The Ugliest Elbow in the World
Certain things can happen to anyone, sooner or later. Getting hit by a bus. Winning the lottery. Having a child. The first two arrive without planning; the third technically requires a partner and a degree of cooperation, though the barrier is lower than it sounds.
I’m 27. At this age some people have already reproduced twice, handed the results to various institutions, and moved on to whatever comes after. I’m sitting here with my fully functional reproductive equipment and no particular plan. Which feels fine, except that I keep coming back to this one thought: having a child is one of the only things you can do that actually continues past you. It doesn’t have to be profound. It could literally be the world’s ugliest elbow. But still—yours. A person who didn’t exist before you made a specific decision at a specific moment.
The biology gives you roughly fifty years to work with, which sounds generous until career pressure, finances, the wrong partners, and ordinary cowardice eat through most of it without asking permission. Jerry Springer built an entire career on paternity tests. Medical professionals will happily sell you information about abstruse positions designed to maximize conception odds. Somewhere out there, people are earnestly advocating abstinence, and I genuinely cannot follow their logic about consequences.
Then there’s the child itself, once it arrives: screaming, shitting, vomiting on the one floor surface you actually care about. It consumes time the way nothing else does. The financial math is staggering—nursery, diapers, toys, school trips, allowance, then eventually rent, then more rent, then the whole anxious ongoing drama of another human life that you feel responsible for. Every year of it, indefinitely.
And yet the instinct is there. Not urgently, not tomorrow, but present—some pull toward continuity, toward not having everything I know and feel and remember just end cleanly with no trace. I don’t know when. I don’t know with whom. I don’t honestly know what I’d do if it happened accidentally right now. And I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to know that in advance, before they’re actually standing in the moment, holding the test.
Twenty-seven years old and absolutely no idea. That seems about right.