• What If Testing Well Means You've Failed the Real Test, Which Is Life?

• What If the 800 Is Actually a "Life Zero" on the SAT?

• What If America Has Lost Its Gumption from Competing Too Hard?

• What If Rewards are Actually Demerits, and We're Also Punishing The Successful, Who Are Actually Cutthroat and Only Barely Empathetic?

• What If Everything We Value Is Wrong, and Years of Test Prep Are Holding MY BABY Back?

• What If Expensive Schools Are Hurting Our Baaaaabies???

• What If My Parenting Is Totally Broken But It's Too Late???

• What If MY BABY Has to Choose Between Being Nice and Being Successful???

• What If My Child's Charter School Is a Cult???

• What If We're Raising a Generation of Horrible Robot Narcs??????

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Amy Jean Porter has some nice prints for sale. And also you can preorder her book, Of Lamb, right now!

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It's not like I want to kidnap them, and keep them in my basement. (I don't have a basement. Basements are for rich people and perverts.) Don't go crazy: I just don't like children. I'm not interested in molesting them, or anything gross and horrible like that. That's terrible! After all, I don't enjoy looking at them, much less touching them.

I'm not even willing to get in league with those other people this Halloween. The kiddy fiddlers, and the rest of them. Even though I know they've too been waiting for this moment of parental incaution—one we thought would take years more to arrive, what with the helicoptering of parents! Sure, I know you'd think we'd all be on the same team. But it doesn't work like that.

Of course, I'm not interested in killing anyone's children with poison. I mean, tops, I was sort of thinking just a mild tummy ache. Or! I could make some fake Skittles, that have the reverse flavor-to-color ratio. Like, you eat a yellow one, but it tastes blue.

Or maybe, maybe I could make candy mangoes, and tell the kids they're candy apples, and then when they eat them, BAM. Surprise mango taste!

You know, just like when you think you're about to drink milk, but it's orange juice, and you're all confused.

Killing them, sheesh! That's not only really mean, it's actually really shortsighted. If you think about it, we child-hating gay people need straight people to keep having children. It's how we get more gays, for starters. (And given the death rate of gays, we need you to have a lot of them. It's like with turtles.)

Apart from that, we know that straight people do a lot for us. Who will work at the DMV? Who will run the music magazines? Who will sell weed? Who will work at Walmart and Sam's Club and pick up the garbage?

That's what you're raising your children to do, and honestly, me and the rest of the people who plan on preying on children this Halloween are appreciative! It's an important job, and none of us can really knock it.

I bet it's a lot of work too. You must be beat. Real tired. Tired enough to finally let your guard down on Sunday night. I'll be the friendly neighbor at the front door, with the big bowl of junior Butterfingers. Except inside the wrappers will actually be butter.

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"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal-as we are!" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Some years back, my daughter wanted to attend a mommy-and-me girls' reading group with her best friend, and I said okay, fine. It emerged that this was a "women of color" mommy-and-me girls' reading group. I'm kind of honorary "of color," because I am Cuban, though loads of my milk-white relations were born in Spain. I've often thought how bizarre the whole Hispanic thing is, because if you want a white European oppressor and/or pack of genocidal thugs who went around wreaking havoc on indigenous populations, well, Spain will give anybody a run for his money there, and yet we use "Hispanic" as a blanket term for the multi-colored descendants of both oppressors and oppressed. In any case, I rarely hesitate to lay claim to whatever demographic option will create the least fuss, because the whole thing seems so arbitrary anyway, and what I really wish is that everyone was treated fairly and there were no boxes left to tick.

This best friend's mama had been a great mate of mine since way back in our Lamaze days. Diana is a terrific force of nature, a lawyer of great toughness and moral fiber, or really more like, moral rebar; part African-American, part Native American and part Klingon, we used to say. The two of us had been Lamaze renegades who'd had no truck with the whole la-la-la-the-life-within-me thing of "expecting" (ridiculous word). We laughed openly at the hard-sell tactics used to promote this idea that we must endure an "unmedicated" childbirth and must never ever listen to any doctors or we'd be betraying our Babies, our Nation and Women. We spent half the class joking about how soon we could demand oodles of morphine when The Time Came, etc.

"Hey, I am just trying to avoid a natural death experience, ha ha!" we'd say. "Wake me when the hairdresser arrives!"

