The Search for Meaning

By Amanda Moreno

I have a confession to make. I have not really been following the Charlie Hebdo story. I’ve pretty much tuned out of world news entirely, although I do pay attention a bit more at the local level.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

I say that and then realize that for me, ‘tuning out’ still involves paying attention. I still see headlines; I still talk to people. I still listen to Planet Waves FM.

But by and large, my distrust in the media is so great that I’ve become apathetic to world news and more likely to browse reader comments to articles, or to stare at pictures to glean what I can from the images, or to scan The New York Times as I wait for my coffee in the morning.

I’m grateful to know that people here at Planet Waves are paying attention and reporting and sifting through disinformation. I myself can no longer do it for the most part. And it’s not out of apathy but out of general distrust of every news source and a belief that I can help in other ways.

In the interest of an abrupt subject change, while I once again find myself in awe of the distortions of religion, what I have been noticing in the past week is that the theme of how we create meaning keeps coming up. You know how I have been told to create meaning? By making babies.

My upper(ish) middle class upbringing instilled in me the belief that I was to graduate from college, begin a career, get married and start having babies before the age of 30. Seems like a fairly typical tale, and in so many ways having children and building life and creating meaning around them has become the substitute for religion. We humans do tend to need to engage that meaning-making function, and the Judeo-Christian myth sure has made it easy to make child-bearing the end-all, be-all of ensuring a life filled with meaning. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for everyone, which makes the monomyth quite problematic.

I deviated from that norm around the age of 21 in favor of figuring out who I am and what I love (mainly through following Dave Matthews Band around) — and the resulting goals for my life did not include having babies, although I reserve the right to change my mind at any point.

Don’t get me wrong — I support people who choose the breeding path. I know some really amazing people who have some really amazing babies and I’m so happy to be a part of their lives. Furthermore, I’m a big fan of the act that leads to creating babies. It’s one of my favorite acts in the world.

I, on the other hand, have suspected since approximately age 18 that I likely would not have babies. For many reasons.

For example, I’m a fairly easygoing person. But as an easygoing person, I’m also quite sensitive. So when I realize that most of my blood relations voted for George Dubya not once but twice, or that radioactive water is leaking into the ocean to the tune of several hundred tons per day and that people consistently support and justify the use of nuclear energy, or that our ground water is contaminated, our air is questionable, food sources have to be consciously thought about, and on and on…well, I’m aware that I would likely become a rabid control freak if I had children. I would probably need to move to the middle of nowhere and would feel permanently guilty, and guilt is an emotion I’ve so far avoided for the most part in my life. Unless I’ve done something wrong. In which case I apologize and do what I can to correct the situation. And I think that’s the function guilt is supposed to serve (though I know guilt is an incredibly complex emotion, and I hope to tackle it more thoroughly in a later column).

I also have huge plans for my life — dreams and goals that require a large amount of freedom. I don’t know that I will reach these goals while I still have eggs to spare, and I’m OK with that.

In recent months, however my reasoning mind has met its match. The biological urge to have children has gotten so profoundly distracting that I’ve become completely convinced handbooks should be written to help women who do not want children deal with this shit. It is absolutely unbelievable. My sweetie can joke about having babies and my palms start sweating, my mouth waters, and it’s all I can do not to… well… make him put his money where his mouth is.

I’ve learned fascinating things about my own cycle and about the female sex drive. I’ve really gotten in tune with the fact that said sex drive is full and constant (well, I’ve always been in touch with that), and that it’s just as intense when I’m fertile as when I’m not. That’s an entirely different discussion. Oh, the power of feminine sexuality.

I’ve also been forced to look at the quality of the urges and place them into context of what I can actually have in my life, and what I want to cultivate. What I’m discovering is an urge for family that is so intense that sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself. If I start to lean into it, I get anxious because parts of me don’t believe I can ever have it. Then there are the parts of me that get anxious because I don’t want to have to subscribe to a model of what that family should look like.

I’m also discovering that inner child work apparently goes on forever. That I’m learning to parent myself and a little girl inside of me, who has so many tears that I’m sometimes afraid it’ll never change. Which is where the process of unconditional love comes in, I suppose. Patience, dedication, loyalty and unconditional love to the parts of me that are still struggling despite years of work, and who still feel utterly alone despite an external world that tells me I definitely am not.

There’s insecurity there, too. I know world events are constantly reverberating through to my core. Mass shootings, natural disasters, rallies and protests… It’s hard for an adult to feel secure in this world, let alone a child who has not yet been conditioned to shut down and shut it out.

In a wonderful little check-in via text with a friend just now, we had a mutual acknowledgement of the desire for family and were able to put it in the context of the Mars-Neptune conjunction. Astrology is, after all, our favorite way of making meaning. There is something elusive about emerging desires right now, allowing us or forcing us to get in touch with that which we may never be able to possess.

So I’m just going to sit with that for a while and try not to jump to conclusions — or to just give in and have a baby because my body is telling me to.