You Heard Me

My husband’s father had been battling some kind of illness or another since I’d first met him. He’d lived a rough life, a tradesman’s life, surrounded by chemicals and characterized by long hours and tough conditions in body and paint shops in Denver. But it wasn’t until 2009 that his illness was given a name: lymphoma. And they gave him less than a year to live.

Lymphoma is a tough bitch. Known treatments more or less fall into a hole when lymphoma is the diagnosis. The doctors said they could treat his symptoms, but that the cancer would not be stopped. He was up for any kind of treatment: chemo, stem cells, transplants, clinical trials. He was going to fight it by any means necessary, and he did. But among the ugly truths about cancer, the one put so eloquently in one of Christopher Hitchen’s last columns for Vanity Fair is that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger. In fact, in the case of cancer treatments, what doesn’t kill you can bring you right up close to death, and what eventually saves you can make you want to die.

Yet, nothing was out of the question for Roy. He wanted to live, at least long enough to do important things like be an important part of his granddaughter’s life, and to learn a little bit more about me, the woman his son married. He wanted to learn more about the man his son had become, with whom he had only recently begun to truly reconcile after a tough childhood and tougher young adulthood. This Tuesday morning, three and a half years after he was given just a half-year to live, he slipped away in his sleep. Quietly and without the complications of breathing machines, ugly decisions, painful and expensive measures to keep him alive. We saw him together for the last time on Saturday evening (Dale had seen him Monday evening, only hours before he passed) and while it was clear he was pleased to see us, he looked depleted in a way I’d never seen before. He was just so tired, so delicate-looking, so small. I didn’t think it was the last time I’d see him alive… but I thought it was going to be one of the last.

Dale and I have been together for about five years, and I think that most of the strength that forms the foundation of our marriage has to do with the fact that for most of our years together, we have held each other up in the face of this awful diagnosis: the trips to the hospital, the treatments, the insane levels of financial and emotional stress it injected into an already-dramatic family dynamic. I truly believe a weaker connection would have been broken by the events of the last three and a half years, but for us, it has brought us closer in ways I don’t think either of us ever anticipated. I wouldn’t wish this kind of situation on my worst enemy’s crab lice, but the truth is, life happens. And when you face life with a partner, both the good parts and the unimaginably bad parts, it is often the bad parts that truly make or break the bonds you share.

I never knew I could be this strong for someone, and the part of Dale I’ve seen in the face of these tragedies is the part of him that I have come to most admire. While it’s ground us both down plenty of times, and while we haven’t gotten here without the occasional aide of a strong cocktail, when the worst times bring out the best in someone, you can’t help but love them even more.

 I already miss Roy. He and I related on a number of things: cars, vintage films (and vintage starlets), food, history. I am sad that I never really got to know him as well as I would have liked. I could have sat in that dusty, tchotchke-filled den and talked about Volkswagens and Stuart Andersons steaks for hours. While Dale and I grew up in vastly different homes and in vastly different ways, Roy and I could always find something to chat about. He spent the last years of his life doing everything he could to raise his granddaughter in an incredibly difficult circumstance, and doing everything he could to make up for the struggles he faced when raising his own family. He wanted to make things right with his son, and I think, in his way, he did.

The way Roy would talk about food was the way I talk about food, and toward the end, he didn’t enjoy eating like he always had. I know that for me, that would be torturous. He was so glad we were there for Christmas, but you could tell he couldn’t enjoy it as much as he wanted to. He was just so tired. His body wasn’t letting him do the things he loved, even on a basic level. I know that if this was the way I had to live, I would only hold on for the really important stuff. I think that he did just that. Thank you for the time we were able to share, Roy. You will be missed.

I was home yesterday and there was a peculiar little marathon of films on some channel from the 80s regarding women in the workplace. I caught the end: 9 to 5  and Diane Keaton looking flustered for 2 hours in Baby Boom.

The crazy thing? Both of these films are actually so feminist I don’t think they’d get greenlit today. The idea of Lily Tomlin’s lament of a “Pink Collar Ghetto” or Diane Keaton’s CEO turned small business owner would bounce right off the shiny faux-tanned foreheads of just about any Hollywood exec today. I actually can’t imagine anything as progressive as either of these films getting onto a screen today. First: middle-aged women and funny women are about as common on the Silver Screen today as wheat pennies, and women who express any power unaccompanied with sexual power simply don’t exist in American film. Even if they remade Baby Boom today, the main character would be an impossibly sexy mid-career starlet, not a dowdy chick in tweed and shoulder pads.

