The Question Of Kids

I just received (with­in 10 min­utes) a one page let­ter deny­ing my appli­ca­tion to become a Big Brother. It great­ly, great­ly sad­dens me. I wish I knew why they decid­ed this, but they aren’t at lib­er­ty to dis­cuss it. I actu­al­ly had to sign some­thing acknowl­edg­ing that if I was reject­ed, I would­n’t know why, if the orga­ni­za­tion chose not to tell me.

I’ll always won­der why I was not allowed this oppor­tu­ni­ty. I thought I’d be good at it, but I’m sure that this com­mit­tee of peo­ple know bet­ter than I. After all, I have lit­tle expe­ri­ence with younger peo­ple. I just wish some­one could under­stand how much this would have meant to me.

I won­der if it could be my matu­ri­ty. If it could be my time restraints. My rela­tion­ship with my par­ents. My being a good hater. Could it be that they feel my motives are out of self­ish­ness? Could it be that one of my ref­er­ences gave me a bad rep­u­ta­tion? Or sim­ply that I’m not the right kind of per­son for the job? I real­ly have no idea, since I believe that I gave an extreme­ly good impres­sion at the inter­view.

I always believed that my expe­ri­ence with par­ent­ing would help me become a good par­ent myself. Many peo­ple whom I’ve spo­ken to believe this of me as well. Yet, the idea of hav­ing chil­dren of my own still scares me. It’s the idea that I am in con­trol of some­one else’s life, when I believe that my own life will always be full of entropy. What hap­pens to my child if I ever got divorced? What hap­pens if I ever died? So many uncer­tain­ties make the whole idea very fright­en­ing.

I also don’t believe I have the capac­i­ty to love in this man­ner. It’s not a pater­nal emo­tion that I have been able to devel­op or learn. I have my rea­sons.

The sub­ject of kids has always been present in my rela­tion­ships, and it’s usu­al­ly been a source of con­flict.

About three years ago I came upon a site called WebMD. It’s a pret­ty good resource for health issues, and psy­chol­o­gy issues. One of their events was a chat ses­sion with a par­ent­ing expert, and I could­n’t help but try to ask a ques­tion that I had been ask­ing myself at the time. The tran­script can be found here (my name was jesterz_webmd).

At the time, I felt like her answer was quite uncon­ven­tion­al.

I had been brought up my whole life think­ing that I need­ed chil­dren of my own to be hap­py. I sud­den­ly real­ized that think­ing this way was not for every­one, and that not hav­ing kids could be as ful­fill­ing as rais­ing kin. It was then that I decid­ed that I most like­ly would­n’t have chil­dren of my own.

Then again, I was only 19 on the time.

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