ONCE PREGNANT, I KNEW IT WAS A WAVE I HAD TO RIDE
I’m not what anyone would call a particularly optimistic person. By nature, I am skeptical, critical and always wondering, “What’s the catch?” So even when things are good — and, actually, especially then — I have questions. This is likely why I ended up a journalist, a profession in which possessing those qualities is generally beneficial.
Maybe this is why people around me seemed really surprised when I announced my pregnancy last fall. I had always kept my cards close to my chest — I made my career covering the cannabis beat, am previously divorced, and am now in my late 30s. I think my cranky disposition combined with those factors didn’t signal to many that I was also planning to have a family one day, but here I am, recently remarried and about to give birth to my first child at the end of May.
Getting to this point has been a wildly physical and mental journey, a large part of which has involved realizing and making peace with the fact that, deep down, I’m actually a wildly hopeful person. I don’t think one could have kids without being so, especially not today.
The list of reasons for not wanting to reproduce is long and heavy: economic inequality, climate change, political polarity, COVID-19’s continuation and ongoing aftermath, and our nation’s gun violence crisis, to give just a handful of examples. Many millennials like myself have decided the challenges facing humanity are too great to subject to a younger, yet-to-beborn generation. I’ll admit that while I find this reticence understandable, it also strikes me as shortsighted and nihilistic.
My friend Nick Riggle, fellow procreator, a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and the author of the recently published “This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive,” wrote an entire book about accepting the life we didn’t consent to be born into. That line of inquiry extends to our offspring, present and future, who similarly did not consent to be made alive.
How can we justify it?
I’m not sure that anyone needs to. Humanity has always been a tough slog. It used to be even more so than it is today, and our consumption habits are what’s threatening the environment. The truth is that humans have never lived so comfortably nor enjoyed so much excess, in aggregate, although the conditions remain starkly different depending on where and to whom one is born.
Still, regardless of how trying the conditions, people have always found the will to reproduce in the bleakest of eras. I noticed lots of people my age giving in and getting pregnant during COVID-19 lockdowns; I’m assuming they were banking on the fact that, someday, things must get better and become more tolerable. If we can’t make it so, maybe our children will be able to. The point being, there will need to be people alive to make that a reality.
It’s fine if people don’t want to have kids. For a long time, I figured I might not myself. I enjoy a good life and have been scared of disrupting that, and I think it’s OK if people feel similarly and decide to continue on that path. But at some point, I realized I’m a person who likes to encounter the totality of life and whatever comes with it, however difficult or easy. For me, that included at least trying to have kids.
I would have accepted it if I hadn’t been able to, but I knew once I was pregnant that it was a wave I had to ride. I’m still scared but also looking forward to stewarding a new life into the future, which has yet to be written. Already, I want the best for my son, which, to me, also means I want the best for the world around him, and I have hope that his life and the lives of generations to come will be worth living. Trying to mold him into someone who believes all of those things are one and the same will be my most profound challenge yet.