My baby diary

There are 2 entries in this baby diary. The first is an essay I wrote on September 4th 2001. I was just finishing it up on sept. 9 then other things interrupted and now it’s a year later. I have often thought about how the last thing I wrote before I watched thousands of people die before my eyes on a beautiful summer day in New York was how much I hated little humans.

Here is the Sept. 4th essay, followed by my current, more complicated ideas on babies. If you get annoyed at the first essay, skip to the second.
 

Things That Are Dumb: Babies

My awesome friend Andrea just sent me this **terrific** article on babies from granta and it got me thinking:

I don’t ever want a baby.

I actually quite hate babies. There is nothng wrong with me. I am a woman, and I do not find those cooing, gurgling, doughy masses of flesh at all attractive. Babies for me mean compromises and a loss of freedom.

People tell me I will change my mind. Oh holy hell, I hope not. And not everyone does. I find such enormous strength in and have such admiration for people who do not have children.
Having children is not your "right." Everyone is not assigned a certain number of children, and if because of some biological glitch you are unable to pop these kids out, you are NOT entitled to endless help and sympathy in your quest to have the snot rags. I do not believe health care should cover fertility drugs (but I do believe it should cover a lot of paid maternity leave). I am (gasp!) in favor of tax cuts for families who have 1 or no children.

Whereas I really hate it when conservatives say that pro-choice people are pro-abortion, I have to admit that I am actually pro-abortion. Please, have an abortion. Naturally, not getting knocked up in the first place is the best option, but if you do, please get an abortion. Because I just can’t bear the thought of any more women having any more damn kids.

I care not a bit about aborted fetuses. Tens of thousands of people live on the streets, I pass by them every day. There are homeless people sleeping in front of the nederlander theater where the musical RENT plays twice a day, a musical that glorifies the dirt-poor, almost homeless bohemian lifestyle. There are homeless people everywhere in New York. Every day millions of animals die: in laboratories to test new fertility drugs; in slaughterhouses, diseased and wallowing in their own filth;
in humane societies for lack of love; for fur coats, leather jackets, the shoes you are no doubt wearing right fucking now. Every day children die all around the globe, and not just in Ethiopia – hunger is quite prevalent in New York, or, for that matter, Hawaii. While rich people (and myself, even though I put it on a credit card and later cry about that fact) spend $11.99 a pound for shiitake mushrooms at any one of a million beautiful supermarkets in Manhattan, kids in Harlem or wherever don’t even have a supermarket near by, because they have all moved to the rich neighborhoods. People are constantly dying of environmental cancers, of AIDS, of a lack of good health care. I really could care less about a 1 month (or 5 month, for that reason) fetus whose life force is painlessly sucked out by a needle or a vacuum or whatever.

I am thankful for abortions, because the last thing we need in this hideous world is more babies. The last thing we need is more babies from the cervixes of women who don’t want them, won’t love them, can’t afford them. Thank heaven women have an option, so that if they are stupid enough to get pregnant they do not have to have these babies that will surely ruin their lives. I am pro abortion. I would not admit it in mixed company (luckily, I have organized my life so that I am never in "mixed company,"), and I will always argue that "pro-choice"
people should not be called "pro-abortion" because they are not, at least the majority of them are not, but I just happen to be pro-abortion.

Of course, I am not in favor of the pill, or any of those other methods of contraception that the sado-society has brainwashed most of us to believe are necessary if we want to avoid pregnancy. I am only in favor of one method of contraception: the Fertility Awareness Method. FAM is revolutionary, and not in that advertising sense that a new SUV or something is "revolutionary." It is revolutionary because within it is the power to upturn how we think about the most basic of all things: our bodies. FAM allows women to understand their bodies and therefore understand when they are fertile. Natural birth control, and no it’s not the rhythm method. Yes, it takes time and effort. But if you’re not willing to take your temperature every day and note what your cervical fluid looks like and write everything down on a chart – you’re definitely not ready for a baby. So you don’t deserve to have sex anyway.

September 4 2001

(the essay ends here. It starts our strong then sort of peters out, i think. Oh well.)

here’s what i have to say today.

 

My Million Contradictory Feelings About Kids

Children. i have so much to say about this subject that before I even begin I feel tired and overwhelmed. I’ve read too much about it, talked too much about it, and felt too many different things.

I think one of the reasons I feel so overwhelmed about discussing the whole mess is because, for once, I cannot write some cruel, glib rant all about how my feelings are the only way to feel and I am right and you are idiotic if you don’t agree (see above). As fun as it is to write those essays I have to be balanced here, because....

...my bestest woman friend is pregnant. She’s actually going to have one of those things, those BABIES. It is growing in her stomach right now, stealing all her food and energy, living off her like some mewling little parasite.

My bestest woman friend is pregnant. She is going to be the fabulous, feminist, revolutionary mother of an amazingly lovely and happy child. The baby is growing inside her right now. I imagine it like an onion, growing in layers, each day developing some vital human thing:

a dislike of cold, little legs that want to swim, a taste for plums.


I can't believe it. Well, now I can, but it's taken me a while. She and I were going to be vegan super chefs together, she was going to help me open a restaurant in Hawaii, she's already a super chef in North Carolina and just bought a house and seems to have everything going for her. She's one of those super-capable cancer women who is just so damn awesome that you know when she's around everything is fine.


