Weighing a diversion in the path
Oct. 3rd, 2024 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkinaso -- TL and I have always assumed we'd have a family. Right? Like, it was one of my conditions of entry back in our early days. I made it clear I'd eventually want to be a parent. She wasn't ready, and that was frustrating to some parts of me but overall, a-ok. The deal is we do it when we're both ready.
She finally feels ready, and our living situation is finally ready (or as ready as it will ever be), and the clock has ticked to the shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. TL turns 40 next year. I'm 38 in a couple of weeks. It's kind of now or never.
Faced with that, with the very real possibility of starting, we're re-evaluating.
We had a near-miss in the months before covid lockdowns started. We'd planned to visit a friend, and as soon as we got back, start trying. TL had been employed at MEC for 7 years at that point, I was getting established in animation, we had a stable living situation -- it was time.
And then a pandemic took everyone out at the knees right before our holiday, TL's job situation fell apart, and the world lit itself on fire. We put it off. I'm glad we did; my health also went to crap in the intervening time and I would not have handled having a child well at all.
But like -- it's a very informative near miss. I think about how it would have been if we'd had an infant when my immune issues were kicking off so bad, and it chills me. We would have been in a bad fucking place, if we had gone through with it. Everything went to shit for no reason with no way to cope and it was BAD. I'm not exaggerating when I say it shook my faith in pretty much everything: the world, my own health, our current social supports, everything. It's not a coincidence I got diagnosed autistic in 2021 -- I was BURNT. THE. FUCK. OUT and could no longer mask and I was falling apart.
My health issues are now controlled as well as they can be, but I don't trust it and I now know how bad it can get if things go sideways. I also have a better idea of my own capacity when things go bad, and it's not as flattering a portrait as I would like it to be.
I've been spending a lot of time in the last little while on subreddits for autistic parents, and for parents of autistic children (honestly our likelihood of having an autistic/ADHD/otherwise neurodivergent child is pretty high, given our ages and the genetic material we have on hand). It's been a hard, eye-opening undertaking: I think if we had a child with extremely high care needs, or a child with lifelong care needs, we wouldn't be up to the task. Or we would, but it would wreck us as individual human beings. Some of the things I read scare me so fucking badly, and the utter weariness and regret I read in the things some of these parents say...
(and yet a lot of them are like "my life sucks, but I wouldn't change having had a kid for the world", and I feel like there's a piece I'm missing. Some factor I don't understand.)
We'd be rolling the dice, and the consequences of a bad roll are life-ruining. Your heart outside your body, tied to someone who the world will never treat well, who will need and perhaps not get help and care and love once you die. The weight of everything on your shoulders, forever, always.
(and yet again I read such love in so many of these parents' voices: and I believe it. And I wonder at it. And it scares me too, in another way, a more tender way.)
I know I will be a parent who worries. One of my fatal flaws is fear. Anti-anxiety meds will be necessary for me if we have a kid: this is already in the planned-for toolkit. But the worry will always be there, and the fear will be worse.
I won't speak to the state of the world, the absolute garbage a child would be inheriting. But it's on my mind, too. No child ever thanked their parent for existence, but I think there's a very real chance that even if the kid grows up fine and able to be independent, they will rage at having been brought into a world that's been brought to burning by their predecessors, who will die and eventually leave them holding the pieces.
And yet TL and I have so fucking much love to give. There is no doubt in my mind, not a shred, that any kid we had would be loved to the moon and back. I want to see my wife teaching a kid how to play the way she does. I want to talk about the stars and space to someone who's just old enough to begin to understand the magnitude of them. I want to pass on family recipes. I want to be frustrated to find out a kid's picked up my bad habits. I want to help a kid discover their first favourite thing! Changing diapers and getting puked on, being hated and loved by the tempest of a toddler, are fair costs-of-entry for getting to help a whole-ass person happen.
Getting to be a family where the parents love each other, getting to be that for a kid. Somewhere they can come home to on the holidays and feel safe and at home. Neither of us has that. I want to give that to someone.
Getting to be dad, or mom, or whatever I would be.
And then there's the things we would be giving up. For me, in the last few years, I feel like I'm fighting hard to rediscover myself after sublimating my own needs into a relationship for something like 15 years. I've been doing things that are only for me, and I've been trying to work on creative projects solo for the first time in yonks: I'm trying to speak to a younger self, and develop a little more into the person she would have wanted me to be.
I want to write a book. I want to at least try for art director on some project. I want to keep, and breed, snakes. I wanna get really into terrariums.
