Friday, April 25, 2008
The Olympic torch
Humanity, I love you. Hundreds of women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Civil war rages in Sudan. The U.S. military operates in secret in Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of millions of people don't have enough to eat, don't have the basic necessities that Westerners take for granted, and can't leave their homes for fear of being killed or raped. But you have convoys and motorcades and security details for a frigging flame.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Useful foreign words: Plaatsvervangende schaamte
Plaatsvervangende schaamte, which literally translated from Dutch to English means "place-exchanging shame." It's that shame and embarrassment we feel on someone else's behalf that causes us to cover our eyes or ears because we can't bear to watch or listen to it further.
Like this clip made me feel last year as I watched it live:
Like this clip made me feel last year as I watched it live:
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Better late than pregnant
(After reading this, I realized it sounded like the childless Unabomber manifesto. I think after 10 years of having your beliefs and values condescendingly questioned, you get a little annoyed and verbose.)
An old high school friend wrote to me on MySpace recently and one of the first questions she asked was if I had kids, as she has one with another on the way. I told her no and that I had no plans on reproducing. She responded: "u really dont want kids?"
No, I don't, really really, and it's taken years to reach a point where I'm comfortable enough to not feel compelled to qualify my answer so as to prove that I'm not a bitter, child-hating monster or to validate my friends' perfectly valid life choices that happen to radically differ from my own.
But everyone told me that once I turned 30, that mythical biological clock would start a-tick-tick-tickin' and I'd be unable to ignore it, and now that I've reached that milestone, I've accepted that if that clock exists, mine is stuck in permanent snooze mode.
About seven years ago, when it came time to consider more permanent methods of birth control because Depo-Provera wasn't cutting it, I asked one of the male doctors at a group practice about the possibility of a tubal ligation. He looked at me with confusion and said, "But what if you meet a millionaire someday?"
The implication being that my values and principles come cheap and all that it would take to compromise them is a man with money and a desire to carry on his genes.
I asked him, "So, you're saying I'm a flaky whore?" He sputtered, trying to think of a response, and I walked out in disgust while he continued to attempt to formulate an answer that would redeem him.
Luckily, I found a practice not long afterward where the doctors and nurse practitioners didn't treat women like silly little girls, where after having an IUD inserted (and without having to argue to get one), the doctor slugged my shoulder and said, "You can test-drive it tonight if you want."
You'd be surprised how often people push the issue. It's rare that I can say that I don't want to be a mother and that I would hate being a mother without someone trying to get me to change my mind or to discover a rationale that makes sense to them.
But when people press me on why I don't want them, I try to dance around the issue because it's none of their business and it's difficult to say why without offending them. I'm tired of trying to retire the discussion with, "Well, you never know..." because it's so damn wishy-washy and a sell-out of sorts. So, here are the answers I want to give but don't when parents and wannabe parents bust out their cliched arguments.
1. Who is going to take care of you when you get old?
No one, I hope. I don't want to spend my final days being a burden to someone who should be enjoying their own life and experiencing the world. What kind of life is it if your days are filled with doctor appointments, hospitals admissions, food that's not too salty or spicy, a TV set stuck on CBS, and hard candy?
If I'm ever so old, sick or disabled that I can't perform routine day-to-day activities without assistance, then please send me to Carousel. It's my time. I'd rather have a shortened life of debauchery and freedom than an unnecessarily lengthy life of drudgery and pain.
And there's no guarantee that your children will be alive during your old age or that they'll have any desire to take care of you.
2. It's different when they're your own
Yes, I'm sure kids are like farts, everyone else's stinks but yours smell of roses and lavender and bring a sense of serenity upon each breath. I don't hate kids, I even like some of them, but I look at having a kid like I look at having a pet monkey: I want someone I know to have one, so I can play with it, dress it in shorts and make it play the accordion, and then give it back when the biting, howling and poop-throwing start.
But what if it's not different? I'm a pragmatic person. You don't get more points with me because we're family. If you're an asshole, you're an asshole, and I don't care if we call the same woman "Nanny." I can't envision the disappointment in devoting eighteen+ years of your life to another human being, only to have him or her turn out to be a junkie, a criminal or a fundamentalist Christian Republican.
