Who loves you baby?

I'm not not going to have children but I'm not going to have any now. Too much else to concentrate on. Too selfish too? Perhaps. Why people have children is a very difficult question to answer with total honesty. But I will say this, if you have them, don't let them have you. Sarah and I see lots of people we know having babies and then becoming what can only be described as shut-down, baggy-eyed, domestic zombies (slaves?). The blanched exaustion and the sense of loss is palpable. Is this the biological imperitive? I say no.

In America, there is a tendancy to treat child-rearing exactly like a job: A rigorous regimen of schedules and proceedures and rules and formulas and neurotically curated environments and, of course, self-sacrifice. I find this to be the wrong approach. I'm not saying it's toll free. I'm just saying that a child's initial experience of life on earth should be filled with random experience, the full scale of sensation, humanity, geography, and modernity. There should be lots of uncurated motion out in the real world so that the tot will naturally aquire a taste for the paraents' way of living and all the adventures and complications that occur in the course of the day. Security, yes, of course this is important, and this comes from the constant natural love that parents exude when they are living their lives to the fullest, and from a growing sense that the world is a navigable place when you move through it with a sense of purpose and adventure.

("Baby Suit" by Phillip Toledano)