Hobson's Choice
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would you do it again?
(I've always liked giving imaginary interviews. Perhaps I've always lived near Radio Neverland and have had to entertain myself in the car. You can only sing for so long. So I like to give interviews to Terry Gross while I'm driving the AA highway. Sometimes I learn things.)
People without children, people thinking about having them sometimes ask if it's a good idea. Would I do it again? I've come to think that people with children probably shouldn't be trusted to answer this question, or at least our answers shouldn't be relied on.
Of course, the answer is yes, I would do this again. But I don't know that you ought to trust my answer.
Experiencing trauma and having children are remarkably similar in the ways they affect your live. Trauma and the advent of children both turn your world topsy-turvy in an instant. Very quickly, your life changes entirely.
This doesn't happen with marriage or falling in love or going to college. Those are processes, not events. They happen gradually, allowing you time to assimilate a new life.
But trauma and childbirth are almost instantaneous. Suddenly, your life is entirely other than what it was, and the only thing to do is to build a new life and a new identity. All parents are members of a Witness Relocation Program.
The goal for survivors of trauma is to come to a place where you can recognize that trauma has become a fundamental part of who you are, with gifts that you wouldn't give up.
We don't think about that goal as parents, perhaps because having children is largely positive, not traumatic. But it requires a shift of identity such that two years on, I am not a person separate from my role as a parent. And even though I can think about and reason about it, I'm not sure I should be trusted to answer the question: would you do it again?
The person who I am now is fundamentally a product of the up-ending experience of becoming a parent; to say no, I wouldn't do it again would be to say, "I don't want to be Jenny." Worse, you have the terror of imagining a world without your individual child.
About the issue of having a child, I will say this: I don't think it's a better or worse life than a life without children. I wouldn't say that it's more rewarding or more fun or less fun. It's just different, just something else. Above all, it introduces you to the terror of mortality, the necessity of living forever. And the impossibility of doing so. It does give you the opportunity to use crayons, play with toys, and be a hand-on psychological/linguistic researcher.
At a potluck this week, a job candidate noted that pregnancy and being a parent didn't seem very fun. Well, no. It seemed an odd comment to me at the time. Who would have thought that these things were supposed to be fun? But perhaps we've set ourselves up with glossy magazines and consumer good to believe that. I don't know what to do about it, to go into Midwestern Stoicism and announce, "Who ever told you that life is supposed to be fun? It's hard and that's just the way it is"? But life post-children has its moments of raucous fun, just as life before did. Looking back at many moments in that life, I certainly could have asked the same question, "Are we having fun yet?"
The nature of a blog is not to find answers. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Is it fun? Much of the time.
Trust nothing I say.
4:25 p.m. - 2005-01-29
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