Now, see, months like this are why I don't want children.
Kids are great. Kids are wonderful. I love seeing Jay, I love taking care of friends' babies, I'd even like to adopt some day. Babies or older kids, I don't know which. Maybe both.
But kids of my own...far too dangerous.
I was watching Private Practice with Mom the other night. (For anyone who doesn't know, that's Addison's spin-off from Grey's Anatomy - Addy moves to LA, joins up with a friend's clinic there. It's a great programme - classic Grey's flavour, but a lot more humour.)
Anyway, much of the storyline in this week's episode focused around a woman with Huntington's Disease in her family line, who wasn't sure whether she wanted to have a baby or not. After she got tested and found she had the gene, she left her husband, but then by the end they got back together and decided to try for a baby. You know how it goes, typical happy ending. (I do like those happy endings, you know.) And Mom and I had very differing opinions on this. I didn't state my opinion, since I knew that was one good way to piss her off, which was something I didn't really want to do right before bed. But anyway, her view was that their choice to try for a baby , despite a 50/50 chance of passing the gene on, and a certainty that the mother was going to die young, was a brave and noble thing to do. Whereas I was sitting there thinking, Woman, are you insane?
I simply cannot fathom why anybody would have a child when they know that there's a 50% chance that that child will have an illness that will cause them to die a horrible, scary, undignified death in their middle age. Some people view this as a show of faith, of hope, but to me it's the ultimate selfish act. If I found that I carried that gene, I'd book myself in for sterilisation right then and there. Some things simply should not be passed on.
The condition that runs in my family isn't as horrible and life-destroying as Huntington's. (Come to think of it, few illnesses are.) But it's definitely something that shapes your life. It's not something that you can escape. And unlike with a lot of genetic conditions, you can't really shrug it off and tell yourself that by the time your kids are grown-up, they'll probably have a cure. There isn't a cure for what we have.
And it's not something that merely increases your chances of getting the symptoms, the way the genes for certain cancers or things like asthma or glaucoma are. I am as certain as I can be without doing genetic testing that this is dominant. I base this on the fact that every woman on my mother's side of my family tree, as far back as I can trace, has had this in some shape or form. Most of the men, too. It doesn't seem to matter whether we marry someone with a similar genetic disposition or not: the children get it. And as far as I can tell, from looking at past relatives and talking to my Ancestors, it gets stronger with each successive generation.
The Ancestors don't agree with me on the no-children front. They tell me it's something my family line have coped with for millennia, and that my children and their children will continue to cope with it, increased strength and all. But dammit, I don't want them to have to. Nobody should have to. TV and books make it look so easy, even pleasant. It's not pleasant or easy. The reality is a life that's never your own. It's being dragged out of bed at all hours of the night for problems you can't do anything about. It's saying goodbye to any personal space. It's machinery that doesn't work, £899 laptops that constantly break down because of electrical interference, being unable to make a cellphone call within your own house because of the static and crossed lines you get. It's frequent headaches, nasty burns on the hand from where someone decided to turn the heat on the cooker up for a practical joke, sprained ankles from where you got tripped while going down the stairs. It's an estrangement from your father, and a boyfriend who left you after a pregnancy scare that occurred because some jackass decided to switch around the contraceptive pills in your medicine dispenser. It's finding soap on your toothbrush and sugar in your shampoo, and it's getting to the gym to find that your gym clothes are missing from your bag, and it's being late to work because all the clocks in your house miraculously got set back an hour. It's friends who accuse you of becoming cold and heartless, and wanting to scream at them and cry because that's not the way it is at all, it's just that you have to close yourself off from a lot of it if you want to survive. Most of all it's never having any peace, never ever being alone, because there's always someone who needs attention.
And that was just this month. Aside from the boyfriend and father bits.
...And I'm just realising that most of you guys will have no idea what I'm talking about here. But that's just the way life goes sometimes.
Krista passed this curse onto my mother. My mother passed it to me. And I am simply not willing to pass it further. I do not want to breed yet another generation of children who will be forced into this...slavery.