It has taken me a long time to realize this, especially given the environment I grew up in, but the truth is, we are not becoming more progressive as a nation, especially in regards to our portrayals of women.

Let me back that up. We are not becoming more progressive in the ways I always thought we would. There are some ways in which progress, as I see it (as a child raised on NPR, PBS and Sunday mornings watching James Carville carve his wife up like a Christmas ham) have occurred. Gay marriage is in the dialogue, the gay community is becoming a more accepted part of American life (at least in most communities, and, I think even if someone is a bigot in the abstract, they often make exceptions in the concrete, day-to-day social maneuvers they perform). Racial discrimination is a social taboo, and all but the most backwards among us accept the idea that outward manifestations of racial prejudice are unacceptable (although the internal beliefs held by many are still very much alive and a much trickier, stubborn facet of racism to remove from a society. Racism may be thought of as backwards and ignorant, but we disagree a lot over what exactly comprises a racist). We accept women in very powerful positions in this country, to a degree and not without a heapin’ helpin’ of sexist comments and degradation. Yes, some progress has been made and  I do think that the social climate that is expressed in those 1980s flicks where women tried to “have it all” is part of that progress. But I don’t think my liberal parents thought that we would still be debating the scientific merit of evolutionary biology in 2011. I don’t think my parents thought that their daughters would still be fighting to be taken seriously in the workplace in 2011, and I am sure they would have been as dismayed as I was while watching a member of the next generation of girls open pink package after heteronormative pink package on Christmas day.

It was actually after watching our niece on Christmas that I had a pretty awful breakdown with my husband. What hope is there? I asked him. I begged him to give me a reason to believe that this world would be a world worth living in during the lifetime of any child born today. As if the big stuff isn’t enough: Christian dominionism, global warming, peak oil, garbage gyre, the diminishing importance of science and technology in the most developed nation in the world… There is the little stuff. Our niece didn’t get a single book for Christmas. Just a slew of plastic crap meant to help her fulfill her more important role as a pretty thing, a pink-clad, oversexualized object. She’s eight. She’s smart. But she’s cute, and she is being hammered with the idea that this is what is most important. And yes, I know that if we had a girl in our lives, we’d do what we could to counteract these kinds of social pressures. And if we had a boy, we’d do what we could to teach him that girls have more to offer in life than to be tiny Barbies or, even worse, passive, faceless Bellas (from Twilight). But nevertheless, there are always going to be kids all around them that feed off of this social narrative, and those will be their peers.

The things we teach girls are not just a feminist issue, or a women’s issue. We all are either women or people who interact daily with women. Women are half of our society. If we continue to go backwards with what we teach our girls, the rest of society will go backwards as well.

It is really easy for me to get morose about this kind of thing, and when I was discussing it with my sister yesterday. She was talking about having children, I was talking about all of these reasons why I wouldn’t want to force someone to have to live through this shitshow of fundamentalism, short-sightedness, greed, oppression, war and self-destruction. She made me feel somewhat better in that she’s much smarter than I am regarding things like human nature and public policy. She said she thinks that things can only get so much worse before something amazing happens, and that while negative changes may be occurring on some levels, in other ways, fantastic advances and changes are happening that have immensely positive implications down the road. Focusing on just one part of the changes and developments in this world is a myopic view. And that maybe this experiment called America will eventually fail, something else will necessarily take its place. Things go on. We don’t know how this story will go. I still don’t think I’ll ever feel confident enough about what happens next to make the conscious decision to try and have a child. But for all of the things that go worse, there are ways in which things can possibly get better.

I find it rather disheartening that in 2011, a man with the talent, wit and philosophical depth of Christopher Hitchens passed away and the facet of his live that so many have chosen to focus on is his outspoken atheism. Yes, he was loud and proud about his non-belief. But that atheism is so remarkable in this day and age that it eclipses his skill as a writer and thinker is dismaying to me.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I was not raised in a religious household. My parents were happy to provide us with the basic ideas of Christianity, but we did not go to church. Perhaps this is why I simply cannot understand the impulse of belief. I remember other children describing their Sunday School lessons to me and just not understanding why anyone would believe it. I find moral guidance in empathy with other people. I find fellowship in family, friends, even coworkers. I find purpose in myself, the support of those I love, my talents and inspirations. I find solace in the beauty and complexity of the world as we know it, and fascination with the discovery of new theories for things we don’t know. I have never in my adult life truly felt a compulsion to believe in anything supernatural. I’ve never come face-to-face with a problem so great I’ve felt a need to consult a higher power for aid. I’ve never had a question in my life where I’ve needed a God to help me find an answer.

