Accident of Birth
Human powerlessness begins in utero. The infant-to-be spends nine months in a tight space, unable to move, aside from an occasional kick to announce his or her presence—as if Mother could ever forget. Those months must get very long inside the womb. As I wrote recently, waiting is itself an activity—or inactivity—born of powerlessness.
From Mom’s bodily point of view, Baby’s a parasite, sucking up nutrition and energy and shoving aside internal organs that operated more conveniently before a whole bunch of cells multiplied. But Baby could reply that he or she has no choice about whatever Mom ingests, has to travel wherever and whenever she does, and put up with whatever makes her comfortable or sane. Then again, Baby can’t reply. Baby just Is.
Much has been written about the inability to choose one’s parents—a truism, but no less significant for that. Would I have chosen different parents, had I possessed the authority to do so? Did Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, have a choice about springing, full-grown, from Zeus’ head?
By the time I was sixteen, I would have chosen differently—and the feeling might have been mutual. But adolescent conflicts aside, I think my parents and I were badly matched, to put it kindly
Also, much as I’m amused by the image of me leaping out of my father’s head, the metaphor doesn’t hold: the Greeks believed in fate. To them, the accident of birth was no accident, but a predetermined future already written.
They understood powerlessness, in other words.
Another truism is that you have to play the hand you’re dealt, because you don’t get another. So I’m grateful that my parents wanted me, at least—my heart goes out to children who are unwanted—and that I wasn’t born in a famine- or disease-ridden place, or one where warlords or a repressive regime terrorized the population. That I avoided those tragedies made my hand easier to play.
But as I age, I wonder about the cards I was dealt, and whether the manner in which I’ve played them has mattered as much as what they were. Part of that is luck, but another part is powerlessness—and as I say, that starts early in the human life cycle.