accepting your fate

It must be said that I am perhaps not the most understanding of people when it comes to the subject of this article – the desire to have children – but I am a keen observer of human behaviour and like to point out the things that I find odd or illogical (as well as those that aren’t) when it comes to mankind and therefore I shall attempt to do so briefly here.

I have never personally understood the desire to have children; the planet is over-populated, it is in a worse state of decline than at most stages of human history and there are large numbers of orphans desperate for families, not to mention the countless millions dying of famine and disease. Never the less, mankind forges on with this desire to procreate. Such is the obsession that if a couple does not ‘fall pregnant’ within a few weeks or months of trying that they head off to the doctor in an attempt to determine what is wrong. This immediately becomes a source of friction in the relationship – ‘it must be you... you must be the one incapable of having children’... people will actually break up because one of the couple is infertile... that is possibly the most perplexing of all, but I shall come back to this.

So, having made this trip to the doctor, some form of treatment begins in an attempt to increase fertility. When further attempts continue to fail, we end up with the situation that I witnessed this week; a woman at work crying and crying and running to the bathroom to sob and weep... only to go home, ‘sick’, and not return to work for the week. Now, what I must ask is... why on earth do you actually want children in the first place? And, if you do, and you can’t have them, why can you not accept this as nature? People lose children to illness, accidents, murder, starvation, disease, etc... so, if you can’t have one, forgive me for saying this but... who cares? What’s more, the particular lady from the example above is a Christian. Now, Christians spend their lives proclaiming that what should be will be and that what happens is ‘god’s way’ or god’s will’. Well, if you can’t have children, is this not God’s will? Whilst I ask these questions, allow me to ask another: Have you ever stopped to consider that your relationship is very weak and that your partner seems much happier when you are not around? If you have ever considered this – which I doubt – then why have a child? Is that going to improve things? Of course, having a child, for many people, like their religion, is borne of insecurity. They are forever seeking someone to love them or to need them, forever seeking some form of glue to mend and hold onto that which is broken. And, as I mentioned above, this often works in reverse because, in many cases, when infertility means that a couple cannot have a child the couple will break up as a result. Does this mean that they are together purely to reproduce? Do they not have fun together and enjoy doing things together? Does the lack of a child mean that going on with this person is not possible? Instead, they must go out and seek a fertile partner.

                I want to live in America... I desperately want to... but the immigration authorities won’t let me. Does this mean that I should cry at work and then take a week of sick leave? No, this means that I have to accept my fate and move on with life, making the most of the life that I have here in England. I am grateful each time I have a meal. I am grateful every night that I sleep in a bed. I am always grateful to be able to say the things that I say without being taken out and shot in the street by a militant force. Some of the things that we want, we cannot have. If you want a child so badly, adopt one. You have a beautiful house, a partner whom you love, a job that pays you well, a car, food, family, friends... and you need to take time off work because you are so devastated that you can’t have a child? Did someone die? Is someone missing? No. Get on with your life and accept that you cannot always have everything you want.