Most women have children, which makes it difficult to be a pessimist. Can you really look down at the bundle of joy in your arms and say that it would have been better if he or she had not been born?
I was once a bundle of joy, but now I am all grown up. Whenever I look my parents in the eye I wish that none of us had been born. Once upon a time I was a Nothing, not even a speck in the Aether. How wonderful it must have been to be a Nothing. But my parents took me from Nothing and made me a Something, a Something that is constantly in pain and knows that one day, perhaps one day very soon, it will return to being a Nothing. My mother wanted a Something to call her own, a Something to alleviate her own loneliness, a Something that would always be bound to her, a Something she could torment as she had been tormented. My father, of course, never wanted a Something, because a Something would ruin his wife's figure, interrupt his sex-life and cripple his finances. But in the time-honoured fashion, my mother got her way and my father reconciled himself to the arrival of a Something that would carry on his genes and his name, a Something he could torment as he had been tormented. So a bundle of joy was born. Did it all work out, did all parties get what they wanted? I do distinctly remember my mother glaring at me with demented hatred and lashing out at my father, at herself, and at me. My memories go back to the age of two-and-a-half, and very few of them are pleasant. "I never asked to be born!" I often argued, as most children do. "How dare you say that!" answered my parents in unison.
Now and then one one hears a news story about a young mother who, in a fit of post-natal depression, shook her bundle of joy to death, or smothered her bundle of joy under a fluffy pillow, or drowned her flailing bundle of joy in a bathtub or a fishtank, or locked her wailing bundle of joy in the family car and then waited calmly in the kitchen for the noise to stop. "I just wanted my bundle of joy to stop screaming," she says in her own defense. Women who kill their own bundles of joy are never called murderers by the media; rather, they are monsters, mythically evil creatures who belong in fairy tales and not next door. "Monster!" they scream from the gallery. "Lock her up and throw away the key." From a legal standpoint, it is better to be a monstrous marionette: "She was a puppet of her own haywire emotions," argues her solicitor. "She was a victim of childhood neglect, of abuse at her husband's fist. She was too young to care for a bundle of joy on her own and she failed to receive the necessary support from her community. It is a failure of society. What we need is infrastructure, damn it! She was driven temporarily insane, and she must be nurtured back to health, not punished." The gallery is touched by the tragedy of it all, moved by the plight of the young monster, I mean mother. But the state prosecutor reminds them that a bundle of joy is dead. "Where there was Something, there is now Nothing. We cannot have people making Something from Nothing and then returning it back to Nothing. Even if the Something in question has only been a Something for a matter of days, of hours. Need I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that this young woman deliberately drowned her bundle of joy in a goldfish bowl, she did away with her bundle of joy, and why, oh why did she do it? In her own words, by her own admission--and let me get this exactly right"--he says, ruffling some documents theatrically and reading aloud--"she did away with her bundle of joy because she 'wanted it to stop screaming.'" The gallery now forgets about the tragic failure of infrastructure and wants the woman punished.
But the marionette show must go on. Can you really look at the screaming, red-faced bundle of joy in your arms--a bundle of joy that you have created for purely selfish reasons, a bundle of joy that will grow up to hate you (if it is wise) for making it a Something that knows it will one day be a Nothing--and wish it had never been born?
If only it would stop screaming.
Postscript: Of the two Nicoles on this website, I can say without hesitation that one of them is a female pessimist of the highest order. And she is not in the least bit monstrous. So they do exist; albeit, they are rarer than mothers who murder their bundles of joy.