Everyone likes to envision what their kids will be like. They'll have the same interests as us. They'll have the same opinions and political beliefs. They'll be mini-mes. How cute, how awesome. We'll rock out to Ministry while playing PS3 and laugh at those fools who believe in "intelligent design." Yeah... no.
You don't get to pick who or what your kids become. You don't know if they're going to have a neurological problem that doesn't manifest itself until several years after birth. You don't know if they're going to end up in a car accident during the junior-high years that leaves them dependent on you for the next 50 years. You don't know if after years of trying to civilize them it'll all be undone by one friend they encounter in high school.
The desire to have a baby and the desire to be a parent are not one and the same. People tend to think of their children in a rather possessive way, but a child is a discrete human being and may be very different from you and very different from what you imagined your children would be like, but you are responsible for their care for a minimum of 18 years no matter who they turn out to be.
That's an investment with too much uncertainty in the payoff.
3. Your child could cure cancer or be an influential leader. What if no one had kids? Where would the world be? Don't you want to contribute to the gene pool?
No one has sex and screams while orgasming, "Yes, yes, yes, baby, harder, harder! We have to prop up a failing socialist Ponzi scheme! Oh, God, yes, impregnate me so that our child might one day work in the research lab of a pharmaceutical company that has discovered the cure for cancer but will charge one million dollars for the entire course of treatment because otherwise it wouldn't be profitable and they couldn't pay their busty, blonde, former-sorority-girls sales representative lucrative salaries to entice doctors to overprescribe medications their patients don't really need. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, Restless Leg Syndrome is an industry-created condition and let's have a baby to be part of that corrupt marketing scheme."
Mostly, the thought process seems to be, "Wanna have kids?" "Sure. Why?" "I dunno. Cuz?" Or more like, "I'm pregnant." "Shit."
Let's not pretend that the average human is reproducing for some sort of higher calling, just taking one for the team.
Children are a commodity. They're a luxury. They're home-grown nursing assistants. They're an accessory. They're soldiers. They're an ode to one's functioning reproductive organs. They're future taxpayers. They're future leeches. They're future crackwhores, drug dealers and operations managers. They're tiny people who grow up to be adults.
We seem to forget that. Childhood is a snapshot. It's a very brief period in one's life, during which one prepares for 60 or 70 years of being a tossed-aside grown-up, pining for the innocence one believes existed in one's own childhood until they start a new generation to recapture their faded memories.
And it's the gene pool, not the gene wash basin. As long as my relatives continue to procreate, a little piece of me will survive. Scary to some of you, I know.
See, I've done nothing particularly noteworthy in my life. Yes, for a number of years I ran a popular website that was mentioned in national magazines and that helped keep me rolling in electronics thanks to reader donations, and yes, I've had the luxury of living and traveling extensively outside of the United States, but for the most part, I've followed the trajectory of most middle-class women in an industrialized nation. There's nothing so extraordinary about my life that I find myself egotistically compelled to bring someone new into the world to follow a similar path. The world is cool, but it isn't that cool.
Although I almost admire those who choose to have kids because it's showing faith in the human race that I simply don't have. It's saying that, hey, maybe things will get better, maybe one day there won't be war or poverty or fascism or elitism or classism or ignorance or needless violence or any of the other negative aspects of humanity that have plagued us since we walked out of Africa and used our evolving brains to create "civilization." It's a naivete that would kind of be inspirational, if only there were some precedent for it.
4. But you were a kid once too; what if your mom felt the same way?
I wouldn't be here to navel-gaze about my non-existence, and my mom probably would have had a far more interesting life. I'm okay with that.
5. Why did you get married if you didn't want kids?
Two words: Health insurance.
6. Someday you'll change your mind.
If I knew then what I know now about having a cat, I wouldn't have taken him in. Being awoken by the early-morning meowing for food, cleaning the litter box and the litter
he scatters everywhere because he thinks it's a game, needing to find someone to watch him when I go on vacation, having to take him to the vet when he's sick, losing [sentimentally] valuable items to his destructive behavior... never... again.
Yes, I could change my mind, but not in the way you anticipate.
