#7: Choosing What’s Best
And fighting my own anxieties about child rearing as someone of child-rearing age
Only recently have I begun to imagine parenthood in all of its details, and these details—postpartum depression, for example, or baby-led weaning—have become the foundation for my hypothesizing about, and preparing for, a future in which I am a mother. This is, of course, a thought experiment not based in reality; I am neither pregnant nor in the process of becoming so, but the growing number of marriage and pregnancy announcements from online acquaintances—occurrences that at one time felt otherworldly insofar as they weren’t of my world, but that have now gathered weekly momentum—make it difficult to remain apathetic and not wonder about my own propensities or inclinations as a maybe-one-day-in-the-future parent. And while I cannot say with absolute certainty that I will, without a doubt, raise children of my own, imagining various scenarios in which I might feel challenged or frustrated has helped me to identify the parts of my character that might need tending to. The largest part? Fear.
My partner, Brandon, with whom most of this hypothesizing occurs—and with whom I imagine co-parenting these nonexistent children—likes to push back whenever I throw around absolutes. And I think his pushing back is warranted, especially since these absolutes are almost always rooted in a very specific dilemma of mine: as parents, is it our responsibility to push our children—heavy-handedly, too, through creative lessons or sports practices—or do we prioritize maintaining a stable, hands-off approach? My childhood, for example, could be defined as one of quitting: quitting piano, quitting track and field, quitting songwriting, and quitting school clubs. I realized at a young age that I didn’t like prolonging my favorite part of the day—when I could finally go home—which meant that most school extracurriculars failed to capture my attention. But I also think that this clear pattern of my having quit things prematurely can be reevaluated more positively; it wasn’t that I lacked an ability to dive deeply into my interests, but that I wanted to dive deeply into many and not just one. I wonder, though, as someone who battles perfectionism as an adult, whether this quitting truly was a consequence of feeling disinterested, or whether I might have grown discouraged by my own failures? As parents, where is the line and should we, if ever, cross it?
Of course, this pattern of quitting foreshadowed my career as a writer (writers, by definition, are cultural omnivores), but I can only say this now as someone on the other side of it all. How, then, did my parents trust that their parenting approach would, in the end, turn out alright? It reminds me of whenever my brother, Matthew, needles my father about having not invested in New York City real estate—my brother, along with my parents, lived in Brooklyn in the late 80s and early 90s—only for my father to exclaim in annoyance: “You know, Matt, I’m sorry I ruined your childhood, but Park Slope was dangerous back then. That’s why we moved to the Poconos. How could we have known?” Parenting seems like a constant menagerie of risk assessment, and sometimes I wonder whether I am okay with the possibility of choosing the wrong way to do things—that I will not, and cannot, arrive at parenthood completely ready and incontrovertibly perfect, but that I might offset these feelings by navigating through imagined scenarios in which I might feel initially unequipped. The key, I believe, is to raise children who come to understand that their parents tried the best that they could with the knowledge that they had.
I told all of this to Brandon during a conversation we had recently about our hypothetical child wanting to drop out of school in pursuit of professional gaming. “Absolutely not,” I interrupted, eyes unblinking. “School is important. It socializes kids.”
“But if our child is passionate about it, who are we to stand in the way of their goal?” Esports in particular, or electronic sports, is the specific mode of gaming we are discussing; multiplayer video games like League of Legends or Counter-Strike, which take place in online battle arenas both domestically and internationally, require cooperative skills not unlike those a child develops in real-life sports. Essentially, players become socialized through cooperative play. One of Brandon’s favorite players, Lee Sang-hyeok, known globally as Faker, is a professional League of Legends player for T1 with four World Championship titles and ten League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) titles. But his career in esports and self-education, regardless of his undeniable, preternatural ability for online gaming, has roots in an all-too-familiar conversation between a parent and their child. In 2011, when League of Legends had finally arrived in South Korea and Faker established himself as a potential world competitor, he needed his father, Lee Kyung-join, to grant him permission to drop out of school so that Faker could pursue his career in esports. After a month, his father finally conceded.
