I am the last in my line, and i carry my family tree. If I dont have a son, my family is gone. I sometimes think I will make it a priority, but I would have to marry a very mentally fit person to balance out my crazy genes. I have had a history of mental disorders, paranoid schizophrenia is just the latest and greatest one.
It just hurts to think that my whole lineage is dead if I dont have a son. I’m also the 4th of my name, so theres a tradition to name the heir to the name “Maurice.” My great grandfather, my grandfather, dad and I have all been the only male in the family and we all have had the exact same name, even the same middle name. The pressure is on me to continue the family. And schizophrenia might just not stop me- If I keep up my performance in school, I will become a psychologist, and that would prepare me for the worst- a son who is schizophrenic. I figure a recovered schizophrenic psychologist would be the ideal father for a schizophrenic.
It sucks. Odds arent that high for one child of mine to be schizophrenic, but having multiple kids increases the likelyhood by 10% each time. So if I have a daughter and then want another kid hoping for a son (like my dad and grandfather did) it would give the second kid a 20% chance of being schizophrenic. If i were to have five kids, one would definitely be schizophrenic…And that’s with a mentally healthy woman.
But I don’t know, I just have to live with this in mind. I wish I wasn’t the last one with my family name, but thats reality. I am not really for having kids, I think the world is overpopulated and its too hard to live in the modern world because of ridiculous education requirements to make a high salary or even get a job. I wouldnt want all of my kids to have to become MD’s or Phd’s in order to get a secure and high paying job. My family stresses financial success, and my immediate family is the poor family in a big family of rich people. I had to go to the school I got the most scholarship money at, not the best school I was accepted to. I’m the poor, mentally ill and socially outcast member of a wealthy catholic family- I was the only one to not graduate the catholic high school, Christian Brothers, and be a “brothers boy”…i was picked on and told that I wasnt allowed to fight, which was how I had solved that problem in grade school…I was the “class badass” in junior high. Instead I went to an international school and now most of my friends are from other countries and bilingual.
My family respects me for being self-supporting, earning a full scholarship to school and highly functioning while being mentally ill and at times completely psychotic, but I sometimes feel like I wish I had never been born.
I can see why some schizophrenics feel like procreation is horrible- I wouldnt wish schizophrenia on anyone, and to pass on schizophrenic genes is not exactly good for humanity. It keeps the worst mental illness in the gene pool, increasing the incidence with each child born of a schizophrenic. That’s the truth. We’re genetic backwash, the most horrific maladaptation of human evolution. There is nothing good about being schizophrenic, it is like living in hell. Without modern medicine and modern scientific insight into my condition, I would surely have been fully psychotic and never worth a ■■■■. But due to these things, I am far from being the stereotypical schizophrenic- I am what people think of as “a person who has schizophrenia”, not a “schizophrenic”…it doesnt define me.