The Wrote and the Writ

allpossiblefaces:

Les Feuilles Mortes

Remedios Varo 

livinglines:

“Never love a wild thing…. He was always lugging home wild things.  A hawk with a hurt wing.  One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg.  But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing:  the more you do, the stronger they get.  Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods.  Or fly into a tree.  Then a taller tree.  Then the sky.  That’s how you’ll end up…. If you let yourself love a wild thing.  You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

- Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.


Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.


There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town… .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
‘Love, O careless Love … .’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat … .
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15279

When I got home last night, as I was winding down from a ridiculously loud evening at work where there were about 15 million children running around screaming in the hotel lobby,  I went online and stumbled on a documentary about married couples who chose not to have children (I probably stumbled on it because I googled “I hate children”).

The concept was great because not many people tackle this subject matter, but the couples they used in the documentary were sort of wishy-washy about the whole thing.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about how I always say I never want kids and how everyone always asks me why, and I realized that I never really elaborate on it well because I’m terrible at explaining such awkward/complex things. There are a lot of things people don’t know about me because I’m always hesitant to share stories…

For some reason it’s still very taboo to say you don’t want kids. I’m always met with disbelief or a patronizing “oh, you’ll change your mind someday” & it’s gotten worse since I was married 10 months ago. I have complete strangers constantly asking me when I’m going to start having children. You’d think that a stranger asking me about the detailed happenings of my sex-life would be taboo, but I’ve actually learned that most people think it’s more appropriate to be married and having sex in order to produce a child versus just being married and having sex. For some reason people immediately identify a childless couple as either reproductively unfortunate or sexually deviant (which I wouldn’t call my husband and I sexually deviant—I mean, we’re freaks but not in the snuff-film and safe-words way).

Regardless, people always have the gall to ask me when I’m going to start popping out babies like a vending machine, and it always makes me want to throw up a little bit because I just don’t like children. It’s not a feeling that’s anchored in feminism at all & has nothing to do with being a career woman (I don’t really want one of those either), I just don’t have a maternal bone in my body. I don’t think that kids are cute and I don’t really care about the experience of watching one grow up and raising a good human being. I actually think it’s quite horrifying to have something similar to a parasite living inside of your body for 9 long months, eating all your energy and shaving a year or two off of your life.

But aside from all that, I find it horrifying because I’m a control freak who loves my freedom. I love to be able to go to bed at 8pm one night, 3am the next, get drunk on a bottle of wine and then slowly work my way to PBR and have a drunken 90’s dance party with my husband until 4am. I like that I can bounce from job to job and not know what’s coming next and most importantly not care. I like to live exactly how I want to without having to answer to anyone—without added responsibility.

When you have a child, you have to make it the most important thing in your life. You have to love it more than anyone—more than anything, and I think it’s terrible to stop loving your husband or wife as much as you first did for the sake of some small stranger. It forces people to drift apart for 18 years until the damn thing moves out of the house because you’re both so focused on the child that you can’t talk about anything else. Once the house is empty you’re suddenly living with a complete stranger instead of the person you married. You then either have to get to know that person all over again or get divorced.

Who knows…that could be a wrong interpretation—maybe having kids brings couples closer together in a unique way that I’ll never experience. What I do know is that I’d rather not roll the dice on that one, and that my husband and I are already close in a unique way. It’s just crazy. For me, it would be crazy.

 A lot of people assume that a person who doesn’t want kids is somehow morally corrupt. I’d like to believe that I maintain a respectable level of the social contract by not doing perceived “immoral” things like eating mushrooms or taking LSD and going on a killing spree. I’m as close to being regular person as the next guy, and the dissidence between what people perceive I should be like (from my lack of desire for children) versus what I actually am like always results in my stance against having children to be taken as a joke.

It’s also interesting to note that it is always other women—not once has it been a man—who ask all the intrusive questions, make all of the unwarranted assumptions, and feel free to make the patronizing comments. It’s shocking how many women have decided to not get to know me because of this. I am somehow judged more heavily because I have an able body that I have decided not to use as an incubator. Infertile women have the especially biting comments for me, which is understandable to a degree but not to a degree that makes it justifiable (I do not, after all, walk around finding infertile women and ask them why they’re barren and then say they’re probably better off because of it).

My favorite encroachment of privacy is when people say “so you don’t want kids, but what if there’s an accident? What would you guys do?”—I can’t even count how many times I’ve gotten this from people. Why is the criteria for me to have an abortion different than the set of criteria for a pregnant single woman (who would not be judged for having an abortion by most pro-choice females) , when I have clearly stated my entire life that I don’t like kids and that having one would make me severely unhappy. At that point, it almost seems as if people are trying to enforce a punishment…and is using an unwanted child as punishment really the best way to go?

It’s just interesting that people still take such issue with this topic when we’ve come so far with reproductive rights. It’s even more shocking that people don’t find this to be a personal issue that shouldn’t be scrutinized. I would never ask someone why they’ve decided to have more than two children and put a greater strain on the environment (which will inevitably leads to an even worse world for children to grow up in)—why does someone have the right to ask me anything similar and not be thought of as someone with a skewed moral compass?

The questioning has always bothered me, but I think that my larger problem here is with myself—I think that when I’m asked these questions, I need to actually give an answer instead of being concerned with how my answers will affect people and my relationships with them. I’m going to be childless all of my life, as is my husband, and I shouldn’t have to hide the fact that it was a well thought out and entirely rational choice.

I chose this on my own long ago, and I met someone who chose the exact same thing. I am lucky. I am maybe luckier than most people in a lot of ways and I’m thankful for it—there is no need to feel sorry for me.

I guess my whole point here is that I wish people were a little less one-dimensional with their views on reproduction/reproductive rights, and could leave a little room for rational thought in the whole process. That’s a documentary I’d love to see.

I took a fairly comprehensive little quiz to see which religion I fit best with…and was relieved to find that I was 100% Secular Humanist, with UU coming in at a comfortable 2nd place. I was also relieved to see that I have nothing in common with a Jehovah’s Witness.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do?

1. Secular Humanism (100%)

2. Unitarian Universalism (94%)

3. Theravada Buddhism (84%)

4. Liberal Quakers (79%)

5. Nontheist (74%)

6. Neo-Pagan (72%)

7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (59%)

8. New Age (56%)

9. Taoism (55%)

10. Mahayana Buddhism (51%)

11. Orthodox Quaker (46%)

12. Reform Judaism (46%)

13. Jainism (38%)

14. Sikhism (37%)

15. Scientology (30%)

16. Baha’i Faith (29%)

17. Hinduism (29%)

18. New Thought (27%)

19. Seventh Day Adventist (25%)

20. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (24%)

21. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (20%)

22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (18%)

23. Orthodox Judaism (17%)

24. Eastern Orthodox (15%)

25. Islam (15%)

26. Roman Catholic (15%)

27. Jehovah’s Witness (11%)

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