SUDDENLY SOMEONE

I read this article on The Hairpin and it’s got me thinking. Beth Boyle Machlan writes about her youngest daughter’s life with Tourette’s Syndrome, but the piece is a moving overview of her experience of motherhood in general.

Machlan pokes fun at herself a little bit for something she said before she was a mother: “Raising daughters is like blowing glass. There’s a painful immediacy to every stage, immediacy born from sand and fire.”

I’ve struggled for a long time with the idea of having kids. I work in a daycare at a fitness center. I see around 100 kids a day for anywhere from an hour to four hours each. I change diapers and rock infants and feed toddlers. I see parents who are completely unenthusiastic to see their kids again after dropping them off for two hours, and it makes me cynical.

I’m grossed out by pregnancy and the labor/delivery process. I watch “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” and have small anxiety attacks about it happening, inexplicably, to me. I know the vast amount of patience and sacrifice required for long nights of crying and feedings. I panic with thoughts like this: “What if my kid is blind? What if my kid is depressed? What if my kid is a sociopath?” These things happen to other people. They could happen to me.

The thing I hear most from my friends with kids, or from my friends who think they know it all, is “It’s different when it’s your kid.” That’s certainly true for some people. But that’s not good enough. I would never purposefully get pregnant if I wasn’t emotionally and financially prepared to have a child with a congenital heart defect, or Down Syndrome, or even ADHD. Right now, I’m not prepared. I can’t imagine ever being that selfless and patient. 

I’m not sure I want to grow into that kind of maturity. But sometimes I look at photos of my parents from my childhood, and I think that it would be a shame not to give them grandkids. I had an amazing childhood, and my parents remain the most supportive out of all my friends’ parents. I owe them everything. I can’t even imagine the love they would show to my children, or to my sisters’ children. 

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. When I read it in high school, I was struck by the friendship between the two main characters, 13 year old boys named Jim and Will. They ride bikes, share secret messages, and uncover sinister mysteries together. Bradbury’s descriptions of all of these activities are exhilarating, in his usual style. It’s an almost heartbreaking story, but I love it. And I remember telling my best friend, also a huge Bradbury fan, that the novel made me want a son. 

Despite all my cynicism and squeamishness, I understand the appeal of raising children. It seems like a huge experiment: you mix your DNA with your partner’s and you spend the rest of your life watching the result. I like to say that I am a perfect mix of both of my parents’ worst qualities, and to an extent that’s true. Of course I also inherited most of their good habits and traits as well, but I have seen my mother’s heart break as I struggle with the same things she did at my age.

Machlan’s article inspired in me the same feelings as Bradbury’s novel. For a moment, I wanted a daughter. I wanted to raise a daughter and fend off a thousand questions a day and watch her struggle with the things I struggled with and watch her win just like I won, eventually. 

The feeling was fleeting, but I’m not sure about the origins of the impulse. Logically, I think, “the Earth’s overpopulated as is, couldn’t you just adopt the first available child and love it just the same?” And I do think I could. That’s an amazing option. But sometimes I’m struck by these urges to have a child that looks like me and acts like me. And then I’m immediately struck by how selfish that thought makes me feel.