Chapter 3: Glass Bowl
"What's up, Will? Did you have a good day at school?"
It's always the same question he gets asked when he returns home. Either by his mom or by his dad, depending on who sees him first. Sometimes his parents are both away on a case and his grandma takes care of him. She doesn't ask him this annoying question he doesn't want to answer. He doesn't want to talk about school as soon as he leaves the building. His grandma understands, his parents always want to know. William thinks that might be the difference between parents and grandparents, the former want to educate and raise you and make you a better person, the latter just want to spoil and love you. His parents love him too, William knows. Still, his only answer to his mother's question is a non-committal, "hmpf."
"What's that supposed to mean? Mind talking to your mother in whole sentences?" She isn't letting him off the hook, and actually today there is something the boy would like to share.
"Jimmy is such a liar, mom!"
Jimmy is his friend since kindergarten, but from time to time they argue about something and today is one of those days. William's still confused about what came up in school today.
"He said his parents made him in a glass bowl and that's why he's so bright and gets A's in maths all the time."
Scully looks up from the kitchen sink where she's been doing the dishes. "Oh? You've gotten your maths results today?"
"Yup."
"And what have you got?"
"B+," the boy huffs, signaling he's not happy about it.
"That's perfectly fine, Will. Congratulation."
Scully hates it when her son is never satisfied with his accolades. Ambition is a good thing, so is stamina and will-power, but he's also just a kid who should enjoy life. Scully remembers her own ride through school all the way until graduating from medical school. She spent too much time with her nose in her books and too little out with her friends. It had earned her the best grades but her social life had fallen a bit by the wayside. It had become a recurring pattern in her life. For a long time, her job had played the most important part she sacrificed family dinners and free weekends for. Even a date once in a while. Her priorities hadn't shifted until she became a mother. First, of a three-year-old girl she adopted and then, three years later, of a baby boy who turned eight last month and is upset about something she hasn't got a clue of yet.
"But Jimmy got an A."
"I don't care what your friends get and neither should you. You've had problems with that particular topic." Text problems, of all kind. The child that was able to read at the age of four had difficulties solving maths text problems. Scully believed it had something to do with compartmentalizing. For William, reading didn't have anything to do with maths. He read the text but just didn't see the maths behind it. It had taken quite a few private lessons until he understood how to approach the task. "But that didn't keep you from making an effort. You studied hard and you are redeemed with a very good grade. You don't have to be perfect, honey, or the best of your class. We love you no matter what grade you're bringing home. And I bet Jimmy's parents tell him just the same."
"But he still is a liar."
"In what sense a liar?"
"Because he brags about being made in a laboratory. He says he's some kind of superhuman because a scientist created him in a glass bowl. But babies are made in the bedroom by their moms and dads when they like each other very much, right?"
Scully clears her throat before she answers. She feels they are approaching difficult territory. "You're right, William, most babies are made when their parents make love to each other in bed, but not all of them. Jimmy might have told you the truth, it's possible he was conceived by artificial insemination."
"Artificial what?"
"Insemination. It means the mother's egg and father's sperm are brought together outside the woman's body."
"In a glass bowl?"
"Well, it's called a petri dish, but yes, it's more or less a glass bowl, rather a small, shallow saucer. The procedure is also called in-vitro fertilization. In vitro is Latin and means within a glass, observable in a test tube or any kind of artificial environment."
"And it's done to make smarter babies?"
"No, it's done when a couple wants to have children but can't the natural way. In the bedroom." She clears her throat again. Talking to her children about the birds and the bees has never been easy for her. Making it sound like a lesson in biology class is her MO most of the time.
"Oh."
"It's a demanding procedure. It puts the future parents under a lot of stress, especially the mothers, but also the fathers. It's not much fun. And it costs quite a bit of money. Only couples that have tried for a baby without success for a long time would try in-vitro."
"Hmmm."
William lets the information sink in. His mother is always good at explaining those things to him. It's so much easier to ask her than to look it up in a book. She seems to be a resource for any kind of topic. "How come you know so much about everything, mom? Even about this in-vitro stuff," he marvels.
"I'm a medical doctor, remember?"
"But you examine corpses to find out why they died, you don't create babies."
He has a point, Scully has to admit. She works on the opposite side of the spectrum. She doesn't deal with the creation of life but with its termination. Some of her classmates at medical school chose to specialize in gynecology exactly for that reason, to be working in a medical field that entailed joy and health and not mainly sorrow and illness. She deals not only with illness but with murder, crime, and death. She's being called when the worst things have happened and nothing she can do will help the victims, their families, and friends. All she can do is help find the offenders and bring them to justice.