And now she's preggers. She told me, and it shook my world. she was deciding what to do, and i had a feeling the guy was (although he said he wasn't pressuring her either way) in favor of the family thing. so i felt i had to speak up for the radical feminist position (why do i always feel like this?) and i tried to lovingly argue for abortion.

in the weeks that it took her to make this huge decision, i honestly thought that if she decided to have it i would slowly grow away from her. i just felt that i had

nothing in common with someone having a baby. i had no doubts that she would be an awesome mother, i just felt that a baby was utterly superfluous at this time in her life. she had a lot going on, and anyway, she needed to talk to me all the time on the phone about vegan baking and she wouldn't be able to do that with a screamy rugrat in the background.

so i was being pretty stupid, i know. but i really feel that, all this talk of how much feminism has done not withstanding, society pressures women to have babies to such an extent that it can never be overestimated. i know part of my vehement anti-baby position is that i want to make so sure i am not being brainwashed by the pro-baby world (i.e., the real world) that i'll go way too far on the other end. not good. my friend being preg forced me to think about all this stuff. since she is my very best friend and not some abstract conceptual pregnant woman i could easily deride and write off, i had to sit down and think about this from all angles and be fair and honest and not just knee-jerky and mean.

so i started calling her every day to try to balance out the happy-family images i felt her guy was feeding her. but i figured she was getting tired of that after a while, so i left her to think it over.

one day she called and said "we're having a baby!"
all my doubts, all my anti-baby feelings, all my fears about us not staying friends vanished instantly. i was insanely happy. i suddenly saw the other side to the spit and shit and sleepless nights and all that and realized that my best friend had something alive deep within her that i already loved. i started thinking about vegetarian pregnancy books and midwives and home schooling and being an aunt. i said i wanted to be there when she had it. i started knitting a babyscarf. do babies wear scarves? maybe i'll have to learn how to make hats.

i was so shocked by my feelings. it's so exciting for me to hear her talk of finding a midwife and listening to the heartbeat and all that. i am still scared about the whole thing, scared that someone so close to me is going through this absolutely undeniably huge thing, the most huge thing. i am scared by the hugeness of it all. but i am scared for me, and not for her. i know i'll be fine, and she will be wonderful.

so i've been thinking about my own baby position, and talked about it at bloodroot and with jacob. I have always felt that I don't want any kids. I feel sure enough that I want Jacob to get a vasectomy (getting your tubes tied is a much more difficult procedure) just so the whole question is answered.
what i realized recently, though is this: i think i am more scared of wanting to want a baby than the actual baby thing itself. i want to stay the way i am, free and with endless options. i am scared of wanting a baby that would tie me down, and from the way jacob's sisters (who both want babies and are laughingly annoyed that he and i have each other and don't want babies) and others talk once you hit a certain age you are a mindless robot who can only think about how much you want a baby. i don't want my body to do that to me.

i'm sure i would make a great mother, eventually, and i know jacob would be an even better father. but as a friend of mine said: "i believe having a baby will be great, but do i have to do everything that is great? even where the good clearly outweighs the bad?" exactly. there are so many other great things to do. i want to do them all, not just one of them, and when you have a baby, that automatically cuts everything else out. Babies don't appreciate great vegan food, they only want mush. and how could i have something around who doesn't realize how amazing tempeh scallopini with a red wine sauce is?

But i guess that’s the thing. As bad as babies are (and I say that without having ever actually touched one of them, as least as far as i can remember) they grow up and stop shitting in their pants and all that.
babies become kids and although seemingly dreadful, some kids seem sort of OK (i once met a rather alright vegan kid). Then kids become real people, and i have met maybe 10 or so people I actually like a lot. So who knows. I want a life unfettered by kids now, and i hope to hell i never change my mind. But i can understand some certain select people having 1 child (NO MORE!). I can see how it might be cool for them.

I’m looking forward to my friend’s baby, and i respect her decision. She is going to be the best mother ever, and i’ll be right there, being mature about the whole thing, smiling and loving something tiny and sweetly new.


July 2002

if you're interested, the new issue of utne reader (july-aug 2002) has a section on being childfree that i found really interesting. you might be able to read it at utne.com

February 2004

i've gotten SO MUCH shit from this essay! but i still like it. i just have one thing to add. In the last 2 years more friends have gotten themselves knocked up and i've talked about it more and people always give me this very weird argument: some people have to have (preferably adopt) babies, because god knows all the nuts on "the other side" (wherever that might be for you) are not getting their tubes tied (free tubal ligations for republican women, that's a compaign i'd contribute to), and you can't just go out and shoot them, so some of us should have good babies. This argument always irks me. First of all - since when do good liberal parents automatically raise good liberal kids? Second, the "progressive people should procreate" argument neatly sidesteps feminist issues of women giving up perfectly good lives to rear some snot rag. I don't happen to believe the world will be around for many more generations, and I think that we must concentrate all our efforts now on making it better, instead of having kids and (like my hippie parents did) assuming they will take on the task of fixing the world.

But, just for the sake of calm, breeder friends, let's make a deal: if i don't whine behind your back about you walking around all pregnant, do you promise not to get made at me for this essay? Thanks.