And now that I’ve seen Christopher Hitchens face cancer, decay and an agonizing battle against the inevitable without once succumbing to the path of least resistance and greatest catharsis, I feel relatively sure there is no dilemma so great that will ever turn me to faith.

I understand why religion exists. We are social animals but also scheming ones, a dangerous combination in some cases. There was a time when, in order to be safe from predators and warring tribes, moral codes needed something more than the enforcement of a tribal leader to be taken seriously. In a superstitious time, the threat of a vengeful God kept people from doing things that were understood to keep a community in control. This control kept the community producing the things that kept a society prosperous in the face of enemies and uncontrollable elements.

To keep a society safe, it needed numbers and structure. It needed women to have and raise babies and men to preside over strong family units. It needed to have trust among its members to not steal or kill. It needed a social contract that provided incentive against doing things that people would do, if acting on pure self-interested instinct. Enter God. And eventually, heaven and hell. Burgeoning cultures needed an entity that enforced the codes that kept civilizations prosperous, profitable and safe. Perhaps this is why we’ve had such a difficult time keeping the church and state separate. In its previous incarnations, the church WAS the state. It was the law.

But much as our progression up the hierarchy of needs allowed us to invent God to keep ourselves in line, our summit to the very top has allowed us to question God’s relevance.  Our world is so different now. Women, freed from perpetual childbirth, childrearing and pregnancy now not only contribute to society’s success but lead, manage and strategize it. Same-sex relationships no longer threaten the society’s growth and “safety in numbers.” Marriage is no longer necessary for building a society’s stability and population. Religion tells us these progressions are transgressions and we must return to the order we once knew. But I see it differently. We built societies based on these moral codes and their success enabled us to come to the point we are at now. But I seriously think that the concept of God has taken us as far as it can. And that clinging to it now only keeps us from reaching the next level of our magnificent, unique evolution.

Crowded again this morning. Always when it’s cold, so many people just need a shelter for a moment, even if it moves, even if they kick you off when it gets to the end of the line. A man with no teeth sits in the front teeth, jawing, asks sloppily for the time. A well-dressed girl with pretty fingers and a thick book shakes back her sleeve and obliges him.

A girl is planted in the middle of the bus despite the crush of people boarding at Downing. The man behind me asks politely but loudly to move back. We all proceed to the back.

There are spots in the back, untaken. I sit across from the roadblock girl and notice she is carrying creamy coffee in a spaghetti sauce jar. I do this often and I smile and I want to tell her how I always feel less crazy when I see someone else do it. But I’ve learned from experience that talking about “crazy,” even in a somewhat colloqial sense, is not usually a good way to start a conversation on the bus.

It is then that I notice her eyes, and from then on I can’t stop stealing glances at them. The lightest lightest gray, as close to white as you could get without looking monstrous. The color of smoke. The color of river stones. Like the sky when you can’t see clouds because the whole sky is a cloud.

I can’t help myself, but each time I see her startling eyes, I think of some writerly way to describe them. Grey like what green looks like in a black and white movie. Grey like a baby goose. Grey like sunbleached cement.

I find myself wondering if it runs in her family. I imagine the same white-grey eyes staring out onto Salisbury Plain or up at castle spires in some Teutonic mountain valley. I imagine a family portrait at the turn of the century, two generations of the eyes staring out.

I try to make a point of not staring at her, but staring out into nothing. Staring on the bus is not acceptable, this is how you differentiate between people who are just trying to get to work and those who don’t have anywhere else to go.

The bus stumbles down Colfax, slowly. I’m late for work. It’s icy out, I respect the committment to safety, but I’m frustrated nonetheless. I notice that right as I finally get to my stop, as I stand up to leave, the grey eyes briefly meet mine. I blink and turn away, shuffling through legs, arms, coats and bags to exit. Everything on the bus is momentary. Touch, sight, people, space. Blink and it’s over.

