Ha. You saw this yesterday, I presume.
When I started at the "great-grandfather who successfully enlisted in the army at 11" part of the story, I thought "Surely this is the part that was told at enough removes to be mostly legend." But then it came to the part about it all making the newspapers.
There is a funny thing that's about privilege in this story, but privilege in the sense that everyone should be treated like this, not that it's unfair that anyone is treated like this.
He had a history of really significantly anti-social behavior until he was a mid-teen, and then it settled down and stopped when his hormones and physicality settled into something appropriate to his calendar age and social position as a teenager. And it sounds like his bad record as a kid really didn't do him significant damage -- he got treated as entitled to a fresh start the minute he was able to behave normally. But wow can you imagine how a kid with that kind of behavioral record would have been treated if his family wasn't white and middle class?
The part about the great-grandfather, at least, seems to be true: https://history.nebraska.gov/collection_section/raymond-burleigh-1905-rg0836-am/
Very Captain Marvel, isn't it. The physical capacity of a grown man being operated by a middle-schooler.
5: All threads are leading to Nebraska these days.
Oooh, the part about making the decision whether to biopsy the embryo made me mad.
He and his dad had a heart-to-heart and came to the retrospective position that, you know, his childhood had been kinda OK and it was fine to repeat it in another generation? They had that conversation without his mother, who had to dedicate her life to hauling him out of the shit he got into? Who forfeited a career to do it? Who lived in daily dread for years? They talked it over without the person who had done the work of managing it and decided it wasn't all that bad and so they'd let chance happen?
Pisses me off. Did they even realize the dynamic?
Obviously I'm biased, because I was faced with also becoming a medical manager mom and I made the other choice. Because I didn't want that to be my life.
9: Particularly noteworthy in that respect was the hesitation of his wife, who happens to personally be a legit expert in that exact field.
He's a good writer and it's a well-told story, but there is some kind of questionable/unexamined stuff going on in the background.
It's got to be a hard thing to get information on. Without knowing the medical words, you'd get on a watch list just googling symptoms.
The end reminded me of the end of a "Boy named Sue", but I thought he should have reached the same conclusion as the guy in the song
Wow there are a lot of parallels & other ties to disability rights conversations in there. I'm kind of shocked that it was only mentioned once, in passing.
Also trans rights, which I thought of first while reading it but then forgot about by the end due to cisgender privilege & disability myopia
Yeah, the trans analogy struck me in relation to the story about the attempt to throw him out of a locker room he was in with his mother when he was very young but didn't look it. That there was no uncontroversially appropriate place for his body to be that would let him participate normally in daily life, if that's a description that makes sense.
I realize that this conversation looks different for other conditions and disabilities, but in my own case if I learned that my parents had the chance to select embryos without the BRCA1 mutation and they didn't take it, I would be super super pissed.
Kind of on topic, walking down the street a few minutes ago I heard I guy telling a woman, "I've run 13 miles before, but I've never run a half marathon because you're just paying to run. They use it as a charity fund raiser so you're paying for cancer research." The last sentence was said in a tone that indicated a negative affect toward cancer research.
Probably thinks cancer research looks for ways to give people cancer. That or he works for a tobacco company.
I guess with remote work the latter isn't impossible.
Woman stopped me in the street and said "Do you have five minutes for cancer research?" I said "Absolutely, but I doubt we'll get much done"
9: PB's father learned about PB's decision to biopsy the embryos from PB's mother so his parents presumably discussed it before PB's father spoke to him and persuaded him to change his mind.
I suppose you can assume a situation in which PB's mother expressed valid concerns and was completely ignored by her husband and son if you want.
Whatever happened behind the scenes, the article itself, which is what we're discussing, considered the opinions and experiences of the writer and of his father as important in deciding whether or not to biopsy, and didn't bring the impact on the mother (elsewhere in the article described as significant and negative) into it as relevant to that question. I have say I'm with Megan in thinking that it seems worth considering in that context.
I suppose you can assume a situation in which PB's mother expressed valid concerns and was completely ignored by her husband and son if you want.
I mean, this is a very common trope when women are discussing their home lives.
I assumed you were trolling! Lately I am now suspecting you of trying to dial it back.
Thing is, the reference condition or baseline for severe childhood medical conditions is that it completely takes over the mother's life. They'll be subsconsciously comparing to that, rather than a mom whose life can also include a job and hobbies. They'll think, yeah, it reverted to baseline (mom is subsumed) and not the but-for condition (mom continues to have a non-medical management life).
I mean, the guy never said, 'I thought about whether I wanted to take on the majority of the work of parenting a raging teenager in a child's body for a dozen years, and decided I was up for it.' It isn't clear to me that he considered who would be doing that work at all.
I myself never really thought about it until I was threatened with it (despite the fact that it suits his dad so much better tempermentally) and I did not want it at all no way no how.
I thought I posted earlier, but what bothers me most -- and I'm not sure how reflective this is - is the likely effect on his daughter, who may have to have the same conversation again with her partner, without any idea of the immense amount of work it took to keep her own dad out of serious trouble.
I mean, there's no guarantees with anything about children but this to me felt like kicking the can down the road. He won't have to deal with it, so no need to bother?
There's also the immense pressure on parents not to openly regret anything they did for their kids -- in retrospect, there's nothing decent to say other than that it was all done freely out of love and they have no regrets. I don't think this pressure is really avoidable: I'm not advocating that parents should be coldbloodedly honest about that sort of thing to their children.
But if there's ever a time for coldblooded analysis it's when you're making a forwardlooking decision. I would expect that part of the reason the mother's experiences were left out of the biopsy decision is that it'd feel cruel to put her on the spot by asking "Mom, did I wreck your life, or was it just fine and okay to repeat in the next generation?" And while I understand not wanting to put her on the spot explicitly like that, that's still not an excuse for failing to consider those issues at all.
Or, pace ajay, to publicly present the decision making process as one in which those issues should be neglected, whether or not they were considered privately.
Man, if you want some grim reading, go by the subReddit for regretful parents. There is a whole lot of misery on there and I hate to think how the kids feel.
Still, I am all for people who don't want kids not having kids, and if that forum helps someone realize they really don't want kids, all the better. LB makes a really good point that the time to consider all this information is forwardlooking.
There's got to be a way to ask and answer the question with more deniability -- "how close was the family to not being able to take care of me?", maybe? Let the mother not specify that she personally was the margin and is still in the red.
Guess culture has its virtues, msain.
31: also, he turned out fine, after putting his family through hell for a decade and a half (through no fault of his own.). It's easy to gloss that as a hard time that led to a good result, but surely the relevant question is how likely his good outcome was. (What happens if the kid he drugged died? Or his behavior as a kid got him on the sex offender list?)
I also don't know if regret is even the right way to think about it - the change in her life was so profound (maybe even transformative) that it's hard mentally to unwind. It could be the case that she's relatively happy to have had the life she did but also that it would be unfair to expect anyone to desire that outcome.
Right! The thing I said about privilege also applies to luck -- none of his bad behavior seems to have gone on his permanent record, whether through general demographic privilege, luck, or the efforts of his preternaturally charming mother. Does that replay the same way in the next generation? Who knows?
Assume a spherical toddler, but with an erection.
What's that WWII graffiti with the nose hanging over the wall? Assume that.