TRANSCRIPT
I would like to riff a little on a strange idea I had. I was recently reading about various animals that don’t breed well in captivity or don’t breed at all in captivity. Certain types of dolphins and pandas, how difficult it is for zookeepers to get pandas to breed in captivity, elephants, cheetahs, certain types of turtles. And I was thinking how different humans are from such animals and that maybe we could learn something from these animals.
It’s like when these animals that I’m talking about—elephants and dolphins and giant pandas—are in captivity, they find it stressful. They find it unpleasant. And something in them, something in their biology, I guess their innate biological makeup, says, “uh-uh, no time for breeding. I don’t want to bring offspring into this world. This world is not right, is not healthy, and it’s not okay.” And humans don’t seem to have that. In fact, it seems that humans often are kind of the exact opposite. All over the place, I see it all over the world. It’s sort of like the worst conditions that people live in, when the conditions get worse, people seem to often breed more. Oh, we’re in the middle of a war. We’re in the middle of a dangerous, poverty-stricken, war-ridden place. Let’s breed! Let’s bring more children into this.
And often the world pities such people. Oh, the children! It’s so sad. It’s so sad for the parents. They have children in this terrible environment. And it’s sort of like, wait a second, no one says, “Why are people breeding in rotten environments?” But I don’t mean to just go in my riff only after people in war zones and other poverty-stricken rotten zones, ’cause I think it’s true everywhere. The whole planet is in crisis right now, ecologically and in so many other ways. So many places of economic crisis, and people go on breeding.
And I’m not just talking men, because people can say, “Oh, it’s just men forcing women, and men have sex addictions.” I think a lot of the women are into it also. I know a lot of women, have known a lot, and still do, who have children when they’re in terrible situations. They choose to do it. And so men and women doing this, and it’s like, why do people do this? You’d think if people loved their lives, loved their selves, and loved their future children, often in the way that they say they love their future children and love their children, they wouldn’t do this. They would say, “This isn’t good for my child. This isn’t a good world to bring my child into,” or certainly, “This isn’t a good world to bring my child into now.” But they don’t say this.
And the truth is, I think they couldn’t care less about their future child at all. Not for the child’s right to have a good future and a healthy future and a stable world to grow up in. Instead, the parents are having the children to meet their own needs. They want this child someday to love them. They want this child to give them structure. They want this child to give them purpose. They want this child to bring them pity. Sometimes they even want this child to garner them money. Oh, the government will give me money, or my parents will give me money, or someone else will give me money, or I can do a GoFundMe to get money. Oh, because oops, I got pregnant. But often they wanted to get pregnant.
Well, then there are people who I don’t even think they think about their future child at all. They just want to have sex. They want to get the pleasure of sex. They want to hook the romantic partner through sex. They want to get the bonding through sex. They want to have the structure in their life of romance, and sex goes along with it. They have a sex addiction to one degree or other, a romantic addiction to one degree or other, and oops, the child is just a byproduct of this.
And now in my little riff, I think of one other thing that I’ve seen a lot of is people doing these weird ways to make children: in vitro fertilization and using surrogates to have their children and sperm donors, where there’s a mom and there’s not even a dad in the picture. The dad is a completely unknown person out there, someone who just donated sperm, and then the mother’s raising this child or children with no father at all. And sometimes even sophisticated people I know doing this and never thinking, “Well, how is my child going to feel knowing that my child has no father, doesn’t know who their father is, and knowing that that was actually my choice as the primary love being in their world, their mother? I have set my child up to have no father.” Devastating. It’s a primary abandonment. Yet people do it all the time.
And then there’s the flip side about the guys who are sperm donors. I’ve known two in my life so far, two sperm donors, both of whom were proud of it. Proud that they were getting paid to donate their sperm. And you could say they just did it for money, but the interesting thing is both of them were financially stable people. They didn’t need to get the $50 that came from donating sperm. Both of them were making like $50 an hour. They did it ’cause they liked the power of it. One of them even bragged about it. Oh, I have so many children out there. I don’t know who they are, but I donated sperm and proud that he was like spreading his sperm around and being a biological father to children who he didn’t even know, who he had no relationship with, didn’t care about, would never meet. Just proud to pass along his genetic material. And I thought that’s repulsive and sad. And to do it by choice, it’s like to get back to like animals that even when they have a male and a female in the same cage saying, “Ah, I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this. It’s against my biology.” Yet we, super advanced creatures with our huge brain and our huge intellect, going against that.
I can go on this idea of surrogates, paying someone else to carry a baby inside of her womb, and then she’s going to abandon the baby and you’re going to take it and raise it. Maybe it has some of your genetic material, and maybe it doesn’t. It’s like buying a pet, a pet who has been abandoned by the person who carried it and thinking that that’s emotionally okay. All of this, to me, this whole subject of people and their profound deficiencies in creating children highlights how traumatized humans are. How much people are playing out the traumas of their own childhoods, how much their own parents failed them in so many different ways, didn’t love them properly, didn’t nurture them properly, didn’t give them a healthy, loving environment, didn’t raise them a pattern of consistency of consistent care and nurturance. Parents who were screwed up, who traumatized their children through their violations and their deficiencies and their abandonments.
Children who grew up in so much pain in so many different ways, yet couldn’t process it, couldn’t work through it, had nobody who cared about them enough to help them process it. Their own parents denied it. Oh, you have a good life. You should be grateful. You should forgive me. You should this, you should that. And the child had to cry themselves to sleep and then eventually had to squelch their crying, squelch their healthy grieving process, their process of feeling their feelings around the deficiencies of their parent. Instead, had to push it all down, split it off, deny it, disassociate from it. All of this being the basic hallmarks of trauma, being so profoundly split off from the feelings of one’s traumas that one can’t even access it. And then going into adulthood as split off, disassociated people. And then guess what? Because they didn’t deal with it, because they didn’t heal it, because they’re in denial of it, because they don’t have access to their own unresolved feelings around it, boom! They do what our screwed-up species do, and they play it out again and again and again and again by inappropriately having children, by putting their own inappropriate needs onto their children. Oh, I’m going to have this child, and this child’s going to love me. What they don’t say is they’re going to love me in all the ways that my own screwed-up parents didn’t.
Oh, I want this child to love me. Or if it’s unconscious and they don’t even realize it, it’s so inappropriate.
And so if I could have my fantasy wish, it would be that we would learn something from the giant pandas and the elephants and the cheetahs and the dolphins. The dolphins swimming around their miserable tank saying, “M, this is not a healthy life. This is not okay. This is not a time to mate. This is not a time to bear young. This is no world I would want anyone to be in.” And I’m not going to bring another being into it.
So that would be my wish, that people would wake up and say, “Ah, this is the world that I grew up in. This is the reality of the world that I was a child in. It was terribly deficient. My parents had no business having children.” And instead of me replicating that, I am instead going to explore my own childhood, make sense of it, and spend as much of my energy in my adulthood as I possibly can fixing it, grieving what I didn’t get, and actually then parenting myself, being a parent for the wounded side of myself.
So that I can grow up and mature and become a healthy adult, make a healthier world around me. And if anyone, if everyone did this, if all humans did this, well then we could make this a healthier planet that, heaven forbid, might be appropriate to bring new human children into.
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