Kintsugi
Sponsor
People cannot fathom why I don't and wouldn't want children, and I cannot tell them the crux of this matter.
I am disbelieved when I say I don't like children. I tend to be quite good with children. I have somehow ended up working with children quite a lot in my relatively brief working life, and I seem so happy, happy doing it. I am patient, and I am tender. I ask open-ended questions. I hold my body the right way--open posture, unintimidating. I stoop to eye-level. I mirror them, repeat what they say with validation--"Yes! That cat is orange."
But I can't shake the feeling that That Girl is a fraud. And I can only wear that mask for so long.
Ever since I was a very young child myself, I despised children.
My parents always teased me growing up--"What if we decided to adopt another baby? Wouldn't you like that?" I fell into fits of tears and protests. "But," they would say, "What if it just showed up on the doorstep?" I thought such a baby had better find a different place to show up.
It started in earnest when my cousin was born. My uncle, her father, was fifty years old. Everyone thought I would be the youngest of the youngest generation in the family. I must have been four or so years old. I walked into my aunt and uncle's house, and I remember standing there, thinking, "Where is everybody?"
They were in the living room, a huge swath of my family from my father's side, all crowded around and crooning over this reddened lump of flesh, this bundle of spit and tears.
"This is your baby cousin," someone said to me. "Do you want to hold her?"
I backed up. "No!"
I was utterly disgusted by this situation. Some seed within me that had been dormant immediately took root. A baby. Disgusting, feeble, fragile, useless, talentless baby. And everyone thinks it's so great, just for existing! Imagine that. A baby has no skills, no use, no employ. It's completely worthless, yet it attracts such love and attention. Why?
This deep, deep, dark feeling of hatred grew and grew, and my poor cousin was the absolute butt of it for so long. I just hated her guts. I remember being perhaps six or seven and falling asleep to what I felt as satisfying fantasies of torturing that poor kid.
My little cousin idolized me, and that just made things worse. I simply wanted her to suffer. I saw her only-child-ness, how she was spoiled, how she was fussed over by family, and I was completely repulsed by the whole package. And then she idolizes me to boot? Everything I did, she copied, and all I wanted to do was kick her in the stomach.
It expanded from there as I got older. Any child younger than I, weaker than I, dumber, more fragile, happier, more naive--I just wanted them to suffer the worst abuses. I didn't know why I felt this way at the time, but I did know my feelings were wrong. I tried to hide my utter loathing. I knew it wasn't appropriate to feel such rage toward those who had done nothing wrong but existed as "lesser" than I, as I saw it.
When I began working with children--at the museum, as a rock climbing instructor, (13-17 years old) I found that I was really quite good at it. I would still tell anyone who asked either that I did not like or that I hated children (depending on what I thought I could get away with saying), but I didn't, really. I loved working with them in those environments. I loved being able to inspire them to learn, to do better, to work harder, to achieve more.
But the feelings remained, deep down, and they persist to this day, maybe even moreso because I no longer work with them.
Well, now all of these issues are surfacing for me. It began with my growing irritation and, frankly, downright terror over B (my ex) talking about children. It's not like he wanted to start a family in the foreseeable future, but something about the idea of having kids just began to grate on me somewhere deep in my center. We had mutually talked about kids, talked about wanting a family, but--I don't know. Maybe just getting older and thinking about the logistics of it all, how it began to seem like a reality close enough to touch, it became too much.
I have thought many times in the past that I would be unable to have children with someone, because I require too much attention. I don't have the prerequisite selflessness I think mothers are somehow imbued with, and I honestly don't want that selflessness. I want to be the center of my partner's attention, and children would distract from that. Then, of course, children are just so needy. How could I possibly fill that sort of neediness when I cannot seem to quell my own?
It's begun to hit critical mass lately, though. My best friend has a son. He turned five recently. I love this kid. I really do. And he adores me. I give him lots of attention. I play with him. In general, I just try to be a positive influence in his life, and I worry about him. I pay very close attention to his development. I'm highly invested in his happiness and success in life.
But then... there is something, someone, else, and She just hates him. Which means *I* hate him, doesn't it? I mean, She and I are really the same person. I've just... sectioned Her, allowing myself to call Her "Her" instead of "I."
Well, She is getting more and more difficult to shut up, harder and harder to contain. The longer I interact with this little boy, the harder it becomes not to notice the shit he doesn't have to deal with that I did, and that cruel, hateful part of me is simply tortured by that fact.
It's like I keep Her in a glass box inside my head, and I can feel her raging against the walls, clawing, screaming, banging to be let out. Every time I notice that he does not have to cope with the shit I had to cope with, it kills her, and she is wild with fury, with the injustice, the perceived personal slight.
