confessional

I am afraid that I do not want children. Or that I will be terrible with them. Or that they will be terrible with me. Or that I will ruin their lives, eternally, mortgaging them to a life of therapy. I am afraid that I will fail, that they will hate me, recoil, retaliate, rebel, rebuke. I am afraid that I will discipline them too strongly, too little, too late.

There was the time I scruffed one of my cats (forcefully) and pinned him to the ground, staring hard into his eyes and commanding him (loudly) to STOP FUCKING ATTACKING the other cat goddamnit and he looked up at me, shocked, alarmed, mewed one tiny, plaintive meow and I sunk into the bathroom tiles, heart pounding, clutching my hair, thinking to myself, oh my god, I am going to beat my children.

In Brooklyn I ran with Fidel, pounding the solid cement from one neighborhood to the next. We stopped at all the stop lights. I snap my fingers, he immediately sits, waits for my signal. On the green light I step forward, he follows, an inch or two behind. We run past owners being pulled down the streets, frothy mouths, pinched necks, powerless people. A woman runs up from behind me, her dog pulling mightly ahead. We stop at the light, I look at Fi, he sits. Your dog is so good, she tells me. I smile, I rule him with an iron fist. She smiles half-heartedly, backs away. Oh, she says, and runs off, being pulled being her own orange dog, before the traffic clears or the light is green.

I watch defeated moms in restaurants cower at the anarchy created around them by their children. I have to push down hard against the swell of judgement and urge to go over to her and physically intervene, enforce. I have no idea what it is like to be a mother. I can only imagine the stress, the exhaustion, the confusion, the absence of instructions. I know I verge on horrifically judgemental. It humbles and terrifies me. What kind of person am I if, were I allowed to, I would walk over to the table, smile, put my hand on her shoulder and then, instead of pleading with them for one more second to sit please sit please please please please please please sit please stop screaming please please please don't scream please for mommy, I would push them (gently) down into their little seats, physically enforce. What kind of person does that make me? What kind of arrogant asshole am I exactly, because I am certain I am one.

The honest truth is this: I (not so) secretly assume that I will end up trying to raise my children under the same tenets that I have my animals--to sit when they are told, to wait patiently for what they are asking for, to not bite or bark or scratch, to play nicely with others, to come when I call them, to eat what I feed them, to understand that I am in charge. But there is a tidal swell of anxious doubt in me every time I am witness to a parent-child interaction and I end up thinking, I'm never going to do that. Because I know that hubris is the fall of my humanity.

I have turned out calm, safe, reliable horses. I've trained sweet, well-behaved, obedient dogs. I have managed, even, to instill a semblance of law and order into cats, creatures that live lawlessly if you let them. I know how to correct badly behaved dogs, cats, horses. I know how to intuit, to anticipate, reward, reprimand. What I do not know is how I will be, how I will react, how I will respond, how will I intuit when it is no longer my dog, cat, horse but rather my flesh my heart my children. What I do not know is what makes me so certain that it won't be me, that I am never going to do that, that I won't be sitting, one day, in a restaurant, surrounded and subjugated, by the flood and anarchy of my own screaming children?