He was a sniper before, in the war before this. In the war that, for all its chaos and meaninglessness, still made more sense than this. On the rooftop now, a breeze blew and it kicked up the scent of diesel fuel from an overturned 18-wheeler on the highway. The smell reminded him of that other war, of the mountainous Afghan town where he was stationed, of the diesel trucks and generators powering everything from street vendors’ carts to a newly-built school’s lights on dark winter mornings.  He remembered the twin boys from that school who would ask to try on his gear. He remembered them, tried to guess their ages at the time. Ten, maybe eleven at most. But with the brutal muscularity that boys have in places where strength is necessary. Tiny men’s bodies. Tiny soldier’s bodies.

The diesel smell was just one of the scents the Albuquerque wind brought to his rooftop. For a while, it was just the one smell. The decaying smell. The putrefaction of all of the bodies in the Red Cross’s makeshift emergency room. The military was able to hold off the sickened masses from the repurposed recreation center for an admirable amount of time. But as he’d seen in the other war, too, desperation makes men and women both stronger and weaker than they could ever imagine. Before long, stores of food and water were running out and even the Marines were fighting among themselves. He had watched from the rooftop as the people inside made an attempt to escape, and as they were devoured by the sickened. He had watched their bodies bake and bleach in the New Mexico sun, a few reanimating to scavenge the streets. For days the death-stench would waft upward to his post, but as the desert heat intensified into the midsummer months, and as the monsoons washed their blood into the gutters, the sage-filled, sandy, summer smell returned. The smell of his childhood at his grandfather’s ranch in Bernalillo. And of course, the smell of teenage summertimes, parked in the desert, making love to her in the backseat of his Chevy Nova.

He arched his back, stretched his muscles, tried to focus on the pain in his back instead of the pain all over that every memory of her would always inspire. He stared intently through the scope of the sniper rifle, hoping that a target would make itself plain, something he could take down. Usually popping a sickened or two would take his mind off of her. It didn’t last long, but it helped get him through the day. The roof of the high-school-turned-lofts had a splendid view of downtown, offering a vantage point for most of Central Boulevard and parts of the surrounding neighborhoods. Usually there was something to kill. And nothing short of killing something kept her from creeping back into his mind.

Today was tougher, though. It was October now, and the leaves on the few deciduous trees downtown were changing to a fierce yellow. The breeze tossed the leaves like confetti into the air, and imbued it with the bitter, tea-like perfume of autumn. He didn’t know what day of the month it was, and even “October” was a tenuous guess, but it was close enough. He remembered seeing her for the first time in her wedding dress, walking under the Old Town Square trees to the gazebo, a slow cascade of yellow leaves falling around her as she walked. Must have been almost ten years ago, he thought, desperately scanning the boulevards for a sickened to take down. He remembered her black hair gently blowing back from her bare, freckled shoulders as she approached him. He remembered her smile, all red lipstick and crooked teeth and nervousness. He remembered kissing the bride.

Pop.

An elderly sickened emerged from an underpass and immediately slumped to the ground. The soldier’s mind refocused for a moment. He took another breath and began to scan the arroyos.

It had to be close to their anniversary. Which meant it was also close to the ten-year-mark of when he was shipped off. Which meant it was close to the eight-year mark of when she started fucking his stepbrother. He hunched his shoulders.

Movement, then, faint at first but growing louder. He strained to hear. A familiar shuffling and muted, bestial howls. There were a lot of them, somewhere close and getting closer. First just a few were visible, walking the middle of a dry arroyo. Then dozens, then maybe a hundred. He tried to calculate how much ammunition was still available in the sporting goods store down the street, the one he’d been raiding for months now. It was pretty picked-over when he got there, but it had sustained him this far. His mind briefly alighted on a long-term plan. How much longer would he stay, picking off the sickened, passively waiting for signs of healthy life while feeding off the canned goods left in the lofts below? He walked to the opposite corner of the rooftop, toward the direction of the wailing sounds of the sickened. They had someone, he thought. They always howled like that when they were hunting live prey.

Then he saw her. Through the scope it was unclear at first, then his heart swelled into his throat and beat at a rabbit’s pace. She was bitten. Probably only hours from sickening. They were after her. She was limping down the arroyo, trying at times to walk up the the sides, but it only slowed her down. Her hair blew around her face as the breeze gusted into a full-blown desert wind. Dust and sand obscured her for a moment, then she was clear in the frame of the rifle scope.

