It Ain't Me, Babe

My friend Brom and I were talking the other night, and he brought up the fact that of all the people we knew and hung out with in high school, only one has managed to procreate (that we know of. There is always the chance of a few bastards.) That got me thinking about all of my current friends, as well, and how very few of them have children. There's my friend Jay (who is the one that Brom and I were talking about) and my brother, and... I can't really think of any others (apologies to anyone who considers myself a friend who may have children. I just went through my cellphone and didn't find you, so...).

I'll ask the same question I asked Brom: Are we weird? Immature? Smart?

Obviously, I have made my distaste for children into a lecture on many occasions for anyone who would listen, but surely that's not the reason. I don't think I'm that persuasive. I don't think it's because I have a lot of lesbian friends, either, because they could have kids if they wanted. Anyone can have them these days: artificial insemination, surrogates, adoption,.. Hell it seems hard not to have them these days. Anyone who has heterosexual sex at the proper time of the month could end up with one. No intelligence or sobriety test required.

I think age plays a factor. Years ago, an unmarried woman of 30 was definitely looked down on as an old maid. But 40 is the new 30, I guess, and more and more people are putting it off to have a career. It all makes sense, of course, but I wonder if we're getting a little close to that movie Idiocracy, where Luke Wilson was cryogenically frozen and woke up a hundred years later to discover that the only people who had children while he was asleep were morons, and that eventually leads to inbreeding and eventually the only people left were the morons. It was scary, and vaguely plausible, I thought.

They say that woman are more apt to have children with birth defects if they have children after 35 or so (or something like that.) So my friends are probably hearing the clock ticking. or maybe not. I think a good deal of it has to do with the fact that everyone else is having kids, so you want to do it, too. So, maybe the reason that my friends don't have any kids is because they don't have any kids, so there's no pressure. It's entirely possible that nobody wants kids (and I was right all along), but sometimes it's just a biological thing, right? All species do it, right? Time comes, a suitable mate is there, and WHAMMO! It's just science.

I don't even know where I'm going with this one, but I just wanted to point out that I'm not the only one. I'm just the most vocal. Or maybe it is me and I've just surrounded myself with people who don't want to have children. And I'm certainly not complaining about it, because I'm not a big fan of Christenings and stuff. Just sayin' is all.

Or maybe I am just that persuasive.