I like having a child. I like the abstract experience of having a child. I am challenged and stimulated by it. The actual human being I adore with a mammally passion that never stops surprising me, but that’s something separate. Right now I am kinda fed up with hearing my generation whine about how much having a child sucks sometimes or acting surprised that it doesn’t make us happy. Conversations about happiness make me particularly uncomfortable first because real, existing children are discussed as abstract objects or events. You can do that before you have kids and it makes good sense, but afterward it’s something different.

A real human being is no longer an abstraction or an object. He is a person. In his position as child he owes me very little. He didn’t ask to be brought into existence. It’s my responsibility as a parent to establish the framework for the relationship that will define us as a family. Someday we will owe one another everything that people who have a long and loving relationship owe one another. (I guess that’s a reasonable definition of family in our culture.) But the idea that my child should be, by his existence, responsible for my happiness is just a new age-y iteration of the idea that he owes me respect or money or unquestioning obedience by virtue of the fact I spawned him.

Anyone who knows me and my particular sainted infant will understand that I do not speak from the sort of dumb luck that causes the parents of fat placid babies who slept through the night from two weeks on and grew up into coy obedient toddlers, to bridle in horror when other people’s kids shriek and writhe on the subway. (No one could describe my child as obedient, a thing I concede with some ambivalence. Also, sorry about the shrieking and writhing. Really. I spend a lot of time feeling truly awful about it.) I am often tired. I have not slept through the night since well before he was born. I get enraged with the tantrums that inevitably take place when I keep him safe and sometimes end up stomping and flailing a bit myself.

But considering all this in terms of happiness? Huh? I could lodge almost the same set of complaints about starting a business. (Though there the tantrums are mine alone and have mostly to do with printers and Adobe products.) Who are these magazine people whose choices in life are determined by what might or might not make them happy? What the hell does happy even mean? I am more likely to choose to undertake something because it promises to stimulate and challenge me, to change me. Having a child is one of those things. I had almost a year of enforced self-reflection, right smack in the middle of my thirties, when we’re all supposed to be too busy to think. I am more comfortable in a position of authority than ever before; more adept at achieving consensus and avoiding ultimatums. I am powerfully aware of the passage of time. In fact, I am changed.

Said Specific Human Child is playing Virgen de Guadalupe now (Soy la mama María!), pretending to breastfeed his exalted babydoll, whom he refers to as El Niño Oso, a mishearing of El Niño Dios, which I hesitate to correct.

My darling sister, who is an English professor and the head of the writing center at a fancy university here in NYC, proofread a small thing I was writing. It was a humbling experience, but not humbling like when you win the Nobel prize and claim to feel humbled. It was humbling in a more traditionally humiliating way. Compliment / complement! Who knew, who remembered? (Jane did, I did not.)

~

Plenty of people are still mistaking generosity for narcissism. If you think that the only reason people make things to give away free online is to gain something in return, I think you might be missing the point. But if I’m mistaken or you just can’t help it, than you’d likely better get to work catching up on what you owe the world. GalaxyZoo is a nice place to start.

And while we’re on narcissism, I just voluntarily put a photograph of my own mug on the internet for the first time ever. I find I need to be recognizable for work-related reasons at the moment. Aside from the evil real estate broker associations, I’m not sure why it feels like such a big deal; but it does. I could say that I got harassed a lot online in the nineties and that keeping a more gender neutral profile just feels more comfortable, and all that would be true; but it’s a little weirder than that. It simply feels more authentic somehow to disassociate my face from my online persona. I don’t entirely own my own image. Photos surprise me and reflections confound me. Do I really look that sulky and uncertain? I am neither. My mirror face, which is apparently unrelated to the face I walk around with, is cool and neutral; mostly poised for hair brushing or lipsticking. I am fond of it and wouldn’t trade if for a more beautiful face if I could. (There was a time when I would have traded my elbows though. When I was eleven I caught a glimpse of my straightened arms in the mirror and refused to unbend them again for a year or so. All that elbow skin!) The face of photos and chance reflections feels oddly fraudulent.

~

Must stop typing. I hear Aure piping to his babysitter about how he will be dead after a while and his body will grow into lettuces and worms. (We are still working on death.) In he comes! My little goth darling is wearing a neighbor child’s dress, the skirts of which he flaps like a butterfly as he bounds about searching for imaginary flowers to “devour.” His red ball cap reads Fierce Avenger. But quickly—more death. Prodromal Alzheimer’s, portraits taken before and after death, and E.M. Forster’s solemn and beautiful claim that “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”

An interview by Kathryn Schulz with Alan Dershowitz on being wrong (and the follow up) got me thinking about the hazards of being a professional, or maybe just specializing. I have been working with one other person on an enormous project of my very own which requires me to get my hands dirty in the making process the way I’ve fussed about not being able to do for years now. (Why I haven’t done it until now is another story.) Unfortunately I’ve done so little of the everything I love for so long that my everything work now ranges from crap to adequate. It’s not immediately excellent. That is humiliating, stupid, and really, really exciting. I’ve always romanticized the polymath Victorian naturalists (Well, after age ten when I learned that naturalists were something different than nudists.) who seemed able to take a sprightly but rigorous interest in folklore, neurology, poetry, fossils, theology, Greek, boat building, painting, astronomy, and the language of flowers over a ten course dinner.

I think a new era of generalism is coinciding with the start of whatever this particular revolution will eventually be called. It’s suddenly no longer ridiculous to speculate on things outside one’s métier. (Partially because now there’s the potential to share some of the risk in increasingly organized ways.) It’s still scary and occasionally mortifying, but the responses to these forays are mostly charitable and rarely as hostile as they were ten or twelve years ago. It’s more okay than ever for me not to be a Scientist or a Technologist. It entitles me to ask a lot of questions. It keeps me humble in my inclination to do my homework and listen to other people, and audacious in my demands of what science and technology ought to do be able to do. Seth Roberts in a lovely paper on self-experimentation (pdf) in Medical Hypothesis, details the constraints under which professional scientists have to operate and says of his informal self-experimentation, “I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem.” He talks about how powerful and how underestimated freedom (to explore without professional consequences) and personal motivation are in research and invention. It’s a really good paper. Read it.

Huh. I think I just may have outed myself as both a reader of Medical Hypothesis and a self-tracking nerd. Might as well finish the job. I’ve been tracking a wild array of data for more than ten years now, though most people I’m close to don’t know I keep these sorts of records. Before now, I rarely mentioned it because of the consistent reactions I got on the few occasions I did. Let’s just say they started with raised eyebrows went on to skirt actual diagnoses of hysteria.⁰¹ It’s not culturally acceptable for women to appear too interested in or knowledgeable about their own bodies. Medical, critical, feminist (I’m looking at you, Linda Hirshman), literary, and popular theory are all frothing with critiques of women who appear preoccupied with their bodies. It’s a cliché feminine frailty, a headache on a horny Saturday night, an insanity defense in nineteenth century Ireland. (Probably. That’s a good paper too.) So I have mixed feelings when I survey the present quantified self culture. It’s exciting to see what other people are doing and gives me more ideas than I know what to do with, but I can’t help feeling as though it’s sudden legitimacy has to do with it being a more male culture. Somehow the hordes of women who have been quietly doing this since the beginning of time (especially to prevent or achieve conception) haven’t really found inclusion there. Why?