The backstory: Part Two

I was born without the girly gene. Not the girl gene, I've got that one (on account of the vagina and uterus and ovaries and such). I mean the girly gene. The one that makes certain people love clothes shopping and shoes that have no business being anywhere but on display. The gene that makes fashion magazines and chick lit and the Fab Five possible. The gene people who get their hair "styled" instead of cut, and who pay any attention to condition of their finger nails and feet, have. That gene. I didn't get one. Or mine's defective or something.

Secondly--while on the topic of defective--there's the issue of my inhospitable womb. What an impossibly ridiculous term, that. An inhospitable womb. Makes you picture a shabby (uterus shaped?) hotel; dingy, smoke stained curtains, moldy mints on stained pillow cases, a front desk clerk that says "Well I'd like to be skinny and rich" when you call down and say you'd like some clean towels. However it's a uterine condition--an "environment" actually--created by a host of painful and degenerative injuries and maladies that, combined, make it so fertilized eggs won't pitch a tent and stay awhile in l'utérus de Geist. There are surgeries, I have been told. Repeatedly. My whole adult reproductive life. Which would have been great news had I ever developed the minutest desire to bear children. The fact that my body couldn't host a fetus was a lucky break in my opinion, not a condition to be remedied.

Thirdly. Anti-breeding politics. Short form: we've got enough people, people! And we have for a long time. There has yet to be a natural disaster, war, or pandemic hearty enough to reduce the population to a number we can feed let alone make breeding necessary. I could never justify making new babies when we, as a human race, aren't exactly doing a crackerjack job of providing for the ones already here--dying of starvation, or preventable disease, or languishing in the world's orphanages and in foster care. I'd always planned to have children someday, however it honestly never occurred to me to like, grow them.

So! How does a genetically impaired zero population freak with a defective uterus end up going through with a--she had been told--medically impossible pregnancy? Damned if I know. All's I know is my ankles, ass and belly are the size of honeydew melons, and the little man inside of me clearly does not care fuck-all about my politics, more masculine bend in the gender-specificity game, or the lacking hospitality in my womb: he has his own agenda. I assume we will be informed more fully at an undisclosed future date. In the meantime...

Well we've moved on uh-up.

I feel somewhat responsible for the sudden onset, blacked-out-sky downpours we've been having all week. Because I've been praying for them ever since we moved here. Manifesting, my mom would say.

See, there are two reasons we picked this apartment. The first and most important: it's three blocks from G's work. With his sixty hour (minimum) work week, proximity translates into being able spend time with me and his child--literally ever--or not. Ever. Well, odd Sunday mornings.

Second: This window

Which, with few key exceptions, is about my most favorite thing that ever there was. OH yes it's a hundred years old and the panes are cracked and the casings just gaping holes, and yes it leaks all of the heat out (which we now pay) and will no doubt make the apartment impossible to air-condition in summer, but I don't care. The floor to ceiling kitchen window overlooking a yard I can't use makes me deliriously happy. It's also the reason I've been doing dances for dark, rainy weather since we arrived. Just so I could stand there. And watch it.

The downside of the window is having to train ourselves to dress properly (read: at all) before heading to kitchen or the bathroom off the kitchen. I'd forgotten about the "if you can see them, they can see you" rule of Rear Window physics until I spied the Occasionally Naked Rabbi* one night, across the way, getting a book off the bookshelf in the all-together. He's not creepy or anything, no exhibitionist, there's no "hey lookee mee!" about it. Just a man at home, who, as I said, occasionally walks through his living room nude at night, who I never would have seen at all had I not made it a habit to stare out my window all hours hoping for rain.

So. That's the update. We're here. Safe, sound, happy and penniless.

* I have no proof he's a Rabbi. It's an assumption based on how he dresses (like a Rabbi) and where we now live (the epicenter of Judaic/Rabbinical study). And it makes a better story.