i don't know what those before me thought or how they thought.i don't think i ever asked my own parents what made them want children or love and parent us.i guess for me it was so obvious it did not need asking,or perhaps it was unaskable,not even possible to formulate the thought et alone the question.
i knew then as i know still that we were loved.i rarely if even doubted it.i was i think,fortunate.i have seen and worked with too many of the unloved since...to have any doubt.
i suspect however,i am not alone in coming from a generation who had more doubts.i surmise that perhaps our parents,were so relieved to have survived one way or another,2 decades of downturn and depression,followed by war and a slow recovery,that as part of that recovery many had children.the development of the welfare state must have meant new optimism that led to the baby boomers born after world war 2 that came to adolescence and adulthood in the 1960s.i also surmise that my own generation were more demanding,not just as a function of capital which latches onto creating new markets,but impatient with the grey,banality of Britain and rising expectations with boom.we wanted it and we wanted it now and we demanded that it was better.We were no,probably are not grateful for the crumbs of a life.
But we were faced by new threats and new questions.Warfare may not be in the form of World War,all consuming conflagration but it was slow burning,semi if not actually constant and saw the playing out of a number of aspects of imperialism.We,well i determined to lead life and our relationships a different way,and not to have children.Could we really bring them into this world of constant horror!?
We compromise,we settle into something.For me it is mostly finding a content with my own discontent,alienation and strangeness.In the 1980s,when i hit my 30s,i was"too busy doing other things",and into the early 90s,still living in a difficult political landscape of relative inactivity and relative fear and despair that World War 3 or nuclear winter could take us out at anytime.The coming down of the wall and the ending of state centred Stalinism offerred some kind of hope,although that went from the false glister of the limited social provision of the Stalinist states to a false dawn of a new world order,that is only a new world order,then the neo-con,now the neo-liberalism of the capitalist world,which is failing and in crisis not seen since the 1930s.
It was however,not quite like this in 1992 when i became a father for the first time,nor the 2nd in 1994.Besides,i think the purely rational calculating can often be and excuse for doing or not doing something,and it is not the determining factor.Is there some biological imperative that drives us to recreate an perpetuate our own species our own line.I do not know,especially as a person who believes that however slowly,we are a species capable of profound or at least significant changes in our own collective psychological orientation.
to be continued...
