Friday, August 12, 2011
preface to a long discussion
on happiness without children
Like the teacher who is a teacher because s/he loved children, but has none of his/her own, I’m fascinated by child development, though I don’t regret never having been a parent with children who are biologically “mine.” (Children aren’t property, of course.)
So, one of my archiving areas is news on research about good parenting (“raising happiness”) and happy child development. My early hope was that, one day, there would be a person in my life with whom I did parenting, beyond my ever-enjoyed role with parents (e.g., in my department) as ironical (but reliable!) advisor on parenting.
I’d love to share what I have during each stage of your sojourn through parenting, including details about the good pregnancy, beyond information available through health care services (which target a general audience in need of general information).
I shouldn’t presume? Dear, I began presuming, February, 2009: It’s The Arrangement that will make everyone happy except—at that time—you. So, I made sure to confront you dramatically with the common reality of college love that one does’t realize was outgrown until one is a parent, just to ensure, as best I could, that you were damned sure of what you were bargaining for, because at that time, you clearly gave me to feel that you were being led into something you didn’t really want, except that you wanted the love of your mother. That was the picture you gave me, early 2009. Invalid it was, but not by my misperception; rather by your deceptive use of me to mirror your own unsettledness, which you discarded when you decided what you wanted.
I presumed, spring 2010, that your destiny was to resign yourself to the intensive decade of motherhood, when I joked about your cube looking like a playroom, i.e., a woman nesting. (You disdained me for that.)
Now, you talk of your children’s future opinion of your bedroom door, and you’re obsessed with pickles.
I love you with all my heart and always will, no matter your opinion of that.
Anyway, I have a discussion of the life without children that I want to upload. Did you know there are blogs by women advocating the validity of life without children? Did you know that formal research indicates that many parents, though loving their children (and accepting responsibility for their decision), would prefer to have not chosen to have children? In other words, children are not a route to happiness, though so many people have children in order to give a marriage lastingness. But it doesn't work, because the children feel used. One cannot hide emotional truth from children for years and years. They grow up emotionally confused, like their mother.
All that’s not true for you, it turns out. But the point remains worth elaborating (beyond what I’ve already uploaded), and I’m going to do that, if only because the issue of parenting and reproduction is so much a part of what’s wrong with our economy: too many new beings by persons ambivalent about what’s happened or what they decided to do, but which usually doesn’t work out (i.e., the parents split, and the kids grow up coping with that, if not underachieving, then compensating by becoming parents). Economics is deeply anthropological: marketing to the naturalness of reproduction and the justification of so much expense for the sake of children. Consumer economics is so much a matter of consumption for parenting, homemaking for parenting, and reproduction of more parenting (through pressures for grandchildren that give extended families—little tribes—something in common to distractedly talk about). It’s primate living, very intricately socialized.
Well, this is a very spontaneous posting. I just wanted to emphasize tonight that I had good reason, years back, to fear for you, and I’m quite glad to have been wrong.
