there is no way i could read that article, i can barely read this thread…
being a parent does change you. my two beautiful girls are my everything.
as a single dad they are the center of my world and everything revolves around them and i wouldn’t have it any other way.
i’d give my life in a second to save either one, without question or hesitation, with only gratitude that i was able to do so.
if i lost one of them it would break me beyond repair but i’d put on my best game face and carry on somehow for the other one, if i lost both i can’t imagine…
sending lots of love and tears to every parent out there who has lost a child.
i don’t expect anyone without children could ever fully understand, but those who have experienced any serious loss can surly empathize. the loss of a loved one can be absolutely earth shatteringly devastating, but a child…
I have no idea why some people are here arguing something they obviously have no understanding or experience of, how selfish to intellectualize away the connection and pain of others. they seem to have never loved something enough to be capable of understanding or even imagining the level of pain and loss being discussed.
As a relatively new parent (oldest is 3) I’d put it like this. Imagine that your life is a hot air balloon with the heat stuck on. Without a tether your off flying out of control never to come down. Thankfully you have a tether that keeps you held down so you can enjoy your life, have some enjoyment, and generally feel a sense of purpose. This tether is different for everyone. It may be their parents, siblings, job, art, whatever they want. When you have kids that tether is cut, but is held together by the child’s grubby little fingers. Essentially they come bursting in and without you even realizing it, much less be able to stop it, they replace your strong, well defined, tether with themselves: a fragile constantly changing mess of humanity. Your old tethers are no longer relevant, what grounds you has fundamentally changed in a way that can’t be described to someone who hasn’t experienced it because you aren’t even sure how yourself. Losing that tether would cause such chaos in your life that it is hard to see how you would ever regain control.
Not reading it either. What is the point? I’m already trying not to be a helicopter parent. Trying to ignore the relentless bouts of anxiety, worry, fear and intrusive thoughts. This article, even just reading the post and skimming this thread makes it all worse.
I mean really, what is the point of posts like this? I suppose if this one specific case encourages someone to do basic maintenance on a building they manage then some good can come out of it. But for me, it just helped make the day harder.
My aunt and uncle had four kids. One was bipolar, went out drinking one night and shot himself. Another was shot by his college roommate. (Other two are fine.) Another aunt and uncle lost their youngest kid to liver disease at 40. (We just had a funeral for the aunt today; her husband died about fiver years ago.) The cemetery where my dad’s buried has way too many babies from the 1700s in it, and a friend of mine from college, who was murdered when she was hitchhiking back home from music lessons one day (I knew her father better than her; he was my junior high music teacher.)
Well, not fully, no. I have no kids but am empathetic and can appreciate and respect the apparent disappearance of motivation and centeredness that can arise from significant deaths.
One of my pressing concerns about the future is that irreligious people such as myself do not have a real viable analog of the church when it comes to communally addressing grief. Given what appears to be simultaneous ongoing reduction of the closeness of extended families, this doesn’t bode well for the mental health of contemporary and especially future peoples…
P.S. Your mental health depends upon the stars, friend. You are made of thus. Never forget that. Even in the darkest night, you will continue to shine, for you are made of starlight…
As an adult, you may think you’ve roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You’ve loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.
I struggle to think of any life event that has changed me and my view of the world as much as becoming a parent. It is not even close.
(Prior to becoming a parent, I had noticed that people I considered uptight became noticeably less so after having children for 5+ years. I do consider this to still be true. Now I know why.)
Parenthood changes you. Or at least changed me. I did not have a big void in my life, I was quite content being myself and living my life. Then my partner and I decided to start a family, and we now have a 1 1/2 year old son. The thought of anything bad happening to him terrifies me, in a can’t-breathe-for-fear kind of way. The irrational fear strikes me at random. Sometimes when he’s sleeping, I need to go and see that he’s okay, and I really can’t explain why. The walk, from the sofa to his room, fills me with dread every time.
Having a little boy makes sense of my life, answering a question I didn’t know I was asking, adding value I didn’t know was missing. To imagine losing that again…well, I didn’t read the article.
Thank you, these were my thoughts exactly. The piece heavily implies that life has no meaning without children, either before or after. Or at the very least, that whatever meaning precedes children is somehow cheap.
Humans can find meaning in a lot of ways. Many choose children, and that’s fine. Some don’t, and that’s fine, too. And still others were never granted the privilege of having the choice to begin with.
I was making a general observation about the nature of modern western secular life among many of my generation (I’m 29). I wasn’t lamenting my personal or social life (which are fine, thanks).
The Buddhist solution is that suffering is part of maya - illusion - our perception of the universe is fundamentally flawed, and our lives are made difficult because we drag behind us karma - the mental baggage that we carry away from events, good or bad. I’m not sure that the Buddhist answer is morally adequate for Westerners, but it’s a lot closer to the physicist’s universe than that of the humanities graduate. To be controversial, you could say that humanities are pure unadulterated karma.
A refusal to create children, to refuse to fulfil “being natural”, is itself an action with its own karma. You choose to avoid the possibility of sadness but you also choose to avoid the possibility of some joy and happiness. It’s essentially a position of the “the sun won’t rise tomorrow, the Earth’s rotation will mean that my present location will receive photons from a large self-powered fusion plant” variety. In effect, it is being afraid of acquiring karma rather than avoiding it through compassion and understanding, so I regard it as being more philosophically defective than the Buddhist position, if that makes sense.
Jains have children. But that’s because their philosophy, unusual as it is, is not fatuous and simplistic. Philosophically inconsistent, but then that goes for philosophers too. Even vegans eat food that has probably been grown as a monoculture involving slash and burn clearance and the deaths of many animals. The truth is that we muddle through existence, and the thing that might do the most to improve the existence of the most people is a way of eliminating psychopathy.
True but so many don’t get the opportunity to make that choice because they never reach an age where they can and that’s the sad part for me, anyone will be sad at the loss of a loved one, mother, father, auntie, whatever, but if someone has lived a full, long life, it makes the loss more bearable than someone who never made it that far.
