Induced fit

Thank you so much for all your comments on my last post.

I sometimes find my desire for another child incomprehensible and puzzling. I feel as though my family narrowly escaped a complete catastrophe. That we are standing outside a burning building with singed hair and smoke in our lungs but still breathing, still alive. We left a member of our family inside that fire, a daughter, a sister, a twin. But I no longer want to sit and watch the building burn to the ground. I want to grab my three surviving family members and hug them tight and run away as fast as I can.  (Tracy OC, sorry. I know you've already been subjected to this particular ramble ahead of the game.)

To decide to have another child would seem to be an open invitation for disaster to come calling once again. I don't want to test my luck. I feel as though I have used up all the good fortune I can expect from one lifetime. It would be stupidity to head back into that place of unexpected lightning strikes and their resultant blazes, wouldn't it? I'm still undecided. Double or quits?

I also struggle with the idea that my hopes for another child are a betrayal of Georgina. That a part of me hopes to replace her or to conjure her back into existence. 

I hope that I am clear in my own mind about I stand to gain. What I stand to lose.

Another child, a different child. Not twins. Certainly not Jessica's twin. 

Another child that could well die. Another child that could well live. It's a fifty fifty chance. It always is as far as I am concerned.

Another pregnancy, a different pregnancy. Not as hopeful or joyful as my first. But I can clothe it in some of the remnants of that joy and hope I'm sure, raggedy little bits left of those things that were left behind. I've still got them. I'm not letting go of them. Not yet.

No guarantees. There never are. 

I will never lose the grief. It is here to stay. No turning back. No ripping up and starting again. Permanent.

I sometimes find myself becoming short tempered with people who say that I can always have another child. Yes, I hope so. But it isn't a given. I hope it is something that I never, ever take for granted. But another child will not be Georgina. I will never have that particular person, my daughter, my first born, back again. 

In the newspaper today, I read a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks. 

It makes me aware that it is not just having children that changes you. It is the children you have, too.

Self-evident you would think. Not something that you would need to publish in a national newspaper but ho hum. And, because of the person that I am and the turns my life has taken, I want to append, and the children you don't have. 

I'm not a creative type. It saddens me. I come from a family who draw, paint, write, photograph, create. But not me. When the gifts were given out, I wasn't standing in that particular line. If you've been reading here for a while you'll know that I sometimes go off on a weird scientific or mathematical tangent. Because that's what I know. The clumsy metaphors that I pick are from the strange collection of stuff that lurks in my brain, stuff I once studied. It's all I have. I wish I had more beautiful stuff to pick from but I don't. So bear with me. You've endured my life as the sea slug, Aplysia. Some of you have endured it twice. Bless your stoical little hearts. You've endured my description of the proportional relationship between gestation and grief allowed. If you're still here, I am about to launch into another. And my science is rubbishly remembered, hazy and partially derived from Wikipedia. So don't go quoting me. And I have a bad feeling that some of you, certainly biojen and bluebirdsinging to name but two, probably know a great deal more about this than me. So ladies, cover for me if I messed this up. Don't go exposing me as an ignoramus. 

An enzyme is something that makes a chemical reaction go faster. It isn't actually involved. Kind of hanging out with the molecules in a cheerleader type role. Some molecules go in to the reaction, different molecules come out. The enzyme kinds of helps it all along. The enzymes don't get used up in the reaction, they are just there making sure that everything is ticking along nicely.

These enzymes are picky guys. They won't cheer for just any old team that rocks up. They are choosy, they are selective. 

Initially, it was thought that this choosiness on the part of enzymes was because only certain molecules 'fit' them. Like a lock and a key.

Subsequently, this view was refined into the induced fit hypothesis. Enzymes may be selective but they react to the molecules that are around them. Their active sites, the places where the molecules bind to the enzyme, are continually reshaped until the molecules are completely bound. Then those molecules are released, as different products as a result of their interaction with the enzyme.

Like so. 

Diagram stolen from Wikipedia. Hope they don't sue. 

And I thought to myself. My children changed me. I am like the enzyme. I am not consumed by, or necessary for, their interaction with the world. Yet I'm there, cheering them on. Wanting them to survive, to thrive. Wanting their interaction with me to free them as something different, something more independent, happier. 

There are places in my body where, I could swear, their marks are left behind. My physical structure, my cell biology, my genetics, my 'active sites' were changed. Their fit changed as a result of knowing my daughters. Places changed, sites appeared. Induced to fit Georgina. Induced to fit Jessica. Those particular children. The children that I birthed and the children that I love. No other person will ever fit those places in me. No subsequent child. Not my husband. Not other family members. Not anything. 

The places that fit Jessica are still changing. They mutate and change shape as she grows. I know so much more about her than I did. And yet I am surprised at how well I knew her prior to her birth. 

Jessica's shape is not fully defined. I hope to leave this world a long, long time before it is. She changes and the places deep within me that are solely hers change alongside her. Constant motion, spinning round to fit the person that she reveals herself to be. Someone who still likes to hear 'Green Eggs and Ham' read aloud about twenty five times a day in case you were wondering. But how precious. How astounding. That I know that is the book that she likes best. I'm so lucky to know that fact. 

Georgina's spaces are different. All that Georgina will ever be, she is and has been. She no longer changes. Her reaction is spent. This time around. Yet the spaces that are hers, hers alone, remain within me. She created them whilst she was still inside my womb, she changed them in the three days she lived. I knew something of her, during my pregnancy, during her life. 

She was bound to me, bound so tightly to those spaces within me. Then she was released. As something different, something I can never understand.

And the spaces she left behind. Carved into me. Created by her. By Georgina. Not her sister, not another child, not anyone else I will ever meet. By my precious daughter. By her particular being. The specificness of her limbs, her mind, her eyes, her personality. Created a void within me. A binding site perfectly matched to a child who no longer exists.

Or perhaps she does exist still, in a shadowy fashion. In that negative space within me. The space that longs and yearns only for her. Her precise inverse. Georgina's true twin. The place she left behind. 

In me. In my husband. In her sister. We miss her.