Foust 3rd Writing Assignment

Hi Everybody: this is a re-write of the revision I posted on week I, the piece called Trimesters II. thanks for your help with this--I followed many of your suggestions. I do plan to return to that first piece, but as a separate essay. If the graphics (the venn diagrams) do not come through on this then I will send it to you as an email attachment. Thanks, Becky

Venn Diagrams

1.

According to Wikipedia, a normal human pregnancy lasts about 38 weeks after conception, a time span “somewhat arbitrarily divided into three trimester periods.” That “arbitrarily” fascinates me and encourages me to think about the notion of trimesters applied not just during pregnancy but also to whole life spans, both actual and expected. I’m 56, with an expected life span of 80 years, so the trimesters of my projected life—you could call them “putative” trimesters—began when I was 1, 27, and 55 years old. Thinking about lives in this way, in chunks that overlap with other chunks of other lives makes me recall the Venn Diagrams once commonly used to teach elementary logic.

Mom died fourteen years ago when she was 70 and I was 41, so a Venn Diagram of our actual lives together would show circles that overlap about 3/4 of my circle and slightly more than half of hers. A Venn Diagram of my son’s and my actual lives together—he is 26 and I am 56—locates his circle entirely inside mine and overlapping it by about half; until I die, no part of his circle exists outside my own. In Venn Diagram terms, he is still in the womb:

            

But in a Venn Diagram of our expected lives, a different picture emerges, our circles intersecting midway, and each of us at the end having lived about half our lives with and half without the other.

What concerns me is that empty space to the left of the area of intersection, that space where E.__’s circle does not contain a single point of my own.

2.

I am 30, in the second trimester of a life predicted to last 80 years, and also in the second trimester of my first pregnancy, in the middle of the middle of things.

                                

I’m reading a book, probably What to Expect When You are Expecting, that says something along the lines of what you can read on the internet now:

Welcome to your second trimester, also referred to as the "golden trimester" by many! First of all you are no longer experiencing many of the initial symptoms of early pregnancy.  You are also in that middle period where the baby is not yet big enough to create new pains in your body.  Gone (for the most part) are the nauseous feelings and sleepless nights.  You are starting to regain that energy that you never thought would return and you are very optimistic about your pregnancy.  

In the second trimester of her pregnancy with me, my mother was also in the middle of the middle of things, 27 and in the second trimester of her life. It was then that she began to bleed. The bleeding stopped when she took the prescription standard for miscarriages in 1957—DES—the drug that, 56 years later, Wikipedia tells me causes defects in the reproductive organs of female fetuses. Defects that, when those fetuses grow up, may cause them to miscarry their own unborn young.                                

I develop a whopping case of premature labor and spend most of my golden trimester in three hospitals. During that time and on through the (even-less-golden) third trimester my son is bathed in a chemical soup of magnesium sulfate dripped from an IV into my wrist and terbutaline pumped through a needle inserted into the muscle of my thigh.

In his second trimester, my son grows from an invisible blastula into a comma, a grain of sand, of rice. On the ultrasounds, his heartbeat looks like a pulsating star. He swells into a seed, a pea, a lima bean, then minnow and I feel his first flutterings. He is a blind, newborn kitten, and against a grainy gray background, I can see his face. I see him bring his thumb to his mouth, see him open his eyes.

In the third trimester he is a leaping fish, then something too big to do anything but turn, radically changing the topography of my belly by heaving up a mountain on one side and carving a valley on the other. Sometimes I make out a smaller bump—unmistakably a foot, or a fist. Together, we make it full term, to almost 38 weeks.

3.

The life expectancy of a male born in the US in 1988 is 77 years, dividing my son’s expected life after birth into putative trimesters, each lasting about 26 years, beginning when he is 0, 26, and 54. On the first day of his first putative trimester he is in trouble, wedged in the birth canal with the umbilical cord wrapped wire-tight around his neck. When the doctor tries to slip a finger beneath it, the cord breaks. Like any torn artery, it pumps and sprays like water through a fire hose and E.__ loses two-thirds of his blood volume, most of it onto the green wall just beyond my stirruped feet.

