Do you have something to contribute?

Saturday night I cooked dinner for friends, invented a recipe, played a board game and held a three-month old child. I felt at remarkably at ease, sitting amongst friends, a baby balanced on my lap, shouting out answers and laughing hysterically into the night. It made me crave to have a child of my own.

I have been at odds with the idea of becoming a parent for most of my life. In high school I decided that I certainly would not become one. I was angered by the accidental pregnancies and lackadaisical parenting I witnessed in my society, and I decided that unless you were predestined for parenting, you should smartly stay away from it. I was also pretty angry with the way the world was heading and my view of the future was somber at best. Why should I raise another human being to travail in this world when i did not have much hope for its future? I believed that I was too selfish to be a parent, and that procreation was too pointless. I thought the best, most mature and selfless thing I could do would be to own up to my inability and avoid having children. I still believe that this is a very mature decision, and one that should be highly respected. I believed then, and still believe now, that being a parent does not make you a saint, a respectable member of society, or even a good person. it only makes you a parent. In fact, some of the most despicable people in our society are people that were ill-suited for parenthood. I was determined not to be one of these.

In a college theology course we studied theological perspectives on procreation. Of course there was the Catholic view of God's plan for us, ad that doing anything to prevent His natural order was a sin. I disagreed. Later on, we studied a theologian with a refreshingly honest view of procreation. His idea was that anyone who denied to bring life into the world was hopeless and pessimistic. He said that to bring a child into the world was to believe that there is something here worth attending to. To have a child meant that you believed in a redeemable quality of life, that you felt there was something here worth noting, worth appreciating, and you wanted to bring life into this world to find that quality. I found myself pondering the things about life that were truly breathtaking. How could I deny a potential life the smell of wet grass after a sudden rain? How could I deny this life the first sight of the sun sinking behind the ocean? How could I deny him or her the exquisite and masterful sounds of Beethoven or the nuances of Milton?

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
-Shakespeare, Sonnet I

In college, I also found something else: an appreciation for myself. As Shakespeare says, a child is a reflection of one's youth after it has passed. I always avoided those who had children in some attempt to be reborn and to live life again. There are those who have children only to see themselves in the face of a child, a selfish desire to live on past death, or a vain ideal of maintaining the height of one's beauty by recreating it in a child. However persuasive the arguments of Shakespeare, I like the idea of passing something on to your children, of believing that there are things on earth worth being born for. In college I discovered many things about myself. I discovered that I have a unique contribution to this world, and I now feel as though I have a duty to pass this along to another generation. As this is the case, I do not feel tied to a biological string, although I look forward to the experience of being pregnant; I know that I could contribute to a life that bears no resemblance to my biological background.

I have only recently put this into words, only because the words have been provided for me. But I know now that these words explain the way I feel. The stirring in my being, the desire to parent a child, to raise, teach and foster the growth of another living being.

I suppose all things have a season, and the season that I could not have seen as a headstrong fifteen-year old is approaching, closer now than I could ever have imagined. I walk toward it with confidence.