7. It's all worth it because having kids is so fulfilling and it's amazing to see the world through their eyes as they make new discoveries
Being a parent, I imagine, is often frustrating, confounding, boring, etc. Why wouldn't it be? Every other human relationship is like that sometimes. Everything worth doing is like that sometimes. Why should raising kids be any different? If it's something you really desire, then I'm sure the sleepless nights, vacations in Disney instead of a diving trip in Southeast Asia, evenings spent arguing over homework, peeing with constant interruptions, not finishing a meal while it's still warm, not making the simplest decision without wondering how it will affect a small human's developmental progress, needing to use your own sick or vacation time to take care of the kids, the heartache, the disappointments, the anxiety and worry, etc. are worth it to you. But not to me.
Kids are forever. They are a lifetime sentence without parole. You can't break up with them if you discover the bad outweighs the good. You can't tell them to take their toys and go home. You can't return to sender if you decide they're little more than three-foot-tall dictators in Osh Kosh B'Gosh overalls.And if you discover it's not a path you should have gone down, about all you can do is put on a happy face to the world while suffering in silence.
I can't fathom spending all day every day for years with the same person, even one that sprung from my own loins. I cherish my alone time. When my husband travels for his job, I'm in heaven (well, bad-girl heaven). I have the freedom of spending the evening in bed, naked, watching downloaded episodes of "America's Next Top Model," while drinking a glass of wine and eating chocolates, and then reading commentaries about the show on Jezebel.com. I can unabashedly dance around the apartment in my underwear to Culture Club and Wham, like a PG-thirteen iPod commercial. I can go to quiz night at a nearby pub with friends and put my pointless knowledge about trivia to good use. I love that freedom of not having to do anything.
8. You're selfish. Having kids makes you less selfish and teaches you that you're not the center of the universe and that there's more to life than work.
I discovered fairly early on that I'm not a special snowflake and that I'm an easily replaceable cog in the machine.
Taking care of the kids you created and expecting a medal for it is like a firefighter setting a building alight, putting it out and then not expecting to go to jail for it. You don't get a cookie because you cleaned up the mess you made.
As this conversation with my recently childed (male) cousin shows:
[12:13] Me: Did you see the Olympic torch protests in London? Hilarious.
[12:13] Cousin: No. I'm not paying attention to that shit. This world's so fucked up right now. I just want to focus my attention on making sure Dominic's good to go. I can't worry about the rest of you fuck-ups.
[12:13] Me: OMG.
[12:14] Me: See, and that's why I laugh when people say having kids makes you less selfish.
[12:14] Cousin: Nope. I'm not less selfish at all.
[12:15] Cousin: I have to make sure he doesn't come out like the rest of these assholes on the street.
9. Accidents happen.
Of course. That's why we have useful inventions like erasers, paper towels and abortion. I'll never understand this line of rationale, to curse someone with an unwanted pregnancy so they can drink the Kool-Aid and join the Joyless Unlucky Club. Kids, ideally, deserve two parents who want them, planned for them, are happy about their existence, and roll with the sacrifices that come with them.
10. Creating a new life is amazing
This is what I imagine creating a new life is like:
11. You don't know what real love is until you have a child.
How boring and narrow-minded are the people who need to create a new life to "discover" love, commitment, compassion and curiosity.
Not long before I quit my first job at a defense contractor and shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, my boss told me that our customer wanted to put together a team to go to Qatar and perhaps to Iraq to see how the project we were working on operated in the field. I like adventure, but the Middle East isn't a place I'm too keen on visiting for the foreseeable future, for rather obvious reasons.
I told him that it wasn't something I intended to sign up for, and he argued with me that I should do it instead of my older colleagues because, "You don't have family."
Which was funny, because I wasn't raised by wolves, although it might seem like it at times.
It's a rather strange concept, that you don't have family if you don't have kids. Your spouse, your long-term partner, your parents, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, even your close friends -- they're just extras. They don't mean anything. They're the Chinese food of human relationships. They're deceptively satisfying, until an hour later, when you're craving just a little bit more. Only a child, I guess the Las Vegas buffet of human relationships, can truly fill you up inside.
I value my friends more than my family because they choose to be there. Family is with me due to the genetic lottery, which is comforting in a sense, but it doesn't fill me with the pride, happiness and satisfaction that building close friendships does. It's reassuring to know there are people out there who feel an obligation to you, but it's mind-blowing when you discover people who like or love you enough to stick by you because they want to be by your side, not because societal pressure or cultural expectations tell them they must. That's the kind of relationship I want to cultivate, not the creation of a human being to be my personal fountain of love.
