When she looks at Amy, she sees all the reasons why she can't be a mother. Not now, not ever.

She sees herself working at the Jeffersonian, night after night, cataloguing, hunting, examining. She hears the call of a frenzied, overworked nanny, hears the disappointment of a child that she never mothered.

She sees herself in a small, dim room with no windows, bound and gagged. She sees herself at gunpoint. She sees the mahogany casket and the tumbling snow that slides off of its shiny cover, sees her small group of friends and colleagues standing nearby, sees the hurt face of a son or daughter that she failed. Failed miserably.

She sees her parents, smiling and laughing, playing with her. She sees her parents, ghostly transparent apparitions that were only there for the first segment of her life. She sees her parents, the perfect definition of abandonment. She sees her parents.

It's wrong to assume that all of her issues regarding motherhood stem from her own childhood. Wrong to assume that she can start spawning once she finds her ideal mate and a good therapist. She's always had issues with the idea of motherhood, of parenting.

Culturally speaking, she wants to make an example of her life. A woman can be famous and revered for more than her incubatory qualities. She doesn't have to be fertile to be respected. After years of enforcing the stereotype, she wants to be a catalyst; she wants to show that the number of children a woman has and her importance in the social hierarchy are not directly related. She wants to be an example.

But even if she didn't have her strong opinions regarding the issue, she still has her hang-ups.

She sees her child holding a black garbage bag, sifting through an invisible parent's objects, trying to decipher the puzzle. How do you determine what's important and what's not when you're unfamiliar with the object in question? She sees her child, deciding in a two-second span what's important enough to keep in his or her life, and what's not. She sees her child holding a black garbage bag, and that's all she needs to see.