Ripshit Heart

I was adopted because infertility runs in my family. All the female descendents of the Schoenwalds have adopted kids. I'm not sure where they went wrong--maybe it is a good thing, though. Apparently my Great-Grandmother Laura (after whom my mother was named) was kind of a freak. My Great-Aunt Julia remembers things that she won't share with anyone out of embarassment and/or shock and horror. Among the things she will share:

GGM Laura used to stand naked in front of the windows of their ground-level apartment on a busy NY street. She also used to like to kiss grandfather on the mouth, even when he got "Too old." I only know of the woman who, when her children complained of being bored, she would tell them to "go count their pubic hairs." Of course, she did this in Hungarian, which makes it a quaint olde worlde story.

I think it's a blessing that my mother didn't get to pass on her genes. It's proof that there really is some sort of God-Like being out there, that he or she saw fit to smite my mother's womb, and at the same time cause the end of my father's rather freakish line. He's an only child. We're his only adopted children. My grandmother's genes stop with him, and that's really not such a bad thing considering.

Although she was not able to carry a baby to full term, Moth was able to get pregnant; she just had a lot of miscarriages. One time she got knocked up by her psycho boyfriend Everett when I was about 12. I remember distinctly the whole discussion about abortion, and how it's good that women still have the right to choose. My sister cried, because she wanted a baby sister. Moth assured her that any kid she would have, should she even be able to give birth to a baby, would be retarded, because that's what happens when people over 40 have kids. "Do you really want a retarded baby sister? It'll be like having a baby sister for the rest of your life, because she won't ever mentally age!" This made my sister calm down a bit.

Moth decided to go to Syracuse (40 miles away) to have the abortion. I was chosen to accompany her on this mission. On the way there, she regaled tales of how everyone she knows has had at least one abortion. Even my grandmother aborted a kid ("I should say 'fetus' because it's not actually a baby yet) back in the 20's before it was even legal! My aunt apparently got kicked out of her Scary Fundamentalist Christian Cult because she had "too many abortions!" So, I got to sit in the waiting room of the doctor's office reading Highlights for Children and watching the tropical fish in the aquarium swim in and out of their fake sunken ship while my half-sibling-fetus was aborted.

I am not pro-life by any stretch of the imagination, and I know my convictions are strong because probably having to sit through your mother's abortion while she talks casually about it as if she were getting a cavity filled would probably make anyone scarred for life. However, it was a few weeks after the abortion that things started to go wrong. She went back to the doctor, and he tried to tell her that she had a Molar Pregnancy which happens to 1 out of 1000 people. She described it as when the embryo actually turns into cancer. She didn't think this was true.

It turns out that the doctor just didn't remove all the fetus.
"You mean they left, like an arm or a leg behind?"
"Well, sort of. Maybe. It's not really a baby yet. It could just be a bunch of cells."

We went back to the doctor and again I got to read Highlights while she argued with the doctor about malpractice. All the way home she made remarks like "that cocksucker! Who does he think he is?"

Eventually the problem was corrected, though I didn't know exactly how, nor do I really want to know. And she wonders why I don't have any kids now!

posted by Scooter B. @ 10/20/2005 08:55:00 PM