hereditary headache

I think it’s fair to assume that most parents bore a child with the expectation that it will live a better life. I had heard this narrative not from my biological mother and father (but it is safe to say that they wanted the same for me), but from numerous other couples who decided to have a kid. Whenever the topic touched on their children, the conversations I’d had with other people took on a very hopeful tone. No matter where they were in life, parents, it seemed, looked to their offspring as the ringbearer to the future they never had.

My parents were younger than me now when they began having kids. I often think about this and wonder how anyone in their twenties can handle child-bearing and rearing at a time in life when there’s so much else going on: finances, pursuit for meaning, unlocking your potential as a human being. If you’re less fortunate, you have to deal with the baggage of trauma and your crippled sense of self, too. Live long enough, and you’ll see how more of these complex problems will find their way to you like Home Credit’s telemarketing agents.

I’m just going to be thirty in a few years and I already feel weary from all the weight of my problems. How heavier will things get if I started carrying a small human in my womb? I can’t begin to imagine how my days will unfold after I pop it out or after it’s yanked out of my sliced abdomen. The only thing I’m sure of is that my problems won’t magically go away if I become a mother. And even if I choose to shun maternity, my problems won’t magically go away, either.

Despite offering no net benefit, my parents somehow decided to birth me into this world. I know it wasn’t an accident because I’m not their first child, nor am I their last, either. I was conceived with intention, and I can’t wrap my head around that. I can think of one good reason why I was born on purpose, but it’s not a pleasant one.

As I’ve mentioned in one of the previous chapters, I lived most of my teenage years suppressing my femininity in fear of being slut-shamed. As a screwed up and confused teenager, I had an irrational hatred for heterosexual relationships, which was the norm when I was in high school. One day, one of my cis female classmates asked me how many kids I wanted to have when we grew up. Being the angsty, misguided, fake manhater that I was, I immediately snarled that I didn’t want any kids, much less be in a relationship with a bepenised person who would consent to fertilize my eggs. “Mag-aalaga na lang ako ng maraming pusa. ‘Di pa ako mamomroblema!”

Disappointed at me, she asked in response, “E sino mag-aalaga sayo ‘pag tanda mo? ‘Di ka naman maaalagaan ng mga pusa mo.”

I think this mindset is the primary reason why my parents deliberately conceived me. They need someone to take care of them when they get old and are unable to do so for themselves.

When I mentioned the parents wanting the best for their children in the first paragraph of this chapter, it’s because they also want to be in on it. They are hopeful of a future of which they’re necessarily a part of. They are hopeful that their baby will live a better life for them, not for the kid itself.

It’s ugly and disgusting, but I have enough evidence and personal experience to confirm that this is true. I am my parents’ retirement plan. It’s a job description I never signed up for. I didn’t ask to be born and suffer.

I think there’s more to the shallowness of my parents’ decision, however. Though I completely disagree with this utilitarianism, I understand why many chose to conceive.

When you’ve passed the first few years of adulthood, life gets increasingly empty, especially if you’re part of the average Filipino masses who gets by with wage labor and underemployment for the rest of their lives. I don’t fully know the social conditions during the years when my parents started their active baby-making, but I am sure that it was a time that perpetuated a life bereft of meaning. I know that they lived in a generation when college education was a privilege (still is, now) and the end of learning, when corporal punishment was acceptable, and when the popular understanding of how to live life was linear: you go to school, graduate, get married and have kids, then find a job. Graduating from school was optional, and the last two stages were interchangeable, but this is generally how things were with them. Oh, and did I mention that during then, having more children was more favorable than having fewer? I don’t have the stats, but I’ve observed this narrative with people my age, whose parents were born in the same generation as mine.

With their limited options further narrowed down by the prevalent understanding of life at the time, I understand how the emptiness borne out of this circumstance drove them to have kids ASAP. Having a baby to take care of fulfilled not only that void in their lives, but also fulfilled the expectations that society had for people their age.

Fortunately, they’re wrong. Having a kid does not protect you from emptiness, and it also does not assure you a caretaker in your sunset years. Having a kid does not guarantee that someone will love you genuinely when no one else does. What most of us fail to accept is that love is not a privilege; it is earned. Family is not a loan that you are indebted to, unless you’re running for high office. Blood is thicker than water, but there are other liquids thicker than blood, like cooking oil and asphalt.

Unfortunately, they’ve already given birth to me.

Right now, I am in a state that feels like a living death. I’ve been the deadest in years, making do with a job that outrightly disrespects my core beliefs. I’m not what my work is, but I can’t help but think of it that way, since I spend most of my waking life working. I’m misemployed, overworked, and stressed out, but I bear with it since this is all that’s on the horizon. Every day, I can feel this hole inside of me grow larger and deeper. Like my parents, I’m in a situation that can easily tempt me to procreation. Why don’t I become a mother already, so I’d have some use in this world?

If there’s any moral to this pathetic sob story, it’s that I know now that I can’t bear a healthy child in me if I’m hollow. I’m so defeated and sick of this life, but I won’t use a child to fill a void that he or she is not meant to. I am hopeful that things won’t always be this way for me. Despite all this darkness, there is light in writing, in my cats, in my friends, in books. Until I’ve found a clear path out of this abyss, I’m not making the same hereditary mistake. ◾

Featured image by yours truly

This isn’t the first time I’ve said that I’m writing a book, and this won’t be the last, either! Three or four discontinued works later, I would like to announce, without a shred of shame, that I am once again working on a new book that I will probably never finish writing. This is one of the many (planned) chapters of my tell-all book that will reveal the grisly details of living life as apiklo. What more do I have to lose?

Your loving,
apiklo