Will My Child Appreciate Having Been Born?
I Hope My Baby Likes Life Enough To Be Glad I Chose To Make Him Live It
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It’s a selfish thing, I did, have a baby. I didn’t think at all about how he would like living, if he wanted to be alive, if he would appreciate all the things about life that I love so much. To be alive is a wonderful and beautiful thing full of the highest highs and the most incredible sensations and experiences and sights and, well, you know what life is like. But it can also get weighty, with it’s sweeping lows and the elements of life that are completely beyond our control. Well, you know about that, too.
But should I have taken that more into consideration when planning and preparing to sentence another human being to life on Earth? Should I have thought about him and if he would appreciate being made to live through all of the experiences life has to offer?
As many of you know, it’s not so hard to make a baby. In fact, some would say it’s one of their favorite pastimes. You just have to have a willing partner, or in some cases, an unwilling but available partner, and in other cases not even a partner; just their essence. Carrying a baby can be a challenge, though I’m happy to say carrying my son was an incredible experience. I was so high on mommy endorphins, I barely noticed I was pregnant. Delivering the baby can be a doozy. It was so hard for me, I won’t do it again. Raising the baby is tricky. There’s a balancing act involved including who will work, who won’t, how ends will be met, who will be the primary caregiver, will the parental relationship make it through the early stages of the baby’s life (I know many couples who divorced shortly after their baby was born), and many other pieces that make rearing a young one an exceptional errand, and nothing to be sneezed at. Achoo! Pardon me.
Let’s take a look at an example of AI. Creation of artificial intelligence is similar, some might say, to making a baby. But AI doesn’t experience the emotions that we do, which make living life such a challenge at times. AI’s heart will never be broken so badly it feels as though it may never recover. AI won’t experience the sensations of severe injury or the feelings of friends abandoning you when you need their guidance most of all. AI can’t remember all the times it felt let down by it’s family members or felt forgotten about or invisible or useless at their job. AI never thinks that maybe the world would be better off without it.
The idea that my son could experience the above emotions hurts in a strange place where I’ve never experienced pain before. Of all the sadness and calamity I have experienced, I’ve never felt anything quite like it. It’s a new pain place that I didn’t even have before my son came along. It’s a target painted directly onto my heart, but I can always sense it. Strangely, I can think of the pain I’ve experienced in my life in a detached way. It’s almost like it happened to someone else, then they told me the story and I remember their story in foggy pieces. But I know the pains happened to me, it must have, because it changed me in certain ways. A piece of me thinks, “Wow, if that ever happened to my son, it’d devastate me,” but it did happen to me, and I made it through it OK. “But will my son make it through it if it happened to him?” I wonder. What kind of boy, teen, man will he be and become? Will he be strong enough to handle the many karate kicks to the teeth life has to offer? Will he have a sense of humor to laugh at the kicks and the courage to kick back, when necessary? Will it pierce him in ways that I was able to avoid? Will being a man make a difference in his life either for better or for worse? What will life be like for a young man 20 years from now in America and the world?
These are some of the questions that race through my head at night as I’m just trying to catch a few friendly zs. ‘Hey questions, could you turn it down, please? I’m trying to sleep!’ I offer to my own head. It, like a bold neighbor, looks me directly into my third eye and turns up the volume. “Is THIS too loud?” it asks, a smile playing on it’s lips, and dives into questions about whether or not he will fall in love, find success in his chosen career, or even more important, happiness, have a family before I am gone, and scarier questions, too.
When my son caught his finger in a drawer last week, turning his pinky nail black and blue, I sent my mom a photo. “Does this look infected?” I asked her. She looked at it and said she’d give it a few days to see how it progresses. I explained to her what happened, and how I felt, yet again, like I’d somehow messed up. “I should have been there,” I said. “I was in the same room as him. I should have seen it coming and have been able to intervene,” I said. My mom, as always, as only a woman who has raised 6 kids and participated in the growth of myriad cousins, neighbor’s kids and more can so succinctly, so wisely say, responded, “You can’t live his life for him”. Check and mate. Bravo, mom. Bravo.
She’s right. I can’t live his life for him, but I can live his life beside him, almost like Gwynneth Paltrow in the movie Closing Doors, and surely I will. Not because I want to, but because that’s how I’m programmed. It’s the same way I can’t not eat peanut butter if it’s in the same room as me, or how I can’t not have a drink at a party with an open bar, or how I can’t skip watching Coming To America if it comes on TV late at night, no matter how far into the movie it is, no matter how tired I am. It’s in my core. I must protect this kid. Mother nature asked me to in my DNA, and my DNA said, “Yes, ma’am”.
However, I won’t always be here to protect. Even if I am ‘here’, I won’t always see what happens, and I won’t always be able to intervene. Already, I’ve learned the hard way many times, I can’t save him from every scratch, bruise, bump, crushed finger. Most of the time, they even tend to happen within arm’s reach of me. How fk’d is that?
I just hope that he will develop my sense of self-preservation that, let’s be honest, honed itself in my later years (the teen me didn’t seem to care much about preserving anything), and will most of the time, be happy and healthy. I’ll be content with 51% of the time, but let’s shoot for more.
I hope he will feel safe enough to come to me and tell me what is wrong and how I can help when he wants to. I hope he will be able to look around the world and see the good things. It’s so easy to see the bad things. They are everywhere, says the news. The internet puts all the good and bad right at our fingertips and in front of our eyeballs. We can see things we’ve never seen before and they seem to be getting worse, depending on how you look at it. Garbage falling from the sky, our planet heating up, water undrinkable in certain areas. It’s enough to scare someone silly. Will he be scared? Or will he have the courage to push through it all?
Will he like life enough to be glad I chose to make him live it?