Scully struggles a bit with what she should reply, then decides her son is old enough to understand. "I have first-hand experience, Will."
"What? I'm also a test tube baby?"
"No," she hurries to erase that thought from his mind, "no, you're not."
"Emily?"
"Daddy and I adopted Emily, remember? You know she came to live with us when she was three years old." It's only half the truth, but Emily hasn't been told the story of her genesis yet, and she can't learn from her little brother. Mulder and Scully have been procrastinating the conversation with their daughter so far, waiting for the right moment. The moment just never seems right.
"Ah, right. So where does your first-hand experience come from then, mom?"
Eagerness for knowledge. It characterizes every child, but William in particular. He drinks in information like a sponge. Scully sighs barely audible. Now that she has started, she has to finish.
"I was once told that I couldn't have children. Doctors call it barren or infertile. I suffered from a condition that prevented for me to conceive a baby naturally."
"In the bedroom. With daddy."
"Um...yes."
"What condition?"
Tenacity, thy name is William. Scully puts her thoughts into an order for a moment, tries to think of the right words to explain it to an eight-year-old.
"A woman's body usually contains enough eggs to provide one every month to get inseminated by a man's sperm. If this happens, the egg starts dividing and settles down in the uterus. The woman is pregnant. The baby grows and nine months later it's born. My condition was called Premature Ovarian Failure which means that there were no eggs in my ovaries, and without an egg, there couldn't be a baby."
Thank God for science. As long as Scully can quote from one of her textbooks, even if it's one explaining the wonder of propagation to children, she's on a secure footing. She once read in a guidebook for parents that it's important to respect the child's natural curiosity without being judgmental, that if she avoids these talks, her children won't learn her values about sex, but will develop their own from what they hear from friends and the media. And she doesn't want that to happen. From a psychology professor, she heard that the most important thing is for a parent to explain the difficult topic without seeming anxious, that the child picks up the melody line, not the exact words. Both children have come to her in mysterious, inexplicable ways but she doesn't want either of them to believe they were an anomaly or some kind of freak.
"But mom, where is the baby daddy and you made in this...uh, what is the bowl called again?"
Answer the questions as they come, that's what the guidebook also said. Don't overload a child with information but don't try to steer the conversation elsewhere either. Scully wants to be an 'ask-able' parent, doesn't want her children to think the topic is a taboo in their family.
"Petri dish. There is no guarantee the procedure works, actually it fails more often than it is successful. We tried twice but it didn't take it. We don't have any other children besides Emily and you."
"Okay, but how come I exist then? If dad and you couldn't make babies in the bedroom neither in a petri dish?"
Once again, William's quick thinking mind, his wit and ability to always see the bigger picture surprises Scully, in a pleasant way.
"You, my son, are a miracle," she whispers in an uneven voice, stroking his hair lovingly.
To this day, Scully is still clueless how it had been possible for her to become pregnant. The only logical explanation would be that they hadn't been thorough enough when they took the ova from her. Somewhere in her ovarian tubes there had to be an egg hiding from the insidious harvesters, waiting for the right moment to make its voyage one fine day to join up with a sperm, Mulder's sperm. When she calculates back from the day William was born, she must have conceived him during one of their first times in bed. What a lucky stroke of fate. It seems that at least once in their lives the stars had aligned and fate had been on their side.
A pair of cerulean blue eyes just like her own stare at her, spanned by the cutest wrinkled forehead Scully has ever seen, for the boy tries hard to throw his mother an appraising look. The only thing missing is that he quirks his left eyebrow, and when he does, Scully almost laughs at the smaller version of herself. Are gestures and facial expressions hereditary or has she looked at him like this so often that he imitates her subconsciously?
Don't overload your child with information, rings in the back of Scully's head, another advice from one of the brochures she'd been reading about parenting when she became a mother. Going into detail about how science failed to provide an explanation for a natural conception would overwhelm the boy for sure.
"You are a miracle because you came to us at a moment of our lives we'd almost lost hope that something really good would ever happen to us. We had already accepted that Em would never get a little brother or sister, and suddenly, totally unexpected, you announced yourself. It was so out of the question that I could be expecting a baby that your father and I misinterpreted the first signs as symptoms of a serious illness. I didn't believe the doctor when he congratulated me on being pregnant. I truly thought he was making a joke."
"That would have been very mean of the doctor. I bet you were sad that you couldn't have children and playing a prank would've have been really nasty."
