearing my birthday I had frequent visions of myself at seven, visions in which I was seen from the back wearing a very tight pair of Jordache jeans in a dark wash. My blond hair fell to my shoulders, and I may have been carrying a purse. While a random sampling of adults might be counted upon to agree that a child of seven is just that—a child—to me Seven was glamour, the Madonna records my mother had forbidden me, cigarettes not made of candy. The number 6 even looked round and babyish, but 7…Seven had an edge. When I was seven, I would leave childish things behind and walk off in my designer denim, my hips swaying in a way I had begun to practice, a way my mother said made me look like I was trying to walk on a listing ship.
I tell you this story to show you that I understand. Perhaps you feel that 24 weeks, your age today, is practically grown up. Perhaps you feel that you have Lived. After all, you are nearly in the third trimester, and with fashion magazines calling 30 the new 20 and 40 the new 30, it is understandable that you may come to believe that at 24 weeks you are now the equivalent of a 10-year old.
Alas, while you may feel your very fetal essence to be precociously mature, let me assure you that your lungs are not. This is not to say they aren’t perfectly lovely lungs, but at 24 weeks, I think of your lungs like small sacs constructed of Bubble Magic—a sticky substance popular during my childhood that could be squeezed from a tube onto the end of a straw and used to blow fragile, sticky bubbles. This is probably not in any way medically accurate, but what is medically certain is that all lungs are fragile and immature at 24 weeks, regardless of the sophistication of the fetus possessing them.

I know there has been much talk of viability, and truly I am weepy with pride in you for having reached it, but viability merely means a chance, and I know we—you—can do better. I am going to ask you to trust my judgment, and stay put for a while longer. I need you to be born live and healthy, and as vigorous as your kicks have been from inside my abdomen, you aren’t ready for the outside world. They eat sweet little babies like you for breakfast out here. You’re not ready. And should you be tempted to trust your judgment over my own, let me tell you another story:
When I was seventeen, my friend Caroline and I called a taxicab to take us to a party being held in an abandoned factory in an undesirable part of town, as was our custom of a Saturday night. As we stood outside waiting for our cab, a car pulled to the curb in front of us. This car, we soon learned, contained two strangers—young Marines in their twenties, possibly intoxicated young Marines who had decided, or so they told us, that we looked like we knew where The Party was. The Party they were speaking of was not the specific party Caroline and I were planning to attend, but a more general notion of a good time, something they were in need of, being recently returned from overseas. Did we, perhaps, need a ride to wherever we were going?

Tell this story to any adult, and they will immediately grasp the correct course of action. But at the time, despite the fact that I had only the weekend before received a perfect score on the verbal section of the SAT, I would have completed the analogy “Getting in a car with strange Marines is to __________ as Bear Baiting is to Dismemberment” with the word FUN! and Caroline and I hopped in the backseat, congratulating ourselves on having saved the cost of cab fare.
I will leave the conclusion of this story for another time, but the moral is this: good judgment is often proportionate to age. Even you must agree that 24 weeks is on the youthful side, and concede that perhaps I am able to see this situation more clearly than you are. Sometimes mother really does know best. So let’s agree on another week of incubation, and we can revisit the issue then.
Until that time, let me tell you again how proud of you I am, and how very, very much I love you.

Love,
Your Mother

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |