Electing to Have Kids

Some people will vomit if they see, smell, or merely intuit the vomit of others. My wife, for example. At our house, the cleaning up of mislaid bodily functions falls to me. We have a 2-year-old and a pug, so I keep busy enough.

Our pug has a simple means of determining if something is edible. She eats it, then waits. One might think this flies in the face of self-preservation, even evolution. But one need only look at a pug to clear up any confusion. Natural selection cannot be held accountable for this creature. Like so many dog breeds, the pug’s continued existence is an insult to Nature. Hell, bulldogs can barely even mate anymore. The males are too heavy and prone to overheating—making artificial insemination the only realistic means of bringing more bulldogs into this world. And pugs, with their two-dimensional face, are prone to respiratory issues, such as not being able to inhale or exhale. Do you think wolves know about pugs? I wonder if they appreciate that pugs greatly outnumber them.

I was getting on an airplane the other day when I saw a mother and her son waiting near the ticket scanner. She was 20-something and he was 2-something. He was on the floor, dangling from her hand in the way only the very young and the very drunk can. She essentially held the tentacle of a giant squid. This duo ended up sitting across the aisle from me. She buckled herself in and stared into oblivion while her son inventoried the seat pocket. Her face was ashen even before we took off. I went ahead and assumed that she was on some kind of drug(s). Attending to our flight was a graying but fit older man—civil, I’d say, but not affectionate—and a middle-aged woman with blonde highlights. Of the two, hers turned out to be the healthier aversion to human vomit.

Perhaps it was this aversion that prompted her to retrieve the oxygen tank from the overhead bin—an ounce of prevention. The tank was about the size of a deli salami, with a regulator valve and a tube that ran to a soft plastic mask. The flight attendant gave it to the mother, who thanked her. The son watched, fascinated, as his mother fastened the mask to her face and breathed the cool, pure gas. He took her at her word when she assured him all was well. Her face flushed from silver-ish to gunmetal-ish. Her eyes drooped. The mask hissed gently. I tried to concentrate on my crossword, but I’m no good at them even when conditions are ideal, let alone when seated directly across from the plane’s second-most-interesting passenger.

The first-most-interesting passenger, for the time being, was actually the guy in the row ahead of us. A Brazilian wearing Nike from head to toe. Literally. As in, not only was every visible piece of clothing and footwear bearing The Swoosh, but a 6-inch version of the logo had been cultivated on the back of his head. The rest of his scalp was shorn save for a cute little mohawk toward the front. I knew he was from Brazil because the flight attendant asked. Because of where he was sitting he couldn’t see what the mother and her son were up to without making it obvious. As the situation escalated, he had to cock his ear to listen and look out the corner of his eye toward me, to register my reaction to the goings-on as consolation for not being able to witness them firsthand. When our eyes met he’d raise his brow, as if to say, “what’s the report?” And I’d make a face that conveyed the tone, if not the specifics, of the situation. In Portuguese.

The mother lay her head back and took shallow breaths. Her son was seated beside her. He wasn’t buckled in, but no need: he had become strangely calm. The mother closed her eyes, maybe thinking she could steal a few seconds of sleep. The barf bag she’d been issued sat in her lap like a napkin. The particulars of this scene didn’t change really when it happened. The boy was still staring somewhat confusedly up at his mother, his legs straight out in the big-person chair. His mouth agape.

Main difference was, he’d become a fountain of vomit. Not a showy Las Vegas fountain. More the gurgling English garden variety. Dignified and understated. He didn’t cry or make a scene. Just sat quite still, gurgling and gurgling and gurgling. His little belly pumped in and out. By the time his mother reacted he’d coated the chair, the seatbelt, the armrests, his clothes, the magazine pouch, the carpet and the straps of the oxygen tank. Finally it stopped and he got a good breath and he began to whimper as tears came to his eyes. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorrier for the mother.

She unbuckled herself and got up. She bent over and told her son through the mask that all was well and she started to undress him. A wizened black gentleman in the window seat beside them set down his newspaper. A moat now separated him from the rest of the plane. The sheer volume of fluid seemed to somehow exceed the volume of its original container. It now seemed quite possible that, in some parallel dimension, this boy actually was a giant squid.

The mother worked slowly but diligently. Off came her son’s shirt, followed by his shoes and socks, last his pants. She put the clothes in a little pile in the aisle, then used a SkyMall catalogue to scrape off the floor and seat cushions. Through it all she never removed the mask. While the air conditioning system began circulating the acrid fumes throughout the cabin, she chose to breathe cool, fresh O2. And for this I can’t say I blame her.

The flight attendants were summoned. The man in the window seat looked up at them imploringly. Something must be done, he said, if only with his eyes. The female attendant turned her back on the mess and whispered something to her colleague. He nodded, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. While he plucked clothes off the floor and put them in a garbage bag, she made a speedy retreat to the back of the plane—where she was to remain for awhile.

The mother stood next to my seat. She had yet to register a real reaction. Beneath her mask, her pale mouth continued to frown, her eyes to droop. I got the impression she was thinking of falling back to sleep. Her son meanwhile was apparently feeling awesome. He was running up and down the length of the plane in just his diaper, giggling and shrieking, and I was glad for the little guy. May we all at some point know the undiluted joy of cavorting without clothes or self-awareness before seated strangers, high on that unlikely, lightheaded euphoria that follows a good puke.

It was fun to watch people react to the situation. Some found the boy adorable, others not so much. My take was: not my 2-year-old. Mine was at home running rampant on my wife. In less than an hour they would pick me up at the airport. Both of them soft and soaped and shampooed and I whiskered and weary. When I landed I would be a functioning dad again.

My mom recently referred to parenting as a painful joy. The more days I spend with my daughter the more it’s just joy. I hear it shifts back though, around age 13. Before she was born I loved my wife with all my heart. So, now that she’s here, have I reallocated my heart so that some of it loves my wife and some of it my little girl? Could a pie chart help convey the human capacity for love?

Maybe. Charts are wonderful.

Or, there’s this house in California. Built by Sarah Winchester, widow of the gun magnate. She broke ground in 1884, but never stopped adding on. For 38 straight years it was under construction. Place has like forty bedrooms. Forty-seven fireplaces. Five or six kitchens, depending on your definition of a kitchen.

You see where I’m going with this.

__________

At some point, a set of absorbent cloth squares were spread out on the floor and across the seats to sop up the mess. When at last the female flight attendant thought it safe to return to the front of the plane she came armed with a little spray can.

Is it okay with you all if I spray some of this? she asked. It’s just some lemon essence. It won’t bother anyone?

One guy actually said he preferred the smell of sick.

No—of course no one said that. We nodded vigorously. We all but sang in harmony, one voice for change: Yes you can! Yes you can! And spray she did. Her aim might have seemed random. It wasn’t. It was all-inclusive. Her spritzing liberal. The aerosol floated across aisles. A refreshing moment in our nation’s history.

It just struck me that maybe the reason that the wolves aren’t cranking out litters and running rampant is because they see something we pugs don’t. A world that doesn’t deserve their superior offspring. I read an article the other day about Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power. He’s on the shortlist for a Supreme Court seat, works at Harvard, writes books about everything: cloning, Wikipedia, animal rights, pornography, Bob Dylan. She’s a journalist who won a Pulitzer about America’s responses to recent genocides, helped start the Save Darfur movement. Oh, and she also works at Harvard. They met on the Obama campaign, where they were both working as advisors to Barack. They’re soon to be married.

Will they elect to have kids? Should they? Or should the Cass Sunsteins and Samantha Powers of the world go into hiding and wait until we run out of food in our bowls and starve ourselves into extinction? Then have kids.

If you just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, you might think so. If you read it some time ago, you’ve likely by now come around to thinking Ayn Rand is an asshole. Or maybe you saw Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy. If you didn’t, no biggie—it’s not very good. But it should have been: the premise is brilliant. There’s this average guy who ends up hibernating for around 500 years and when he wakes up, America has become ridiculously stupid (as in, the Oscar-winning movie that year is 90 minutes of a naked human butt on screen). So this average guy is now the smartest person in the country. The reason for the widespread stupidity is that idiots have far out-bred those who never end up having kids because they’re always thinking they need more career stability or more maturity or insert perfectly rational reason here.

I’ve veered away from my own poorly executed premise. Let’s get back to the sick. The seats at this point looked like a hazmat scene. And the mother was just where we left her, standing like a zombie in the aisle, watching the flight attendant clean up the mess while she breathed oxygen from a tank with puke on the straps and let her little boy have free reign of the plane. The mother, as luck would have it, was the type who can’t deal with puke and soon slipped into the lavatory. I could hear her retching in there. The Brazilian could too. He just shook his head.

Such a good boy, I heard a woman behind me say. The little guy had pulled up next to her seat to suck on his fingers. He was probably wondering where his mother went.

The television screens were showing something about a river in China, all chocolate-milky at flood stage. I didn’t have my headset on so I didn’t know what exactly the show was about. But the images were great. Evidently, there was no bridge in the area and so to get across the river the villagers had rigged up a zip line. They’d snap into a harness and shoot out over the churning river, then pull themselves along hand-over-hand up to the opposite shore. One man tethered not only himself to the line but also his goat. Mothers braved the crossing with children on their chests. The look on their faces placid. This was just how they got across. Then, a little later, the televisions showed some nature program about a troop of monkeys high in a jungle canopy. The mother monkeys were swinging effortlessly from limb to limb with babies clinging to their chests.

By this time, the mother on my flight was out of the lavatory. She and her son now had a whole row to themselves, after a few people volunteered to give up their seats. Out of nowhere, the mother started singing Yesterday. The pitch not perfect but the lyrics word for word. Oh I believe, in yesterday… Nicely and quietly. I dared not turn around to ogle them, so I had to imagine what they looked like, and I imagined the Pieta. Her eyes glazed from exhaustion and stress and whatever else. His eyes unbiased. Her heart getting a new kitchen.

We do the best we can, us parents—at least most of us. It’s easy to argue that the best and brightest should breed and breed, but who’s to say they’d be good parents? There are no ideal candidates for reproduction. Hell, a dude just gave birth to a baby. Who can say what compels us to bring children into this world? Sure, there’s the disproportionate allotment of nerve endings in the groin region, but at a fundamental level, there’s a belief in tomorrow. Or there should be.

I’ll tell you what also sweetens the deal, at least for me: a little lemon essence.