I am mostly thinking about creative projects these days, but the hot temperatures in the past week have meant more sleepless nights and podcasts, so I have one more controversial topic.
Last night I listened to
an interview with self-declared pronatalists Malcolm and Simone Collins. The link takes you to the description, so I won’t bother with introducing them.These were my 3 main takeaways:
2) They happily described their lifestyle as weird and admitted that it is part of their parenting approach to teach their kids to be weird. The children are different because more is expected of them than of other people. If nothing else, this sparked recognition in me: My family growing up was also more than a little bit weird and I also learned to accept it and even take a certain amount of pride in it.*
3) At the end of the interview, Malcolm says that his and Simone’s approach to family life is based on a hypothesis, and if they are wrong, they want other people to be right. He emphasizes that he wants other people to take a different approach to family life and to share whether it works. This improved my opinion of them and their sanity. It’s so rare to find people who are humble, especially when they are claiming to solve the world’s problems (of course this is a hubristic claim in and of itself).
* I do have a complex relationship with weirdness. These days there are so many labels, and everybody is busy “identifying” as this or self-diagnosing as that. That was not my experience growing up: I was just weird. I knew it; other people knew it. (The polite people told me I was “creative.”) So when Malcolm and Simone described themselves (accurately) as weird it was bracing and even gave me a pleasant feeling of nostalgia.
On the other hand, as a young person (teens to early twenties) I felt a great deal of shame over the weirdness. There were a couple of main reasons for this. One, I didn’t feel like I was given a choice as to how weird to be. I suppose if you have a choice it isn’t genuine weirdness, but play acting. But I still wanted the skills to not be very weird if I chose, and as soon as I figured out how to get them I set about doing so.
The second problem is that the kind of weirdness I experienced as a child, even when it had arguable benefits, didn’t seem to scale up. It worked in our family but I couldn’t see a workable model for a weird life in the larger community. And I wanted that life. I experienced enough isolation as a child to know that I had to find resilience and connection.
But there is always an ambivalence here because I don’t actually mind being weird; I like other weird people; and overwhelmingly, they like me.
I also have, perhaps, a higher than average openness to ideas outside the respectable norm. In real life, I pass as a middle-class progressive professional. (All those years learning how to be normal!) I say that only to give a shorthand of what’s considered respectable opinion most of the time among friends and colleagues. However, I don’t necessarily accept that the things that most people believe are correct (which nowadays is just as or more likely to be meme- or trend- influenced than the product of experience, tradition, and/or careful thought.) Every now and then, fringe ideas are correct. Not the majority of the time, perhaps, but it’s a non- zero chance.
In other words, part of me, while I quietly go about my conventional, enjoyable existence, is wondering when it is time to abandon it and fully embrace weirdness. I know I can do it after all: it’s a question of whether I want to and whether it’s the best choice. I give the weird people some attention because I think they are in many ways more perceptive in certain circumstances, than my comfortable, conforming peers.
For now, we proceed as normal with occasional adjustments. Next time, something completely different. (Maybe.)
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