Face to Face with the Human Condition

Tuesday I had to get some blood drawn for some routine pregnancy tests. I went over to my friendly neighborhood lab to have the work done. It's a depressingly gray one-story building with the best lab techs I've ever known--they never have to stick me more than once, and every other lab I've ever been to usually has at least one false start before finding a good vein. (Do you care about any of this? Of course not. But since I have, for better or worse, fallen into the category of "high-risk pregnancy" I have become a human pin cushion, so for me good lab techs are right up there with ice-cold Coke and finding an extra buck in my pocket in the "good things" category.)

So here I am in the depressing lab, signing in and passing over my insurance card to be copied. It's a busy day in the lab--the reception room is full of people sitting in chairs, waiting to be called. Pregnant women flipping through American Baby magazines. A large African-American woman slumped over across 2 chairs, sleeping. An elderly couple sitting close together, stiffly upright and looking suspiciously over at the colorful assortment of people around them. And next to me, to my left, sits a Hispanic woman--little more than a girl, really. She looks barely out of her teens. She has long, curly black hair and a white tank top on. She's about as pregnant as I am--maybe 5 or 6 months at the most. She is waiting alone.

When you're pregnant, you can scope out other pregnant women as if you've got radar. Without even knowing them, you know you're in the same club. You eye them from the belly up. When you catch each other's eye you smile. But this girl wasn't looking at anyone or anything in particular. It was as if an invisible barrier stood between her and the rest of the room.

Well, maybe not that invisible. It was hard to ignore her grossly swollen upper lip, even as she tried to cover it with her fluttering bird-hands. Or the vaguely sinister purple markings that showed around her cheekbone and nose. It was obvious that someone, very recently, had beaten the crap out of her pretty face. This young, pregnant girl, waiting alone in a room full of people.

What do you do when you see this? When you see someone in horrible trouble for a split second in a waiting room and know there is no way, no time, to offer any help? Her body language made it clear she was not open to conversation. I got the feeling that if I asked her what happened, I would have been told she tripped and fell into a door, not some loved one's fist.

I've wondered about her for the past two days. I've prayed for her a lot--prayed for protection for her and that unborn baby. In the area of town where the lab is, there are a lot of Hispanic immigrants, and I wonder if she is one of them. I wonder if she even spoke English, and if she lived in one of the run-down rental houses a few blocks down, those houses with graffiti sprayed across the peeling siding, with windows broken out and curtains for doors where so many of the day laborers who wind up in this area live. Or maybe she lives a few miles out in the suburbs like me, in a nice house with a nice yard in a nice neighborhood. I've learned over the years that things like abuse are not limited to the poor, run-down areas of town. They're everywhere. They're sitting right next to me.

You get isolated in the suburbs. It's not intentional, it just happens. Your life becomes smaller and smaller, focused on your house, your family. It's easy to forget there's a world outside of the little life you have constructed, easy to let the details of your busy life crowd in, to shield yourself from life's darker side in your comfortable house or driving down the interstate in your comfortable, air-conditioned car. I know I've fallen victim to this. In the city, the darker side of life was right next to me, right next door. The house next to ours was owned by a church, and homeless men would often be allowed to camp out on their front porch overnight. They would occasionally stumble over to our front porch, singing some song off-key, staggering a little, telling us stories and begging for change. One guy tried to break in to our newborn baby's nursery while he was blind drunk, thinking he was at his grandmother's house--this was about when we decided to move to the suburbs.

In the city, I felt like the human condition, the good and the bad, was always laid out in front of me. Here in the suburbs, I confess I sometimes forget the bad stuff. Until the beaten face of a too-young pregnant girl brings it back to me. And then I remember that the darkness, like poverty, is always with us. It is important to always remember, to occasionally have it sit next to you.

If you get a chance, offer up a prayer or some good thought for that girl and her baby tonight. God knows she probably could use it. I know I will.