Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Three years and a day

Saturday, Sept. 9, 2006
1:28 p.m.
Believe it or not, yesterday marked my third anniversary at Diaryland. That is utterly unbelievable, especially since I started this diary wondering what the hell I was getting into. But it's been a fantastic three years. I've made friends, I've lost friends, I've learned things, and I've become totally addicted to the Diaryland chatroom, but more on that later (perhaps, we'll see).

Anyway, I have tackled the problem of love before and I thought I would do so again. I am a subscriber to a publication (among others) which specializes in cautionary tales set in the not-too and distant future. The story in question, called The P0p Squad by Pa0I0 BacigaIupi takes place in a North America (Newfoundland is mentioned once) where the coastlines are flooded and the interior is a jungle due to global warming. People are amazingly wealthy and live forever, thanks to a process called "rej00" which stops them aging at whatever point they start taking it. It also makes them sterile, but in a society where everyone lives forever, you don't want population growth anyway. In fact, it is illegal. Still, there are people who will stop taking their treatments in order to become fertile and produce babies. They hide in houses overgrown by the jungle and try to live out of sight of the authorities and any neighbours who might report them.

The main character in the story is a policeman whose job it is to arrest these women and dispose of their illegal offspring. That means killing them, plain and simple, usually by shooting them through the head. The mothers end up in a same-sex work camp where they will probably live for another 20 years before dying for lack of rej00 treatments. At one point he sees a woman buying a train set in a "collectibles" store. No one buys toys anymore, it is impossible to get anything related to children and child rearing, but there are still dolls and stuffed animals, and he has found the shop because someone gave his girlfriend, a star violist who sill looks like she's 19, although she's probably more like 119, a stuffed dinosaur, similar to one that was in the hands of a baby he had dispatched the previous day. He recognizes this woman as a mom, the unmistakable food stains on her clothes, the fact that she's carrying around extra fat and her clothes don't fit properly, and finds out where she lives. He ends up paying her a visit, even though the p0p squad hasn't been alerted yet to her transgressions, in other words, she hasn't been caught.

In the course of his visit to her place, he asks her why "you women" keep doing it, go off rej00 and squirt out babies. She answers that she doesn't want to live forever, she wants to see the world anew through the eyes of her child. At this point, I won't reveal anything more of the story, because somebody might not have read it and I don't want to give the ending away. But it did get me to thinking about why we do have children and why we are so attached to them when they are squalling brats who need constant attention, are always dirty, keep us awake at nights, grow up and disappoint us, and then never call and put us in old-folks' homes.

Human beings, like other animals, have a built-in imperative to reproduce. In simpler terms, we come with a sex drive. Unlike other members of the animal kindom who are only interested in reproduction when the female is in heat, we are always interested in gratifying our sexual desires. Society has developed all sorts of niceties to prevent rampant population growth such as: saving sex for marriage, saving sex for the bedroom (or the back seat of a car), and birth control. Since the world population has passed the six billion mark, I don't think these are particularly effective, at least not the first two. But I digress.

In a primitive society, such as one where people live in caves, wear animal skins and aren't too sure where their next meal is coming from, it is very important for a woman with a child to have a male protector. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied this long and hard, and have surmised that most male/female pairings lasted for about four years, which would have coincided with the child (finally) being weaned from the breast and the mother freed up from constantly being in attendance. (I have no idea how a woman can breastfeed for four years, nor how a child can possibly want it that long, seeing as how both my kids quit on me before a year, but that's another story.) At that four-year mark, the couple may choose to part ways, and pair up with different partners, repeating the cycle.

So, what keeps a family of this sort together? The only thing I can think of is "love". It can't just be sexual proximity (a guy can get sex anywhere, or so we've been led to believe), there has to be something else, a bond which makes a man decide he wants to hang out with a woman and nurture the kid they've created together. In our modern society, we bind couples together with ceremonies and legalities, making dissolution inconvenient, if not downright difficult. Women are not stuck caring for babies 24/7, many now employ nannies or take advantage of day-care so that they can enter the working force and make a living wage. In cave times, this would have translated into the older women looking after the children so the mothers could plant beans in an adjacent field. So where does love come into all this?

We all know what it is. We all have a really hard time describing it. As a mother, I love my children. I desire their well-being over my own; I would go hungry so that they got enough to eat. In other words, it seems that the love of children means the willingness to sacrifice yourself so that they might live and be well. What about the love of a mate? Is it the same thing? Actually, even though I love my husband very much, and I have sacrificed plenty to ensure that our marriage succeeds, I still think I would sacrifice more for my kids.

So how do you know that you would be willing to sacrifice anything to be with or to ensure the wellbeing of a certain person? When it comes to one's children, there isn't any question. But when you choose a mate, how do you know? What is love? Why do we keep doing what we do?

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