But my hang-up with gaming isn’t that I find the whole enterprise time-wasting or undeserving of accolades—in fact, some of the best artists and musicians, as well as the world’s premier scriptwriters and software engineers, are responsible for creating stunning virtual environments that are proven to be effective in managing anxiety and stress. However, screens are screens, and as a future parent, how do I combat the research that excessive screen time negatively impacts a child’s physical health? Emotional wellbeing? Online communities, too, are rife with misguided trolling and bullying; yet, I understand that as a parent, it isn’t my job to shelter my child from the world, but to provide them the skills and confidence needed to flourish within it. This hypothetical of Brandon’s later morphed into another what-if—that of our child wanting to be a Formula One racer—and how we would support them, if at all, when the time came for them to strap themselves into a racing car that, when engineered expertly, could reach 233 mph. “I don’t know about that,” I said again, unwavering in my resolve. But these strangely guttural responses—instinctive, maybe, but even that feels too generous—directly oppose my personal belief that children ought to make mistakes, get hurt, and learn lessons.
Who am I to deny my child any one of these physically or mentally risky careers when the world is already so unfair and so mean? Who am I to project my own anxieties and fears onto a completely autonomous human—a human who might be a thrill-seeker or a self-starter—and who am I to decide which interests they can and cannot pursue? What happens when my children, like I once did, want to ride their bikes two miles down the road for an ice cream? Those excursions with my neighbors meant everything to me as a middle schooler, and this was even before any of us had cell phones. Will I be afraid that any number of things might happen to my own children if I were to allow them to do the same? Of course I would be. It’s like that poem by Maggie Nelson, “Good Bones,” in which she writes: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake. Life is too short and the world / is at least half terrible, and for every kind / stranger, there is one who would break you, / though I keep this from my children.”
I think about this as it pertains to Hollywood and child actors, too—how my favorite actress, Kristen Stewart, somehow managed to evade the fraught fate that most child stars encounter: sexual assault, managerial abuse, addiction issues, threatening paparazzi. She grew up in the industry, as her mother was a script supervisor and her father was a stage manager, and landed her first major film role as the daughter of Jodie Foster’s character in the 2002 thriller Panic Room. Stewart’s story can be juxtaposed to that of Amanda Bynes’s or Drake Bell’s: two Nickelodeon child stars who were victims of sexual and emotional abuse as teenagers and consequently had their burgeoning careers stolen from them by the very adults who promised to protect them. My mother once told me that as an infant, my eyes—big and blue—had attracted modeling and advertisement agencies. “But we denied them,” she told me. “We didn’t want you growing up in that industry.” Again, the risk is there and the choice is clear, but whose choice—the parents or the child’s—ought to take precedent?
As a mother, it will be my job to keep my child safe, but safety can sometimes be subjective. Even my father once told me that communicating his fears about my safety—particularly when I traveled to Budapest, Hungary by myself a few years ago—would be selfish and unhelpful. While exploring Budapest, I never once felt like I couldn’t handle myself, and a large part of that was having a parent who supported me without asserting their fears—fears that would have inevitably impacted my ability to discern for myself what was and wasn’t a threat, and ones I would carry with me during subsequent trips I would take in the future.
In a FaceTime call recently, I mentioned to Brandon that nature versus nurture can most clearly be seen in Shohei Ohtani’s family. Ohtani is actually the youngest of three; his oldest brother, Ryuta, plays amateur baseball for the Japan Industrial League—something that their father, Toru Ohtani, feels immense guilt about. Despite both his sons having a similar passion for baseball, only Shohei was able to pursue the sport professionally and at such a high level of athleticism. This is in part due to Toru’s inability to dedicate time to Ryuta when Ryuta was a child. “If only I had worked together with him more…” he admitted in an article for Japan’s The Mainichi. “I’ve got to give to Shohei what I couldn’t give to his older brother.”
“Toru says he had some regrets about the upbringing of his first son. When Ryuta was a young child, Toru was working in a car assembly job with day and night shifts, and while handling his busy job and two other young children, he was not able to spend enough time with him.”
All of this might sound extraneous given I am not anywhere near becoming a mother, but processing the ways I instinctively react to a situation has shown me just how much growth I need to experience before welcoming an infant life into my world. Just two nights ago, while eating lackluster Mexican food in one of Tokyo’s more expensive neighborhoods, Brandon and I discussed parenthood again, but this time the hypothetical wasn’t about our future children and the myriad ways they might experience hardship, but about my own anxieties—of becoming a mother, but also of how motherhood might change me. But at that point we had had enough of imagining nonexistent things and instead ordered margaritas and a taco platter big enough for two. There are few absolutes in this world—I am learning that the hard way, through these discussions with Brandon—but one of them most certainly is how much I love tacos. And margaritas. And Brandon. Kids or no kids—at this point, nothing else matters.
Thanks for reading,
Rachel