RABBLE DISPERSED — SARAH BAAR
/If I had a daughter, which I most certainly will not, since I have two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five reasons not to have kids, not the least of which is that I’m just too damn selfish to have another human being depend on me—but, if I did have a daughter, she would most certainly be a girl, since girls run in our family, to the tune of three generations birthing fifteen girls and only three boys, and now that I think about it, that makes five girls giving birth to five girls giving birth to five girls, which is a lot of fives and a lot of girls, and further proof I will never have children, since it would break the rule of five and throw off the balance of the universe, which is the last thing I want, since I exist as the center of my universe, which, by the way, might factually be continually expanding into the vastness of space, while figuratively collapsing into itself in a spectacular display of self-destruction; at least from my perspective, which doesn’t seem all that selfish anymore, since I do more than my own part to stem the planet’s slow death by helping to keep the world population down, in ways that include: never having a daughter, donating money to negative-population growth lobbyists (which isn’t even tax deductible), and educating others on the perils of overpopulation; I still admit, at night, when I’m watching TV and one of those commercials comes on with the sad music playing, and the bloated bellies of undernourished children in underdeveloped countries filling the screen, I’m not heartless enough that my eyes don’t well up with tears, though my head tells me that life simply isn’t fair, and sometimes, children are just born into the wrong country at the wrong time, like those butterflies who were born just after a mudslide destroyed their winter home and they got so confused they ended up migrating to the backyard of a man who thought the hand of God had swept up the world’s population of monarch butterflies and placed them on his land as a sign that he was meant to sell all of his belongings and wander the earth proclaiming the Good News to those who had yet to hear, or at least to the same seventy-five people who walked past the same street corner in suburban Nashville where he preaches atop a battered suitcase that only managed to get him about twenty-five miles from his former home before he ran out of gas, both literally and figuratively, and decided the people of Nashville needed to hear the gospel just as much as the people of Nairobi or Kenya or the Gambia, and whom, by the way, I pass every day as I walk to work, contemplating the myriad reasons that I will never have children, but if I did, she would most certainly have weak teeth.
Sarah Baar lives and writes in Holland, Michigan.