My baby spends an indeterminate number of seconds lasting an eternity still in inside me but disconnected from his placenta. Forceps are produced, and during another indeterminate number of seconds lasting an eternity, he lies in terrible silence on a steel table surrounded by a thicket of green scrubs whose hands work over him with a suction pump. Until at last I hear it—one tiny, exhausted sigh.

“He’ll live,” the doctor says, after the third transfusion and a week in the neonatal ICU. “There’ll be issues,” says a nurse when, three weeks later, we wrap him up in the sweater, booties and cap Mom knitted while we were waiting to bring him home. “Be ready,” the nurse says.

By the time he is 13 years old and halfway through the first trimester of his expected life E.__ is diagnosed with the all the alphabet soup acronym disorders: ADHD, OCD, NVLD (nonverbal learning disorder), PD (panic disorder) and my personal favorite, PDNOS (personality disorder not otherwise specified). I look down the long, dark corridor of future and see at its end: institutionalization, jail, death.

But in ninth grade he is diagnosed—this time, correctly—with Aspergers, and when he leaves middle school, things begin slowly to change. He moves up the social ladder from actively-shunned-and-beaten-up-bullied to merely ignored, an improvement that lessons the frequency and duration of the panic attacks. Learning to tell time with his cell phone and how to drive, he gains independence and makes his first real friends since the ones made (then lost when we moved house) in kindergarten. From the basement I hear voices and laughter while boys play board games, video games, and computer games. An agnostic on my most spiritual days, I sometimes find myself kneeling, one ear pressed to the door.

When he is 25 and in the second trimester of his expected life-after-birth, my son moves with three friends into an apartment three miles from our house. Driving both ways across the Richmond Bridge three times a week, he finishes a ten-year-long college slog and graduates with a math degree.

4.

Parents of sons and daughters with autism are haunted by the thought of their children outliving them, especially when the disorder is profound. In the movie Autism: A Musical, one father says he finds himself hoping—even sometimes wishing—his severely disabled daughter will die before he does. I know a mother who makes her son hold hands to cross a busy street, but cannot enter the intersection without thinking: I could just let go.

E.__’s Aspergers is mild in comparison with those cases. Still, when his car broke down on the way to school two years ago, he spent six hours pacing the perimeter of a Berkeley gas station because his dad and I were out of town and he had not yet been walked through each step of how to call a tow truck. While he was pacing, a kind, elderly woman came up and held out a piece of worn carpet for him to sleep on. More recently, another offered him spare change when she came across him shopping for groceries in our local market. Cops have stopped him for suspicion of dui—because he was driving too slowly. Another boy with ASD I know ended up jailed when  similar incident caused him to panic and lash out at the officers. That story has an even sadder ending—a boy who loved ice cream so much that he mastered hundreds of recipes to serve to his neighbors ended up homeless, then dead, found sprawled in a shallow river near his childhood home. Aside from a few perfunctory handshakes and family hugs, I am the only human being my son has voluntarily touched in the last 20 years.

The life expectancy of a female born in the US in 1957 is about 80 years, the age I’ll be if still alive when my son turns 50 and reaches the third trimester of his life. The doctor whose hands, at the moment that mattered—slipped—will be long since gone. If my son reaches his own life expectancy, he will live out the last trimester of his life, another 27 years, without his father or me in it.

Perhaps E.__  someday will have a child whose gestation in the womb of his putative partner will overlap with his own life; perhaps that child will be born and live out the first two thirds of his or her own life span while my son is alive. It does not seem likely, though, not the putative child, sometimes not even the putative partner, and in those dark moments I can draw no neat circle to contain my fear, nor find any logic to confute the calculus of loss,

I trace the Venn Diagram of our lives, my son’s and mine: where they intersect in the middle, and then the edge-etched empty space of E.__’s last years, clear, vacuous and illuminated like a diatom on a specimen slide under a microscope. Tell me, who will love him, then? Remind him to pay the rent, to shave, to replace his frayed t-shirt and jeans, not to forget to eat? Who will love him?