My eczema doesn't lie. It flares when I do, so I'm striving to not put myself in a position to lie. My right ear, left eye, upper lip and scalp are quietly on fire the closer we get to finishing jumping the hurdles necessary to be on permanent loan of a child.
I'm sure civilians, the ones who get to make their own babies for free, often without even really trying, have these dark nights of the soul, questioning whether they have the endurance, stamina, guts, selflessness, organization, patience and love that raising a child demands. "But people do it every day", we tell ourselves as a means of providing comfort. But then I add unhelpfully, "And almost all of them completely fuck it up".
Consider for a moment what it means to be a person of Irish Catholic German Jewish descent- to be, in other words, me. Did my parents actually think the mingling of their blood, genes, neuroses, pale useless skin, soft teeth, weak gums, alcoholic tendencies (on both sides), clinical genetic depression (on both sides), extremes of height (or the lack thereof), preponderance towards eating starches and naturally high cholesterol levels-- did my parents truly think this out before they had three of us? Clearly not.
And then they raised us, as best they could, with next to no money and years of tumult. I'm still rather stunned that it didn't occur to them that they might give birth to a drug-resistant strain of super-neurotic, barrel-chested fantastically guilt ridden short rashy, boundary-free half breeds who require lifetimes of therapy, but they didn't. Thank god for the timely invention of Lexapro. It could have come sooner, for my taste, but better late than never... I'm just saying.
And yet, despite the genetic yahtzee our parents played on us, we turned out to not be career criminals or sociopaths or even terribly bad people. In fact, my sisters are excellent parents of their own stunning children.
But what do we have that not everyone else has? Guilt. 36 karat, studded with blood diamonds and very busy refracting prisms of brilliant hard expensive light while fund raising for schools and neglected animals. My sisters and my collective guilt could be made into a venom that would bring the most corrupt genocidal African President for Life to his knees weeping to be executed to relieved of the deeply crushing guilt eating away at his viscera.
Guilt has made us as successful as we are, and kept us from being more successful than we are. Guilt has made us obedient in our rebelliousness. We 'eff' up with the best of children raised in the era of play-room/basement bars, but none of us has really thought outside the box in terms of joining cults or creating new cults or cult-hopping until finding one suitable to drink the ultimate Kool-Aid for.
Guilt- both curbed and unleashed has inspired many artists to create and creatively destroy- from James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, William Saroyan, Steven Spielberg, Paul Rudnick, Spalding Gray, Madonna, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Wendy Wasserstein, Erma Bombeck, Michael Jackson, Tina Fey, Lady Gaga, and I believe this trend will only bear itself out perhaps one generation past mine, due to the weakening stranglehold of Catholicism on working class saps looking for the right things to keep their kids from doing what they did.
And guilt brings me back to my fear- of being a bad parent and my biggest current guilt-ridden struggle. It appears my guilt will flow freely from childhood throughout adulthood- I felt guilty for being a bad kid, and now, while I prepare for a kid, I will try not to feel guilty about being a bad mom.
The biggest challenge to me being a benevolent, groovy awesome mom will consist of me not using my prodigious environmental-genetic, titanium Teflon guilt-talent to make my kid feel guilty (in order to feel less guilty about being a bad mom) and all through all this- I still get to feel like a guilty child- despite being able to wave to fifty from here.
My Mom hates my blog title. She's trying very hard to not suppress my creativity, she respects my talent and feels like I can write like the dickens, but she doesn't like my slightly edgy and ironic use of 'bastard' in relation to my future foster child. She worries it will hamper our getting our baby and she ran it past her book club. They all winced at the word 'bastard'. One woman, who was apparently born a bastard, way back in the 40s, told the book club that her parents called her their "Love Child", and I finally understood what that Diana Ross song was all about.
I have no truck with the phrase "Love Child", but in this age where we can all smell the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, is calling a child born out of wedlock a 'bastard' still a bad word? Why is it that Angelina Jolie can basically get away with having six bastard children? She's not married and her adoptive and birth children are all technically, poetically, rebellious in an Ed Hardy kind of way, bastards.
I have friends who are grown, healthy 'bastard' people- I intend the use of the word the way someone might still use "mulatto" or "stewardess"-- in a completely "isn't this a fun antique word redolent of a time when people had to be married to have children or risk banishment from society?" kind of way.
So now I grapple, stung and swollen with guilt, wrestling the scaly itchy crocodile of eczema that punctuated my wool-ridden childhood in a way that really begs a graphic novel- I grapple now with not being a parent, but being a mommy-whipped daughter. Do I change my blog title to Where is My Love Child Foster Child? Because if I don't change it, I will feel guilty. And if I do change it... what will I feel? Less itchy? Less me? Less guilty? Less like a bad future mom? For changing my vision and voice for my... mother or my child? Or me?
