Teach Your Children
When I was a teenager, there was always some sort of girly magazine somewhere in my house. The now defunctYM or CosmoGirl! would come in the mail or I'd pick one up for a flight to which I hadn't bothered bringing a real book with actual substance. 90% of the content is mindless entertainment. Sexual mishaps! The best night creams! 28 weird sex tips involving a set of silverware! Vests!?
However some of the articles featured were actually relevant to my romantic/relationships/sexual education. One article actually began with a quiz, and not a stupid "Lol which red panda r u this week based on your mom's astrological sign?" but a quiz asking for my experiences with children and if I'd hypothetically be interested in having them in the future. It was fairly short, nothing I needed to take a prep course for. And my results were unenthusiastic: maybe.
I absolutely love kids. One of my favorite things to do with my nephew is to "answer" a banana and hand it to him saying "it's for you." I'm sure he's so sick of it by now and I like picking on him with his opinions about the world around him, mostly the wrong information kids receive about certain stuff. When I was home for Thanksgiving, he was adamant that Ken (Barbie's Ken) was the same person as GI Joe. After some further insistence and some back up support from my mom, Laszlo still wasn't convinced that the army ranger and Barbie's boyfriend were from two entirely separate universes.
It sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids. Both of my step-siblings have kids and I've tried to be around as much as I can in Seattle while they're growing up. They're all under the age of 8 and at varying degrees of communication and exposure to the outside world. Laszlo has discovered YouTube and Maddy asks me to chase her. Emily can't speak much at the moment but she likes eye contact and high-fives. Their development has been cool to watch, and I love them dearly. But within the last eight years or so, I've decided that this enjoyment is best felt as an aunt and not a parent.
In short, I'm not having kids.
As I said above, it sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids, and I know what I'm like when I'm exhausted. I practically become a child myself when I've hit strenuous periods of overwhelming stress and the subsequent aftermath. If I could boil my stress down to a few factors, they're definitely immigration, bureaucracy, finances, and my mental health. If just one of these goes into awry, at least one other will follow until I'm contemplating my entire living situation. For instance, getting let go from my job last month sent my mental health into a spiral, which led to applying for jobs in UlaanBaatar. Eventually I caught myself mid-fall and recovered, but it took a while. I was never so low at a point where I felt like drinking, but at one point, the thought of picking up seemed more plausible than dealing with the inclement blow of losing my job. Is having kids just because I'm expected to or have the biological capability worth blurring the lines of my sobriety when things get tough?
I think about adding kids to that equation. Not even plural, but any living human younger than me. It feels selfish to say that I want to conserve my time and energy for myself but it's not necessarily a bad thing. I've chosen to live my best life, which I know sounds like I pulled straight from a 22-year-old's Pinterest board, but it's true. I also don't want to compromise the quality of life of someone else because there are indeed times where I cannot handle my own shit, and they don't deserve that.
You know, this bullshit.
Speaking of quality of life, my shit genetics are also a huge part of my decision. Diabetes doesn't run in my family, and before you make a joke like "hhhnnnuurrrr it's because no one runs in my family," please know that extending this disease to another human is not a type of guilt I want to feel. We already bring kids into this world without their consent. No microscopic embryo can hold up two middle fingers to an ultrasound to give its plea for non-existence. But imagine knowing that the person you're bringing in to this world may end up with the same difficulties that you currently live with or that may have ended someone else's life. It seems incredibly cruel to me. Having kids should be the best part of your life, not a regret or a burden.
There are varying studies about Type 1 and the likelihood of your offspring developing the same disease. Some studies place it around 8%, and others place it as high as 25%. Keep in mind these are just my genetics alone, not paired with someone else's who has the disease in their family, as well. I know what I go through on a daily basis to not die. I encounter extremely misinformed people who, at no fault of their own, have ingested information from the media that "diabetes" is synonymous with obesity, poor lifestyle, amputations, no exercise, food choices, etc. They hardly ever differentiate from Type 1, 2, and the two other types that affect people, so all of the misinformation gets lumped into one disease which everyone thinks I have. Type 1 used to be referred to as "juvenile diabetes," as it was mostly common in children, sometimes as young as six-months. But with factors of exposure to viruses, Epstein-Barr Syndrome, and other autoimmune disorders, adults can be diagnosed into their 40s. I was diagnosed at 22, roughly six years after I had mono, a virus which stems from contact with Epstein-Barr. Doctors I've spoken figure that my body started attacking itself around this time, but the symptoms of my pancreas giving out and no longer producing insulin didn't develop for a few years.
