When I was a kid, we did Valentine's Day as a holiday for all kinds of love, and that was good.
I also want to say that I think this continues, this thing: "We can want those things, and not have to be Unhappy People for wanting what we don't presently have." Because I want to have a baby. I want to be the mom of someone tiny and importunate who eventually grows less tiny (note that I make no assumptions, given the environment and likely genetic pool of this hypothetical creature, about less importunate). I do, and there are various complicated factors that are making that not possible at this time. And I am having trouble finding room in our cultural narrative between, "I am blissfully child-free and stop assuming I want children!" and, "I am shattered with grief because I do not have a child." I have friends who fall into each of those categories. I am not them. Maybe at some point I will find that instead of being not them, I was in a superposition of them and the cesium atom has done something or other and I am now one or the other. Maybe not. But wanting and not having: it is not actually always misery. Sometimes it is a thing next to other things, and the other things it is next to are good and bad and mediocre.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 03:03 pm (UTC)I also want to say that I think this continues, this thing: "We can want those things, and not have to be Unhappy People for wanting what we don't presently have." Because I want to have a baby. I want to be the mom of someone tiny and importunate who eventually grows less tiny (note that I make no assumptions, given the environment and likely genetic pool of this hypothetical creature, about less importunate). I do, and there are various complicated factors that are making that not possible at this time. And I am having trouble finding room in our cultural narrative between, "I am blissfully child-free and stop assuming I want children!" and, "I am shattered with grief because I do not have a child." I have friends who fall into each of those categories. I am not them. Maybe at some point I will find that instead of being not them, I was in a superposition of them and the cesium atom has done something or other and I am now one or the other. Maybe not. But wanting and not having: it is not actually always misery. Sometimes it is a thing next to other things, and the other things it is next to are good and bad and mediocre.