zero kids later i

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this is the first part in a series. here’s part ii and part iii.

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“remember kids…” — rz

“the fact is, most of the freedom i had before kids, i never used. i paid for it in loneliness, but i never used it.” — pg

i’ve been love oriented for, more or less, all of my conscious life.

i’ve been family oriented for, more or less, all of my conscious life.

i fall in love quickly and all over the place, my heart is a huge slut, which eventually led to my poly years, but that’s a story for a different post.

i have no problems with commitment — heck i joke that i bring uhauls to second dates, proposing to stop by the fertility clinic on the way back.

i care a lot about my parents and sister, and have receipts about it. family oriented.

and somehow, here i am, currently single and zero kids later, despite wanting both the partner and the kids, and having had decade-long relationshipS, lived with partners, yadda yadda.

what went wrong?

in a sense, nothing. it’s fine. it will be fine. i will be fine. but, in a different sense, this:

Subject: Northwestern University

Congratulations! We like to inform you that you have been admitted to our PhD program.

[…]

Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance, and we are looking foward to your arrival on the Fall-2006.

Best regards,

Prof. Mayda M. Velasco

i was 23 years old at the time that email arrived and i was ecstatic. in my mind, i had made it, life was gonna be good from here. Nobel Prize here i come!

i had a lot of uncertainty about my grad school prospects for a few reasons. one of them was that i had started STEM fairly late — when i was 17 or so.

one of my favorite professors, in his awesome Russian accent, told me something like this one summer: “hmm…theoretical physics. you are 19? too late. for math you must start at 13 latest, and theoretical physics is basically math. you can do easier, maybe, more applied.”

the context is that i had been telling him about my trajectory and desires, which roughly went like this: i didn’t care about anything except playing guitar in bands until i was 17 or so. i then decided i cared about physics more than anything else and that i was going to be a World Class Physicist. this would entail complications such as serving in the military, immigrating away from Bolivia, and learning algebra. bring it.

what math can do to a hairdo -- i'm the one sitting

at the time, a classmate of mine in differential geometry was 13. not only that, but he’d do his psets right before they were due while waiting for class. the same problems i’d toil for hooooouuuuurs on. so, i thought that Prof. Botvinnik had a point. even as hard as i was working, there was a lot of catching up to do.

by the time i was applying to grad school, the whole thing looked very tenuous. not only did i start late, but i had also gotten distracted away from my studies and gotten in tiffs with professors about coming to class a few times, with the expected repercussions on my transcript.

so, you might imagine the ecstasy at having been accepted at a good school such as Northwestern! wildcats, is it? go wildcats!

this warranted a long-distance call to Bolivia (very expensive at the time, i probably spent $50 on minutes). right after i told my parents that i was “saltando de una pata!” as i hung up, i had a deep sinking feeling. i even remember the place along 13th Street, near Alder, where i was walking.

what about kids, Rodrigo?

gah. what about indeed. faaak.

at the time i had a realistic understanding of what my phd would entail — a lot of work. and i also had a realistic understanding of what academic careers were like, especially in that era in a field like theoretical physics: a life at the whim and mercy of the academy. faaaaaaaaak!

so i did what i usually did to unfak myself: a long walk down by the Willamette.

i thought i had to think about whether i wanted to have kids. but instead, i thought at the meta level and made a deal with myself like this: i could defer the question until age 34. [i turned 24 that fall, and so age 34 was 10 years…i like 10 years, as you know if you’ve read my other posts]

that settled it. i went to gradschool. i worked hard. i got distracted. i dropped out. i started startups. all of life. it was great.

what no math can do to a harido -- i'm the one with the mustache

alas, it took many more years to see the gravity of the mistake i had made. i am writing this to warn you about this kind of mistake.

it’s a mistake to think that such a Big & Important Existential Question can be deferred until it is convenient to consider it.

mistake: “i’ll figure out my career first, then think about kids” and all variants of that.

the mistake is similar to the mistake of trying to fully separate one’s creative life from one’s financial life: family & kids are way too interleaved with everything else. it is basically impossible and unwise to think about that as an independent variable. whether to have kids informs and constrains ~everything else. it is not only whether to have kids, but also all the implications of how to raise them. the multi-decade project doesn’t end at conception, it begins there. being a guy only buys you a little extra time.