But I know my bandwidth: if we had a kid, that would be The Project. That would be The Thing I Am Doing With My Life. Some people can have it all and fucking work on their own stuff while being a parent: I don't think I would be able to. There's always the chance I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. I think it's a worthy project, but am I ready to give up this nascent sense of self I'm trying to build? Become just Someone's Parent?
Am I willing to give up this just-now-budding vision of myself as a butch genderqueer auncle to other queers, still going out to dance now and then, engaging in queer community? Am I willing to give up very visibly experimenting with gender? I don't think that's a cost of admission, per se, but I think the practice will suffer with parenthood; the sense of myself as part of the local queer community, also a tenuous thing, will disappear into the efforts to try and socialize with other local parents so that my kid can have a good start. I know my bandwidth.
Am I okay with the idea of being so overstimulated and exhausted and burnt-out that any sense of self once again gets sublimated into another kind of relationship? Do I want that for me?
And again -- the people I talk to, the parents I talk to about it all say similar things: It's the most important, best thing I've ever done, but think really, really hard about whether you want to do it.
Wrapping it back around to pragmatic concerns, I do think, genuinely, the thing I'm most afraid of is having a kid with high enough care needs that they have no chance of having a happy, independent life. I want to raise a kid, and then see them take on their own life; I do not think I have it in me to be a lifelong caretaker. And there is a chance that would happen. I don't even know how high a chance, I'm having trouble finding hard numbers. Am I willing to take that unknown, possibly life-ruining chance?
I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. These are all questions we've thought about and talked about in bits and pieces -- these and more, honestly. I am less certain of the answer to this question than I have ever been.
I'm twisting in the wind of it, and I genuinely don't know what side I'm going to come down on.
She finally feels ready, and our living situation is finally ready (or as ready as it will ever be), and the clock has ticked to the shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. TL turns 40 next year. I'm 38 in a couple of weeks. It's kind of now or never.
Faced with that, with the very real possibility of starting, we're re-evaluating.
We had a near-miss in the months before covid lockdowns started. We'd planned to visit a friend, and as soon as we got back, start trying. TL had been employed at MEC for 7 years at that point, I was getting established in animation, we had a stable living situation -- it was time.
And then a pandemic took everyone out at the knees right before our holiday, TL's job situation fell apart, and the world lit itself on fire. We put it off. I'm glad we did; my health also went to crap in the intervening time and I would not have handled having a child well at all.
But like -- it's a very informative near miss. I think about how it would have been if we'd had an infant when my immune issues were kicking off so bad, and it chills me. We would have been in a bad fucking place, if we had gone through with it. Everything went to shit for no reason with no way to cope and it was BAD. I'm not exaggerating when I say it shook my faith in pretty much everything: the world, my own health, our current social supports, everything. It's not a coincidence I got diagnosed autistic in 2021 -- I was BURNT. THE. FUCK. OUT and could no longer mask and I was falling apart.
My health issues are now controlled as well as they can be, but I don't trust it and I now know how bad it can get if things go sideways. I also have a better idea of my own capacity when things go bad, and it's not as flattering a portrait as I would like it to be.
I've been spending a lot of time in the last little while on subreddits for autistic parents, and for parents of autistic children (honestly our likelihood of having an autistic/ADHD/otherwise neurodivergent child is pretty high, given our ages and the genetic material we have on hand). It's been a hard, eye-opening undertaking: I think if we had a child with extremely high care needs, or a child with lifelong care needs, we wouldn't be up to the task. Or we would, but it would wreck us as individual human beings. Some of the things I read scare me so fucking badly, and the utter weariness and regret I read in the things some of these parents say...
(and yet a lot of them are like "my life sucks, but I wouldn't change having had a kid for the world", and I feel like there's a piece I'm missing. Some factor I don't understand.)
We'd be rolling the dice, and the consequences of a bad roll are life-ruining. Your heart outside your body, tied to someone who the world will never treat well, who will need and perhaps not get help and care and love once you die. The weight of everything on your shoulders, forever, always.
(and yet again I read such love in so many of these parents' voices: and I believe it. And I wonder at it. And it scares me too, in another way, a more tender way.)
I know I will be a parent who worries. One of my fatal flaws is fear. Anti-anxiety meds will be necessary for me if we have a kid: this is already in the planned-for toolkit. But the worry will always be there, and the fear will be worse.