But the worst part of having kids, to me, is that everyone is in your business. It starts from the moment you find out you're pregnant, when you're admonished for daring to have a glass of red wine with dinner, even though most moms of the past drank and smoked during their pregnancies (and still do in many countries) and we turned out fine. No coffee. No soft cheeses. No sushi. Everyone is watching you, waiting for you to fuck up so they can get on their high horse and show what a better parent they are. Then once the kid is born, you're forced to deal with so many assholes you would normally have the option to avoid, and you're still being watched by the parental busybodies who are chomping at the bit to tell you how much you suck as a parent or to call child services if you do something that violates their view of what a happy family should be. They say parenting forces you into the world, but it seems to be a world I'd prefer to avoid.
This is one of those areas where I'm speaking Greek and parents are speaking Chinese. We'll never really understand the other.
As wonderful as I'm sure it is for most people to create a new life and water it and watch it sprout like a Chia pet, I wouldn't trade my freedom to wake up on Saturday at noon, have a leisurely two-hour brunch at an outdoor cafe, and spend the evening at a beach BBQ with old and new friends for any amount of butterfly kisses and macaroni necklaces. I'm meeting people and having experiences I wouldn't have if I were tethered to a wee one.
As my aforementioned cousin joked once, I'm meant to be the crazy aunt who travels the world, has sex with exotic three-legged men, and writes about it.
I'm happy that you're happy about having kids, and I'm happy that they make you happy, and sometimes I might be happy to take them off your hands for a few hours and corrupt them, but it won't make me happy as a full-time gig, so please stop asking me about it. You too, Mom. You should have had a spare if you wanted a better chance at grandkids.
the misanthropic bitch
An old high school friend wrote to me on MySpace recently and one of the first questions she asked was if I had kids, as she has one with another on the way. I told her no and that I had no plans on reproducing. She responded: "u really dont want kids?"
No, I don't, really really, and it's taken years to reach a point where I'm comfortable enough to not feel compelled to qualify my answer so as to prove that I'm not a bitter, child-hating monster or to validate my friends' perfectly valid life choices that happen to radically differ from my own.
But everyone told me that once I turned 30, that mythical biological clock would start a-tick-tick-tickin' and I'd be unable to ignore it, and now that I've reached that milestone, I've accepted that if that clock exists, mine is stuck in permanent snooze mode.
About seven years ago, when it came time to consider more permanent methods of birth control because Depo-Provera wasn't cutting it, I asked one of the male doctors at a group practice about the possibility of a tubal ligation. He looked at me with confusion and said, "But what if you meet a millionaire someday?"
The implication being that my values and principles come cheap and all that it would take to compromise them is a man with money and a desire to carry on his genes.
I asked him, "So, you're saying I'm a flaky whore?" He sputtered, trying to think of a response, and I walked out in disgust while he continued to attempt to formulate an answer that would redeem him.
Luckily, I found a practice not long afterward where the doctors and nurse practitioners didn't treat women like silly little girls, where after having an IUD inserted (and without having to argue to get one), the doctor slugged my shoulder and said, "You can test-drive it tonight if you want."
You'd be surprised how often people push the issue. It's rare that I can say that I don't want to be a mother and that I would hate being a mother without someone trying to get me to change my mind or to discover a rationale that makes sense to them.
But when people press me on why I don't want them, I try to dance around the issue because it's none of their business and it's difficult to say why without offending them. I'm tired of trying to retire the discussion with, "Well, you never know..." because it's so damn wishy-washy and a sell-out of sorts. So, here are the answers I want to give but don't when parents and wannabe parents bust out their cliched arguments.
1. Who is going to take care of you when you get old?
No one, I hope. I don't want to spend my final days being a burden to someone who should be enjoying their own life and experiencing the world. What kind of life is it if your days are filled with doctor appointments, hospitals admissions, food that's not too salty or spicy, a TV set stuck on CBS, and hard candy?
If I'm ever so old, sick or disabled that I can't perform routine day-to-day activities without assistance, then please send me to Carousel. It's my time. I'd rather have a shortened life of debauchery and freedom than an unnecessarily lengthy life of drudgery and pain.
And there's no guarantee that your children will be alive during your old age or that they'll have any desire to take care of you.