As of now I've been diabetic for 8 and a half years. Managing the disease has become second nature for me and I have to be incredibly in tune with my body to make sure everything is operating according to plan. I'm always on manual mode to ensure my body can function the same as a person without diabetes. The process is exhausting, frustrating, time-consuming, embarrassing, and difficult to navigate bureaucratically. The reason I'm handling it well (most of the time) is because I was diagnosed at an age where I could effectively communicate and use my entire vocabulary to describe different feelings or the difficulties I was encountering with my doctors, parents, and friends. A six-month-old child doesn't have that same luxury, therefore creating an entirely different path of stress for parents to navigate with a diagnosis. I don't want to do that to a child or myself.
Not to mention the financial burden behind it. There have been so many times in the last eight years where I've felt like a financial burden due to my disease. Knowing it wasn't my fault and wasn't avoidable didn't make it any easier. I didn't ask for this, so why am I paying for it? But not just paying for it, why am I paying so much?
To give an idea of what the financial costs associated with diabetes are, here are a few numbers for you:
Between 2001 and 2015, the cost of insulin rose 585%.
Insulin is the sixth most expensive liquid in the world at $9,600 a gallon.
In 2013, diabetics in the United States spent more on their diabetes medications and supplies than the NFL and NBA spent on advertising combined.
If you wanted to know how staggering the numbers are when it comes down to treating diabetes, that's what it looks like. I'm of the belief there will be no cure. It's become a joke in the diabetic community, only five to ten more years! If there's no cure, they keep making money off of us. If we have diabetes and want to live, we have to pay. Bringing a child into the world to possibly take on that burden seems like a death sentence, and if the price of insulin keeps rising, it may very well be. I know I've harped about it on here before, but the movie Arrival got to me in a lot of ways. It didn't only affect me as a language nerd, but it also struck me as someone who has the ability to change the course of life for someone else and ultimately know I could have done it differently. Arrival has been out since 2016 so I'm not going to do a spoiler alert because you had your chance.) Amy Adams has a daughter and at one point in the movie, we learn her daughter dies from an incurable disease. However, Amy has the ability to see time in a non-linear fashion as a result of communicating with the Heptapod aliens. Before she even has the child, she sees that her daughter will die from the disease at a young age. She knew the outcome of her life and her daughter's pain and demise, yet she went through with it anyway.
I can't be that person.
Initially I thought the decision to go childless was easy. I've presented myself with all the evidence, it makes sense, and there won't be any drawbacks. But the only thing I'm hung up on is the opportunity to name another human being. Most of my family's pets have had human-ish names: Jake, Elwood, Gracie, Edgar, Rocky, Cosmo, and Patrick. Patrick came with his own name and the rest were a family effort which took a number of days to come to an agreement. I can't have a kid just because I want to name something, someone. When you're growing up and you get a new puppy for Christmas or find a stray kitten there's a whole "well, what should we call you?" process. It's exciting!
Sometimes their name is an indication of their physical appearance. But most newborns usually look the same. There's no striking characteristic which will sway you one way or another about a particular label or comment on your child's appearance. But with humans, names aren't facts or statements. I had a short list of names I really liked, nothing complicated or tough to spell. I like them still, but at the same time they aren't names for pets; they are names for people.
Josephine.
Vivian.
Cedar.
So I feel like I've had to abandon this little list. They aren't terribly rare or elusive, just an extension of me and what I feel connected to. But choosing to knowingly make someone's life more complicated, arduous, or tragic, isn't worth a name. I know I'm making the right decision.
Plus if I ended up with twins I would fucking lose it. So there's that, too.