[Blarg]

Apology accepted.

We do come from different backgrounds. I think mine is very different than most, so my perspectives may seem unusual to a lot of people. Our family was a foster family that took in kids after their parents had truly messed up. I learned through daily living with their kids the results of poor parenting, and it took a lot of the magic out of idyllic notions of motherhood and parenthood. I came to see them as what they really are, which is not a bad thing, but an ordinary thing and a difficult thing that can easily be messed up, and one with pretty huge repercussions when it is messed up.

So I'm not negative on parenthood, but I realize that it can be and very often is bungled. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It's just like any other part of life that way. But as a society, we tend to mythologize parenthood and childhood a lot, so talking frankly about it can seem very negative and unnerving, like a buzzkill, when really it's just bringing things back down to earth.

To be clear, I don't blame all the potential problems in parenting on women, too. Parenting takes two. Dads can, and do, mess up all the time. Lots of the kids we got were raped and/or beaten and/or tortured by their dads. (But believe it or not, women do messed up sexual stuff to their kids too.) And of course there are plenty of ways to mess up badly without anything that catastrophic.

One of the things I took from dealing with all those kids myself at such a young age was that parenthood is a really serious undertaking with profound consequences for both parent and child, and that it should not be undertaken lightly or with the idea that things will just work themselves out. Things basically don't. Generally speaking, YOU work them out. Or not. We got other people's "or nots." False pride and idiot optimism can leave quite a trail of carnage.

So many of those kids seemed so traumatized, almost ruined even at, say, four years old, that it made me worry a great deal for their future. How easy is it to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if what you understand about the universe is that it's basically hell? If these kids grew up even halfway normal, it would be a small miracle.

Yet they were going to have to go out there and compete. Among other things, that experience made me promise myself that I would never have kids unless I was truly ready to give them a truly good life, and one with the full scope of opportunities needed to remain competitive with their peers. I don't want them struggling to catch up from behind. In my mind, the kid and his needs come first, always, not the needs of the parents for fulfillment, conformity, to be optimistic, to please their church, anything like that. I really don't care about adult dreams in comparison to the dreams of the kid. And when people talk about their dreams, and insist everything will work out fine and that there's never anything to worry about or really prepare for, I think they are vain and still children themselves.

Unfortunately, I have seen a good number of people, including some real clods, credit themselves with wisdom just because they have proved their fertility. I am not first in line to praise people's fertility, nor even their hopes and dreams, much less their wisdom regarding parenthood or anything else if yet unearned. My first thought is always, "Enough about you. What about the kid?"