I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [40]
But I don’t care. And neither should you. Because if the birth of the baby Jesus teaches you anything, it’s that there are lots of ways to make a family—even to have God as your fertility specialist. For Neil this was the best way and really the only way.
People always say things happen for a reason, until they disagree with the reason it happened. I can’t stand those kinds of people. I have never been big on the whole concept of things happening for a reason, but the reason here was crystal clear: it was a beautiful baby girl. Sophie.
If this weren’t amazing enough, a few years later Neil and Machiko fell in love, and she found the whole arrangement completely acceptable—with a few adjustments, I would imagine. They got married and everybody is living happily ever after. (Sometimes you’ve just got to tip your hat to the life force.)
This is definitely not the way they do things on the Upper East Side.
What about the baby girl? She’s growing up quite nicely with her two mothers and a father, thank you very much. Sophie is doing well in school. She doesn’t need therapy or the myriad chemicals being administered to our children so they will sit still and learn. And she actually likes Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. Need I say more? From my vantage point, she has adjusted to what can only be described as an unusual family arrangement brilliantly. Maybe children are just a whole lot more fluid than adults realize. She certainly is more together than I am. My day goes up in flames when my coffeemaker doesn’t work or when my editor says he doesn’t like this sentence. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Lewis, I never criticized this sentence. It’s the paragraph I had problems with.) It has never taken much to throw me off my game.
Life can be fucking strange and odd, and who knows, maybe you’re better off if you learn that lesson when you’re young. It might be the vaccination that helps immunize you from the bumpy twists and turns that life brings your way. It may be a little easier to deal with the weird stuff that life can hit you with if you’ve already had a chunk of it thrown your way.
Everyone involved in this story has been completely up-front about it. Which I find stunning, in a world where people hide their mistresses, sexual proclivities, and whatever else they can fit in their psychic closets.
The normal traditional way of creating a family seems to have freaked me out, so I can’t even begin to imagine what I would have done in Neil’s shoes. I certainly would have been unable to have leaped into the type of family that Neil has embraced. If I were in Neil’s situation, I would have responded by looking for work on the Space Shuttle.
In the end, though, is this familial arrangement any more strange than the chemistry set that many have to pay for in order to reproduce? I am talking about the utter gymnastics required to get the borrowed sperm, the purchased eggs, the surrogate mothers, and all the pharmaceuticals in order to create a petri dish popover that will grow up to be the apple of someone’s eye.
Not to me, at least not this family.
Once again, though, it just goes to show that most people want to procreate more than I do and will do anything to achieve it. I really don’t get it.
And on Christmas Day I wonder: Have I missed the point of life on this earth?
“You’re here,” announces my Ugandan cabdriver.
I have found that Ugandans always have the answer.
It’s downright amazing.
CHRISTMAS DAY, 6:00 P.M.
Outeating the Christians; or, Is a 10,000-Calorie Dinner Too Much?
You’d think that after all I’ve said about this girl that I would arrive