last stop

 

 Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) by Salvador Dali

Yes, I may regret not having children when I am no longer able, but I'd rather regret this as it only affects me, than damage the psychological development of a child whose mother will be distant or abusive, forcing the father to fill the motherly void. This is similar to the premise of one of my favourite films, Ingmar Bergman's "Persona", where a successful actress in a perfect marriage was told she was incomplete because she was childless. So she knocked up. Then she suffered a major breakdown because she could not act anymore, because she saw motherhood as just another role, the one that broke her understanding of performance and authenticity. She could not force herself to love her son, and that inability was what opened the unspeakable void. She could not pretend to love even as a professional actress - and that's definitely a risk I'm very self-aware about.

So where does that leave women who don't want to start a family, but also don't want to participate in hook up culture, who view sex as inseperable from love? Speaking from a heteronormative viewpoint, there seems to be only two main choices to go with - men who won't want an antinatalist woman because they definitely want a family someday, or men who don't want her because she wants commitment and monogamy - even without kids.

But there is a secret third category of men, men who don't pretend to know what the future holds, who know desires and opinions can change through life experience, men who are open to possibility without controlling the outcome. I think this is correct, this should be the default. Because even when you know what you want, you may discover that desire wasn't even true to you until it's too late to change it. Or you may find yourself pretending not to care about love or even believe in it, wasting your body and youth with temporary pleasures, only to then fall for someone you're not good enough for, or someone who will abuse you. We need not cling so tightly to certain ideas of love, family, sex and morality.

I think a woman without children can become far more inward, dedicated and intensely focused on learning about the limits and depths of loving another person. Not a family member, not a friend, not a child of your flesh and blood, but someone you chose specifically to "sacrifice" your life to. That's what I always wanted to experience, even as a little girl; the desire to give my love and my body completely to one person forever, and no one else, is there. It's not a desire for a child, even though I can imagine the feeling comes from the same stream of existential need, I never look at a baby or a child feeling any desire for "one of my own" I don't feel a void, an incompleteness or brokenness. I can be maternal in that I am protective, nurturing and supportive if the people I love - some of whom are a few years younger than me - but that does not mean I'd make a good mother. Not even a good babysitter. I'll be blunt, I'm uncomfortable around kids if I'm left alone with them. I feel like a trapped animal. I've worked with kids in a controlled environment, and I've held a toddler in my arms, but then I had the safety of other people to free me from the obligation, people much more willing to take over from me. If I genuinely wanted kids somewhere deep down, if it was written in my DNA, I'd feel motivated to overcome these obstacles, just like how I've overcome so many other fears and anxieties to fulfil a specific desire. As it is, I don't. My aversion to parenthood feels natural, instinctual. All that energy, all that "mystical" capacity to create something from nothing that my womb has, that CAN be redirected and that's what I want to do with my life, the legacy I want to leave behind so to speak. I want to harness the primordial instinct to procreate in order to bring something new into the world. Not another human, but maybe a vision, or an idea - or an ideal. Or maybe, just maybe, an unusual mixture of a child as and an idea/vision?

I sometimes wonder if it is possible to raise a child into a revolutionary adult, for example, like inspiring in them a destiny beyond mediocrity. I don't know yet what the answer is, but I do know this - I am not incomplete and I am the only person alive who can determine what gives my life meaning or not. To me, tying up your meaning with parenthood is the inability to experience true meaning unless you live it vicariously through your "mini-me" like you don't really reflect on values until the moment you're forced to embody them and teach them. If your life is void of meaning, the child embodies that void, which you can fill with anything or nothing. If I am ever to have children, I need to be clear on what I actually value and find meaning in, so that my child can grow up to be their own person and not a reflection of the society we live in. The highest ideal of any parent, I believe, is to raise an independent thinker who can take care if themselves, so that when you get old you can trust they will take care of you with the same respect, love, intelligence and support you've given them.

Essence of Lilith should lead the current of a truly egalitarian heterosexual culture. Recognise the Adams and their Eves, who want domesticity, obedience to tradition and social and class inequality, from the Liliths and Samaels who live for intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, revolution and liberty no matter the cost. The latter are few, but they need their space to exist too.

We need to completely overhaul the way we raise children and WHY we even have kids. The world is a burning building. The Epstein revelations prove that human society is fundamentally hostile to the poor and the uneducated and the children of the poor. God has left us and he's not coming back. Therefore our new children need to be raised into tough, brave, smart, self-sufficient and deeply empathetic revolutionaries. They need to be made aware of the truth about the world they're born into and strong enough to cope with that awareness. Not as another cog in the machine, another average little life just to fulfill the meaningless lives of the parents or entertain the aging elders. We're fucking up as a species and the future generations can't be dumb, soft, distracted, materialistic vampires anymore - we cannot afford that, for their sake even more than ours. Children should be raised to feel acidic contempt and disgust for the world as it is - but be armed with enough knowledge, classic idealism and recognition of true beauty to know what to build out of the rubble of a fallen world - enough hope and determination that it can be rebuilt at all. Not to go back to the stifling yet seductive values of the past, but to think in ways that are necessary for major political, economic & cultural change. We need to breed thinkers and creatives who can do more than yap into the endless cacophany of social media, we need not spawn more insecure narcissists and mindless materialists.