Just a heads up! This will look better on my website.

Hello from a Twin Peaks themed writing meetup. Yes, there are donuts and strong black coffee; yes, the host is wearing a 1950s-style diner waitress smock; yes, the Twin Peaks soundtrack is playing on repeat in the background.

So an article I keep thinking about is Sara Hendren’s “catechesis by camera”, which, like everything Hendren¹ writes, is a must-read.² It spring-boards off the controversy surrounding an influencer couple’s public decision to abort a fetus with Down syndrome³ to discuss the rather lacking state of public bioethical conversation in 2026 and, in particular, the common “project rubric” applied to children, as if they were a product launch attempting to meet OKRs. Because in an era of optimization and (supposed) self-actualization, as we’re supposed to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, what other criteria are available for the decision to have children?

Which is provocative, right? Because I don’t know if I’d make a different decision, but could I honestly say I was doing it for any reason other than my own convenience? As someone not-unaffected by a genetic condition, could I honestly say I would want someone to make that decision for me?

A point that Hendren touches on is the idea of children as a transformative experience.⁴ You can’t honestly judge the experience of parenthood before you become a parent because you literally become a different person, with different preferences; so in many ways the project rubric doesn’t even make sense, because you can’t really judge the pros and cons of having a child from the perspective of a parent until you’ve already done it.

Now, as a current non-parent, I can’t really speak to this, but I think pet ownership offers the same experience in miniature. We’ve had a lot of “negative” experiences with Rooibos — he had pretty severe separation anxiety when first adopted; he had a bad spot of insomnia due to noise in our last apartment; just this week he had half his remaining teeth extracted, at no small cost to our pocketbook. But a while back I was chatting with a friend who was considering getting a pet, and they mentioned the “pros and cons” of pet ownership — of getting woken up in the middle of the night, of vet bills, of finding sitters for trips — and my first thought was: wait, that doesn’t even make sense. Because Rooibos has become so central to my life, in some ways, that I’m not even sure what I would be like without him, let alone mere “pros” and “cons”.

One thing Sherry and I chatted about recently is that strange empty feeling that often occurs when wrapping up a project, be that a novel manuscript or a painted canvas or just a successful party. I proposed the rather cheeky name “post-artum depression.” That’s not intended to make light of the seriousness of postpartum depression, but there is a parallel between the two, I think. Of course, luckily, with post-artum depression, you can just move on to the next project 😉