Q

by Christina Dalcher

When I was young, I had dreams of the Child Catcher from that old musical, the one with the flying car and Dick Van Dyke stumbling through a bad British accent. He lurked outside my house in predawn shadows, grease-slicked black hair and Pinocchio nose. Waiting.

It. This single word covers all kinds of sins, from backseat gropes after a high school dance, to putting the dog down when he’s too old and too needy, to taking a fetus from a woman’s belly. Sex, euthanasia, abortion.

Children are resilient, I think. And that’s good in so many ways—they fall down, they dust themselves off, they get back up and do it all over again. But resilience brings a sort of callousness with it, an acceptance and tolerance that piggyback along.

Teenagers are like hobbits: breakfast, second breakfast, that odd prelunch snack the Brits call elevenses, lunch, and so on.

Or the state school headmistress persona. When you’re dealing with hundreds of hormonal adolescents on a daily basis, you need to put on your hard-ass mask and let the world know you won’t take any shit from it. Personally, I’ve always suspected there’s a course in education programs the rest of us don’t know about. Something titled How to Be a Bitch and Still Keep Your Job 101.

Maybe all mothers are semi-insane. Maybe that’s part of the deal we make when we decide to let our bodies become hosts,

I guess in the same way there are bug politics, there are kid politics. He’s got blue eyes; she has brown. Go with the one most like you. She’s fat; he’s thin. Go with the one who looks more like a mirror image. He’s Irish; she’s English. Identify with the known.

We’ve always done this, we humans in our little societies. We categorize and compare and devise ways to separate ourselves into teams, not so differently from the rituals of a grade school gym class. I pick her, we say. But not him. Someone is always last; someone is always at the bottom of the barrel, the last to be chosen.

They say it’s postpartum depression. Or hormones. Or who knows what. But I knew then what the deal was—a simple matter of trading myself for my baby, should it ever come to that.

We tell our girls when they start their periods that they’re women. We say trite things like You’re a woman now. Does the converse also hold? At the other end, when nature stops us, do we become unwomen?

The technology changed, but girls are girls, new women, life stretching out before them, futures unplanned and uncertain. What killed my birthday buzz was that old sonofabitch called time.