Anyway, my daughter and I went along to the mommy-and-me women-of-color book group. It was fun, these lovely women and their daughters, this beautiful house. We all gabbed and had snacks for a while. Later on, I was asked to recommend a book for the girls to read, for next time, and I instantly suggested The Phantom Tollbooth.

THEM (uncomfortable)
"Uh, is that written by a woman of color?"

ME (oblivious)
"Oh God, no."

THEM
"Is the hero a minority?"

ME (a light dawns)
"No, no, oh no. Um. A boy, Milo, and a talking dog."
(while wildly thinking how talking dogs constitute very small underclass)

THEM
"Is the writer a minority?"

ME
"No, no! A white guy! This total white guy. I think from New York, or something?"

THEM (patronizing as hell)
"Well, we want the girls to be able to identify with the characters..."

ME (bristling)
"Listen, I have been identifying with Milo since I was eight years old myself. Are you trying to teach these girls that they can't identify with Milo?"

Of all the dumb things to get into a tussle about. But I found I couldn't quite wriggle out of it, because it really did drive me wild that these girls weren't going to be encouraged to read The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter was embarrassed to see me getting into an actual disagreement with these nice Moms. It might have gotten really awkward but for Diana, who managed with her usual raised eyebrow or two to smooth everything out.

Even so, we never went back, and I often recall the frustration I felt that afternoon.

I cannot help but think that it is flat wrong to teach anyone that he or she should not read, or love, or identify with, any book he or she pleases. Indeed, to my own way of thinking, that's the whole point of literature. David Foster Wallace had a lovely thing to say in this regard, about Cynthia Ozick.

Here's what's cool is that this is this hyper-educated, very seriously Jewish person writing about a culture and ethnicity that I know very slightly, and mostly only from books, and whom I-number one, the prose is just completely luminous, but number two, I find myself feeling stuff for these folks that I sure don't feel for most of the people who look just like me in regular life.

Literature's a democratizing force. Its power makes so much of the world accessible to anyone who can read, equally, without regard to anything about "who we are" or where we came from or any of that. If you want to participate in the world of letters, all that matters is your ability to make yourself intelligible, when you write, and to apprehend what is being said, when you read.

It doesn't matter whether an author is a Great White Author, or a minority author, or anything like that. As a reader, I don't care if you are a woman of color, a white man or a Lhasa Apso. I only care whether or not your book is any good.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

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Despite not having children, I think about them. A lot. In recent years, the full teeming strength of my biology has been consumed with a single, driving goal: to produce babies. And now that I've met the man with whom I will gladly (but not immediately! Don't freak out, babe!) have said babies, the topic has become even more germane.

Unfortunately, thanks to an entire body of pop-literature, magazine articles, and semi-accurate science, I am also aware that having children will not make me particularly happy. Or, more specifically, it may very well leech every iota of joy from my existence. (But I'll never regret it! Never! No regrets! Wouldn't trade it for the WORLD!)

Yes, according to myriad sources, having children is the quickest path down the proverbial Slip N' Slide into abject misery. No sleep! No freedom! The complete loss of a halcyon lifestyle that we ("we" in this case meaning predominantly "white middle-to-upper-middle-class professionals with college degrees and subscriptions to New York magazine") enjoy with vigor. Gone are the boozy weekend brunches and "Mad Men" marathons and bi-weekly pilgrimages to Bruni Sifton-ranked restaurants. Banished are the freedoms and comforts and indulgences of modern life.

And the expense! Let's not forget the expense! It will cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to raise just one offspring — money that may (gasp) be incentivizing us not to procreate, money that could have been spent on innumerable bounty, like unnecessary Apple products or Brooklyn Heights co-ops or yacht upgrades. Or simply not earned at all, as we enjoy the budding "free time is the new wealth" economy embraced by our generation. Between, ineffective tax breaks for parents and rising inflation, potential breeders are all in danger of seeing their finances slashed and burned by the gestation of a fetus.

Get pregnant, and suddenly so many funds must be procured! Careers and spending habits may be questioned! Mate-gaming may be necessary! All sorts of problems arise that can only be solved by 1) relocating to a developing country, 2) marrying rich or 3) dropping the idea that a child must be a manifestation of upper-middle class angst.

There's also the enviro-guilt of reproduction. What a carbon footprint it will have! What a tax on our already-gasping planet! You could commute to Taiwan on a weekly basis for the rest of your career, and your carbon output still wouldn't approach the environmental assault of plunking another human being down on the earth.

