A Pain in the Neck

If you asked people if I like kids, quite a few people would say no. That’s not true. I don’t dislike kids; I’m just not big on people, and children are small people.

Let me explain.

I’m not exactly a misanthrope. I’m shy, but I enjoy the company of others. I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with good people and quite often, people have shown me great kindness. I believe that people can be selflessly good.

However, I also believe the opposite is true: People can also be absolutely terrible. If you don’t agree with my pessimism regarding humanity, just read the comments section of just about any article online or most social media debates. Read posts from people who threaten the survivors of the Parkland school shooting, read why people eat Tide pods, watch YouTube videos of people pouring water over an orange to prove the world is flat. (I’m concerned about this celebration of ignorance. It’s as if, when presented with too many facts and too much information, humanity is overwhelmed and begins to shut down.) People like this and this and this and this exist, and every day, it may seem as if a new cast of deplorable people are shown to us.

Does that make me a pessimist or a realist? I think one of the reasons Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” poem struck such a chord with so many people and went viral was the acknowledgment, “The world is at least fifty percent terrible and that’s a conservative estimate.”

Perhaps focusing on the negative sometime helps me deal with the thought of leaving this world. I am angry at my body, but I’m also angry at the world sometimes. I want life to show me how beautiful it is and beg me to stay. But sometimes, it’s ugly. And it’s not just me who feels this way; so many people are angry all the time. A recent column in The Washington Post posited that “Our anger is poisoning us.”  I’m actually being poisoned, physically, on a regular basis, and it’s sometimes hard to not let my anger turn into the soul-killing kind of poison. In fact, it’s impossible. I acknowledge that and just try to be aware when I feel the unneeded poison enter and I try not to let it spread too far.

I often believe it’s safest to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I am convinced that one of the reasons the horizontal age line in my forehead aren’t very pronounced, is that (aside from genetics) I am not that often surprised by people.

My view of the world has influenced whether or not I thought I would have children, and it’s why I was still waffling when I turned 35. Motherhood isn’t something I actively pursued, but until my cancer diagnosis five years ago, it’s something I thought would eventually happen. A few years after my stem cell transplant, I was expected to get the green light, but shortly before then came the pancreatic tumor. And then the other tumor. After the liver ablation, if I was clear, it’s still something I could have pursued, but not now. I have to call a doctor’s office at some point and tell them to unfreeze my genetic material. I want them to create a clone army or a mutant strain of superpeople. But I think they just thaw it out or use it for research.

It’s really the loss of my genetic strain that bothers me. When I see people with children, I don’t have an envious tug of lost motherhood or grieve for what I won’t ever have. I want to continue somehow. Selfishly having children to avoid feelings of your own mortality is probably not the most noble reason, so it’s probably best that the decision is off the table.

Look at this childcare situation. It’s for the best I don’t have children.

Still, I sometimes feel the loss you feel when a door in your life closes permanently. I wish my mom could have been a grandmother. What will happen to my old toys that we saved for future generations? Sometimes, I think, What was the point of all that, if I was just going to die early and leave nothing of myself behind?

But another reaon I hesitated about having children was that I was worried I couldn’t be that vulnerable. How do you send a piece of your heart out into the world, unprotected? How do you create someone who has the ability to bring you so much joy and wound you so deeply? How can you ever let them out of your sight? After the Parkland shooting, I realized how grateful I was to be able to keep my three cats inside all the time and away from people who might hurt them.

How do you deal with someone hurting your child? A kid on the playground calling him names? A first heartbreak when you’re sure you will never heal? A bully?

Some of the worst and most cruel things ever said to me were out of the mouths of kids, when I was a kid. My mom told me that it would get better. She had been through it herself. But at the time, it was tough. I was overweight and funny-looking and wore weird clothes, and for most of fifth and sixth grade, I would spend recess standing against the school wall because I had no friends. It made me a nice big, easy target for people when they got tired of running around and wanted to try out a new taunt. When I lost the weight, I was (am?) still funny-looking, but by sophomore year of high school, I tried to be funny-looking and wear weird clothes on purpose to avoid getting teased too much. Looking a bit scary and uninviting worked for me.

