No, I'm not having a baby. Michi is not pregnant, and we're not setting any dates for marriage. But during our dinner and movie date, the question did come up: don't you want kids?
The question raises all sorts of qualms for me. Delving into my family's history, kids have tended to get shafted by their fathers, at least on my father's side of the family. My father's father's father (paternal grandfather's father, if that makes it any simpler), was killed in a street robbery when my paternal grandfather was quite young. He became a heavy drinker later in life, and my father, the oldest of 5, took the brunt of his drunken violence.
My own father never drank, but his temper was no less scary to a child, and I remember being angry at him and afraid of him as a child, and even into my twenties. Following an episode I don't care to recount right now, I gradually cut him out of my life.
As if going through puberty were not trial enough, my parents began a lengthy, tumultuous divorce procedure when I was around 12-13 years old. My parents had been fighting for years, but with the divorce it became a tug of war over me and my brother.
That is my experience with fatherhood. Why would I want to inflict something like that on my hypothetical children? Obviously, I am not my father, nor his father or any of the fathers in my mother's family. I can tell myself that I am not doomed to make the same mistakes, but even thinking about the divorce or some other painful experience from my childhood is enough to start the tears flowing, with promises never to let that happen to my own children; the only sure way being never to have any children.
Many of the women in my life have told me that they sense a great kindness in me, from my mother and Michi, friends, and co-workers, to sometimes random strangers. Personally, I feel like Wolverine or the Hulk: capable of kindness, but with an inherent savage rage lurking in the background. Only the wish to be different from my father keeping the violence in check. Melodramatic or cliched, maybe, but that's how I feel. Can a person like that really raise a child without devastating emotional scars, or make a relationship last?
I have been debating this with myself since my teens, to no resolution. Sometimes I think about what I'll do with my own children, forgetting that just a few weeks, days or hours earlier I had decided never to have any. Of course, having kids (in the current socially accepted sense) goes together with marriage, and I've been debating that too for over a decade. The majority of my relationships have been so short-lived, or at least reared major problems early enough that I've been believing that I'd be alone forever.
Maybe in some sense, I've been believing that I don't deserve love or happiness, that I'm incapable of giving that to others. Do I believe any different now? Maybe not all the time, but I'm trying.
Needless to say, the question has brought about a lot of self-reflection.
Anyway, the date was really good. We made gyoza, soup, and sabayon, and watched Zatouichi, about a blind swordsman who wanders around helping peasants in need.
"We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself."
~ David Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Cheers,
~ David Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Cheers,