Forget that he has not endured the abuse that I lived through (although seeing a child who is the age I was while I was living through abuse does not help). He simply has no idea, and will never have an idea, of what it is like to be the omega. Everyone hates a spoiled child, but this isn't what bothers me. It's not that he's spoiled. It's just that to me he is spoiled, sheerly because he does not have to know what it is to be at the very bottom of a lengthy totem pole. He is not required to be independent, to mediate family relations, to carefully judge whose side to take or when making himself scarce is the only thing to do. He does not know what it is to be the weakest, the easiest target. And he will never have to.
And that ignites this cruelty inside me.
I am so careful around him, so careful with everything I say and do, but one day, I snapped at him. It was Her. It was not me. No one blinked, really, but all I wanted to do at the time was look around at the other adults and say, "It wasn't me!"
I had spent all day with him and my friend. I hadn't eaten. I asked if my friend wanted to go out to eat that afternoon, but we had to do all this other shit for her, her son, her parents, her husband, etc. before we finally sat down at a restaurant around 8pm. It went from she and I going out to the whole damn lot of them, which took some coordination.
I really didn't mind. I was just extremely hungry, and going out is a huge treat for me these days, so I was careful not to eat anything and thus spoil my appetite. Her son, on the other hand, was in rare form that day. Really, all week he had been nothing but a bundle of complaints and demands. I wasn't the only one losing patience with him. Over the past few months, he has changed a lot--which I attribute to several factors--and he has begun to issue orders to people--"Come here and sit down right now!" It irritates me, but I remain calm, jovial, even.
Well, this child is the pickiest eater I have ever met (which has always, always been hugely irritating to me, even when I was his age, because I could never figure out why children couldn't simply shut up and be grateful), and he whined continuously as we waited for our food that he was hungry, but he refused any of the appetizers we offered him. Finally, something in me just broke.
"Would you just quit whining?" I snapped, and my voice, it was brimming with frustration and edged in, just... disgust.
Well, he shut up, and no one seemed to think anything unusual had happened (aside from the fact that I reprimanded him, which I rarely do, and never with such a tone). But this whole episode haunts me. I let Her speak, even though I am always so, so careful to keep Her wrapped up. If it happened once, I worry it could happen again, and I have lost my faith in my ability to always maintain complete control. It's not like I can't always hear Her, Her obscenely angry shouts, Her cold commentary. I feel Her repulsion of this boy all the time.
So when someone asks me about children, what can I say?
"Oh, no, I don't want kids; I see a happy child and just want to stamp out all their joy and innocence."
I am disbelieved when I say I don't like children. I tend to be quite good with children. I have somehow ended up working with children quite a lot in my relatively brief working life, and I seem so happy, happy doing it. I am patient, and I am tender. I ask open-ended questions. I hold my body the right way--open posture, unintimidating. I stoop to eye-level. I mirror them, repeat what they say with validation--"Yes! That cat is orange."
But I can't shake the feeling that That Girl is a fraud. And I can only wear that mask for so long.
Ever since I was a very young child myself, I despised children.
My parents always teased me growing up--"What if we decided to adopt another baby? Wouldn't you like that?" I fell into fits of tears and protests. "But," they would say, "What if it just showed up on the doorstep?" I thought such a baby had better find a different place to show up.
It started in earnest when my cousin was born. My uncle, her father, was fifty years old. Everyone thought I would be the youngest of the youngest generation in the family. I must have been four or so years old. I walked into my aunt and uncle's house, and I remember standing there, thinking, "Where is everybody?"
They were in the living room, a huge swath of my family from my father's side, all crowded around and crooning over this reddened lump of flesh, this bundle of spit and tears.
"This is your baby cousin," someone said to me. "Do you want to hold her?"
I backed up. "No!"
I was utterly disgusted by this situation. Some seed within me that had been dormant immediately took root. A baby. Disgusting, feeble, fragile, useless, talentless baby. And everyone thinks it's so great, just for existing! Imagine that. A baby has no skills, no use, no employ. It's completely worthless, yet it attracts such love and attention. Why?
This deep, deep, dark feeling of hatred grew and grew, and my poor cousin was the absolute butt of it for so long. I just hated her guts. I remember being perhaps six or seven and falling asleep to what I felt as satisfying fantasies of torturing that poor kid.
My little cousin idolized me, and that just made things worse. I simply wanted her to suffer. I saw her only-child-ness, how she was spoiled, how she was fussed over by family, and I was completely repulsed by the whole package. And then she idolizes me to boot? Everything I did, she copied, and all I wanted to do was kick her in the stomach.
It expanded from there as I got older. Any child younger than I, weaker than I, dumber, more fragile, happier, more naive--I just wanted them to suffer the worst abuses. I didn't know why I felt this way at the time, but I did know my feelings were wrong. I tried to hide my utter loathing. I knew it wasn't appropriate to feel such rage toward those who had done nothing wrong but existed as "lesser" than I, as I saw it.
