So the other big change in my life is that T and I are going to have our first child. The due date is August. (Yes, I was prolific this year.)
We decided in November. (If you're clever and counted back from August, you're right—T got pregnant right away. Well, we had a thirty-day marathon, so "right away" is open to interpretation. I still feel tired just thinking about it.) At any rate, we made the decision in November, and I've been thinking about decisions and decision-making lately.
Daniel Dennett, in a New York Times article from 1/2/07, commented on making decisions. If you don't know his work, he's a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts who writes about the concept of free will. He's a materialist. (A materialist in the scientific sense, as in a monist—I don't know if he has a big screen TV or drives a Mercedes.) Anyway, Dennett said that when we consider whether the traditional idea of free will is merely an illusion, as he seems to think, we confront "nihilism or despair." Thinking about whether we're just meat puppets driven by DNA and the vicissitudes of our endocrine systems, in other words, can be depressing.
But, says Dennett, his particular materialist view of choice isn't really a downer because we have what he calls "imagination": "We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes." Whoopee. The story, then, runs something like this: after years of vetoing our urges, T and I vetoed our veto and conceived the kid. How parliamentary!
As a writer, I have to say I'm more than a little invested in free will and the imagination. I can't see how one writes a novel by vetoing one urge or another. I can't see how one has a child that way, either. [Insert joke here. (Probably a joke with the word "insert" inserted in it.)]
We decided, T and I, to live how we want to live—as ever. I prefer my philosophers to be nutty, so I'll quote some others who are more fun. Here's Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus (I think it's plateau #367), "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage ... Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation." Why try to fix definitions for "free will" or "imagination?" Why not exercise them instead?
Some of our friends might be worried that T and I will sell out or grow into bourgeois idiots because we're breeding. Well, perhaps I'm already an idiot. But I'm not going all bourgie. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I'm not giving up my art. (Which means, of course, that I'll never have the money. Damn.)
Having the kid, for me, is writing another kind of novel. This novel will be cool in the same way the ones made out of words are: she/he will generate his/her own metaphors in a manner wholly unpredictable. This novel might form a punk band or become a corporate lawyer (hopefully the former). This novel will almost certainly drop something expensive in the toilet by age four. But who knows? The way I look at it, I'm inviting a healthy dose of chaos into my life—the same way I invite chaos every time I sit down to write.
Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.
5 comments:
I can't wait till your kid is 15, dressing in bondage pants, wearing eyeliner, and listening to speed metal. Because that's what going to happen. You should look forward to it, since all the kids I've ever met who grew up to be exactly like their parents were fucking psychos.
Expect the unexpected. It seems like having kids is a lesson in reaction-formation.
And by the way, B and I will totally supply all the eyeliner and speedmetal said offspring can handle.
Well, I think there are many different issues here that could go in many directions. It's true that some of us like to poke fun at "breeders," but I think it's not so much about being bourgeois--a class issue--as it is about conferring a gender identity.
Having kids--esp if you're straight-- confers something special, something "golden"; at the same time it confers an negative identity on those who don't have kids. I'm just saying that it's really difficult for me right now--esp at this age--because I'm constantly having to think about it. Each month, there's a new baby I know! I call them "Baghdad Boomers."
Last month I was even more convinced that having kids makes a couple golden. I was visiting my brother, Husna, and their new son. Husna's dad prodded me with questions like, "So what about you? Don't you want a family? Don't you want kids? You have a Ph D after all. You could get them." We can forgive this sort of stuff--differerent generation, etc. (It's also a part of Pakistani culture, in which NOT doing these things is unthinkable.) What troubles me more is that my brother and his wife have this whole support-network in place that garners them all sorts of celebrity-like privileges. So many friends that came out of the woodwork to honor them! The gifts, the gifts! They were gods on earth--from the simple act of propagation.
Having a kid made them golden, and so did getting married. It's unbelievable the power these two institutions can garner. My youngest brother hooked up with a woman ten years his senior who already had a five year old son, and almost overnight he went from go-nowhere band member to Respectable Family Man. I pointed out that he had switched genders in less than a month--from playboy musican dude to RFM, he said, "Oh you're just jealous--you wish you had these things, right?" Tha'ts always the worst--when I'm accused of criticizing that wish I desire.
Lorna likes to point out that I have a car, a house, a job, etc., that I'm living the American Dream just as much as anyone else and that . But these things don't carry nearly the weight of gender identity. For instance, at work, talking about my house lasted about three days. Coworkers have stopped asking about "family." Meanwhile, the most hated co-worker there--the one EVERYONE despises--merely becomes a grandmother for the third time and she's golden: the whole lunchroom has been abuzz over thischild for weeks.
I tried mentioning how I'm an uncle now--ZOOOM! All day that day I was golden, too. I'm asked about it all the time. They're more interested in my brother, whom they don't even know, than in my interests. It's really amazing.
