World Population Day and Grandma

Today is World Population Day, and also the third anniversary of my tubal ligation. What did I do? Well, overpopulation is a frightening thing, and nothing to celebrate. My tubal, however, is something that I am very happy about, but my way of celebrating it isn’t limited to once per year.

Today, I called my grandmother and had an interesting conversation. For one thing, she mentioned that she had something like a dozen children. She said that she didn’t necessarily want that many, but her options to do anything about it were limited at the time. Because of blood clots, she couldn’t take birth control. She said that she might have had what I got, a tubal, but said that it was nearly impossible for a woman under 40 to get one way back then. But she took care of her children, she and my grandpa, without relying on their own parents or otherwise being a burden to anyone.

My siblings rely heavily on our parents. My brother and his pregnant wife live with my parents, and as far as I’m aware, do not work. My sister and her husband used to live with our parents, but social-services eventually made our parents kick them out to get them away from the baby they had, which our parents now foster, and of course she’s pregnant again. They all rely heavily on our parents to pay their bills and to get them two and from work (when they actually do work at all.) My parents expect that they will be stuck fostering this one baby for some time, and may be saddled with more babies once they’re born. They are not able to enjoy the freedom of an empty nest, nor the money they should be saving. Instead, they work harder, have more stress, and the arrangement actually is something of a potential danger to my mother’s job. I feel sorry for them, but it’s their own choice to allow it to continue. My grandmother agrees that my parents are enabling, not helping.

My grandmother told me that my sister, when criticized for her reproductive irresponsibility, once complained to her “well, you had kids too!” and my grandma said “Yeah, but I actually took care of them.”

My grandma told me that there are too many people in the world now; it’s overpopulated and there isn’t enough to go around. Things were different in her time. There were fewer people on the planet and the resource demands for a decent standard of living were less, the life expectancy was shorter, and people didn’t really have much of a choice anyway. She says that, nowadays, people have no excuse.

What surprised me was that she knew about my tubal. I had posted about it on Facebook before, but I know that she never touches a computer. My mom apparently told her. It’s not that I hide the fact that I was fixed, it just never came up and, honestly, I didn’t know what she would think about it. That she just mentioned it in passing as no-big-deal somewhat surprised me, so I asked her more about it. She said that it was my choice to make and that it seems to be working well for me. She thinks I’m not likely to change my mind, but if I did, adoption and IVF are still possible, and that it’s better to regret not having children than to regret having them anyway.

I’m not the sort of person who has any particular need for approval, but that support from someone who has seen the world and ridden around the sun aboard it so many time does feel nice.