When I began working with children--at the museum, as a rock climbing instructor, (13-17 years old) I found that I was really quite good at it. I would still tell anyone who asked either that I did not like or that I hated children (depending on what I thought I could get away with saying), but I didn't, really. I loved working with them in those environments. I loved being able to inspire them to learn, to do better, to work harder, to achieve more.
But the feelings remained, deep down, and they persist to this day, maybe even moreso because I no longer work with them.
Well, now all of these issues are surfacing for me. It began with my growing irritation and, frankly, downright terror over B (my ex) talking about children. It's not like he wanted to start a family in the foreseeable future, but something about the idea of having kids just began to grate on me somewhere deep in my center. We had mutually talked about kids, talked about wanting a family, but--I don't know. Maybe just getting older and thinking about the logistics of it all, how it began to seem like a reality close enough to touch, it became too much.
I have thought many times in the past that I would be unable to have children with someone, because I require too much attention. I don't have the prerequisite selflessness I think mothers are somehow imbued with, and I honestly don't want that selflessness. I want to be the center of my partner's attention, and children would distract from that. Then, of course, children are just so needy. How could I possibly fill that sort of neediness when I cannot seem to quell my own?
It's begun to hit critical mass lately, though. My best friend has a son. He turned five recently. I love this kid. I really do. And he adores me. I give him lots of attention. I play with him. In general, I just try to be a positive influence in his life, and I worry about him. I pay very close attention to his development. I'm highly invested in his happiness and success in life.
But then... there is something, someone, else, and She just hates him. Which means *I* hate him, doesn't it? I mean, She and I are really the same person. I've just... sectioned Her, allowing myself to call Her "Her" instead of "I."
Well, She is getting more and more difficult to shut up, harder and harder to contain. The longer I interact with this little boy, the harder it becomes not to notice the shit he doesn't have to deal with that I did, and that cruel, hateful part of me is simply tortured by that fact.
It's like I keep Her in a glass box inside my head, and I can feel her raging against the walls, clawing, screaming, banging to be let out. Every time I notice that he does not have to cope with the shit I had to cope with, it kills her, and she is wild with fury, with the injustice, the perceived personal slight.
Forget that he has not endured the abuse that I lived through (although seeing a child who is the age I was while I was living through abuse does not help). He simply has no idea, and will never have an idea, of what it is like to be the omega. Everyone hates a spoiled child, but this isn't what bothers me. It's not that he's spoiled. It's just that to me he is spoiled, sheerly because he does not have to know what it is to be at the very bottom of a lengthy totem pole. He is not required to be independent, to mediate family relations, to carefully judge whose side to take or when making himself scarce is the only thing to do. He does not know what it is to be the weakest, the easiest target. And he will never have to.
And that ignites this cruelty inside me.
I am so careful around him, so careful with everything I say and do, but one day, I snapped at him. It was Her. It was not me. No one blinked, really, but all I wanted to do at the time was look around at the other adults and say, "It wasn't me!"
I had spent all day with him and my friend. I hadn't eaten. I asked if my friend wanted to go out to eat that afternoon, but we had to do all this other shit for her, her son, her parents, her husband, etc. before we finally sat down at a restaurant around 8pm. It went from she and I going out to the whole damn lot of them, which took some coordination.
I really didn't mind. I was just extremely hungry, and going out is a huge treat for me these days, so I was careful not to eat anything and thus spoil my appetite. Her son, on the other hand, was in rare form that day. Really, all week he had been nothing but a bundle of complaints and demands. I wasn't the only one losing patience with him. Over the past few months, he has changed a lot--which I attribute to several factors--and he has begun to issue orders to people--"Come here and sit down right now!" It irritates me, but I remain calm, jovial, even.
Well, this child is the pickiest eater I have ever met (which has always, always been hugely irritating to me, even when I was his age, because I could never figure out why children couldn't simply shut up and be grateful), and he whined continuously as we waited for our food that he was hungry, but he refused any of the appetizers we offered him. Finally, something in me just broke.
"Would you just quit whining?" I snapped, and my voice, it was brimming with frustration and edged in, just... disgust.
Well, he shut up, and no one seemed to think anything unusual had happened (aside from the fact that I reprimanded him, which I rarely do, and never with such a tone). But this whole episode haunts me. I let Her speak, even though I am always so, so careful to keep Her wrapped up. If it happened once, I worry it could happen again, and I have lost my faith in my ability to always maintain complete control. It's not like I can't always hear Her, Her obscenely angry shouts, Her cold commentary. I feel Her repulsion of this boy all the time.
So when someone asks me about children, what can I say?
"Oh, no, I don't want kids; I see a happy child and just want to stamp out all their joy and innocence."