2. It's different when they're your own
Yes, I'm sure kids are like farts, everyone else's stinks but yours smell of roses and lavender and bring a sense of serenity upon each breath. I don't hate kids, I even like some of them, but I look at having a kid like I look at having a pet monkey: I want someone I know to have one, so I can play with it, dress it in shorts and make it play the accordion, and then give it back when the biting, howling and poop-throwing start.
But what if it's not different? I'm a pragmatic person. You don't get more points with me because we're family. If you're an asshole, you're an asshole, and I don't care if we call the same woman "Nanny." I can't envision the disappointment in devoting eighteen+ years of your life to another human being, only to have him or her turn out to be a junkie, a criminal or a fundamentalist Christian Republican.
Everyone likes to envision what their kids will be like. They'll have the same interests as us. They'll have the same opinions and political beliefs. They'll be mini-mes. How cute, how awesome. We'll rock out to Ministry while playing PS3 and laugh at those fools who believe in "intelligent design." Yeah... no.
You don't get to pick who or what your kids become. You don't know if they're going to have a neurological problem that doesn't manifest itself until several years after birth. You don't know if they're going to end up in a car accident during the junior-high years that leaves them dependent on you for the next 50 years. You don't know if after years of trying to civilize them it'll all be undone by one friend they encounter in high school.
The desire to have a baby and the desire to be a parent are not one and the same. People tend to think of their children in a rather possessive way, but a child is a discrete human being and may be very different from you and very different from what you imagined your children would be like, but you are responsible for their care for a minimum of 18 years no matter who they turn out to be.
That's an investment with too much uncertainty in the payoff.
3. Your child could cure cancer or be an influential leader. What if no one had kids? Where would the world be? Don't you want to contribute to the gene pool?
No one has sex and screams while orgasming, "Yes, yes, yes, baby, harder, harder! We have to prop up a failing socialist Ponzi scheme! Oh, God, yes, impregnate me so that our child might one day work in the research lab of a pharmaceutical company that has discovered the cure for cancer but will charge one million dollars for the entire course of treatment because otherwise it wouldn't be profitable and they couldn't pay their busty, blonde, former-sorority-girls sales representative lucrative salaries to entice doctors to overprescribe medications their patients don't really need. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, Restless Leg Syndrome is an industry-created condition and let's have a baby to be part of that corrupt marketing scheme."
Mostly, the thought process seems to be, "Wanna have kids?" "Sure. Why?" "I dunno. Cuz?" Or more like, "I'm pregnant." "Shit."
Let's not pretend that the average human is reproducing for some sort of higher calling, just taking one for the team.
Children are a commodity. They're a luxury. They're home-grown nursing assistants. They're an accessory. They're soldiers. They're an ode to one's functioning reproductive organs. They're future taxpayers. They're future leeches. They're future crackwhores, drug dealers and operations managers. They're tiny people who grow up to be adults.
We seem to forget that. Childhood is a snapshot. It's a very brief period in one's life, during which one prepares for 60 or 70 years of being a tossed-aside grown-up, pining for the innocence one believes existed in one's own childhood until they start a new generation to recapture their faded memories.
And it's the gene pool, not the gene wash basin. As long as my relatives continue to procreate, a little piece of me will survive. Scary to some of you, I know.
See, I've done nothing particularly noteworthy in my life. Yes, for a number of years I ran a popular website that was mentioned in national magazines and that helped keep me rolling in electronics thanks to reader donations, and yes, I've had the luxury of living and traveling extensively outside of the United States, but for the most part, I've followed the trajectory of most middle-class women in an industrialized nation. There's nothing so extraordinary about my life that I find myself egotistically compelled to bring someone new into the world to follow a similar path. The world is cool, but it isn't that cool.
Although I almost admire those who choose to have kids because it's showing faith in the human race that I simply don't have. It's saying that, hey, maybe things will get better, maybe one day there won't be war or poverty or fascism or elitism or classism or ignorance or needless violence or any of the other negative aspects of humanity that have plagued us since we walked out of Africa and used our evolving brains to create "civilization." It's a naivete that would kind of be inspirational, if only there were some precedent for it.
4. But you were a kid once too; what if your mom felt the same way?
I wouldn't be here to navel-gaze about my non-existence, and my mom probably would have had a far more interesting life. I'm okay with that.
