Madelyn Schneider

The Building Blocks Of Life

“The funny thing about DNA is that it belongs to you, something unique that makes you who you are. A series of complex organic building blocks that only the smartest of people can tear apart and put back together to tell us how we’re built. Even though it is so uniquely you, it is also your mom, dad, grandparents, and siblings. It is the culmination of the short-term evolution that your family has gone through just to create you. That’s how I always thought of it, anyway. But sometimes other people don’t see it the same way. Some people don’t see DNA and the miracle of evolution at all. They see a small child writhing around, covered in the blood of their mom, who didn’t make it. These people see a baby screaming and crying as if unaware of the destruction they have just caused, how impossible they have just made life.” 

“Please, why are you doing this? I have a family now. I love my children with all my heart. Please let me go. Just untie me and walk out the front door. No one will ever have to know you broke in. It will be like this never happened. Please, please, I beg you.” 

“Uh uh uh. The story wasn’t finished yet. We need to listen to the whole story. As I was saying, sometimes people just don’t appreciate the miracle of children and all of the science that actually goes into creating a child inside the human body. Half of the mother’s DNA, she has half of her father’s DNA, and it just goes and goes in quarters and eighths and sixteenths of all of the people who came before. It’s fascinating, really, how you are yourself but also everyone else. Technically, you should be half your father and half your mother, personality and all. 

That’s when all of these “scientists” come in and tell you about nature versus nurture and all this other horse shit that is really just guesswork. No one can really truly prove that your surroundings determine your personality. I thought that the day I met my parents was the day I would finally figure out for sure that these psychologists were just taking stabs in the dark. I, who grew up in nine different houses and hopped from dinner table to dinner table with all sorts of families, and all kinds of lives, I would be just like my parents. I would be the proof that DNA is everything, you and Mom were two halves of me, and I was the sum of you.”

“What are you even talking about? Please just untie me, and we can talk through this like adults. You want to know if you’re half of me, right? We can go to get dinner, and we can talk, and we can be a family again. We can talk about your mother. I’m sure you’re just like her. You look just like her.”

“Stop talking. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it isn’t nice to interrupt people? No one ever told me that. You never told me that, Dad. You never told me anything, actually. Do you talk to your precious little kids now, Gary? What was so different about these ones? Did you like them better because they didn’t take Sarah away from you? Did you think about me when she was giving birth? How you could lose a second wife? Go through giving away a child all over again? Well, I lost her too, Dad. I lost Mom too. But I also lost you. I lost both people who made me who I am. I need to take a deep breath…”

“I just couldn’t do it without her, please. I loved your mom so much. I was just too young to do it alone. I am so, so sorry. You’re older now; I’m older now. We can still be family.”

“No. What are you not understanding? Now, open your mouth. If you can’t shut up on your own, I’ll help you. Yup, mhm, open for the airplane. Do you like the taste of that? Haha, yea, I bet you do. I just grabbed it out of the dirty rag pile in my kitchen. Either way, not knowing you or Mom really did help me in the end. I needed to find you; I needed to figure out why I’m like this. It turns out that if you’re an orphan, colleges really love you. They love you even more when they realize that your research has some deep-rooted connection to your past. They think it’ll make you work harder. They even gave me $2,500 to try and get a deeper understanding of our DNA. They helped me pay for a DNA test and even found you for me just so I could really get down to the roots of my building blocks, the things that made me. Now don’t worry; all of my scalpels are fresh out of the packaging. You’ll feel a tiny pinch, but then you don’t feel anything. Isn’t that so nice? Now stay still; let’s find out what DNA looks like in real life.”