A Pat Benatar song came on the car radio the other day and I was instantly reminded of a blog post I wrote years ago about antinatalism.

Antinatalism is the belief that it’s morally wrong to have children. Why is it wrong? Because “life is harm” and because the unborn is unable to give consent.

On the face of it, this argument is just nuts. I mean, it’s unconscious knowledge that this is nuts. By unconscious knowledge, I mean instinctual knowledge. We may also find it self-evident that a person who believes that “life is harm” is a deeply unhappy person.

But in trying to refresh my memory on the lunacy of antinatalism, I came across an essay that tries to refute the idea that antinatalism is a philosophy borne of depression. Yeah, well, some depressed people may see things more realistically than an incurable optimist, but it’s inherent in the illness to see the world in distorted ways that only therapy or meds can modify. (The most well-known proponent of antinatalism is a guy who insists on strict privacy about his private life so that we can’t extrapolate anything from his history or psychological make-up. Hint: He is miserable.)

Anyway, Pat Benatar caused me to go back and read the post from 2008, and just as I recall, the comments are hilarious. Comment threads like these have kept me writing here for a million years, and while they don’t occur very often, they are pure joy. I hope you will go read that post and then laugh your heads off at the comments.

And I hope you will be moved to comment here, so we can laugh some more.

News of the crazy new restrictions to abortion rights in Texas has triggered memories of the abortion I had at seventeen. I’d been living in London for a little over a year and I was deep into a relationship with a 21 year old student. I don’t remember what I was doing for birth control, but it obviously didn’t work.

I remember bring surprised, but pleased. I think I thought it was romantic to be a teenage mother, and it awakened my urge to nurture. As an unloved kid, I harbored the fantasy of a loving mother-child bond. At first the boyfriend adjusted to the idea of fatherhood and said he was up for it. But then he changed his mind. I had to have an abortion, or we were through.

I called my mom in California, and asked her if I could move back in with her and have the baby. She whined, “Can’t you get him to marry you?” She wasn’t up for it either. So the boyfriend  arranged an abortion with his family doctor, and I went to have the procedure in a daze, courtesy of the National Health system. You know the phrase “railroaded into” something? I was railroaded into the abortion.

I awoke from the anesthesia in a recovery room, next to a few other girls in hospital beds. The boyfriend came to visit me later in the day, and sat on my bed. But he couldn’t stop ogling the girl next to me, who wore some kind of sexy baby doll pajamas. I struggled miserably to get his attention. He informed me that a guy we knew had overdosed and died.

Fifty years later, I recall my hurt feelings as if it were yesterday. Why do our painful moments have to cling like this, to be etched so deeply that they can come to life in a flash? Why don’t our happy moments flood our brains like the bad ones? When my Mexican-American mother-in-law was 103 years old, she still recalled the little girl who called her a “beaner” in elementary school, and told me the story again and again.

I am staunchly pro-choice like any normal person, but it occurs to me that at 17, I didn’t have a choice. No one offered me one. I didn’t have the money to take care of myself, and my boyfriend threatened to leave me. I think I should have had a choice, even though I was not equipped for motherhood. It still bothers me.

Many years later, I was unhappily married and having an affair with an amiable stoner who was good at sex and had a lot of free time. I was horrified to find my self pregnant, evidently still a moron about birth control. Having the stoner’s baby was unthinkable. I had a young child at home. And my husband would find out about the affair.

So I went to have an abortion from a doctor who asked me when I showed up, “What’s the matter with you? You look depressed.” Afterwards, I had to get home before my husband returned from work. To my furious contempt, he never noticed that I lied on the couch all evening, barely able to contain my “discomfort” as they say in the medical trade. What a fucking dope. He was the same guy who railroaded me when I was seventeen.

That second time, I was very depressed but not in any doubt about the decision I’d made. I wouldn’t want to imagine a world where I would be forced to have that stoner’s baby. It’s just unthinkable.

Girls and women should have real choices  about whether or not to get pregnant and whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy. It should be their decision alone to make. Ideally, no one would be as stupid or lax about birth control as I was, but things happen. Fetuses aren’t babies and seeds aren’t trees. If the pro-life people would adopt all the world’s unwanted children, disabled or starving or orphaned, then we might take them seriously.

As it is, we all know that the unborn are way more important to them than the born.

Girls, my best advice is to find a means of birth control you can live with, keep some Plan B handy, and stay away from guys who won’t have your back in your worst moments. Wait, also remember to vote sane people into office, or you end up with Gregg Abbot, Kristy “I’m Batshit Crazy” Noem, and Ron DeSantis, who in a better world would all have been aborted before or after the sixth week.

If you have a story you want to share, step right up. xo

Watching Trump on TV the other day, I considered the depth and breadth of my hatred for him. I hate him with more specificity than I’ve ever hated anyone, except maybe my ex-husband.

After 17 years with him, I hated the way my ex drank his daily orange juice. He placed his feet in a certain way, and always faced the same window.

Usually, you have to spend a lifetime with someone before you can hate them at this granular level, but Trump lays outside of usual parameters. In four years, he has seeded a wild garden of almost metaphysical hatred, such that most of us feel like world class connoisseurs.

Who among us does not hate the way he shapes his mouth in that puckered O? What about the sniffing? What about how he stands, leaning forward and rocking back and forth? What about the back of his head, the way he combs his “hair” into a coiffed duck-tail? The way he pronounces China, always pausing a beat before uttering the word and letting you know that he’s really thinking “vagina.”