And of course there's the myopic drudgery of caring for said human being, who at the outset cannot see to its most basic needs. Feeding, wiping, washing and burping will replace the serenity of guzzling Starbucks and reading the Arts & Leisure section. Yes, we can all pretty much agree that no one has ever really liked caring for babies-and now in the age of post-gender co-parenting (right?), we can all recognize just how much it blows to spend your hours changing diapers when you could be reading blogs and imbibing organic cocktails.

Plus there's the ballooning need for validation. So much validation sought in parenthood! That desperate desire to hear that you're "doing it right." Therein lies the true misery-that all of this sleep deprivation and poop-scooping and Disney-watching will be "for nothing" if we mess up (which we inevitably do, and then heap on truckloads of guilt that we could have "done it all differently"). Parents could save themselves some serious grief by not thinking of children as outlets for personal outcome-if I do X, Y will happen-and accepting that when it comes to the survival and development of human beings, whether or not you're fully satisfied with your child's SAT scores is a bit irrelevant.

Plus there's the risk that parenting will run up a misery tab later in life. There's the inevitably assholery of the child's teenage years, and then, as anyone who's ever read a Philip Roth novel can attest, there's the not-insubstantial chance that your child might grow up to be an irredeemable jerk.

Yes, there are myriad reasons not to progenerate. And yet billions of us keep on doing it. And those of us reading and writing articles like this are, more often than not, doing it willingly. Why? The mere biological imperative isn't enough to explain it.

One reason to have children is that there isn't necessarily a reason. That producing and caring for a child is outside the parameters of the "reasonable," consequence-driven, cause-and-effect logic in which we live the rest of life. There's not really an "end" to becoming a parent-in fact, one key mistake people make is expecting parenthood to solve all the questions of purpose and identity that plague the Westernized post-individualism mind.

Like it or not, children won't answer any existential "Who am I? Why am I here?" questions. You may find temporary purpose in the day-to-day of wiping tushes and dishing out peas-but not meaning. Nor will your kids fill the hole of inadequacies leftover from your own childhood-didn't get into Harvard when you applied? Perhaps your children will! Better order $700 of Baby Einstein products, stat.

Still, even beyond the suspension of reason, there lies a deeper truth: Somewhere in the froth of neuroses and judgments and doctrines about modern middle class parenting (and parenting in general), there is a transcendent peace, a unique opportunity to engage in humanity as a whole.

We don't remember our own babyhood. Somewhere in the congealed mass of stories and half-truths that make up the human memory, we forget our transformation from squalling infants to the semi-mature beings we are now. We know this metamorphosis happened-largely, we no longer pee into diapers or shove olive pits up our noses. But the minutiae of the change are lost to us forever.

Parenting doesn't just re-immerse you in this transformation: It gives you a front row seat to the daily revelations of forming and shaping a life. Yesterday, this tiny being had no concept of trees; today, she's speaking the word and grabbing leaves. This morning, a two-year-old realized that other children are not simply a manifestation of his own id and superego, but separate individuals with their own needs. It's the entire human experience boiled into its essential elements-there is no fear or angst or worry in babyhood, no status-envy, no sense of not being loved, no nagging inner monologue constantly informing you of your inferiority to everyone else. There is only possibility, a blank canvas of soul and insight and the full spectrum of chaotic and sacred emotions that make up the human experience. All there for your personal marveling.

Not compelling enough for you? Well, there's not much more to offer. Having a child isn't a panacea, or a means to an end, or even an end itself-it's more a gateway to fuller participation in humanity. Our lives are terminal; human life is not. Children are what they are, and nothing more. There's no overarching moral imperative or greater spiritual truth to it (sorry, Ross Douthat).

You'll always risk the chance that your baby will grow up to be an asshole, or that your spouse will leave you after seeing your stretch marks, or that you'll go broke on SAT tutors and squash lessons. Maybe those things weren't going to provide you with happiness/meaning/purpose anyway. Simply play a bigger game-enjoy your participation in the continuation of the species. What these baby-struck parents are really gazing at in wonderment is the capacity of the human race to grow and evolve-all playing out right there in their living rooms.

It's just about the only thing that gives us hope that adults can grow and evolve the same way. After all, we're really just big children.

Melissa Lafsky usually writes about horror movies here.
Photo from Flickr by Gabi Menashe.

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