Fertility and Children

April 20, 2008 bonkie02

Two Passages:

1. Pg. 306 “Meanwhile, inside, changes,

cleavages and shifting,

thickening,

zygotes in morula into hollowed

blastula, still suspended,

free-floating, until…

now…

it brushes up against the soft and spongy wall. Parasitic,

it sticks tight, begins to burrow.”

Pg. 307 “It’s not important. What I wanted to say was it fertilized the egg, you see, and last night I concieved…so I can’t have the X-ray.

You what?

A baby. I’m pregnant.

How…how do you know this?

I watched the whole thing.”

2. Pg. 326 “Twisting the dial, shuttling the tape backward and forward, running my finger across the cusp of life and death, over and over, like there’s a trick here, something that if I practice I might get good at. Sucking life back into a body. Sometimes when I think about it I cry.” “At night, though, the displaced fragments float to the surface. I shuttle back, dream the baby is alive, I feel him kicking. The body remembers.”

Explained:

The first two passages on pages 306 and 307 deal with Akiko and how she is handling fertility and children. The poem she writes on page 306 talks about how women are connected to their children both emotionally and physically. Akiko can feel her baby inside her forming because she is connected to her baby on a deep level. On page 307 she tells the Nurse how she watched her baby forming inside of her. Now I can’t say that it has never happened to women because I’m sure somewhere there’s a “crazy” lady who said she did, but I’m thinking she just imagined her baby forming because she is so attached to it. She was probably having women’s intuition. The third passage deals with Jane and how she loses her baby but still feels connected to it because she dreams of having it inside her belly still and even when she watches the baby cow being slaughtered she wants to “suck life back in” because she sees men just taking it away.

Sentence(s):

Having a baby and being pregnant with a baby connects women, not only the baby inside them, but to women all across the world. It doesn’t matter if you live in Japan or America or if you are rich or poor and pregnant women are still going to have the “same” experience while being pregnant on a broader sense. Men can’t have children so they can’t really connect to a child like a mother can and they can’t connect to each other because it isn’t like all men bench the same amount of weights or eat as much as another man.

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