empathetic pessimism (warning: rant)

i have never wanted to be a mother. i have never wanted a family. i have wanted love-- yes. but, i have never thought of that love as the foundation of a family. whether hetero or homo. when i have thought of love, i have thought about it as a space of creativity, of questioning and breaking norms. not one that would recreate them. this makes me a hard person to be with.

i have known this for a long time, because i did not have the privilege of ignorance. the older i have grown, i have become more and more convinced about the essentially conservative nature of romantic-sexual love, especially the heterosexual variety. but, also to the extent the homo-normative imaginary of our times is invested in recreating the marriage-family-private property-state continuum, i don't see anything inherently radical in same-sex love either.

this is not to deny the intensity of homophobia either in USA or in India.this is more about recording how romantic love is integrated into the dominant structures of modernity. love was/is subversive to the extent the social structures question its legitimacy. to the extent, love itself becomes an institution, becomes the foundation of an institution, love loses its radicality. for love to be decolonized, for love to be radicalized, these structures need to be broken in the first place. there is no "equal" love in an otherwise profoundly unequal world. there is no "free" sex in an otherwise unfree world. beyond that, just the presence of the romantic love (or for that matter, any love) does not make anything better. indeed, love is implicated within our very structures of domination.

so, at this ripe age of thirty-five, i am a lonely woman. most of my women friends are on the mommy-track, struggling between jobs and parenthood. and those who aren't, are looking for ways to step into these roles. they grieve over their non-existing marriages, worry that their biological clock is running out, and i listen to their stories, while thinking: what exactly were the lessons of the feminist movement? and i am one of those very few women, in my vicinity, who has no desire to marry or reproduce. often times, i am astounded by the fact that how profoundly my friends – even the   radicals/queers/activists/leftists/indies/alternatives/bohemians/artists-- are bought into this marriage-parenthood-family crap. it seems, after more than hundred years of theoretical wrestling with the oppressive nature of family, our understandings of a perfect human collectivity begins and ends with family. still. yes, I feel sorry for my species for that.

as a result, within the spaces i inhabit, there are almost no discussions of how one balances creativity and academic life. within academia, there are discussions around balancing parenting (mothering) and academic work. within the writing/poetry world, there are discussions around balancing mothering and creative work. but, there are hardly any discussions on how a non-parent (especially a non-mother) juggles between teaching, scholarly writing and creative writing. 

i am not a mother. but, right now, i balance teaching, editing, scholarly writing and creative writing. all of which are extremely time-consuming and demand emotional and intellectual intensity. they require as much energy and attention as parenting. but, I rarely get that acknowledgement from the social worlds I inhabit..

for me, the message is clear: you're only valuable when you're engaged either in social production or reproduction or both. creativity, when it's not part of that cycle of social production or generation of capital, is useless. that is why, i refuse to professionalize my poems, my creative writing. and i do not intend to change my plans anytime soon...