So I think it's the situation, not so much about class or friendship or even choice--decisions, as Geoffrey Crayon puts it. I don't know about decisions--they are either held up as acts of singular will or reduced to "meat puppet" impulses. I don't like either pole. I guess I'm a believeer in Michael Warner's theory--in "The Trouble with Normal"--that most people want to believe that choices are "mine," part of the sacred realm of the person, but they are actually political acts that intersect with others. Some people try to legislate others' sexuality while simultaneously holding their sexuality as off-limits. Mary Cheney said that her baby "is not a prop," but unfortunately for her, her father and Bush won the election laregly by exploiting homophobia. ANYONE who has a baby, whether it's as public as Mary Cheney's or not, has just had a prop. That's why I call these babies "Baghdad Boomers": these a war-time babies. And I don't just mean the war abroad, but the war at home.
For me, the current debate on gay marriage is as important, if not more important, than the war. THe Middle East will always be "other" as long as there are "others" at home. And marriage here is still framed as a "personal choice." Yet this choice chooses for others as well. A straight couple that marries chooses to add a heavier weight to those without that privilege--gays and the intentionally single. I'm just saying I feel the weight, man, I feel the weight. I'm at the age when everyone is having kids (in addition to getting married), and each new day I feel the weight of being defined negatively--UN-married, child-LESS.
It's theis feeling that I don't like, not so much the act of having kids itself. In the long run, it doesn't work to blame "breeders" or straight married couples alone. Normative heterosexuality will always reproduce itself. Rather, it's the political situation we're all in right now. Marriage+kids=wholly American right now. You are only part American--part human being, really--if you cannot have thes things or do not want them.
My brother says, "Well, that's your choice to feel that way." Again, the argument is framed in terms of choice--a personal act somehow exempt from the realm of the political. I object to how it locates the problem in me. I mean, it may be me that feels this way, but it's a political feeling, garnered from all the elements "out there" in the public sphere. He might say that it's not his personal choice either--and I would agree. I think the pressure to have kids is enormous. And I don't mean pressure as in peer-pressure--no one's holding a gun to his head. I mean the pressure/power of heterosexuality reproducing itself.
When straight couples have kids, they reproduce and they also reproduce heterosexuality in a way that seems "natural." One can choose to have kids or choose not to, but either way that identity is defined against a norm. The identity is reproduced and proliferated. Add baby culture to it and you have a huge arena of normal. When I say "baby culture" the parents usualyl go "huh?" because for them it's just plan regular culture. It's uncomfortable for them to now have an identity "as" something.
To have or not to have. This is how I see it: neither a personal "choice" nor some "brainwashing" as if you couldn't help it.
So if we're uncomfortable with "breeding," it's not the kids (I love kids), it's not maternal misogyny (I like how the act of childbirth looks and am not grossed out in the slightest), it's just the current political climate, which is extra-charged right now. And my age! At forty I won't have as many friends having kids.
I think that there's a point of difference here even between me and all friends who are in a relationship, gay or striahgt, kid or not kids. Most invites I get are to hang out with couples. Most parties I go to are attended by all couples. And not just any couples, but truly committed and monagamous couples who rarely do anything alone without first conferring with the other. That just seems weird to me, but maybe that's evidence I'm a selfish self-centered person who doesn't know how to honor the feelings of someone else. I guess I have this ideal of a relationship that is way laid-back, where a phone call every day is not requisite, where for a chunk of the summer I can plan to do something with a different friend that doesn't involve her. The last girl I talked to (at Noah and Husna's baby shower) had a lot in common with me and we emailed for a while. But then I found out from her myspace page that she wants "marriage, kids." Dealbreaker.
Maybe it's just Buffalo. When I lived in Amherst, MA/Northampton area, there were all sorts of genders roaming around. Lots of polyamorous folks, especially. It makes sense that Mass passed gay marriage--they are ten years ahead of their time. New York--especially BUffalo--is way behind, and I'm an anachronism here.
I think most of the bitching about breeders will be towards co-wrokers whose classes I must cover. But you've got to grant those of us non-breeders the right to speak out every now and then. The chorus of disapproval against such criticism is enormous--like how dare we say anything, you know?
As long as politicizing babies is allowed, as long as I'm permitted to vent frustration at the political situation we're all in, at the center of which are babies, and as long as I don't have to be ecstatic about it any more than I would for any other news, I'm in better shape. I've told my brother the same thing: if I seem uninterested beyond a certain point, it's only because of the situation, not him or Zachary. The dfference there is that he's pouring his whole identity into it, into being a Father, whereas I think you guys (A and T) have a lot of other interests that you want to maintain. You know, careers, art, and all that "junk"!
Damn B., that was long.
It;s cuz I'm sick with laryngitis and can't speak. Overcompensation. But it's also because it's the thing I think the most about these days and with hardly anyone to talk to about it.
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