So many online quizzes are devoted to finding out if you’re an extroverted introvert or an introverted extrovert. I haven’t taken one, but I took that Briggs Myers test a long time ago at a therapist’s urging, and I’m an INFP that is on the border of introverted, I guess. I like people well enough, but I’m pretty shy. I’ve devoted a lot of my life to trying to be someone invisible and getting people to leave me alone. Being an older, sickly woman made me invisible within the past few years and I’ve enjoyed it immensely but that’s another blog post I have been working on.

I’m an only child, and I grew up mainly around adults, with my mom and my grandparents, on a small cul-de-sac that didn’t have too many kids. There was a girl about four years older than me next door who would sometimes play, and some kids down the street, but no one really my age. My mom played board games with me in the evenings, and I vividly remember forcing my family to eat tiny sandwiches and drink coffee from tiny tea set cups for lunch one day, chastising my grandfather for using a large coffee mug instead of having 10 tiny cups. I would listen to adults’ conversations, and to this day, sometimes I get quiet and listen to conversations flow around me rather than actively participate.

One set of neighbors either didn’t like children or just didn’t have them. I think I was told they didn’t like kids, but they would sometimes babysit me. I can’t imagine they actively disliked children, especially after they put up with me crying the entire time my family was gone when they babysat me the first time. The neighbor gave me Viewfinder wheel slides of LTV Steel, where she worked. Sometimes when my family would go over to their house, they would make me Shirley Temples, with ginger ale and cherries. I loved having Shirley Temples while the adults talked and visited.

I was fascinated by people who didn’t like children. Weren’t they children at one time? I wondered. Yet by the time I got to kindergarten, I understood a little bit. Kids cut in line sometimes, and they didn’t let you win at games like adults did, and they had weird rituals. For instance, I had to spend all of Monday (Marriage Days) avoiding contact with any boys or I’d have to marry them. I think Tuesday was opposite day and so I had to spend the day saying the opposite of what I meant. It was exhausting. Friday was Flip-Up Day, the day when the boys would flip up the skirts of our Catholic school uniforms, so you had to wear shorts underneath your plaid romper. (Catholic school was rough, but I guess Flip-Up Day prepared us for the patriarchy and harassment way in advance. See? I’m not cynical. I am just prepared.)

Whenever someone didn’t like kids, my family would give me a stern warning to behave. I understood, to some extent, that I was an ambassador of children, a representative of my kind. My grandfather had a cousin we would sometimes visit in Southern Ohio, and we gave her the title of aunt like you do with family sometimes. She had two cats: Perky, an orange tabby, and Pretty, a fluffy white cat. I loved going to see the cats and that I still remember the cats’ names after all these years point to my future as a cat lady. We went on a trip with her on a river somewhere or to St. Louis (I was pretty little at the time and non-cat-related details are blurry but we saw a ship in a bottle that her late husband made, I think, at some point), and my mom and I shared a room with her. I was taken aside at some point by my mom, who whispered that my aunt wore a wig and I shouldn’t stare when she took it off. At night, she took out a wig stand/wooden head and placed her hair on top of it, but I dared not take too long of a glance, like it was Medusa’s tangle of venomous snakes.

Things were OK on that trip at least, and I didn’t ruin things until my uncle’s wedding when I was around 7 or 8. She had traveled with us to West Virginia, and we dressed for the wedding and having breakfast at our hotel. I was drinking a glass of milk and was putting a spiral/slinky-type bracelet around the rim of the cup and my mom told me not to do that because I might spill it. I was usually pretty good, but I kept doing it anyway, and sure enough, I spilled my milk. Right into my aunt’s lap. She was wearing navy, of course, and when she blotted it with a tissue, it made things much worse. As she cleared the milk from her lap, I realized, “This is why she doesn’t like children.”

I don’t want to be that person.  It’s not that I don’t like children. I love my friends’ kids. It stands to reason that people I like have produced other people I like.

A small part of me is sad that a door to my life is permanently closed. Another part of me thinks that being a cat lady was always my destiny, and things have worked out just as they should have.