The Chance to Be Here

I am grateful to my parents for birthing me. Not because they raised me especially well — much of who I became was shaped by forces they neither chose nor controlled, and some of it in spite of them rather than because of them — but because they gave me the one thing no one else could: the chance to be here at all. They handed me an opening, and everything I have made of my life, every meaning I have managed to create for myself and whatever of it has reached other people, has come through that opening. Like most parents, they did their best inside limits they had no say over. That seems to me enough, and more than enough.

So I think the responsibility, for those of us who choose to bring children into the world, is not to extend a family line but to make room for a person. We received our own lives as a gift we never asked for and cannot repay backward; the only direction repayment runs is forward. The task is to give rise to someone who can feel their life from the inside, and who — as far as their circumstances allow — can carve out by their own effort a life they recognize as their own. Not our picture of a good life. Theirs. We do not have to do it well to have done something enormous. We only have to open the door and then stand out of the way of what walks through it.