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This post is not about microeconomics. It's about why my heart hurts whenever I try to focus on this discussion.
I want kids. I plan to have kids. The woman I plan to have kids with once told me -- brimming over with delight -- that if we split up and both ended up with other women, our kids would have four mummies. (We've decided to keep this as a backup, rather than Plan A.)
My kids' lives will be shaped by the stories we tell each other -- in books and TV and film and music and casual conversation and epic poetry and my half-hearted attempts to inculcate some Jewishness in them -- and they will learn about life through imagination and experience.
I don't know my kids yet. I haven't met them. I don't know anything about them, apart from that I hope to love them with all my heart. But whoever my kids are, I want them to see themselves in the stories they hear. All their lives, I want them to have stories that include them and their friends and their family (however many mothers it contains...). And, just as much, I want them to have stories about people they've never met and points of view they've never considered and joys they didn't know existed to reach for.
I want that for my kids at all their ages, whoever they turn out to be, whoever they turn out to love. I want them to know that they and everyone else have a place in the stories we tell, the happinesses and sorrows we imagine. I want that when they're five, when they're fifteen, when they're fifty.
And I can't do that alone.