Parenthood

[poliphilo]

I want to say thank you to everyone who responded to my post about surrogacy. It's been really interesting.

Here's a related issue. At the beginning of her article Melanie Thernstrom writes, "to be childless felt like being deprived of something essential: the primal human experience." This niggles me. To begin with I simply disagree. Parenthood is not the "primal human experience".   The primal human experience is engagement with the world- and whatever it happens to throw up; a childless life is not a second-class life. Secondly it comes dangerously close to asserting parenthood as a "right"- which I don't believe it is. Parenthood is a privilege- which many abuse. Children are not property or playthings or an extension of the parent, but  autonomous beings whom the parent is never going to fully understand. The greatest thing a parent can do for their child is to let it go. As Khalil Gibran wrote, "Your children are not your children."

I'd like to know what you think...

Comments

[jenny_evergreen]

One of my pet rants is the one that goes, "No, having children is NOT 'just a part of life that everyone should experience'", and, when Tom and I questioned our decision to have children, I reacted quite strongly against people who suggested as much. (It's actually a thread in my LJ from way back, since Will is five years old now.)

Now, from as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a mom. I was a born nurturer. I was developing my own ideas about how I wanted to parent, in a very concrete way, all throughout my own childhood.

Of course, when the time finally came that I was married and ready, it turned out to not be so easy for me. I was infertile for about eight years. I went through two miscarriages and a stint on fertility medication before I got Will. (And, before Finn, another two miscarriages.)
It was when I was going to use the fertility drugs, I think, that I, I of all people, decided to reconsider having children at all.

We didn't adopt because I was concerned about whether we would even be able to (finances, mostly, but also our rather alternative lifestyle made me nervous), because I worried about always feeling "watched", insecure that my children might be taken away if I didn't meet someone else's standards, and, finally, my own insecurity about having to deal someday with the complication of birth parents coming into the picture.

Now, in the end, obviously, I decided to have children, but I did actively, actually evaluate it, and I was one of those "always wanted to" types, the kind most people go "of course they're going to have kids" about...I SERIOUSLY encourage everyone to do that kind of assessment, and NOT to think of parenting as something "people just do", every chance I get.

I don't regret my children; I thrive on parenting exactly as I always anticipated. In fact, it's rather fascinating to see how my previously misplaced nurturing drive has utterly focused on my children and changed how I relate to the rest of the world. I was truly a "natural" at this, and I love it with everything I am...and I STILL say that it's actually something that, in an ideal world, only a very small portion of people should/would do. I think most people do it for all sorts of bad reasons, and it's just fortunate that nature has evolved humans to be ridiculously hard to hopelessly screw up; even really bad parenting still produces humans that are basically functional members of society. That's consolation, though, not a reason to keep doing it!

Parenting, done well, is a hugely demanding job whose ultimate goal is to take something you love more than yourself and send it out into the world without you, expecting (though you are free to hope otherwise) nothing in return.
It requires one to take a positively inordinate amount of joy in the happiness and success of someone else, and that's just the first job requirement.

So, yeah. That's my very wordy way of agreeing with you, basically. :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've got three children- all now grown up. Parenting was the hardest work I ever did.

The hardship was exacerbated by the break-up of my first marriage when the youngest child was four. For the next ten to fifteen years my life was organised around having the kids at weekends and ferrying them backwards and forwards between their two homes.

I admire the thoroughness of your approach to parenting. You treat it as the vocation it is.