On parenthood and suicidal/self-harm fantasies
Tuesday, October 17, 2023 1:43pm
Today I am thinking about how much of parenting is a practice of self-regulation. Now that I have a one-year-old, I am constantly talking myself down, talking myself (and others) through the consequences of allowing my child to live her life, getting out of the way while she explores new skills, tries solutions that I know won't work, take risks that make my uterus and vulva twist in dismay. She is seeking new experiences. The process of learning is unavoidably messy, but messes that are not irrevocable can be cleaned up (often with hydrogen peroxide, or Dr Bronner's, or a little rubbing alcohol) and the probability of the worst case scenario actually playing out is really quite low for the baby I've been ...issued (ha, here's where English fails me...賜 cì "awarded by heaven" is the term that comes to mind), a child who is bold and careful, extremely strong, but also alert, deliberate, and the opposite of reckless. Unlike myself.
We are alike in physical competence, but the caution and empathy that I have spent years cultivating in myself come naturally to her. And her good sense of herself resembles Kate's indefatigable self-esteem, though (luckily for me) some of it has rubbed off on me in utero.
My heart is so full these days, there's no room left for angst. It is a bizarre experience. I am, perhaps for the first time in my life, one hundred percent determined to go on living.
All my life I have questioned my worthiness of being alive, on this planet, as a citizen of one of the most wasteful, consumerist and unapologetically greedy countries on God's green earth. Though I do not have a history of actually carrying out my self-harm and suicidal fantasies, I have carried them into every life choice, trying to make of myself an offering fit to justify the gift of my life.
Parenthood has fundamentally shifted that for me. I don't think it's just because of the genes I shared with Boon while gestating. I have shifted from the thought that I might be better off dead to the thought that I better not die with so much work unfinished, before my child is ready to take flight without me.
It is not just that after waiting so long for parenthood, the thought of leaving somebody else to raise the child I have waited years to bear is unbearable, though it is. It is also the knowing that if Kate and I were to die untimely, we would traumatize Boon into being a totally different person that she is currently poised to become.
It is strange to be afraid of dying, when I have flirted with the idea all my adult life. And stranger still, to be more afraid of dying myself, that of the death of my parents, my grandparents, or even my chosen co-parent (which would REALLY SUCK). I believe, no, I know that I can survive those things. I even think I could survive Boon's death, now, though it would change me into someone I dread to become.
