The shadow child

I've seen him over the last few years, darting in and out of my consciousness. He stands off to the side, lost in the shadows. I can't quite see his face, but I know he has dark hair, and his eyes are so blue they look steel gray.

His name is Quinn. He's the child who will never be. As of 2 p.m. yesterday, we are out of the baby-making business. SO went in for a vasectomy and is resting uncomfortably in bed while I imagine our shadow child.

Having given birth to two boys, I can only assume our third would also have been a son. In listening to anecdotes from friends and co-workers, I know there's always one child in the family who makes all the wrong choices, takes the path less traveled, worries his parents into an early grave. In short, he's the bad seed. Quinn, I am certain, would have been that child.

Quinn would have been the one who stole my heart. His birth triggering a bout of postpartum depression from which it would take me six months to recover, I would have tried to make up for the guilt of not being there for him by overcompensating. He'd be given whatever he wanted. Instant gratification.

Flash forward.

Jealous, LegoGuy and Sport do whatever is in their power to make Quinn's childhood a living hell. And I do whatever is in my power to make Quinn happy. My marriage deteriorates. SO questions my irrational attachment to the child. Quinn steals money from my purse and his father's wallet. He gets in with the wrong crowd at school. He does poorly in all subjects and drops out at 16. A runaway, he comes back into our lives when he's 18, addicted to heroin. He begs us to help him, and we do. Again and again, we bail him out of difficult situations. At 26 he's still living at home. SO is fed up and threatens to leave, but I beg him to give the boy one more chance. He relents, but the stress catches up with him. My beloved husband dies at 69 from a massive heart attack. Quinn promises to take care of me, but ends up draining my savings account. When all the money is gone, he disappears. I'm left alone, sprawled on the kitchen floor with a broken hip ...

Maybe, after reading the above paragraphs, SO won't feel like a couple days of discomfort are such a bad deal. The thing is, he's having a hard time and I'm feeling pretty guilty. I'm the one who encouraged him to get the vasectomy, and yesterday was a long and difficult day. He's being a trooper about it, but when he read a list of the side effects from the antibiotic he's taking, we both got a little freaked out.

"Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of appetite, mouth sores, black hairy tongue..."

"Black hairy tongue?" I interrupted. "You are making that up!"

"Black hairy tongue," he insisted, showing me the paper that came with the prescription.

There it was, in print.

"What kind of radiation-soaked drug are they giving you? I mean, have you ever seen a human being with a black hairy tongue?"

We pondered that image.

It's been 16 hours and SO's feeling pretty crappy. I'm going in to check on him and see if there's anything I can get him. But it's a real challenge, communicating with his new black hairy tongue.