Where My Bitches At?

Right Here

The Qweenbeen isn't a big fan of that expression. She needs to take that up with historical convention and the editors of the OED because until I hear otherwise, it's perfectly appropriate for me to call my puppies with that phrase.

So there are puppies. There are my puppies, Chelsea and Lily, but there are also siblings to these puppies. I don't know them. Even though the Qweenbeen and I played with all these puppies to get a sense of their personalities and chose the two we thought most suitable for us, we could have very easily chosen two other puppies. If we had chosen two other puppies, we would be as attached to those puppies as we are to these puppies. It's strange to think of these puppies as interchangeable now, but at one time they were.

They are attached to us now as well, though if I say they feel for me what I feel for them, I'm really just projecting a whole lot of impossible onto these puppies. But here I am; I'm buying their food, waking up in the middle of the night when they cry, cleaning up their crap, paying for vet visits, posting their pictures on my interblog, creating MySpace pages for them and all sorts of other things that I could just as easily have been doing for other puppies.

It seems normal to do most of this for these puppies, maybe some of it is crazy. But it would be really crazy to do this for other puppies, though at another time it could just as easily have been other puppies. That is, it makes some sense to do this for these puppies, but if I were to now go out of my way to do this for their litter mates, that would be weird. If I were to just up and start doing this for my neighbor's puppies that would probably be un-neighborly of me.

I'm the kind of dummy that will run down the road to try to rescue a stray dog and if I catch it, find its home, or failing that, a new home for it. But I don't always do that. Sometimes I just say, "ohh" and keep driving. But I would spend all kinds of time going to find my puppies if they were missing. Your puppy? Maybe not.

Does that mean I don't value all puppy life equally? It seems to. I'll come right and say it. I don't value all puppy life equally. I don't think you need to worry; I would probably never do anything to harm your puppy, if you have one. But it's also very likely I am not doing anything to promote the life of your puppy. I seem to only value puppies that somehow come before me, that is if value is expressed by the effort I put into caring for them.

That's puppies. But it goes further.

The Qweenbeen has had a couple of miscarriages (maybe that's why I invest so much in dogs now). I have felt very nostalgic for things that never were. The first time we knew she was pregnant I felt attached to this strange thing that could someday be a baby. I felt anticipation, excitement, love, fear, protective, hopeful, nervous, unprepared, and on. I imagined an entire life, or at least the entirety of life I could imagine. Things felt as I figure they were supposed to feel.

But then all that was gone.

She's had another miscarriage. We didn't know she was pregnant until she wasn't and that was a very different experience. The sense of loss wasn't as dramatic. I didn't approach the date when a baby could have been born with any sadness- I didn't even think to know when that day could be. And since then, we suspect there have been others.

So I'm clear- I think something begins at conception. I don't think it says anything helpful or clear to say that what begins at conception is life. That is not to say I don't think it's a life- only that saying it is or isn't does not mean much. How much I felt or didn't feel for a zygote did not depend on my seeing it as a life but instead on how much I attached to it.

Now I could be wrong in that. Maybe I'm bad because I didn't value both pregnancies and miscarriages the same. Maybe I'm bad because we continue to have sex knowing that life might be created but likely not sustained. You may have very good reasons for thinking so, just as you might think it is enough to say life begins at conception and that saying so satisfies something.

I don't.

Maybe I think it's actually worse to say life begins at conception and leave it at that- or from that assume that the life that exists at conception is anything like the life that exists at three months before or after birth, or 5 years after birth, or 20 years after birth, or anything like the life that exists with my wife, or the life that exists with some unnamed person on the planet right now at the point furthest from me.

Or maybe I don't think it's worse to say that- maybe I just think it's worse if, between taking a petri dish with an embryo and my wife who had succumbed to smoke inhallation, you took the petri dish from a burning building.

Maybe the point is we can say anything we want about valuing life, but the choices we make, even in the choices we don't think to make, say more about what we actually believe. And it seems that we believe life isn't worth all that much. Or at the very least, what I can say about me is: I seem to value the lives of puppies on my porch more than the lives of people that must certainly exist but have made the unfortunate choice to do so far beyond the horizon of my empathy.