How to Love Claire Mason

Baby

I told myself I'd never have a child of my own. I'd adopt from some war-torn, third world country where babies are abandoned on the streets like soda cans on any given highway in the USA. Because it was the philanthropic thing to do.

Or so I pretended was the reason.

The real reason, the driving force behind my early, stubborn decision to adopt, was selfish. It was vain. It was everything an A-list celebrity who adopts is slammed for being.

It was because I didn't want to be fat. Having a child of your own means, inevitably, pregnancy, which inevitably involves excessive weight gain to support the little person inside you, which ultimately, to me, spells FAT in big red letters with a capital F.

And fat, under any circumstances, baby or no baby, is unacceptable. Can't happen. Just can't. For me to be fat would be the end of me. The end of all things sane and safe and okay in my life.

So that's why adoption was my predetermined route for acquiring a child. You don't get fat and you look like a charitable, caring, selfless humanitarian. With a great body.

But now that I'm getting thin again, now that everything is so numb and so empty and so meaningless; now that a jagged hole has been ripped in me through which my very soul and being seems to have escaped off to somewhere where the grass is always, always greener, I have a yearning.

The joking I keep to myself is starting to become more real. Me, pregnant. Sure, it'd be a curse. Sure, it'd be like stabbing myself a thousand times in the heart while sitting in the depths of Hell, but it'd also give me a reason. A meaning. A purpose.

It'd give me something to hold onto, when everything seems to have slipped through my fingers like water. It'd give me something to love, that would always love me back. A tiny human being, in all it's innocence and blissful ignorance, could never hurt me. It could only need and want me and miss me when I'm away. I could hold it in my arms until my arms weakened beneath it, and not once could it turn to me and say, "I don't love you Claire."

I could love it without the pain that seems to come hand in hand with the bittersweet adventures I've always known as love. I could wake up every morning knowing I had a reason to be breathing. It wouldn't matter how I looked; if my hair was tangled or if my clothes were frumpy and wrinkled. It wouldn't matter how much of a belly I had or whether or not my thighs touched. It wouldn't matter if my eyeliner had run or even if I was wearing any or not. The love a child, a pure, unaffected, newborn baby, would be completely and utterly unconditional.

And that is what I need more than anything.

Now, when my hands move to my stomach, I imagine a bump. The slightest, almost imperceptible little bump, but a bump at that. A baby bump. I imagine a tiny little boy, or perhaps a girl, growing inside me, within my narrow frame. I walk around thinking, willing myself to believe that their is a human life beginning inside me. Though I hate the body that contains it, though I starve it and abuse it, I would give anything to see this baby born. But there is no baby. Yet I find solace in daydreaming of one every day now. And during those fantasies, a warm, fuzzy feeling bubbles up inside me. It warms my whole belly and fills me with a fluttery kind of joy.

It's the kind of feeling you only get when the cute boy you've been eyeing for what seems like light years finally makes eye contact and starts walking toward you and talking to you and then suddenly you're on a date in a coffee shop and he's holding your hand and then you're alone with him and its so dark you can't see and things happen you can't comprehend and then it's over and the next week he's gone and......

I wouldn't care. If the child was his. In fact, I'd prefer it if it were. At least then, I'd have something to show for it, for that day in the red room. Something to prove it wasn't all a waste. Some would call it a mistake. I'd call it salvation.

I just want a baby now, more than I've ever wanted anything. More than I even wanted his love. That is, pretty fucking bad.