| Edit: You can skip the below rant about my imaginary child-rearing skills and instead now know that I've bought a shrub to convert into a bonsai tree. The sad thing is I'm terrible with plants and I'll probably accidentally drown it in a few weeks. For now, his name is Eugene.
Life is hard. Nature gives us innate desires that go against common sense and morality. I know that having a child would be a terrible thing. I still cry sometimes, when I really feel the weight of my inabilities. I'd be a good mother. I'm not stupid. I know what children want and need and I know what I want the goal of child-rearing to be. I don't want to raise a baby with the idea of their happiness being of utmost importance. I want to raise a baby with a strong moral backdrop and the ability to make their own decisions, and make their own mistakes, so they can make their own happiness with the tools that they develop. Adoption was already a better option, I've got no end of skewed genetic brain chemistry, all kinds of disorders that no amount of my inherent attractiveness could ever make up for.
I'm angry at feminists. I'm angry at men. I'm angry at the fact that feminists demanded rights and that made men go, "Fine. You want rights? Take them, but you and all your female children are going to have to do everything we do, now." I'm angry at my genitals. I'm angry at the fact that I only draw women and I only catch female pokemon and I've never roleplayed a man or made a single male character that wasn't an animal. I'm angry at the fact that it all boils down to compensating for the fact that I have never felt like a woman all while knowing what I think a woman is is something that I just can't box my personality in to. I'm angry at my mom and my dad, but mostly my mom because she could've at least have tried a little harder. Even a little. I'm angry that she only ever wanted a baby while being that same stupid woman that doesn't realize that babies grow up. I'm angry at that kind of person. Babies grow up. It's common sense. It's the only sense. I'm not as angry at that kind of person because on a lot of levels it's really hilarious that someone can grow up after being a baby, and a child, and a teenager, and still not ever truly grasp that their own children eventually stop being children.
I don't pray for myself. I have maybe twice, in depressed frenzies where I pray for death to come swiftly. I pray for people close to me that I know would pray. I think that that's okay. I don't think that any iteration of the concept of a God would ever deny someone something because a non-believer asked for it for them. That always makes me worry most, because if I'm right and the world is governed only by chaos, nobodies prayers mean anything and that's not fair to everyone else. I keep thinking about Matthew. We haven't talked in at least four years, and the last thing he said to me was that he didn't want anything to do with me because I am not a cohesive person. He was right. For a long time I though of my thoughts and ideas as being a big puzzle, not self-generated opinion but rather so many tiny fragments of the opinions of outside sources that all fit together so well that I seem like a different animal all together. It's not true, nothing fits together. The irony in that whole situation is that he and I were never particularly close but never particularly distant, but he might've taught me more about myself than anyone else in my life.
I want to instill a deep love for reading in a child, like my own. At the same time, I worry about that. Good reading skills kept me a little too afloat in school for years until I realized caring wasn't mandatory, almost landed me in a lot of those stupid "You're smart, so we're going to punish you!" programs. And I dodged another bullet thanks to college fucking me over. I don't want to be in honors English. I just want to be normal. I don't even want to know how much of this spawns from my mother's dangling carrot pride. It's just such stupid shit. Grades don't make anyone a good person or a bad person, grades don't even prove your intelligence. In my experience grades, particularly in elementary school, don't do anything except give parents another way to make their children overwhelmingly insecure over-achievers. I'm happy with a C. A C means I did about 1/3rd of the asnine work they assign in schools. (When I get an F my mom just asks for a pass, when I get a D or above, suddenly the goal is an A. Failure in school was pretty much mandatory for my self-esteem.) I think I'd just teach my own child to aim for a B, encourage them to figure out their own way to achieve said B if they fall below it, and praise them upon achievement. Conditional love can reap benefits if executed properly. I think the hardest part for me would be not teaching them that the education system is the devil. Really, really hard. Stupid education system.
The real balancing act is the perfect wire-thin line between overprotective and overly lax, and then staying on it. My mom has switched sides sporadically at random points, all happening to be the development period where the change was detrimental. I'm terrified that I'd end up erring to far on one side due to my personal traumas, but I also trust myself to be strong-willed and adaptable. It's all made more difficult with my strong intention for two parents to be in the picture, though. I'm not sure how that's going to work, because if I'm not with William I'll probably be with a woman, but I don't think two parents of the same sex can produce a "whole" child any more than a single parent can. I could be wrong, but of all the people I've met with gay parents, all of them lack something. Significant somethings. Except Olivia who just came out a bit eccentric. I think if I turn up the gay too much, I might just skip the whole child thing.
There are two things I will never, under an circumstances, ever do to a child. I will never make "You're not as fit as you should be" in to "You're fat". I've been the same weight since I was about, maybe twelve. When I don't have weight issues I look in the mirror and am horrified at how scrawny I am. My torso looks healthy but everything around it is just small. Only once did my mom ever outright call me fat, but even then she tried to cover up for it. Wailua mentioned how much bullshit that was. (I miss her, but I'm angry at her too, because she knew better. There are a lot of unwritten drug-use rules that we all know will keep us alive, and "If you don't feel it, don't take more." is probably number one. I don't feel bad saying it because I think she'd agree with me and laugh at her own judgement lapse.)
The other is female-teen specific. I will never accuse a sick girl of being pregnant. I will never make a home a place where vomiting is an automatic sentence to judgement. I've allowed myself to throw up maybe five times in the presence of my mom since I first got my period, because after that, every stomach bug was a potential baby, and every severe migraine was a response to hormones. Only one of these incedents was even after I became sexually active.
Really, in the end, I can't bring myself to appease my whim to rear a child. I can't. That's not fair to the child. I'm full of emotional problems and as much as I can wish and pretend, they're probably not going to go away once I grab the reigns of my social interaction and my autonomy. My mom may have created a toxic environment through her actions, but it probably wouldn't have been much better had she done everything right except control her random spurts of rage. Furthermore, rage is probably somewhat, though not by much, healthier than the depressions. The children of depressed parents almost always end up really empty over the fact that they can't make their parents happy. That sucks. It sucks enough when you feel all abyss-like over your own depression.
This is the point where I'd post a VHEMT banner, except that anyone who reads this is either gay, infertile/sterile, both, or with an infertile/sterile person. Well. Either way, thank you for not breeding.
Now maybe I'll go fix my colorbar. Or just... Not. I'll do it later. |
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