Planned Service Outages

"Am I what I think I am?" is a psychologically useful bit of self-examination, the kind of thing you really wish would occur to, like, tech bros and cops. Categories of people who have the resources or authority to affect real, positive change but for some reason can recently only manage to come up with vanity phallo-rockets or kettling.

I have a therapist, so I feel confident at least that I have some idea how I present vs. my self-conception. What is a therapist except a person you pay to act as a mirror for the things that you know, deep down, make you vile and undeserving of love? It's possible that's too specific a read.

Becoming a parent can be overwhelming as the weight of the socio-evolutionary expectation can be nigh-impossible to achieve any kind of escape velocity from. Not literally of course, as plenty have made the decision to just go out for a pack of cigarettes and never look back, but for those of us who a) choose to stick with it or b) did this shit to ourselves on purpose, the default setting for species propagation is Total Personality Domination. Plenty is made, usually by lazy comedians, about the sleep-deprivation and terror of the earliest days of parenthood, but it's not a coincidence those are the same tactics interrogators use to break the will of their subjects. Having a kid is a literal reprogramming process. If the gross torture monsters could just find a way to make themselves look like small versions of their subjects who might one day play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys or some shit, the success rate would immediately jump to 101%.

The violent, shuddering halt of the end of the active phase of parenting sure seems like it should be more of a bone-grinding ordeal, where the threshold breaching leaves you with some combination of whiplash, migraine, amnesia and, I don't know, some kind of gall bladder complaint. It should be as upsetting as being born again, but not in the Christian sense where you come out the other side with a convenient set of someone else's ideas in place of your responsibility to take in and understand the world on its own terms; more in the literal sense, where you're shot out into the world blind, bloody, screaming and overwhelmed by the input of your new, undeveloped senses.

But so far? Nah, not really. I don't mind trying to be a new thing, especially when I've invested a lot of time and energy planting my feet, feathering (or de-feathering, as needed) the nest in preparation, but then the youngest one moves out and... the oldest one had already moved back in, so he's here all the time. And the other ones show up 2-3 times a week.

I'm an empty-nester but I'm also not at the same time. You're supposed to be able to define something by as much what it isn't as what it is. That's how you define the borders, the contours, the shape of the thing, the A as much of the Not-A. It's a simple formulation, but doesn't really compensate for the complication that Not-A sometimes wants to swing by and do its laundry for free.

The freedom I thought I was going to have to orient myself to hasn't really materialized. If anything it's more complicated than ever. They used to all vacate 50% of the time on a very reliable schedule. I'd like to be more upset about this, but... well, I'm still figuring it out. My feelings about my kids are not complicated, but my relationship to the logistics remains an irreducible fraction of a surprising high number, like 23/47ths or something. It's fine and interesting on its own, but it makes all the other math way more complex when other numbers get involved. And by "other numbers" I mostly mean dates.

The good news about identity is you have one whether you understand it or not. If a therapy is good for anything, it's not for figuring out what you're becoming, it's retroactively filling you in on what you didn't realize you were the whole time.