You Ruined Everything

I'm working on a list of the worst things that have ever happened to me.* I haven't had time to rank them in any fashion, but the unordered working list includes: hit by a car (1986), parents' divorce (1977), marital separation (2010),** birth of younger sibling (1975), birth of older sibling (retroactive, 1973), stung by wasp (1986), asked to the prom (1992),*** Payless Shoe Source ProWings tennis shoes (1987), Tecmo Bowl corrupted save-game file (1990), teppanyaki botulism (2004), G.W. Bush administration (2000-2009), Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (2013, and ongoing), self-haircut (1984), self-haircut (2002).

More could go in there, sure, but as I look over it, I'm completely dismayed at what a relatively non-traumatic life I've lived so far. I know people who've gotten MS or cancer, been paralyzed in some sort of accident, had loved ones commit suicide, suffered a total PlayStation3 hard-drive failure... genuine, heart-rending tragedies to degrees I'm happy to say I cannot bring myself to imagine.

And what relatively little I've been given to carry as a Burden of Woe, it's been more than balanced out by all the best things that have happened to me. I'm not going to give the same kind of detailed list as above, but you know, they made a successful film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in my lifetime. I have a computer in my pocket that will tell me what song I'm thinking of. Before I get too lathered up about it all, I'm reminded of the following exchange:

Q: What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?
A: Keep it to yourself.

So I'm not even going to start about the overabundance of awesomeness that are my bodily offspring. Because, as it turns out, not everyone feels the same way about their own.

A woman in the UK has dared to commit to paper the idea that maybe having totally dependent human children around isn't a 100% pageant of nonstop awesome. The article itself reads pretty harshly in black and white and, for all the context and nuance to it, it is pretty relentless. She makes sure she stops and reminds you every paragraph or two that yes I'm actually saying I regret my children.

A couple of things about it stand out for me, though:

First of all, she says: I don't know why I feel as I do. I'm one of five siblings and was raised in a happy family by loving parents. Dad was in the Army; Mum, whom he met while posted in Germany, brought us up in the West Midlands.

Red flag, right? Typical British upbringing... but with a Nazi mother. OK, the part about her being 57 years old doesn't quite pan out with the Nazi thing exactly, but that's only if you're going to insist on getting hung up on timelines and facts. How about these facts: Germany. War. Infiltration of the British homefront. She's says she just never connected to her children. I think it's fair to speculate that she was aloof and standoffish because she worried her kids were somehow Jewish.

Compare the wording from Der Jude als Weltparasit (1944) versus her own damning words: like parasites, both my children would continue to take from me and give nothing meaningful back in return.

She doesn't specifically link her children to the Treaty of Versailles, but I think it's implicit.

And to that end, I think we all sympathize. Nobody wants to be the mother of an Alien Peril.

I'm also considering two other options. One is that the divorce of a woman from the expectation of not just maternity but maternality is the last shackle of domesticity to shake off before anything like actual feminism can be realized and articles like this, shocking on the face of it to a degree, are exactly what will be necessary to liberate women from the presumption of what quickly escalates from an emotional to societal to political aspect of family-core-unit maintenance based on romantic and/or crudely causal biological associations between mother and child.

The second option is that she's an asshole. It's pretty clear throughout the whole article that she was, at no point in her adult life, Rick Ross'd into this arrangement. On the contrary, she's very clearly, almost Vulcan-ly, clearheaded about the specific active choices she made that resulted in both the production of her children and her subsequent (genuine, for all her strenuous protests) devotion to them. But then to wait until they're adults and with children of their own to take to the newspaper to not only bemoan your chosen victimhood but to lay it at their feet is a dick move, and a girthy, veiny one at that.

And then again, if the first part is true about the feministy stuff, maybe waiting until they're adult is the only way to do it. Making children feel unwelcome or unwanted is right up there with puppy hobbling on the list of Unforgivables.

Maybe she's just being a trailblazer. Which has gotten me thinking. My youngest will be 18 in eight years. And I won't lie, there's some stuff maybe I've been holding on to. I think maybe it's time to start a new list.

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*It seems like an odd thing to do, but I'm getting a little tired of my generalized self-pity. I'd like to be a lot more efficient and ordered about it. As we age, we realize we have to do more with the little time we have left.

**It may also seem odd that divorce (2011) is not on the list. I say it may seem odd.

***Beautiful girl, completely unexpected, very flattered... but some of us, alas, are not prom people. That is the end of that story.