Because J- is recovering from a vasectomy, our decision is at the forefront of our minds.  Here are more reflections on a topic already discussed here.

J- and I were discussing a friend and her decision about how she will become a parent. We reflected on our own back and forth about whether we wanted to create a child.  The main draw was definitely the curiosity of what our kid would actually be like. Would it be dark, cute and outgoing like me, or would it be blue-eyed, super-brainy and quiet?  In the end, this kind of science experiment wasn’t really a good reason or enough of a reason to consider this.

Ultimately, I had laid down the law. Over a number of years, I had become certain that I did not want to have a baby, but that I did, indeed want to parent.  As a bodyworker that works on pregnant women, a friend that participated in a labor and a neighbor that has done a lot of babysitting, I decided that pregnancy, birth and infant care were all not for me.

I think that we also felt that our genetics just weren’t all that worth preserving, they are nothing special, really.  With a history of mental illness, chronic pain, cancer and heart problems in my family and neurotic behavior, sunburns and long necks in J-’s (okay, even I know this is reaching to call it bad genetics, his are probably actually pretty good), ours was not necessarily a torch to be carried.   We do like our families, so I really hope this doesn’t slight anyone.  We both just felt that we could like and love kids just as much that weren’t of our combined genetic makeup.

I kind of hate admitting this, but the affection that I feel towards my dogs was one of the things that convinced me.  I really love my dogs and I realized if I could have such strong attachments to an animal that aren’t even in my own species, that I could definitely build greater ones  for kids.

I do consider the fact that Jeff and I are pretty dystopic-minded people. We think that the world has gone wrong and that it probably isn’t going to get any better.   So, why keep the life-chain going if it is only going to get more miserable? This raise questions of hope, continuing on the nihilistic theme, Nietzche said something like “[Hope] is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”

But, okay, while this may be a part of our though process in choosing not to have kids, there is also clearly a danger in having this attitude while trying to raise healthy children. It is not so much a question of hope, in general, because it has been proven better to live without hope than live with potentially false hope.  It is more a question of being able to have purpose and that with this kind of attitude, it is kind of hard to have a strong sense of belonging.  I suppose that it is about hope for one’s life and lifetime.

In the end, I think that all hope is contextual; sometimes it is healthy and sometimes it is not. Of course the irony is that our children have had more life challenges than we are used to and we will probably learn more about hope from our kids that we could ever predict.