April 3rd, 2012 (08:53 pm)
I had my grading last night and I passed! My kicks were pretty average, but I didn't mess up my Kata which was what I was most worried about, so yay! I'm a blue belt now :)
I've created a flist filter to weed out all the communities I pretty much never read any more, so now the only pages are see are the lovely updates from my lovely friends :D (that's you guys)
I'm reading a book. It's called 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', by Lionel Shriver. I will put my thoughts under a cut, but they're not particularly spoilerly, unless you count the blurb as a spoiler,
( We Need to Talk About KevinCollapse )
I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on my personal LJ, but I consider myself to be Childfree. I say 'consider myself to be' because I'm not so naive to think that I can know the person I'll be in five, ten or even two years; I can only speak for who I am now. I don't want kids. I hope I never want to want kids. Sometimes this makes me feel...lesser. Like I'm missing some key ingredient. But ultimately I think it's a valid choice, but more than that it's a part of me. For some reason a lot of parents - or aspiring parents - tend to take this as some sort of personal insult. Often we're called 'selfish' for not wanting to relinquish the lives that we love living in favour of nappies and tea-parties and sleepless nights. Reading through the childfree comms, other CFers often have people tell them 'once you have one you'll love it'.
Really? I can think of few things more selfish than creating a whole new person just to test out a theory. Or because society says we should. Or because I'd make 'such a good mother'. If parents out there thought half as hard about having kids as CFers do about not having them, I imagine the world would be a less chaotic place. My biggest fear about parenthood is rather succinctly covered in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin':
Whatever the trigger, it never entered my system, and that made me feel cheated. When I hadn't gone into maternal heat by my mid-thirties, I worried that there was something wrong with me, something missing. By the time I gave birth to Kevin at thirty-seven, I had begun to anguish over whether, by not simply accepting this defect, I had amplified an incidental, perhaps merely chemical deficiency into a flaw of Shakespearean proportions.
Because you can't take that shit back. So you have a kid and decide that, you know what, you were right the first time and this isn't for you. Drop him off at the orphanage and off you go? Your partner - assuming you have one - cheerfully accepting the results of what was, after all, an experiment? Doubtful.
Sometimes the idea of a child - ONE child - when I've lived a lot more of my life, when I've finished forming the person I want to be (surely that should be mandatory before you start forming someone else?) and if I have a partner - not a boyfriend, not a lover, not a husband but a partner, in every sense of the word - isn't appalling. If I knew I had the time and money and dedication to devote to creating the best person that I could, giving it all the love and devotion it deserved, without compromising my own personality - trading in Natalie for Mummy - then maybe that would be nice. But mostly the idea doesn't appeal to me.
And what the hell is so wrong with that?
