(Female, California) When I was pregnant, I had a series of bad dreams about what was going on inside me. First, I gave birth to a little stone that was only shaped like a baby, brittle and fossilized and everything a baby is not. In the next, I realized that my unborn child had somehow migrated to the outside of my body to continue its growth and was, in fact, a potato wrapped for the grocery store. I was attached to it through my navel by a tuber. I was afraid to move because I didn’t know what would happen if the tuber broke. It might kill the “baby,” or perhaps I might bleed to death. Finally, I dreamt that my baby rolled up against the outside of my belly, stretching the skin and revealing its form: it had two heads. When it was born, one head was upright on the neck, but it was defective, mostly brainless. The other head had curly blond hair and was gurgling musically with a sharp, smart look in its eye. But it erupted from the baby’s back, rooted between the shoulder blades. I was told I had to choose which head to amputate. I could keep the one that “looked right” or choose the smart head but condemn the child to a grotesquely misshapen body. What a decision I had to make.
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