virtual fears

"So, apparently we shouldn't let the baby eat raccoon poop," Mike informs me casually one day. We are driving in the car, him behind the wheel, me the passenger, each looking straight ahead. I have known this man for seven and a half years. I have learned damn well in that time that, as bizarre as it is, I won't get any more out of him until I ask explicit questions. Yet, I wait it out. Another traffic light. Several minutes. I am offered nothing. I bait my hook, rifle through the plethora of questions in my head, take a breath, dive: "And why, my love, would our child be eating raccoon poop in the first place??" "I don't know," he replies. Again, we return to silence. A left turn arrow. A parking space appears ahead. Finally, another morsel: "I heard it on the van." Strangely, this explains quite a bit.

"The van" is the car pool he takes to work most days. He and up to a dozen other bobbing heads chug to and from work together 30 minutes each way, taking turns at driving and generally being upstanding eco-citizens. This scenario, as it turns out, is ripe for sharing random information. At home he regales me with tales from the van. "On the van today…" "Someone was talking on the van today and…" I've learned about personal philosophies and local politics, the growing cycle of the artichoke and the flight patterns of the pelican. And now, raccoon poop.

At this rate, we will never escape the voices. They are chasing at our heels, their well-meaning handouts of knowledge and rumor morphing into snarling canines with fire in their eyes. I know the voices are only warming up – the advice from every corner of society about what to watch out for. After all, the baby hasn't even arrived yet.

Just for kicks the other day, I started reading one of my preggo guides again. Thought I'd get a feel for the current alarmist tidbit. Appendicitis, in case you were wondering. I'm supposed to worry about appendicitis. The authors admit that it can happen "any time." But thankfully, they've tossed it onto the preggo pile of worry dolls. Pray tell, dear guide book, why should I worry about appendicitis, exactly? Some of the symptoms of pregnancy are similar to the symptoms of appendicitis, making detection rather difficult during the nine months of prenatal bliss. Ah. Of course.

Could this be another symptom of our separation from community? We no longer only worry about truly relevant threats from our local environment. Tornadoes in Kansas, poisonous tarantulas wherever poisonous tarantulas live, etc. We live in virtual space (blog anyone?), where, in fact, virtually anything can happen. We no longer look at what's in front of us; and if we do, we don’t believe it.

Take, for example, the interchange I enjoyed with my former doctor after she performed an ultrasound at seven weeks (That's doctor weeks, in real gestational time it was five weeks. Long story). At this stage you see and know almost nothing about the little heartbeat on the screen. Still in my fog of shock and disbelief, I stumbled along with this "routine" procedure only to ask again and again later why it was done. The biggest reason I was provided was that it would "date the pregnancy." In other words, to discover how old the little blip was and devise a due date. When I protested that I should have had a choice about it and that if they wanted to know, they should have simply asked me when I got pregnant, they held calmly to their ground on the basis that "most women don't know." I know. This woman knows. Hello? In front of you…yoohoo! Real person, over here…

I think that at night doctors must snuggle up close to their statistics, whisper sweet cliches at them, slip out of their physical bodies to enter erotic dreams of percentages dancing in sterile white cages, margins of error the bouncers at the club door, only the hottest new research pulled out of line to enter… But now I'm just spreading rumors. In their waking hours, turning back into human form, doctors schedule unnecessarily automatic early ultrasounds (which are not automatic for all doctors or patients, I should mention, but I happen to have insurance that covers it…).

Since our initial conversation, Mike has told me that it's not harmful for us adults to eat raccoon poop. I try not to linger on thoughts of how this conversation resurfaced in the van pool or what that breeding ground of bizarro facts would leave on my door step next. "Uh, huh," I manage in response, trying to banish the visuals. We are made of tougher stuff than babies when it comes to fighting off the evils of raccoon poop then. And that we must do. Stand between our babies and rodent excrement. Defend all, grown ups and children alike, against fears that would have us turn our backs on common sense, our lives into wishbones.