Halfway through the Disney film, Coco I realized that I massively underestimated it. The vibrant lush colors, cinematography and compelling and moving story touched on a theme deeply important to human existence: death.
The movie takes place around the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where the gates between the world of the dead and the living are open and those who have passed can visit living family members. In the film, the main character Miguel is an aspiring musician who comes from a family that has banned music. One day, he finds himself magically transported to the Land of Dead where he meets a trickster named Hector. Together they work together to help find his missing ancestor. In Coco, Day of the Dead is not just a way to remember loved ones who have passed but it’s also a way to ensure they don’t die the second death of being forgotten.
Making sure there is someone to remember you by is one of many reasons people are encouraged to have children. Other than that, a child can be a source of companionship, a retirement plan, and a duty required of all members of society and the species to carry out. But lately it’s becoming more common to question the seemingly unspoken requirement that you must produce a child. More and more people are beginning to see having children as a potentially ethical decision rather than just a duty to God and Country.
This is due to many reasons. Late stage capitalism has made having even just one child more of an economic burden than an asset and children are being humanized in ways they haven’t before. Attachment theory has helped to establish the importance of the emotional state of a child and the role family and environment plays in both nurturing and disrupting it. As a result it’s not enough to just provide for a child’s basic needs. You must now fulfill and cater to the child’s emotional needs and teach them the importance of emotional self regulation. You must parent in a way that acknowledges their individual personalities. Gentle parenting has come onto the scene in an attempt to replace older more authoritarian style parenting that effectively neglected the emotional health and wants and desires of children.
The veil depicting parenthood, particularly motherhood, as a 1950s paradise where mothers bake cookies and pies for adoring children is being ripped away by TikTok moms who are exposing the real grueling work and labor involved in raising children particularly in a society that requires most of its members to work in order to survive. The responsibility of parenthood as a job that requires emotional and social awareness in extremely demanding and taxing ways is becoming more understood.
The fantasy of raising good healthy children so long as you are a good parent is also being ripped away as people realize that you can do everything right by your child and they can still live a miserable or unproductive life. Birthing a child into a dysfunctional situation, hoping that your love and telling them to “do what you say and not what you do” will be enough to prevent them from going down the wrong path may not be enough to keep them from doing so. You may not like the child you gave birth to. They may not be pretty enough, or smart enough, or athletic enough and you may spend all of your life trying to wrestle with those unmet dreams and expectations.
But these conversations are sometimes met with vitriol or just rejected. How could you not want children? How could you question someone’s desire to do so? What about your legacy? Who will carry and safeguard your memory into the future?
But this argument fails to point out that a legacy and a bloodline are not the same thing.
Though most people assume building a legacy is having a child, a legacy actually is something you build. It’s the work you do to build economic and social capital and a reputation that a child will inherit. Your bloodline is a child/children that will inherit the legacy that you’ve built. You don’t need a bloodline to have a legacy and you don’t need a legacy to have a bloodline.
But there is a benefit that comes with confusing the two. Generally speaking it’s not hard to create a bloodline. All it takes is for you to have children. To build a legacy however takes grit, resilience, luck and focus to create a good and successful life that you can pass on to your bloodline.
To believe that having children is all it takes to build a legacy is to relieve you of the responsibility of actually building a legacy. You don’t have to get out into the world and fight to place your stake in its sand. You don’t have to do hard things and make hard choices and endure this discomfort that comes before reaping the fruits of your labor. Believing that a legacy is the same as a bloodline allows people the ability to live unremarkable and dysfunctional lives, birth children into those lives and point to them as their contribution to the world, regardless of whether or not they turn out to be productive members of society.
But even if they don't, that's all right because they will grow up to fulfill another expectation of children, which is to immortalize us. To carry on the memory and genes of their parents into the next generation. But the future is cruel and time is unpredictable. Thousands of people’s bloodlines have died out at this point in history and thousands more will too. Or the exact opposite could happen where your family tree grows so big your descendent will have to take an ancestry DNA test to find you. How many of us have lost ancestors we have never been able to track down? How many of us are able to recall the memory of our grandparents more than two generations before? Not me.
But I can’t exactly blame people for using children as a way to console themselves of the brutality of time. Thinking long and hard enough to realize that time is so constant and cruel that at some point all evidence of your existence will be wiped from the face of the Earth like you never existed at all is a scary truth to stomach. So we tell ourselves to have children. But this of course calls attention to the insidious fact that we don’t bring them into existence for their sake, but for ours.
In one of Marvel’s Avengers films “Age of Ultron” an AI robot created by Tony Stark goes rogue. During his journey to destroy the world he states that children are created by people to supplant them. To help them end. Which to a certain extent is fine, but at what costs? Children never ask to be brought into the world. They are consequences of someone else’s actions, willed into existence due to intentions that had nothing to do with them. To make things more ironic, it’s always the people who have the worst shit to say about life that want to have kids. Every time I log on Instagram or Twitter I find young adults and kids my age complaining about the responsibility that comes with sustaining their own life force. We’re depressed, we’re anxious, we’re struggling at dead end jobs, we’re lonely. Social media contains the names of millions of people who never asked for life but we’re given it and now have no idea how to find joy in it or even what to do with it.
So yes, while life can be a gift if you’re unlucky enough to not have elders or people around you to teach you how to manage it’s pitfalls in a productive way, it can serious burden and a difficult responsibility. The fact that it’s a responsibility that you never asked for makes it all the more painful.
I don’t want to choose that for my child. I don’t want to bring my child into a world and environment where they can’t be loved and protected and pampered. I also have no interest being pregnant or wading through the trash heap that is the dating pool to find a guy who is going to father that child but that’s a different story. Choosing to be childfree has forced me to come to terms with the fact that there is no amount of children that will guarantee your immortality. I’ve had to think about leading a life and making an impact on the world that will outlive me, without a child to do that for me.
I’m lucky enough to not suffer from an overinflated ego that I convinces me that the world will be at a loss if I don’t procreate. I’m not hellbent on ‘legacy building’ either but I understand that a legacy isn’t just an intention, it’s a natural consequence of a life lived. Whatever life I live, whatever story I write will be the one that is added to the metaphorical ‘global library.’
So I’ve decided that the life that I will lead will be a good one. I’ve had to vow to myself to put the needs of my child before any existential crises I may face in later life. I’ve vowed that I will not have a child to live out a life I couldn’t create for myself, to heal wounds I couldn’t heal myself. If I can’t offer them the skills and tools they will need to carry the burdens and responsibilities of life gracefully, they are better off not existing than having a mental breakdown on TikTok.
I’ve had to surrender myself to the little control I have over time, over death and live my life as bravely and realistically as possible despite their brutality. Because despite the miracle that is a child, it’s not going to stop the forces we brought them here to protect us from.
With that said, I encourage you to move into this new year with a similar spirit. Be brave enough to take that first step towards your goals, to fall along the way and pick yourself up again.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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