Twenty-ten-from-now

Last night, I dreamt about having children. That's misleading. Most of the dream was filled images of dying children.

And I say I don't have nightmares.

Its because usually my bad dreams end on a very positive note. Right before waking up, I dreamt I had just dropped a baby, and it was carried away by a rabid dog. All was lost, but then my compatriot (who happened to be Jenna Fischer from The Office) pulled me aside and told me that my child hadn't died. She plunged her hands into loose soil and pulled up a strange vegetable that looked like a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. It was clearly alive and as the fronds and leaves started to unfold I felt my heart spill open because I knew, in this hoagie sized mass was my actual daughter. Jenna Fischer handed the vegetable to me and I broke down into tears. The vegetable blossomed open and this tiny little cabbage patch child looked up at me with a familiarity I rarely encounter in waking life. It was a blissful reunion with someone I loved dearly, though we had never met.

Recently, I was talking to Tim on the phone. For a while I had been having reservations on whether or not I should have children. I explained to my good friend that if I were to have a child, it would have to be a son. While I would rather have a daughter, I know it would probably not turn out well. Let me explain. I fear passing on my mother's genetics. I know that if I have a son, I will be passing my father's Y chromosome on. If I have a daughter, I know I will be passing my mother's X chromosome on. My mother is insane. Some people, including her sister and my aunt, assert that she suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. When I was younger, I thought she had something like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Today, I am more inclined to think she is just a garden variety, watered down psychopath. My change of heart comes from the belief that people with personality disorders (as actual mental illnesses) can be treated and rehabilitated through cognitive therapy. The current thinking on psychopaths, or antisocial personality disorder, is that they cannot really be treated all that well.

I have seen my mother go through various paths of medications, and relationship therapies. They don't really do anything. She wouldn't necessarily score very highly on the Bob Hare test. I put her at about a 25, which isn't low, but most clinicians require a minimum of 30 before they consider locking someone away.

So armed with my checklist and basic knowledge of genetics - which stems mostly from a biology lesson involving pea pods - I had decided that I had to have a son. Tim's response was, "So what you're saying is... You're Chinese. You're a normal person." We laughed about this for a few minutes. It's true, we haven't quite kicked the notion of drowning baby girls from out ancestry, but at least my reasoning was backed by science. I wanted to participate in bettering the gene pool.

You may ask, "well how do you know the psychopathic traits associated with your mom were passed down to you? Maybe you got the other X chromosome?" It's a possibility. I would put myself at about a 14 on the Hare checklist. My father scores a flat zero, so looking at my score it is a bit above the perceived average. My concerns are further when compared to the relative psychopathy of my brother, who I would put in at a soft five. So in that respect, it doesn't look too good for my X chromosome.

Of course, this is all just the numbers. I have yet to factor in the nurture side of things, and lots of recent studies show that nurture plays a role in activating certain expressions of genes during certain periods of life. (My brother would probably have been a straight zero as well had he not been subjected to certain experiences in our childhood) I forget what word they use to describe it, but its a long one. The most common example shown is that if a child (usually a boy) has this gene called "the warrior gene" and at an early age (around 6-12) experiences some kind of violent trauma, there is a high likelihood that he will commit violent crimes when he grows older. Many individuals have this "warrior gene," but never act out because there was that lack of nurture based trauma in their early childhood.

It is interesting to note that in our respective childhoods, I generally spent more time with my mother than my brother did which may help to further explain the discrepancy between our Hare scores.

For the most part, I appreciate, and sometimes even enjoy, my watered-down version of psychopathy. I used to be terrified of it, and try to bury it or push it away. This is a poor approach. It is denying who you are. I spent a lot of my time fighting myself. Its a lot like having an uncontrollable dog. You will never get it to do what you want, but you can love it for what it is and structure your furnishing accordingly.

I used to have a nasty habit of seeking out people's pain and poking it with a stick. It wasn't that I enjoyed bringing up their painful memories, but rather that it was the most interesting part of the person to me. I usually don't stay friends with people who haven't suffered a great deal of emotional trauma or pain. They're usually incredibly boring, superficial people.

In terms of my future-children dilemma, I think I have a work around. Thanks to my dream last night, I realized that if I choose my parter properly, I can continue to dilute the psychopathic traits out of the gene pool. If I partner with someone who scores a flat zero, then have a daughter, they would genetically come to about a 14, like me. However, the difference would be that I was raised by a 0 and a 25, whilst my children would be raised by a 0 and a 14 who was invariable aware of the issue at hand and could strive to make choices minimizing that number through nurture. I think it would be reasonable to assume that with the right parenting techniques, a daughter of mine could be pushed as low as a five or a seven on the Hare checklist.

Another key difference is that my parents were more or less, unprepared for rearing children. My father was in optometry school, and my mother was in medical school. They were doing their own things. My future career path in information science will not be as demanding. If I choose to have children at a time when I can devote time to having and raising children, the result will hopefully be even better.