This stops here.
Kids are great. Kids are wonderful. I love seeing Jay, I love taking care of friends' babies, I'd even like to adopt some day. Babies or older kids, I don't know which. Maybe both.
But kids of my own...far too dangerous.
I was watching Private Practice with Mom the other night. (For anyone who doesn't know, that's Addison's spin-off from Grey's Anatomy - Addy moves to LA, joins up with a friend's clinic there. It's a great programme - classic Grey's flavour, but a lot more humour.)
Anyway, much of the storyline in this week's episode focused around a woman with Huntington's Disease in her family line, who wasn't sure whether she wanted to have a baby or not. After she got tested and found she had the gene, she left her husband, but then by the end they got back together and decided to try for a baby. You know how it goes, typical happy ending. (I do like those happy endings, you know.) And Mom and I had very differing opinions on this. I didn't state my opinion, since I knew that was one good way to piss her off, which was something I didn't really want to do right before bed. But anyway, her view was that their choice to try for a baby , despite a 50/50 chance of passing the gene on, and a certainty that the mother was going to die young, was a brave and noble thing to do. Whereas I was sitting there thinking, Woman, are you insane?
I simply cannot fathom why anybody would have a child when they know that there's a 50% chance that that child will have an illness that will cause them to die a horrible, scary, undignified death in their middle age. Some people view this as a show of faith, of hope, but to me it's the ultimate selfish act. If I found that I carried that gene, I'd book myself in for sterilisation right then and there. Some things simply should not be passed on.
The condition that runs in my family isn't as horrible and life-destroying as Huntington's. (Come to think of it, few illnesses are.) But it's definitely something that shapes your life. It's not something that you can escape. And unlike with a lot of genetic conditions, you can't really shrug it off and tell yourself that by the time your kids are grown-up, they'll probably have a cure. There isn't a cure for what we have.
And it's not something that merely increases your chances of getting the symptoms, the way the genes for certain cancers or things like asthma or glaucoma are. I am as certain as I can be without doing genetic testing that this is dominant. I base this on the fact that every woman on my mother's side of my family tree, as far back as I can trace, has had this in some shape or form. Most of the men, too. It doesn't seem to matter whether we marry someone with a similar genetic disposition or not: the children get it. And as far as I can tell, from looking at past relatives and talking to my Ancestors, it gets stronger with each successive generation.
The Ancestors don't agree with me on the no-children front. They tell me it's something my family line have coped with for millennia, and that my children and their children will continue to cope with it, increased strength and all. But dammit, I don't want them to have to. Nobody should have to. TV and books make it look so easy, even pleasant. It's not pleasant or easy. The reality is a life that's never your own. It's being dragged out of bed at all hours of the night for problems you can't do anything about. It's saying goodbye to any personal space. It's machinery that doesn't work, £899 laptops that constantly break down because of electrical interference, being unable to make a cellphone call within your own house because of the static and crossed lines you get. It's frequent headaches, nasty burns on the hand from where someone decided to turn the heat on the cooker up for a practical joke, sprained ankles from where you got tripped while going down the stairs. It's an estrangement from your father, and a boyfriend who left you after a pregnancy scare that occurred because some jackass decided to switch around the contraceptive pills in your medicine dispenser. It's finding soap on your toothbrush and sugar in your shampoo, and it's getting to the gym to find that your gym clothes are missing from your bag, and it's being late to work because all the clocks in your house miraculously got set back an hour. It's friends who accuse you of becoming cold and heartless, and wanting to scream at them and cry because that's not the way it is at all, it's just that you have to close yourself off from a lot of it if you want to survive. Most of all it's never having any peace, never ever being alone, because there's always someone who needs attention.
And that was just this month. Aside from the boyfriend and father bits.
...And I'm just realising that most of you guys will have no idea what I'm talking about here. But that's just the way life goes sometimes.
Krista passed this curse onto my mother. My mother passed it to me. And I am simply not willing to pass it further. I do not want to breed yet another generation of children who will be forced into this...slavery.
This stops here.
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