and yet, we're constantly encouraged to defer this fundamental decision because there’s a mismatch between the ancestral environment and the modern one. having kids very young is biologically advisable, but not pragmatically so. pragmatic worldly considerations such as ‘career’ encourage people to defer the decision.

the author & El Abuelo Roger — before learning to read one must learn aaaoooww

so, what happened?

well, when i was about to turn 34 one of my girlfriends reminded me that i had to figure it out about kids by then.

so i did what i usually did to unfak myself: a long walk from my place in the East Village to the other side of Central Park.

in my defense, i had a lot of things going at the time, okay? sshhh sweet summer child, that’s stupid. i was running a startup, i had relationships in both coasts, i was trying to stay in shape, … sshhhh that’s all stupid.

i took more than one unfaking walk about it. i talked to friends. i tried talking to my parents about it. journaled. read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. the works. by my birthday, the best i could come up with was that i was “not no” on kids. ie i was open to it in the event that a primary partner wanted it. [ugh i sooo dislike the ‘primary’ terminology, but that’s a subject for yet another post]

at the time, that seemed and felt like very successful introspection. what a beautiful way of being, open to possibilities and partner wants! i mean yes, it’s nice, but it’s also deferring the question and failing to see that the answer impacts everything, including how to go about partnerships.

i finally made up my mind in the context of another partnership a couple of years later.

“yes, i want to have her babies.” i thought.

alas, “i want to have my babies” is not a thing she thought. and “i want to have his babies” is definitely not a thing she thought. it goes like so.

that breakup was devastating and it took a long while to recover. in particular, it took reinvention.

that’s when it began to click that this decision family impacts ~everything.

from there, there were a couple of valiant efforts at purposeful family-oriented partnership that didn’t work out for good reasons. but i s’pose it hadn’t fully clicked because i embarked on the subsequent one despite knowing that she didn’t want to have kids. “one of us will change their mind”, i said. i was right. but it was still a mistake.

repetition legitimizes. yeah, it does: repetition legitimizes. so, let me say it again and again:

it’s a mistake to think that such a Big & Important Existential Question can be deferred until it is convenient to consider it.

it’s a mistake to think that such a Big & Important Existential Question can be deferred until it is convenient to consider it.

the core issue is that each piece of the life puzzle takes years to figure out. this is true even if you’ve chosen a direction and are going about life deliberately & intentionally. it gets really tenuous when you don’t bother choosing the direction. for one, directions are chosen for you by the universe when you don’t. but for another, it is very easy to make irreversible mistakes that way.

it is foolish not to aim a shotgun because you know there are many pellets and each will have a different trajectory. you can't worry too much about a single pellet’s trajectory, and you also can’t use the fact that there are many pellets to avoid thinking about how to aim the shotgun.

some life decisions are like pellets, but some others are like the aiming of the shotgun. whether to have kids is probably the most aiming-the-shotgun-like decision possible. and as such, it is most important to not defer thinking about it lest you shoot yourself in the foot. leaving it aside while you consider other puzzle pieces (pellets if you don’t like mixed metaphors) is very likely to produce bad thinking about whether to have kids and about the other puzzle pieces. and worse, it’ll feel good, like you’re successfully introspecting and learning yourself.

the decisions about kids are categorically different from most others in life. thinking about them as another potentially worthwhile life adventure that competes with other such adventures will lead to bad thinking.

not only because whether to have kids is a huge decision, but also because how to go about raising them is a whole maze worth of big decisions. founding a family is a multi-decade project, afterall, and deciding not to do it also leaves you a multi-decade project.

spelling it all out: i had all the ingredients necessary to decide to orient my life towards a family at age 24. i made the mistake of deferring the question until age 34, and finally made up my mind at age 36. i am running up against biology despite the biological-clock advantages that being a man offers. it doesn’t end at conception, it begins there. it’s a mistake to think that such a Big & Important Existential Question can be deferred until it is convenient to consider it.

so, dear reader... it’s fine. it will be fine. i will be fine. but let me be the one to rectify mistakes and you the one who didn’t make them.