While I've been remiss about taking photos this week, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this whole parenting gig we've taken on. A dear friend's concern over the remotest possibility that her unborn baby might have a chromosomal disorder, along with two radio programs I recently chose to hear--
Childless by Choice on KQED's Forum and
World Population on the Diane Rehm show--all have me wondering why we choose to procreate. There are so many of us in the world--too many by any count--and it takes so much work to turn a helpless blob into a human being, that common sense provides no reasonable explanation as to why any of us take on this thankless job.
Just a couple of the cons observed this week:
~ Parenting is exhausting. Even when the progeny sleeps well, you find yourself using every minute after they go to sleep in order to catch up on life with each other, or do the work--the loads of work--that somehow did not get done during the day, what with feedings, morning baths, walks to the park, book readings, milk pumping, and much else. Packing everyone in the car and getting out of the house on a weekend for an hour-long picnic feels like an accomplishment of the magnitude of a fifteen-mile run in your previous, childless life. You walk around tired and yawning, but you are grateful that at least one of them is strapped (for the moment)--
~ Parenting exposes us like an open wound; from the moment that little life is conceived and we see on an ultrasound the grain-sized heart beating, we find ourselves wrapped in all sorts of irrational worries; if it's not one thing it's another, and anxieties thrive in the parenting brain like weeds on fertile soil.
Maybe we find ourselves still feeding them at four years of age, and we wonder if we'll be rooming with them in college in order to make sure that they eat enough--
Or maybe we look at a sweet face still bruised from a recent laser treatment, and we wonder if she'll remember some years from now, and if she will trust that we made all the right choices when she couldn't choose herself--
And then some pros:
~ As I told my friend, your children are never as perfect as you may wish they'd be, but they are also about a hundred times more wonderful than you could ever have imagined. Maybe at age four they build a paper airplane while you are cooking that simply takes your breath away. Here you were wondering two months ago if they'd be able to use scissors by age five, which would mean they are kindergarten-ready, and now they confidently wield the scissors and tape and paper and crayons behind your back in order to make their own creation like it was nothing--
~ Maybe their sweet silly play with each other makes you grin so hard that the sides of your face hurt--
~ Maybe their affection for their "best friend" and their ability to find joy in the simplest things, like playing "swords" with sharp grasses, makes you pause so that you, too, notice the grass and flowers--
~ And maybe you watch in awe as each of them gets acquainted with the natural world, and you notice how uncannily the collision of genes has worked
twice to create a similar personality: one driven by curiosity but kept in constant check by a cautiousness that in ages past probably would have kept each of them from eating the poison berry;
And maybe you pump milk while writing a post, all bleary-eyed, on Saturday evening, and you wonder if you would change this for another life. And you think--yeah, you would, but not right now...Right now this is where life happens, and you wouldn't want to miss it. You just hope that some day you could be reading
their blog about
their kids, while sipping a glass of wine and remembering how different it all was when you were a parent and in the thick of it.
So, I am not sure why we procreate. But it seems like on balance it's not a completely insane thing to do.
Our parents did it. It kind of makes sense that we would, too. Kind of.
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