He remembered the first night they slept together. Blake’s burgers and a sunset, vanilla cokes, driving to the top of Sandia, finding a dark spot to pull over, making love in the way only teenagers do, as if death were coming and only their fumbling passion could hold it off another day. He remembered the last time he’d seen her before today. The day he came home. A party with American flags and his grandmother’s tamales. And her, making an obligatory, wounding appearance, smiling sadly at his friends and family. It had all been said by then, of course. She was young, she couldn’t wait or him, they both had changed, Ernesto had been there for her, but could they please still be friends? The same cliches he’d seen with half his platoon. Young men, young women, impatience. Love that, when tested by PTSD, amputations and every kind of distance, doesn’t survive.

She and the mob were much closer now, and now; he was positive it was her. She was thinner, like everyone who had survived. She was flushed and obviously weakened. Blood stained her dark green pants near a wound on her thigh. She was losing ground to the sickened. She must know from the bite that she has no hope of survival, he thought. She knows… but she’s still running. But then, what choice does she have? Their peculiar, plaintive calls echoed from the bowl of the arroyo.

He arched his back, stood up. He stretched his neck from side to side. There was the familiar anger within him, the anger that had fueled the killing of dozens of insurgents and by now, God knows how many sickened. Before he had found out about her and Ernesto, the killing had been harder. He shook when he aimed. He’d shake for hours afterward. He was told he would never be a sniper and they suspended his training, tried to figure out how to use him. But once the divorce papers were signed, the trigger nearly pulled itself. He was a bullet-delivery unit. A conduit for swift and accurate death. The best sniper they had, they said. When they redeployed him, time and time again, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t his anymore. And since then, the only world he cared about was the one he saw in the crosshairs.

Squaring his shoulders again, he took aim, tracking her down the arroyo. She was almost walking directly toward the lofts, slower now, as the sickened, and the sickness, began to close in on her. Desperately, she was looking around her, as if trying to see everything she could before she could see nothing at all. A gust picked up, and a shower of locust leaves, yellow and small, fell around her, onto the sickened, all around. She looked up. It was almost as if she was looking at him, her black hair swirling around her face. He breathed out and squeezed the trigger. The shot was clean. Her neck arched, and she fell back. The locust leaves fell gently onto her body.  

He took to the matter of the rest. Mechanically, accurately, he took them down as they converged on her motionless body. He exhausted a clip before the sickened began to disperse. They would eventually move off, he’d discovered, if the smell of their own dead overwhelmed that of the fresh. They wandered away from her body, their howls quieting into the grunts and growls signifying a failed hunt.

He turned around and slumped to the ground, leaning his back against the short wall of the rooftop. He shook. Shaking as though it were his first kill. Shaking like after that moment on Sandia. He took the barrel of the rifle in his mouth a moment, shaking, sobbing, the butt of the gun resting between his feet. How to pull the trigger now?

No. Not yet.

He threw the rifle to his side. It skittered and spun on the rooftop, landing with the scope and barrel pointed toward him. He folded his arms on his knees and sobbed heavily, like a child. He arched his neck and screamed, the sound of it echoing through the silent, ruined city. As the sound faded, he sat in silence, breathing deeply, looking straight ahead. The sun hung full and low behind him, though it was only afternoon. Shadows of trees, buildings, his own shadow, were stretched long against the low orange cast of the autumn sunshine. It would be winter soon. He had to make a choice.

He walked over, picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He walked to his pack of food and water, nestled in a corner of the rooftop’s low, brick wall, and picked it up. He looked down, the long way down to Central Boulevard. Time to go, he thought. Maybe there was nothing left, maybe he would die in the desert. But he had to get the hell out of Albuquerque.

One of my favorite tweeps, Rob Delaney, recently posted a story for Vice Magazine where he walked down memory lane and told his readers why he thought each presidential candidate he’d ever voted for was worth his ballot. While Rob is a hilarious man and he has the 140-character tweet format down to a virtuosic science, his long-form story here was not only funny but thoughtful and profound as well. The part that really stuck out to me is this:

“I placed so much stock in Edwards’ health plan because I am unable to shake the belief that there is anything more important to our nation’s future than A. access to affordable healthcare and B. education. Make it easier for your citizens to be healthy and smart and they will save you in ways you have yet to imagine.“

Rob is right. But right now we live in a culture that is detrimental in almost every possible way to our health. Healthy food is perceived to be out-of-reach for working, poorer Americans. Healthcare and insurance remain too expensive for many Americans, though strides are being made and the Affordable Care Act (presuming we’ll see it be all it can be) will help eventually. Our lives are fortified with cheap refined sugars and flours, kept sedate and inactive, and the cost or even the time investment it takes to make a priority out of preventive care ensures that many Americans never get the care they truly need. And by extension, they never reach their full potential.

