Gratitude 89

I'm not exactly huge on children: they're noisy and they get in the way.  They also have their moments of wonderfulness, but generally if I see small kids being brought into a café where I'm sitting, my first instinct is usually to run the hell out of there.  There are exceptions and some kids are extraordinarily well-behaved.  It's the little squealers who sound like piglets being slaughtered that give well-behaved children a bad name, I suppose.  That said, I never had any of my own, I've never regretted not having kids and my life still feels complete.

On the other hand, while seated on a café patio this afternoon in the UBC area, following a walk in the forest, two mothers sat at a table nearby.  One had a recently-born strapped to her.  By their conversation, I could tell that the other had at least one or two of her own, likely now in school or day care.  Their conversation seemed pleasant enough.  Their voices weren't loud but I could hear them clearly enough, almost as though if I wanted I could participate in the conversation.  I didn't of course, and for several reasons.  For one thing, I didn't really feel like talking to anyone.  I was focussed on my art, today a drawing of a yellow backed oriole:



I must have been completely invisible to those two women, who talked openly and freely as though they were in a private room somewhere.  They didn't divulge anything particularly inappropriate or intimate, which is certainly fine by me, but I couldn't help thinking that by now, I know both these people far better than they'll ever know, or perhaps would ever want, to know me.  It was, for me, rather like sitting at home and listening to the radio.

It isn't that I found either of them particularly interesting.  Outside of being human beings, which in itself is something that's always interesting.  I know that the one with the baby is from New Zealand, and the other is a Canadian, likely from Toronto.  I don't know what they are studying at the university but they both appear to be working towards advanced degrees.  They otherwise seemed reasonably intelligent, articulate and well-spoken. 

I particularly wouldn't think of speaking to them because we are different genders.  This, for me, is not an issue.  In fact, only later in life did I find myself having to become more conscious of gender, and for one simple reason.  The vast majority of people are going to respond to me in one way or another because I happen to be a biological male.  I have never had a strong sense of gender identity.  I still don't.  But when I forget this some people, especially women, many of whom have had some very crappy experiences with men, are not going to see me as a person, nor as a human being, but as a man.  This rather inhibits me from communicating with women and men, at times, because I live in a world that is very gender binary and I am not a gender binary person.  I am just a human being.  Everything else is negotiable.

Still, I am thankful that I am gender neutral.  This way I think of and see other people primarily as persons and I try to treat and respond to each person with the dignity that they deserve as human beings.  However, we still have to keep the human species going.  Some lucky couple is going to want to produce the future genius or hero who is going to help save humanity from our own self-destruction.  At the very least, they do need to crap out future tax-payers who will help keep us alive as we shuffle and limp into the nursing homes.  Overpopulation be damned.   The show must go on.  Some of us are not going to reproduce and so we are also doing our duty by keeping our kind from getting too numerous too quickly.

Yes, every parent thinks their little mini-me is a genius and is going to grow up to cure cancer, win all the major sports competitions and the Nobel Peace Prize to boot.  I am just happy that some of this new crop of kids could well grow up uninfected by Mommy and Daddy's narcissism and go on to be decent, productive and kind human beings.  Who knows, maybe they're the ones who will eventually get it right.

I almost thanked those two women for having kids.  Of course I didn't, it would likely have been misunderstood and I would have been judged as slightly crazy or a creep.  Still, ladies, both of you, and other moms and dads.  Let me shout out to all of you:  despite the pathetic narcissism that a lot of you Millennials, unfortunately, were fed on through the breast milk of your Boomer mommies; and despite some of your really crappy and overindulgent parenting styles, you have taken that critical step of ensuring the future survival of the human species.  You are making huge sacrifices for the general wellbeing.  You're likely not aware of this, and far be it from me to further swell your already inflated egos.  But thank you, all or you, for keeping the show going.  Someone has to do it, and that someone has become you!