William is not only smart but also remarkably sensitive for a boy his age. In such moments, Scully sees the young Mulder in him, Mulder at a time he was still called Fox. An attentive, empathic, and caring boy and protective older brother to his sister Samantha.
"Yes, definitely. But he wasn't mean, he was being very nice actually."
"So, I'm not a test tube baby. I'm a completely normal child."
"Yes, you are."
"Normal is okay."
"More than okay."
"Even if I don't get A's?"
"Your school grades have nothing to do with what you're worth as a person, Will. I want you to remember that well. What really defines a person is their compassion, their ability to truly love another human being, to give instead of taking. When you think about yourself, I want you to pay attention to how you interact with others, with your friends, with your family, and most certainly not to a grade you got in maths."
"Hmmm," the boy lets his mother's words sink it. They seem heavy and significant, but there's something else bothering him.
"So, you chose Em as your child but you had to take what you got in me."
"I'm not sure I understand what you mean, Will." Her son's trains of thought take unpredictable turns sometimes.
"You saw her and liked her and then you decided to adopt her, but when I was born you had no choice, you had to keep me. Would you have adopted me too? I mean, if you had been given a chance to decide? If you had found me somewhere, in an orphanage or some other place, would you have chosen me or would you have looked for another kid? Someone you liked better?"
It takes Scully a moment to fully grasp the idea behind William's question. Usually, the adopted child in a family questions if they're being loved as much as the biological child. They are usually the ones who are unsure about their position in the family, not the biological one. Her son surprises her once again with the way he looks at things, with how he sees the world around him. She feels the urge to pull him close and shower him with kisses but she doubts he would appreciate this kind of answer. He needs a reasonable explanation he can verify.
"There is no difference between Emily and you as our children, William. I can speak for your father as much as I'm speaking for myself. We were blessed with two little individuals enriching our lives and it doesn't matter how we became a family, the only thing that matters is that we did. We're linked together by our love for each other, not by how we joined this family."
"Is that why grandma calls dad her son once in a while? Because he isn't her son, right? Uncle Bill and uncle Charlie are."
"Daddy is grandma's son-in-law. That is what he's called officially because he's married to me, her daughter. But she loves him just like she loves uncle Bill and uncle Charlie. Even before we were married, she loved him and treated him like family. See, love has nothing to do with how the other person came into your life. You either do love someone, or you don't."
"Complicated."
"Well, actually, it's quite simple. You'll understand better once you're older, sweetie."
"Ugh, mom, don't call me that! I'm not a baby anymore!"
"No, you're not," Scully admits, hiding her melancholy at how fast he has grown. "I'm sorry. William."
"Will is okay, but not sweetie or jellybean or pumkin or-"
"I got it, sugarplum." She grins and hurries to add, "just teasing."
"Good." The boy is really serious about this. "I'm going to also tell dad. I hate it when he calls me fuzzybear. Only because his parents chose to call him Fox doesn't give him the right to annoy his own children likewise. I wonder why Em still lets him call her kitten. I mean, seriously, she's all grown up."
She's fourteen, Scully thinks, and still their baby. They will always remain their babies, their sweetpeas, their angels, and it strikes her as funny that when it comes to naming their children, Mulder is even more prone than she to this syrupy tawdriness. The man who demands to be called by his last name picks of an embarrassment of riches coming up with pet names for his offspring. Maybe it's because he missed this kind of fluffiness as a kid, the sugary sweetness with which parents coat their children.
"What's for dinner?" William asks all of a sudden, letting go of the topic of his conception abruptly which, the guidebooks say, is typical for children his age.
"Chicken curry with rice," Scully answers somewhat relieved the conversation is over. It won't be the last time she will be bombarded with questions, either from him or Emily. She will be open and willing to answer each and every one of them.
"Oh, yum! I'm in my room, call me when it's done." He's already halfway up the stairs.
"I'll call you when the table needs to be set."
"Just as well," the boy shouts down from the landing, ten seconds later Scully hears his door slide shut.
She turns to the stove where the chicken curry has been simmering for almost an hour now, lifts the lid off the pot and stirs absentmindedly. She marvels at how mundane her life is at times. Preparing food, waiting for her husband to come and her family to gather at the dinner table. She worries more often about school, the grocery list and how fast her kids grow out of their shoes nowadays than liver-eating psychopaths, men regrowing body parts and immortal photographers, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Not at all.
Who would have thought life had this in store for her when young, green, ambitious Special Agent Dana Scully took her first ride down to the basement to meet her new partner?
She loves it, and she knows Mulder loves it as much.