5. Why did you get married if you didn't want kids?
Two words: Health insurance.
6. Someday you'll change your mind.
If I knew then what I know now about having a cat, I wouldn't have taken him in. Being awoken by the early-morning meowing for food, cleaning the litter box and the litter
he scatters everywhere because he thinks it's a game, needing to find someone to watch him when I go on vacation, having to take him to the vet when he's sick, losing [sentimentally] valuable items to his destructive behavior... never... again.Yes, I could change my mind, but not in the way you anticipate.
7. It's all worth it because having kids is so fulfilling and it's amazing to see the world through their eyes as they make new discoveries
Being a parent, I imagine, is often frustrating, confounding, boring, etc. Why wouldn't it be? Every other human relationship is like that sometimes. Everything worth doing is like that sometimes. Why should raising kids be any different? If it's something you really desire, then I'm sure the sleepless nights, vacations in Disney instead of a diving trip in Southeast Asia, evenings spent arguing over homework, peeing with constant interruptions, not finishing a meal while it's still warm, not making the simplest decision without wondering how it will affect a small human's developmental progress, needing to use your own sick or vacation time to take care of the kids, the heartache, the disappointments, the anxiety and worry, etc. are worth it to you. But not to me.
Kids are forever. They are a lifetime sentence without parole. You can't break up with them if you discover the bad outweighs the good. You can't tell them to take their toys and go home. You can't return to sender if you decide they're little more than three-foot-tall dictators in Osh Kosh B'Gosh overalls.And if you discover it's not a path you should have gone down, about all you can do is put on a happy face to the world while suffering in silence.
I can't fathom spending all day every day for years with the same person, even one that sprung from my own loins. I cherish my alone time. When my husband travels for his job, I'm in heaven (well, bad-girl heaven). I have the freedom of spending the evening in bed, naked, watching downloaded episodes of "America's Next Top Model," while drinking a glass of wine and eating chocolates, and then reading commentaries about the show on Jezebel.com. I can unabashedly dance around the apartment in my underwear to Culture Club and Wham, like a PG-thirteen iPod commercial. I can go to quiz night at a nearby pub with friends and put my pointless knowledge about trivia to good use. I love that freedom of not having to do anything.
8. You're selfish. Having kids makes you less selfish and teaches you that you're not the center of the universe and that there's more to life than work.
I discovered fairly early on that I'm not a special snowflake and that I'm an easily replaceable cog in the machine.
Taking care of the kids you created and expecting a medal for it is like a firefighter setting a building alight, putting it out and then not expecting to go to jail for it. You don't get a cookie because you cleaned up the mess you made.
As this conversation with my recently childed (male) cousin shows:
[12:13] Me: Did you see the Olympic torch protests in London? Hilarious.
[12:13] Cousin: No. I'm not paying attention to that shit. This world's so fucked up right now. I just want to focus my attention on making sure Dominic's good to go. I can't worry about the rest of you fuck-ups.
[12:13] Me: OMG.
[12:14] Me: See, and that's why I laugh when people say having kids makes you less selfish.
[12:14] Cousin: Nope. I'm not less selfish at all.
[12:15] Cousin: I have to make sure he doesn't come out like the rest of these assholes on the street.
9. Accidents happen.
Of course. That's why we have useful inventions like erasers, paper towels and abortion. I'll never understand this line of rationale, to curse someone with an unwanted pregnancy so they can drink the Kool-Aid and join the Joyless Unlucky Club. Kids, ideally, deserve two parents who want them, planned for them, are happy about their existence, and roll with the sacrifices that come with them.
10. Creating a new life is amazing
This is what I imagine creating a new life is like:
11. You don't know what real love is until you have a child.
How boring and narrow-minded are the people who need to create a new life to "discover" love, commitment, compassion and curiosity.
Not long before I quit my first job at a defense contractor and shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, my boss told me that our customer wanted to put together a team to go to Qatar and perhaps to Iraq to see how the project we were working on operated in the field. I like adventure, but the Middle East isn't a place I'm too keen on visiting for the foreseeable future, for rather obvious reasons.
I told him that it wasn't something I intended to sign up for, and he argued with me that I should do it instead of my older colleagues because, "You don't have family."
