“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
last year i wrote an essay, “why I don’t want kids.”
i’m glad i wrote it.
it was part of the process.
my conscious mind still agrees with that essay, still feels the same way.
i haven’t officially changed my mind.
i’m not quite ready to.
my conscious mind is kicking and screaming.
and yet…
i’m aware of parts of myself that don’t agree. that feel differently.
like my body. my body very much wants me to have kids. and isn’t that obvious? straightforward?
i’m a horny man, a monkey that loves to fuck like all the other monkeys. it’s my nature to want to have sex. that’s what all this horniness is for.
it’s my nature to want to reproduce. it’s my nature to want children. it’s evolution. it’s the very life of the universe.
any time that my mind has wanted one thing and my body has wanted another, my body wins out in the end.
that shape of inner conflict only has one endgame.
so i can see where this is going.
there’s a voice i use when i’m speaking from my mind.
it’s a little too confident. a little too insistent.
and i can hear that voice speaking when i say i don’t want kids.
i can tell that’s what’s running the show.
at least consciously.
U know, i write a lot of fiction.
and if i look at my own life from that perspective, from the third person, where I’m the protagonist of a story in God’s universe rather than the frontman of my own life-
it’s obvious where this is going.
the very thing the protagonist is resisting turns out to be the answer. the solution. the plot twist.
the plot line feels like it stretches out towards me having kids, whether present me likes it or not.
i noticed how inspired i’ve been by The Godfather. Vito Corleone is a father to four children and the steward of a line.
how inspired i’ve been by my friend Zencephalon: by his views about family—his values and dreams and plans for his line.
how inspired i’ve been by the idea of a clan—a family of families. an old, stable pattern which has faded with history but is ripe for revival.
i love the idea of being not merely a father but the steward of a line. a leader in a clan.
i can see how that would serve my aims with The Service Guild, rather than detract from it. how that would be a long game worth playing.
i got triggered once when someone said they trust people less when they don’t have kids. because they don’t have skin in the game.
my triggers show me my shadow. my unfelt feelings. my repressed desires. the future that is waiting for me but i have not yet acknowledged, accepted, submitted to.
a big change happened when i realized that my resistance to having children was predicated on the assumption that I would be poor all my life.
I’d been voluntarily poor for most of my twenties and early thirties.
that worked for me for a good long while.
and then it stopped being the thing.
a lot changes if I allow for the possibility of being wealthy in the future. of not only having my needs met, but of having abundant means.
child-rearing becomes much less foolish of a prospect and much more realistic.
last summer i was walking down a trail in a forest late at night. it’d gotten darker much more quickly than i’d anticipated. i was stumbling around in the dark and at risk of getting lost.
a woman drove by on her bike and asked if I was ok. she warned me that there were some wild animals nearby that i ought to be careful about, wary of. she offered to walk me home. very kind of her. i took her up on her offer.
as we walked, we talked, and got to know each other. traded life stories. she told me about her struggles with her abusive ex and how she was growing through her current relationship. she told me about her kids. she said that children change U more than anything, because they demand that U look at your blindspots, that U admit all the ways your patterns aren’t working for U. that U are forced to grow.
that same summer I met a young man named Wilder. i told him about the novel i was writing, about its plot and its characters, its world and its magick. he got so excited. he got more genuinely excited than anyone I’ve talked to about the project.
and then he gave me feedback. he told me i needed a villain in the story, and told me what he thought the villain should be.
he made a good point and i plan on incorporating elements of that feedback. i’ve added Wilder to the acknowledgements section of my novel. above all, i really enjoyed that conversation, and i think he did too. i hope we meet again.
i’m not gonna lie, i’d be far more excited about parenting if it felt like that. i know i’d be a good dad in so many ways. but would i really enjoy it? wilder made me think i might just.
anyways. one day at a time. we’ll see what my karma holds. we’ll see what the will of God is for my life. I shall do my best to surrender to it.
and if i change my mind about having kids, I might as well go for having four.