People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the familial experience with which they’re already familiar.

Although, perhaps it is precisely this inherent familiarity that is to blame for making inconceivable the flip side paradigm. Every passing moment reaffirms or adjusts slightly our perception of where we exist within a given microcosm, and over the course of years, as a point of stability is approached, our capacity to imagine alternatives lessens. This is why sci-fi visions of the future are effortless and forthcoming–they are so independent of what we have known that they command their own newly-formed microcosms, and thus do not challenge our years-in-development perceptions of where we currently exist.

By contrast, imagining parenthood is a personal affair so disruptive to conceptions of identity that the effort fails in providing a preview of what being a parent might be like–perhaps involuntarily, we safeguard our curated outlook against the threat. Sure, we can anticipate the purchase of a crib and being awakened by newborn cries every 2nd hour, but these considerations avoid addressing the mindfuck that presumably accompanies crossing the chasm separating pre-procreation life from life after having fulfilled the primordial, selfless rationale of one’s existence.

And where now is that aforementioned savior, the reciprocal? A false prophet for two reasons:

The idea is that, having shared an experience with another, the experience can be imagined from the perspective of the other, in an effort to gain insight through approximating their state of mind. In the case of the parenthood query, the most relevant period of life for the inquirer to recollect is infancy, because it was during this time that the inquirer’s parents were undergoing the most profound shift, assuming, of course, that the inquirer is the eldest–or only–child. So, for example, a daughter might attempt to recall life prior to her 1st birthday and observe in those artifact memories her mother, from whose expressions and behavior might be gleaned an appreciation of the psychological reorganization she herself could expect to contend with even months before giving birth. The obvious problem with this is that the minds of months-old infants are awash in a nebulous, sensory soup and developing too quickly for a memory to be anything but ephemeral.

Furthermore, as time extends to infinity, the temporal distance between A: {the timestamps of the necessary-but-non-existent infant memories} and B: {when the inquirer poses their parenthood inquiry} only grows taller.