DELVING BETWEEN THE TOES OF LIFE....I AM TOEJAM


2004-12-10 - 3:53 p.m.

So I�ve spent the better part of the last five years adamant that I was not going to have children. You see, I came to realize at some point that most people, when expressing their excitement to have children, are only filling a space in their minds that was preset by some societal �rule/expectation�. They didn�t know WHY they wanted children; they just knew that was what they were supposed to do. And then there were the people that were trying to fill some void in their life or relationship with their partner. After a long hard look at myself and why I had previously wanted to have children I realized that there was no reason. Not one except some thought that it would be cool to have a daughter. And besides, I am only just now getting started on MY life�I don�t particularly have the time or the space of being right now to have a child. That is what is most important. I need to make sure that I am taken care of, that I am living my life to the fullest before I could ever think of having a child. There is no void that is going to be filled in my life by having a child, I can fill all those pesky voids by myself with no other additions other than the additions of achievement.

That said.

There have been times in the last year when I will be with Eric�and it is usually a couple weeks into one of our visits, after I have shrugged off my hermit coat and have gotten used to having someone around. After I have realized that I enjoy time much better when he is around than I do when I am alone. During the times when my love for him makes my heart pound fiercely and I can think of nothing but crawling into his skin so I can be as close to him as possible�sometimes during these times I find myself wanting to have a child with him. But I realize, quickly after that thought meanders across my mind, that it is only my desire to be as close as possible to him that is causing that thought. When I find that thought penetrating my previous thoughts of being childless I realize that I am never visualizing an actual baby, nor am I thinking about raising an actual child or being a parent, I am thinking about the ultimate feat of being interconnected with someone. I am craving that meshing of our beings because I want nothing more than to attach myself to him and not ever let go.

I am able to relinquish these crazy thoughts into the bowels of the useless thought swamp within me (along with the notion of going to college and getting a career simply because in the terms of the working force I am a waste, I could do a lot more than I do and sometimes I feel as though I am letting the world down) because I know that I am not thinking about being a parent, but am needing a closeness with my husband.

However�yesterday I was struck with a thought that I cannot sink away with any anchor into my swamp of useless thoughts. I am writing this story right now. It has to do with a woman who feels guilty about cutting down Christmas trees but doesn�t like artificial trees because they seem so sterile. So this woman has four children and she starts calculating how many Christmas trees, if each of her children has four children and each of their children has four children and all these people get fifty Christmas trees in the course of their lives, will be cut down in ten generations of her family. And that number is 23,650. So she plants 23, 650 trees to cover ten generations of her family murdering trees. ANYWAY�I was struck by the implications of this. Not the cutting down trees necessarily, but how prolific and exponential the numbers can get just from having a couple kids�And I got totally freaked out because the way the world is going now most people I know and respect are having like one child if any. And these people who I just can�t understand, people who are destroying the world, being evil and non progressive�these are the people having four or forty children. So by my calculations, the offspring from bad (I am just using this term, bad, because I can�t think of anything else but undesirable and I think that is more mean than bad)people are going to totally out number the off spring from the good people and this world, this country, is going to totally be fucked. Because children DO learn from their parents. Their spiritual, political and their ethical characters are shaped by their parents. And that scares the hell out of me. Sure, you might have a family of six, parents belonging to the Ku Klux Klan and maybe one of their kids will be like��uh, you people are evil, fuck off.� But I am pretty sure that most of those kids will grow up believing that black people should be killed. Just sitting at the Secretary of State today I saw two really young, ghettoed out girls come in with two kids each�dirty kids who were crying and screaming and punching�and the girls (who were not together) were both yelling back at their kids in some form of Ebonics meets Kalamazoo illiteracy and smacking them around. And then there was a nicely dressed woman my age with a well behaved, clean, smiling little girl. So just at the Secretary of State the child that is most likely to grow up to be something desirable and good for this country was outnumbered by the children who will (and oh how I hate to say this but it is so sadly true) most likely end up causing trouble and being violent and not contributing anything to this society. So I am scared now and I am going to have a baby. Not now�not any time soon. But I am going to. I am going to have two probably. Where I used to feel like people were really stupid for telling me that it was basically an obligation to have children (I have even been called selfish for not wanting to have children and I previously did not understand how that could be selfish)�I now understand where they are coming from. We don�t need more humans on this planet�but damnit�if people are just going to keep reproducing and reproducing like rabbits, I better get with it and keep the numbers equal.

But I need to get my shit together first. I need to get smart, and I need to get smart fast. Our child is going to be global. He/she will know languages, will know cultures, will know everything there is that I can teach her/him. But I suppose I need to know all that before I can teach all that.

And you can stop jumping up and down for joy, Mother.


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