And now, there is an even more pervasive problem: the idea that health is simply not an “American” virtue. Like education, multiculturalism and being informed, being healthy is becoming yet another very positive part of the human experience that is being dismissed as an “elitist” activity, which “Real” Americans can’t be concerned with. Take, for example, the recent scuffle between Anthony Bourdain and Paula Deen. Now, Bourdain already has a couple strikes against him in this battle. He’s a high-end chef and restaurateur in the French discipline (we all know that you can’t get too cozy with the French, or you make the Statue of Liberty cry… oh, wait…). He says the fuck-word a lot and tends to make snyde comments about his godlessness and cocaine-fueled indiscretions. He travels all over the world (i.e., places outside of America, which, as any True American knows, is highly unnecessary). But he really screwed the suckling pig when he lashed out on The Food Network’s very own white Aunt Jemima, Paula Deen, calling her the “worst, most dangerous person to America.”

Now, that is classic Bourdain-style hyperbole, and it overstates his point. But he does have a point: a woman who has built a media empire around recipes such as this monstrosity might consider the fallout of putting a burger between two Krispy Kremes and calling it “brunch,” when we are facing a generation that will likely live fewer years than their parents due to bad food and a bad lifestyle.

Now, Bourdain is the target of a conservative shit storm. Suddenly, he’s an “elitist,” a “blue-state paternalist,” and, in other words, not one of those “real Americans” we keep hearing about. Conveniently not bringing up the fact that Paula Deen shills for food companies, has her own brand of cookware, and is, in all probability, wealthier than Bourdain will likely ever be (why is it that a billionaire with a folksy accent can ALWAYS pull this off?), Bourdain’s detractors view her as their own food populist, one of their own. She’s the “Real” American, unfairly under fire from a Nanny-State-Lovin’ intellectual elitist with a “Let Them Eat Arugula” attitude.

But the problem with the labels used here isn’t just that people eat crap food… it is that they are proud of it. The commenters in the blogs I’ve cited here seem to think of massive portions, huge amounts of known toxins, saturated fats and refined carbs as a right. And yes, it is certainly a right to kill yourself through food. My problem: you shouldn’t be proud of it. And you shouldn’t make the disease of obesity part of our national identity. Being unhealthy is not what makes you a “Real American.” You are completely at liberty to eat as many “Ladies’ Brunch Burgers” as you like, fine, but don’t call me un-American because I find it reprehensibly self-destructive. Don’t treat your hypertension like a first-amendment right.

It’s written all over their faces when you say it. They think you’re selfish. For wanting to keep your disposable income, your firm stomach, your next 18 years to yourself. They think you will never really be a fully-realized adult, since you’ll never have know the unimaginable joy of changing diapers, or having a door slammed in your face by a red-faced pre-teen, or spending an entire afternoon and far too much hard-earned cash at a Chuck E. Cheese.

And I don’t ever say so, but I think they’re the selfish ones. They brought people into this world. THIS world. This one, right here, the one with Michele Bachmann and MURSA and Katy Perry and polygamist cults and terrorism and “How I Met Your Mother.” They chose to have babies and force them to grow up in this miserable world of corporate tax breaks and ghettos and the widest gap between the rich and the poor we’ve ever seen, and why? So they can stuff fat babies into cute, ironic onesies and name them things like “Grayden” and spend a lot of time looking down on childless people for being hopeless perpetual adolescents with nothing to live for?

The truth is, we’re both selfish. And we’re both not selfish. I don’t think I’ll ever want a baby enough to go through what it would take to make it happen. And when I do look at this world… the one with Justin Bieber and riots in London and the Kardashians and “Real Housewives of Orange County,” I sigh to myself and think, it’s probably for the best. And those people, the ones who make that choice, who decide to have those kids, they probably spend a lot more time awake at night than I do trying to think of how they can keep their children safe from all the horrible things in this world. They probably spend a lot of time thinking about how maybe their kids can help this world become less horrible, how maybe, just maybe the future might be a better place because of little Madison and Slate.

I’ll probably never have babies and you happen to have babies. This doesn’t make me the better person, it doesn’t make you a better person. We both have life experiences that make us better at things, more experienced at other things, more broad-minded than each other in different areas. Different. Not better.