It's all about me! Is it? Oh, I don't know

I find it difficult to have a definitive stance on a lot of issues.  Some people consider that to be “not really having an opinion.”  I don’t like fence-sitters, and it’s not much fun being one either.  If I sit on the fence I can never fully enjoy either side and, depending on what kind of fence it is, tears in my pants and puncture wounds in my butt will be all I’ll have to show for myself.  But I don’t think I’m fence-sitting.  I think I just understand that most situations are circumstantial and not black or white, wrong or right, fries or onion rings — I like to go to Harvey’s* and get both.

I once told my friend Stuart that I thought I was very opinionated and he challenged me to prove it by stating an opinion without qualifying it with exceptions.  I chose abortion, a topic that people generally speak very passionately about, clicking my laptop keys with more force than necessary to say that I was pro-choice.  But I found myself feeling uncomfortable without adding “…unless the people were just irresponsible.”  Now I say I’m anti-abortion but pro-choice (thanks Biden).

More recently, two friends and I got into a discussion of “to have children, or not to have children.”  One friend said he really wants to have kids because his father wasn’t very attentive to him so he wants to build forts and play ball with his kids.  The other friend isn’t very keen on children and doubts he’ll change his mind about wanting any, saying that “life could just be so much more fun without them.”  Again I found that my opinion wasn’t as straight forward as either of theirs. 

I’m very close to my parents, especially my mom, and I think it would be nice to have a family, but I have personal and career ambitions that would monopolize my time.  I don’t want to be 40 when I have kids and I don’t want to be 70 when my husband and I can get back to doing things just for us again.  I want to be a journalist.  I want to travel.  I want to be a travelling journalist!  And writers are not known to make superfluous amounts of money, which doesn’t bother me, but children are probably the only things to raise that are more expensive than thoroughbred horses.  And I don’t like horses.

Sometimes I tell myself that I have misgivings about wanting children because I fear I won’t be a good mother, or that I don’t want to resent my children because I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to do.  The fear hypothesis seems viable because I like to be good at everything I do; I need to be good at what I do.  The one about resentment makes sense because it always seems to be an issue when people are on Dr. Phil and they’ve made a mess of their families.  But the more I think about them, I feel that both reasons are so cliché that I want to have children and love it just to spite them.  But I think behaviour like that is what gets people into those bad Dr. Phil situations in the first place.  To state another cliché: it’s a vicious cycle.

But I keep going back to the one about resentment.  There is an undeniable hint of selfishness that draws me back to it like a nerd to Comic-Con.  I am I child.  I am selfish.  I want my time to myself, I want my future husband to myself, I want to be free to do what I please.  I don’t want to be accountable to anyone but myself.  When I graduate I’m finally going to start living my life and it is going to be all about me.  So maybe when I get a little older I’ll find some balance and know for sure that I want to have children.  Or, maybe I’ll still feel like a child myself and be okay with being kind of selfish.

*This refers both to the delicious fast food chain and the DC Comics character Two-Face. Sometimes I'm invited to his place for lunch.