The hyperbole, the biggest ever, more than anyone has ever seen, perhaps in the history of the world. And the imaginary People who are always Saying.

The slow lumbering portentous walk, the ill-fitting suits, the flapping overcoat, the hand gestures. The fucking hand gestures! The way he modulates his voice, the way he says “intress-ting” when he means “I’m so mad about this.” The way he mimics intelligent people in a dumb Poindexter voice. The way he likes to call himself Sir when he quotes people.

The way he says “Ivanka” with a disturbing reverence. The expression on his face when he’s pretending to listen to anyone, restlessly waiting to return to the spotlight.

I know I’m leaving out so much! Yesterday, my sister texted me to see if I’d noticed that his hair was less yellow. Of course I had. Am I blind or what?

I feel I’ve been driven to the outer limit of hatred with this cunt. I’m a hateful person anyway, but this is different.

However, luckily, I can still register love.

I’ve been watching the Smithsonian’s Panda Cam, enthralled by the way Mei Xiang, the 22 year old mother, cares for her baby, Bao Bao.

It’s almost unbearable to witness such maternal tenderness. Watch her as she plays with her cub and audibly kisses it, rolling it around and cradling it as it snuggles into her huge body.

Any mother will be moved by this exhibit of sublime love. Cynics can point out that this is just instinct, but so what? Plenty of our behavior is instinctive. It would be nice if we were better in touch with some of our instincts, like compassion. Compassion can be hard to muster while our bodies and souls have been so relentlessly threatened in 2020.

I wish I were the mother panda, or the baby. I wish I could be immersed in love. It’s a daily struggle, isn’t it?

But as I’ve been sitting here typing, my husband has popped his head in three times to ask how I’m doing and if I need anything. Maybe he is my mother panda! In the awful awfulness of my life, he is a blessing. Should we have our own live stream?!

The approach of Mothers Day fills me with a constellation of emotions that are tough to untangle. Maybe they can’t be untangled. Being a mother and having a mother seem like conflicting states rather than complementary ones.

My mom left this photo on my doorstep when I was 37. I know that because on a note she included in the manila envelope full of baby pictures, she wrote: “You piece of shit, thanks for 37 years of misery.”

Look at my innocent little self in that party dress! I wonder what the occasion was. She usually dressed me like a boy. At 21 months, according to her, she already hated me.

My mom was mentally ill but no one ever explained that to me and my sister. We knew she had mood swings and an explosive temper. We knew she was given to theatrical screaming. We knew she had an assortment of pills in her handbag that she sometimes threatened to kill herself with. But I didn’t grasp that she was crazy until the manila envelope appeared.

She was not a good mother. She was divorced early on and unequipped for the job of raising kids. Her own mother was cruel and rejecting; her passive father didn’t protect her. Her sister spent time in a mental hospital and abused her three children. It’s a mess.

But how can I hate my mother? How can I even blame her? What did she know? Now in 2020, what does anyone know about being a mother?

I know mothers who won’t vaccinate their kids or let them watch TV. I know mothers who won’t let their kids eat gluten or dairy. I know mothers who take their kids to shaman healers. I know mothers who abandoned their kids, and mothers who cling to adult children with disturbing tenacity. Everyone is just flailing around, trying to do their best.

I’m learning to strive for compassion when it comes to my mother, and for myself as well. I made so many mistakes raising my children but much more often I did okay. I made sure they knew how much I adored them. I was their advocate. They never had to be anything but themselves. They didn’t have to perform in school or anywhere else to be valued. They knew I admired them. I loved their friends and their girlfriends. I tried to always be honest with them.

I was a good enough mother. It’s a relief to know that.

My life as a mother is still the best part of who I am. My heart is broken but it’s full of love.

Those of you with crazy mothers, try to forgive them. Those of you who are crazy mothers, it’s never too late to apologize or to get some help. Don’t write shit on baby pictures if you can help it. If you can’t, it’s probably not your fault.

May we all find someone to mother and be mothered by, today and always.

It’s been nearly a year and I’m surprised to still be here. I swore I’d go after him if he left. But things are complicated.

June 6 will be a year. I know it’s just a day on the calendar but still I feel the weight of its significance. I have to go to the grave, where I’ve had to pay for a granite marker. I don’t think I can bear it but I have to. I haven’t been back since we buried him. Mostly because I pretend he’s around, maybe in another room or maybe in New York, where he lived for so many years.

When no one can hear me, I whisper to him and beg him to come back. Maybe he’ll hear me and change his mind.

I’ll miss him every day for as long as I live. It’s better when I stay in denial.

I wish I could hug him and smell him. I’ve been reading all the email we sent to each other: All the links to things we thought were funny or enlightening or stupid, all the mp3’s he sent me, all our complaints and  encouragement. Thank god for email. It’s so full of our relationship. It’s a way to spend time with him. It’s something to treasure.

If I have to keep living, maybe I can do something that Max would be proud of, or maybe I can help with suicide prevention. In the end, even though I know there’s no god or heaven or hell, I know we’ll be together.

Some days are easier than others.   I’m still thinking about the Bitter Intellectuals project. Max would love it. We need a url to get started.   Just try to bear with me while I work through the bad days.   xoxo