adorable

Also this is still just one big family reunion. I found my people trudging along in their finest, pissed off, catty, judging and criticizing all of creation. I just popped in to say hi, but there were a few babies I hadn't met yet. No one even told me they were born. How could that be?

One baby was in my grandmother's arms and another was bundled up in a double stroller. The one in the pushchair looked the way one would expect a baby to look, but the other– I hardly have words for what was happening there, physically. It was as though half the head was smashed in, an eyeball dangling loosel, casting about wildly in all directions. Its body wasn't like what we expect in bodies. Misproportioned and flattened in places, arms too short to reach anything and without the muscular development or incentive to even try. They were infants, but already cast out and rejected. My family expressing the depths of their disappointment and anger at the burden of their births at every instant.

The baby that had been carried in arms, in the time it took for me to turn my head to look away and then turn it back, was dropped on the ground and abandoned. The family kept walking along in the slow queue, acting like they didn't even know that howling child. Like they're not with us. I swooped in to pick it up and I understood instantly why they rejected it so fiercely. It wasn't just an issue of deformity or aesthetics, this new life was fundamentally different from anything their minds were prepared for. Profoundly different. There would never be eye contact, there would never be spoken words. The child demanded a kind of nourishment and care that my people couldn't conceive of. They would never see themselves in this child. Would never hear laughter ringing in their ears, or hear "I love you" parroted back to them in small, sweet voices.

Some popular media has been trying to prepare people for this change for many years, depicting children and small beings endowed with psychic gifts and great strength, but they always show them being irresistibly cute, adorable. God don't make ugly, other humans do. Many humans, whatever they look like on the surface, actually move through their entire lives harboring ugliness deep within their hearts mistakenly imagining that no one around them can see or feel it.

I held the child in my arms and tried my best to care for them, at least shield them from the violence these people were enacting in their ignorance, greed and selfishness— forever wanting things to go according to their own desires, lashing out unpredictably when life doesn't meet their expectations. 

I couldn't tell what the child needed to eat, but it seemed to be choking on whatever they had been feeding it. The food they were giving it to become strong and beautiful, to improve vision and hearing, it might as well have been poison. They're not getting what they need. What they need isn't flesh, it isn't our fawning or demands either. More than anything they need safety and protection. They also need to be with each other.