Making Irrevocable Decisions with Insufficient Information
As a 24-year-old married man, I was certain that I didn't want to be a parent. My wife felt the same way. We had lives to live, after all. We were the kind of people with places to go, things to do, adventures to have, and none of them involved being parents. I once found myself being harangued (or so it felt) by a colleague, himself a new father, "Until you have children, you're just scratching around on the surface of life. I want to go deeper." And I replied, "You're just digging the same hole everyone else is digging. I'd rather at least try digging somewhere else."
He wasn't the last one to suggest that I would be missing out were I not to have children, my mother being prominent among them. I pretended to listen, but with my mind made up against their evangelism. They were all so earnest, so sincere, so sure of their decision, but, I reasoned, they had no other choice but to be that way: they had made an irrevocable decision and to behave otherwise would be a kind of cruelty to these new lives to which they were now committed. Of course, they had to adopt the position that parenthood was a transformative experience. What repelled me in particular, however, was their condescension that no one could fully appreciate it until they were likewise CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Making Irrevocable Decisions with Insufficient Information
He wasn't the last one to suggest that I would be missing out were I not to have children, my mother being prominent among them. I pretended to listen, but with my mind made up against their evangelism. They were all so earnest, so sincere, so sure of their decision, but, I reasoned, they had no other choice but to be that way: they had made an irrevocable decision and to behave otherwise would be a kind of cruelty to these new lives to which they were now committed. Of course, they had to adopt the position that parenthood was a transformative experience. What repelled me in particular, however, was their condescension that no one could fully appreciate it until they were likewise CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Making Irrevocable Decisions with Insufficient Information