Which was funny, because I wasn't raised by wolves, although it might seem like it at times.
It's a rather strange concept, that you don't have family if you don't have kids. Your spouse, your long-term partner, your parents, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, even your close friends -- they're just extras. They don't mean anything. They're the Chinese food of human relationships. They're deceptively satisfying, until an hour later, when you're craving just a little bit more. Only a child, I guess the Las Vegas buffet of human relationships, can truly fill you up inside.
I value my friends more than my family because they choose to be there. Family is with me due to the genetic lottery, which is comforting in a sense, but it doesn't fill me with the pride, happiness and satisfaction that building close friendships does. It's reassuring to know there are people out there who feel an obligation to you, but it's mind-blowing when you discover people who like or love you enough to stick by you because they want to be by your side, not because societal pressure or cultural expectations tell them they must. That's the kind of relationship I want to cultivate, not the creation of a human being to be my personal fountain of love.
But the worst part of having kids, to me, is that everyone is in your business. It starts from the moment you find out you're pregnant, when you're admonished for daring to have a glass of red wine with dinner, even though most moms of the past drank and smoked during their pregnancies (and still do in many countries) and we turned out fine. No coffee. No soft cheeses. No sushi. Everyone is watching you, waiting for you to fuck up so they can get on their high horse and show what a better parent they are. Then once the kid is born, you're forced to deal with so many assholes you would normally have the option to avoid, and you're still being watched by the parental busybodies who are chomping at the bit to tell you how much you suck as a parent or to call child services if you do something that violates their view of what a happy family should be. They say parenting forces you into the world, but it seems to be a world I'd prefer to avoid.
This is one of those areas where I'm speaking Greek and parents are speaking Chinese. We'll never really understand the other.
As wonderful as I'm sure it is for most people to create a new life and water it and watch it sprout like a Chia pet, I wouldn't trade my freedom to wake up on Saturday at noon, have a leisurely two-hour brunch at an outdoor cafe, and spend the evening at a beach BBQ with old and new friends for any amount of butterfly kisses and macaroni necklaces. I'm meeting people and having experiences I wouldn't have if I were tethered to a wee one.
As my aforementioned cousin joked once, I'm meant to be the crazy aunt who travels the world, has sex with exotic three-legged men, and writes about it.
I'm happy that you're happy about having kids, and I'm happy that they make you happy, and sometimes I might be happy to take them off your hands for a few hours and corrupt them, but it won't make me happy as a full-time gig, so please stop asking me about it. You too, Mom. You should have had a spare if you wanted a better chance at grandkids.
the misanthropic bitch
Ferosh
I went to the mall earlier for lunch. Yes, lunch. Unlike in the United States, other countries manage to build malls that have real restaurants, destination restaurants even, and fast-food joints that don't have you running for a bathroom mere hours after eating. (I still love you and your ghettoness, though, Quaker Bridge Mall.)
Afterward, I stopped in Zara to see about buying a couple of basic T-shirts. But this being IFC, one of the more upscale malls here, this particular branch didn't sell anything as beatdown as that. As I walked toward the exit, I saw a woman who summed up what can be the sheer ridiculousness of living in one of the most capitalist-loving places in the world: Her, in a wide-brimmed, black beach hat, a strapless, floor-length summer dress, kitten heels, pounds of jewelry, and cradling a kitten as she held up shirts to herself in front of the mirror.
It takes a certain level of arrogance and entitlement to carry around an unpredictable, furry ball of evil in a shopping center.
Afterward, I stopped in Zara to see about buying a couple of basic T-shirts. But this being IFC, one of the more upscale malls here, this particular branch didn't sell anything as beatdown as that. As I walked toward the exit, I saw a woman who summed up what can be the sheer ridiculousness of living in one of the most capitalist-loving places in the world: Her, in a wide-brimmed, black beach hat, a strapless, floor-length summer dress, kitten heels, pounds of jewelry, and cradling a kitten as she held up shirts to herself in front of the mirror.
It takes a certain level of arrogance and entitlement to carry around an unpredictable, furry ball of evil in a shopping center.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Word of the day
In researching the likelihood of being kidnapped, held hostage and decapitated by Muslim terrorists in the Palawan region of the Philippines if I go on vacation there, I came across a useful new term: Steatopygia
Saturday, April 5, 2008
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