The answer to the question of siblings is sex.

For three days I've been traveling:  first to McDonough to visit family and then to roughly Milledgeville for a lake party. Graham and I made the trip to McDonough alone, and I'm pretty proud of myself for gathering the courage to go and of him for being such an easy travel companion. I went totally alone to the lake party, which I just returned home from with a sunburn, because children and men were expressly prohibited from attending. I had three beers and one boat ride.

You can't doubt Thomas Wolfe:  you can't go home again. Henry County has a new Traumatic Brian Injury rehabilitation center and, not unrelatedly, signs posted in the front of businesses that root relentlessly and needlessly for Newt Gingrich. Henry County also recently had me and Graham. Mimi, my dad's mom, who has become a recurring character in my blog, lives in Henry County permanently, and we visited her. On the phone a few days ago Mimi talked to me about her best friend, Edna, who is the kind of hoarder we should all be:  her house is cluttered with photo albums, family letters (some bound chronologically), and books. The closet of Tom, Edna's late husband, is no different than the day he died, still full of his suits and shoes. Mimi, conversely, is proudly unsentimental and gave away everything that belonged to Bill, my grandfather, within months of his passing. After Edna moved away from her childhood home her mother began sending her letters and enclosing in them freshly minted dollar bills, which Edna instead of spending saved and stored decoratively in a crystal bowl on her dining room table. A few years ago her house was broken into and the bowl and its dollars were taken, and Mimi said, "To talk to Edna you'd think it was a national tragedy." Mimi's house is sparse. She has photographs but they lack feeling. They're just there. I don't know how to explain it. They inspire as much emotion as a still life might. She has books, some Saul Bellow. 

I recently texted my oldest sister and told her I was wondering if I should, for Graham's sake, have more children, since siblings help socialize each other. I know that overpopulation is a problem, but … can you imagine a world of nothing but only children? What damage can I do to Graham by denying him a sibling? Could I, as my sister suspects happens, overwhelm him with attention that would be dispersed if he weren't my sole focus? None of this should matter now, since Graham is only seven months, three days and twenty-three hours old and since I just got back from a party and still feel vaguely beery and thoroughly sun-soaked. But it matters because I am having an episode of doubt:  I doubt that I am very emotionally mature. You might think that if I determine that I am in fact emotionally immature, then I should not have more children. But if I'm as immature as I fear, then I need to have a brother or sister for Graham so that they can raise each other. I'd still do the mom stuff like cook and bathe them, but they could help each other grow into mentally stable and emotionally competent people if I end up not being able to. I hope I can. When I got home from the lake I had, in addition to an attractive sunburn, a new dress, and Aron said that I looked really nice and that he wanted to take my dress right off of me. He didn't, but it's good to know he had the thought. I am too rarely the target of anyone's motivational states. 

Today I heard a group of ladies agree that the service at an overpriced restaurant was "bad," and I felt that their assessment of the service created a huge ideological gap between us, one that I fell in and couldn't get out of. I couldn't just go there with them, to whatever station in their shared mentality where complaining about "bad service" is a legitimate thing to do. I understand that feeling disgruntled over this indicates my emotional immaturity, and I'm sorry, Graham. To me it just makes sense to get bad service. I don't feel wronged or offended if a waiter appears grumpy or seems to have no patience with me. I just think:  he is probably tired and has had shitty customers all day and feels like he's working for nothing before remembering that he has to pay rent and then thinking, "Oh, that's why I'm working:  not for nothing, but so that I don't have to live outside," and then maybe after he's had that thought he's not in the mood to be nice to me. That just makes sense. But can't I just nod my head and agree that it sucks to have to wait five minutes before my drink order is taken? For some reason, I can't. For some reason, it feels like an unbridgeable gap. 

Here's a poem I wrote on my drive home from the lake. It's called "Magnetic Alphabet," and it's sort of a sonnet and made mainly of lines taken from other poems/stories.

Sara, I don't think you should get married

For someone as beautiful as you are

There are other options, children from tubes

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Who needs a daddy, two mothers will do

The mother you are, turning sometimes in

To the mother you knew, you were a child

Sara, I have had to kill you, you died

Like sunlight at night, resting just to rise

And St. Jude gives and St. Jude gives away

He steals from my mind your face and wears it

As a sort of test, I guess, and I pass.

Why, no, I don't recognize those black eyes

Or that creased nose you borrowed to hurt me