I won't speak to the state of the world, the absolute garbage a child would be inheriting. But it's on my mind, too. No child ever thanked their parent for existence, but I think there's a very real chance that even if the kid grows up fine and able to be independent, they will rage at having been brought into a world that's been brought to burning by their predecessors, who will die and eventually leave them holding the pieces.
And yet TL and I have so fucking much love to give. There is no doubt in my mind, not a shred, that any kid we had would be loved to the moon and back. I want to see my wife teaching a kid how to play the way she does. I want to talk about the stars and space to someone who's just old enough to begin to understand the magnitude of them. I want to pass on family recipes. I want to be frustrated to find out a kid's picked up my bad habits. I want to help a kid discover their first favourite thing! Changing diapers and getting puked on, being hated and loved by the tempest of a toddler, are fair costs-of-entry for getting to help a whole-ass person happen.
Getting to be a family where the parents love each other, getting to be that for a kid. Somewhere they can come home to on the holidays and feel safe and at home. Neither of us has that. I want to give that to someone.
Getting to be dad, or mom, or whatever I would be.
And then there's the things we would be giving up. For me, in the last few years, I feel like I'm fighting hard to rediscover myself after sublimating my own needs into a relationship for something like 15 years. I've been doing things that are only for me, and I've been trying to work on creative projects solo for the first time in yonks: I'm trying to speak to a younger self, and develop a little more into the person she would have wanted me to be.
I want to write a book. I want to at least try for art director on some project. I want to keep, and breed, snakes. I wanna get really into terrariums.
But I know my bandwidth: if we had a kid, that would be The Project. That would be The Thing I Am Doing With My Life. Some people can have it all and fucking work on their own stuff while being a parent: I don't think I would be able to. There's always the chance I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. I think it's a worthy project, but am I ready to give up this nascent sense of self I'm trying to build? Become just Someone's Parent?
Am I willing to give up this just-now-budding vision of myself as a butch genderqueer auncle to other queers, still going out to dance now and then, engaging in queer community? Am I willing to give up very visibly experimenting with gender? I don't think that's a cost of admission, per se, but I think the practice will suffer with parenthood; the sense of myself as part of the local queer community, also a tenuous thing, will disappear into the efforts to try and socialize with other local parents so that my kid can have a good start. I know my bandwidth.
Am I okay with the idea of being so overstimulated and exhausted and burnt-out that any sense of self once again gets sublimated into another kind of relationship? Do I want that for me?
And again -- the people I talk to, the parents I talk to about it all say similar things: It's the most important, best thing I've ever done, but think really, really hard about whether you want to do it.
Wrapping it back around to pragmatic concerns, I do think, genuinely, the thing I'm most afraid of is having a kid with high enough care needs that they have no chance of having a happy, independent life. I want to raise a kid, and then see them take on their own life; I do not think I have it in me to be a lifelong caretaker. And there is a chance that would happen. I don't even know how high a chance, I'm having trouble finding hard numbers. Am I willing to take that unknown, possibly life-ruining chance?
I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. These are all questions we've thought about and talked about in bits and pieces -- these and more, honestly. I am less certain of the answer to this question than I have ever been.
I'm twisting in the wind of it, and I genuinely don't know what side I'm going to come down on.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-18 05:25 pm (UTC)There's a lot of fear in this post, and I TOTALLY get it because I can viscerally feel that I'd be right where you are. But sometimes I find that centering myself on the joy of the choice in front of me can help guide me to the right way where fear is only making me hesitate.
You do both have SO much love to give, but this world has a million places that need it. You're amazing people individually and together, and I'm confident that whichever you choose, you'll find the places and people that are right for you to pour all that love and passion on.
I don't know whether that's helpful or not, but please also take all my love and support and best wishes!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-18 09:30 pm (UTC)But like -- a lot of this is predicated on having lived for years with the foregone assumption that we would someday have a kid, and then over the last few years started to sort of cautiously look at what life would even look like without raising a kid, and going, wait. WAIT. I want that too! That sounds awesome! Particularly as I've started to find my footing in things like union work and animation. And come to think of it, some of the grit in the gears of the choice is the part-that-wants-kids throwing a startled fit because the-part-that-wants-freedom has suddenly stolen some of this attention and excitement that it had cornered the market on for (checks watch) most of my life. Huh. I really had never even imagined a life without kids until a couple of years ago.
This was helpful (and sweet, and encouraging, and a very good point to make). Thank you. I'm going to try to see what happens if I lean into the delight of both ideas instead.