There are 1001 things you have to think about when making a baby.
The first question usually is “When?”. The follow-up: “How many?”. Sometimes your answer is immediate. Sometimes it takes more than a few minutes — to avoid cursing yourself. But implicitly, you know: you’ll never know what it feels like until you do it. Until the moment comes when you put your baby into existence — that creation of a genetic link — all you can do is guess.
As you know, walking blindly in the dark is scary.
To create is, most of the time, a matter of reverse engineering.
That is to say, the best case scenario is that you have an idea of what you want. Your idea doesn’t have to be concrete. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. All it has to do for it to be useful is give you a direction. Just one direction is all it takes to overcome the inertia that prevents the act of creation.
Chase direction, not perfection. Perfection is fantasy.
When? How many? Boy or girl? How? With whom?
Making a baby and having one are two different scenarios. You could have a baby without needing to make one. That solves a number of potential problems: no pain, no effort, no richness. To have a baby gets rid of the process of making one.
If you ignore the process, there is less reason for you to care.
In a typical 24-hour day, how many people do you cross paths with?
20? 200? Less if you’re living in a town, village or in the countryside. In the city, you are an ant. People in cars, on bikes, as pedestrians and like sardines in trains whisk past you every few seconds. Every single person passing by has their own life to think about. They have their own unique life to push into movement. The thing to realise here is: you are one of them.
You are the passerby. You are the stranger that catches someone’s eye. You pass, and you become a part of their past.
Making a decision always requires sacrifice.
The sacrifice might be the temporary suspension of the boundaries of your comfort zone. Or the sacrifice may mean time apart from your loved ones. While having a decision made for you saves your mind from sinking into a pool of headaches, in the long run, growth is not automatic. To grow is to deal with consequences, with critique, with constraints. When accidents happen, decisions have to be made on the spot. The calculations have to be immediate, though they may be wholly inaccurate. Whatever happened, happened. Now act.
All creation results from the process of sculpting a collection of happy accidents.
You, the creator. Your baby is a miracle. If it doesn’t work out as well as you predicted, it stays with you anyway. So who cares? You can always scream at it later.
