I was not like other babies. I was created. Not spontaneously made of randomness like everybody else. Not made exactly how I was supposed to be made, not made as fate would have it. No. I was made as my parents wanted me made. Yet the odd thing is, even though I am their perfect child, I am not perfect enough. It is their fault! They created me this way! My siblings and I are yet to be born and lie, waiting, still unthinking, too small to be seen, in our little petri dishes, while our parents make the verdict. Who will live? Who will die? Who will be thrown out in the trash because our genes don’t match up with what they want?
Why?
That’s what I want to know. Why? Why wasn’t I created the natural way? Why am I created in this harsh, cold white world? Why aren’t I safe in my mother’s womb? It isn’t supposed to work like this! It’s not supposed to be this way!
Only two of us pass the test, and I am one of them. We match our sick older brother, but we will not be sick. It’s sick how we have to compete for the chance to be his spare parts. The two of us are implanted in our mother’s womb. We grow and change, not big enough yet to be infringing on each other’s space. My sibling’s egg splits in half, and now there are three of us sharing this limited space, me and the identical twins. We’re still not old enough to be a girl or a boy yet.
My heart begins to beat, and my eyes are forming. I can’t see, I can’t think, and I can’t do anything but grow at this point. My siblings and I grow and grow, and soon, we discover something. I am a girl. They are boys, though we don’t know these terms yet. We just know that we are different. My brothers in their shared placenta but separate sacs, become close, closer than close. I am left out. Then one day, one of my brothers disappears. The surviving one is devastated. His companion is gone. But I am still here. He is still here.
We continue to grow and change, we continue to learn. My surviving brother and I play games with each other. We kick and push as our mother’s womb gets smaller and smaller and we get more and more cramped in the ever shrinking space. We begin to hear our mother’s voice, taste the food she eats; we hear our father comfort our sick brother when he vomits. Is it selfish not to want to be his spare parts?
Thirty eight weeks after the day in the petri dish where so many of our siblings met an untimely end, my twin and I are taken as rudely from the womb as we were put into it. We are back in the world of bright lights, cold air, and white. Something tells me we will never be going back to the cramped warm comfort of our mother’s womb.
“Artemis, Apollo,” my mother names us, “Meet your big brother, Z.” Z stood for Zeus, my brother and I knew. I suppose he was Apollo now. The blood they take is from our umbilical cords. We don’t need it, but we’re not stupid. My brother and I know that this is not the end. We will always be Zeus’s spare parts should our cord blood not be enough. They will never be satisfied. He came first, and it will always be that way.
My name is Artemis. I have two brothers. I love Apollo, Pol, we call him, and I hate Zeus. He wants to be called Z, but I always call him Zeus. It reminds me that he is the oldest. He is more important. He is Zeus and he is God. I am just his spare parts. It’s what I was made to do.
And I hate everybody for it.