We misunderstood the brook when we arrived, but today I found the deepest part of it. It was murky, but I stepped into it without fear. The water reached my upper thigh.
That feels like an adult thing; like going into dark cellars, walking through the forest, stepping into murky brooks, doing it without fear because monsters don’t really exist.
I suppose snapping turtles do exist, and bears, too.
But this place just doesn’t feel like the sort of place to bite off toes. It’s more the type of place where you find toads and make pizza ovens out of clay you found over on the south side of the forest. The world listens, I think.
That feels like an adult thing; like going into dark cellars, walking through the forest, stepping into murky brooks, doing it without fear because monsters don’t really exist.
I suppose snapping turtles do exist, and bears, too.
But this place just doesn’t feel like the sort of place to bite off toes. It’s more the type of place where you find toads and make pizza ovens out of clay you found over on the south side of the forest. The world listens, I think.
As we’ve gotten closer to the fall, when our child will be born, as Abby’s gotten more pregnant and more people know about it we’ve gotten more advice, or at least, perspectives, about our future.
For the most part they’ve been kind of shitty:
Enjoy freedom while you can!
For the most part they’ve been kind of shitty:
Enjoy freedom while you can!
You’ll miss sleep!
Have fun touching poop!
You’ll wish you didn’t have some diminuitive asshole taking up all your time, you poor bastard.
I didn’t like that attitude at first and now I hate it. I understand that having a child is difficult emotionally and physically. But to consider it somehow inconvenient seems so wrong headed it is almost deranged. Is cooking inconvenient? Is eating? How about walking? Breathing? Praying? Working?
Where do we draw the line of inconvenience?
Can something that is so fully in our nature really be inconvenient?
How is it that our society is so adverse to difficulty and discomfort that something as profound and profoundly human as -procreation- is seen as somehow inconvenient?
I find it very upsetting, more upsetting the more I think about it.
I have no doubt that there will be an evening some time in October, or November where I think of this post and reflect that I didn’t really understand just how difficult it would be.
That’s fine.
But somehow the idea of embarking on the project of parenting already under the impression that it’s a pain in the ass feels very wrong indeed.
Not just wrong, but almost evil.
Not that the people who feel that way and give me this advice are evil, but that the society that has normalized this perspective is evil.
Evil in so far as it is antithetical to what is good for people to do.
As my good friend once said:
That’s fine.
But somehow the idea of embarking on the project of parenting already under the impression that it’s a pain in the ass feels very wrong indeed.
Not just wrong, but almost evil.
Not that the people who feel that way and give me this advice are evil, but that the society that has normalized this perspective is evil.
Evil in so far as it is antithetical to what is good for people to do.
As my good friend once said:
Anything worth doing is a hassle.
