In my 20s, I was positive I was not going to get married and have kids. My reasoning for this was because as a teacher I saw so many clueless parents, and I didn’t want to be part of the problem. I had a teacher, a good friend and mother of two, take me to task for such thinking. You don’t go into parenting thinking about how many bad things you could do, she explained; you become a parent to make the world better, through making a better world for your child. My retort to my friend was a whine: “But what if your kid is a fuckup?” My friend looked right at me. “But it’s your fuckup.”
On being a parent in tragedy | Slay All Dragons