C is for Children and "Catastrophe, Cataclysmic"

As many of you already know, I'm not particularly fond of children. Children make me uneasy and they slow me down when I'm walking down the street. I have been shamed on too many occasions into believing that something is terribly wrong with me for exhibiting very little interest in holding babies.

Recently, however, I have been giving some thought to the idea of children. This is because I have been informed by my father that one of my eldest cousins, Karine (whom I have not spoken to for about 7 years), is 7 months pregnant. I also have been reading Margaret Atwood's latest book, The Penelopiad, in which the protagonist (Penelope of Homer's Odyssey) has this to say about offspring:

Marriages were for having children, and children were not toys and pets. Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

The main point of this post is to share that last sentence with you. I think it's a pretty stunning statement. To date, I have experienced only one moment of maternal instinct (two summers ago in Old Montreal, when standing in line for ice cream and chatting with friends - I involuntarily reached out for a rambunctious child bouncing around nearby, briefly believing she was mine and that I needed to calm her down). This, of course, simply could have been caused by a sudden and severely acute loss of touch with reality. Who's to know?

Sometimes I stop (usually whilst musing about things like duty and sacrifice and my failure in becoming a doctor or when watching Kill Bill) and ask myself whether my personal share of maternal instinct has arrived (along with, "Do I feel any desire to cook and/or bake?"). The answer is always no - but I think I have hope after encountering the above quote. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of sending out various forces into the world. That sounds interesting. And, you know, totally APOCALYPTIC.