INFANTICIDE

my parents should have killed me when i was 13

i’m 31 today.

last year i remember having a distinct insight - i am now the man i was pretending to be in my teens. i was so lost back then, as most of us are. it’s not that i’ve found the ONE TRUE path, more that i called off the search.

i’m grateful to have graduated from the religious and nationalistic superstitions of my upbringing, narrowly dodging the woo-woo mysticisms of the psychedelic and yoga communities i found in my late twenties.

i can’t help but wonder if my philosophical positions, or lack thereof, are disappointing to the village of christians who reared me. i wonder what my father would think if he could sit in front of me and ingest a sample of my worldview. no doubt, he would have his concerns.

purity

if my parents had any sense, they would have killed me when i was 13, the age i was most likely to go to heaven.

on my 13th birthday i was a pious, god-fearing christian like them. i was 5 months shy of watching my father suffocate on his own blood and not quite old enough to have experienced true lust for a woman. i was a virgin in every respect. i had been baptized and knew at least the first three catechisms by heart even though we were protestant.

i was still four years away from questioning my faith and ten years from losing it altogether, further still from becoming a card-carrying atheist (i have a card). i had not yet become addicted to alcohol, food or brought violence upon another man. i had yet to experience the greed of business or the self-hatred and crippling doubt of being married yet wanting divorce. my heart had only been broken by movies and rainy days. i had yet to bury a friend who preferred heroine to living or suffer my own nicotine, sugar, or alcohol withdraws. i was a committed creationist and i took communion seriously. i sang in church earnestly.

if my parents were true believers in the phrase apostle paul allegedly scribbled in the first century c.e., “to be absent with the body is to be present with the father,” they would have done me the humane, gracious service of sending me straight to the father. their decision to keep me on this earth can be the result only of weakness, misguided narcissism, or doubt.

cowardice

one could argue i was kept here to share the gospel of our lord jesus christ and make more converts. but my father and my mother (via her strategic submission) believed in predestination - the idea that god chose his people and led them to salvation while destining the rest of humanity to burn eternally. therefore, what good is it for me to stand around like a dummy and preach to people who don’t have the ears to hear the good news? since it was clear by 13 i had been chosen for salvation, why not do me the favor of skipping to the good part of the story before i had a chance to turn my back on god or commit abominable sins?

perhaps the idea of their own sadness in losing a child was the thing that stayed their hand. for this moral error, i would consider them cowards - too afraid of their own pain to send their son into the welcoming embrace of eternal bliss with god almighty and his host of angels where they would soon be joining me. living out 40 or 60 years on earth without their son would be an infinitesimally small amount of time when stacked next to eternal glory.

narcissism

maybe their concern was with the legacy of their namesake on earth, particularly my father’s name, through my own reproductive success. if this was the case, i would accuse them of greed, pride, and call them fools for i will bare no offspring or pass on a legacy for them.

their genes whispered in their ears “you love him,” coaxing them to blindly push my development into adulthood where i would hopefully pass on their precious, immortal DNA.

but they mistakenly raised a man who would do everything in his power to end the possibility of passing down their genetic legacy in his own body and destroy the ideals they strived to defend. their genetic and cultural conditioning led them to a false certainty of my afterlife and apparent mission on earth.

not only did they bar me from eternity, they chose to keep me on earth where i would suffer loss, heartache, fear, and tragedy all in the name of continuing their dna, their biological eternal life, through me.

how could they do this to a son they claim to love if not for narcissism, DNA’s primary tool for survival?

doubt

that leaves us with doubt.

perhaps they weren’t entirely sure of the message from the pulpit even as my father stood behind it on occasion projecting his full confidence. did they fear my soul may not be destined for glory and not all of their beliefs were on solid ground? when my father argued with pastors about the age of accountability or god’s divine revelation in nature, was there a fear scratching at the back of his throat, causing him to wonder if his fate and his son’s were truly secure?

surely my parents were confronted at 4am on occasion with the mystery of what it all means and what they were raising me for if not the ever accessible gateway to eternity always an arms reach away. their mission being to get me to heaven as fast as possible, they should have carried out their plan swiftly in the still of the night, spilling my blood, my brothers’, and possibly their own. a sacrifice to god like in the old days. a burnt offering pleasing to the lord.

if my parents, unlike abraham poised to slaughter isaac and cook him alive as a sacrifice to the maker, stayed their hand because they contained even a grain of skepticism,

i could find them respectable.

thanks for reading hungry ghost. subscribe for free to receive new posts whenever i get around to it.