On the first day of Spring Break I fired an M-16 assault rifle.

Motherhood made me do it, but not for the reasons you might think.

You see, this peace-loving, anti-violence mother who won’t permit anything to be killed in the house gave birth to a now grown child who is a gifted marksman. So off we went to the only public indoor shooting range in town - this being my other hometown of Albuquerque, NM, since DC has some rules about gun possession that haven’t changed recently to the best of my knowledge, though they may be about to…

The last time I fired a gun was in 1992, when I was living in the South Fork Valley in Shoshone National Forest, 42 miles from Cody, Wyoming. Most everyone I knew carried a weapon in their vehicle and had a few others stashed at home. Guns and hunting were deeply embedded into the local culture, harkening back to town founder and promoter Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. Firearms weren’t part of the culture I grew up with, but I figured when in Rome do as the Romans do. So I learned to shoot with a sweet little 9 mm Italian pistol that fit my hand like a newborn baby’s foot.

My son was a toddler when we left Wyoming. Now, it may have been early exposure to guns that lead to his fascination with them later; I’ll never know. But the point of my blog today is not so much to wax poetic about the smell of gunpowder and the bone-jarring feeling of recoil that passes through your body, but something else – the idea of an open future.

As I wrap up my dissertation, which evaluates the question of whether using genetic technology to bear deaf children is morally justifiable, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about open futures, a concept popularized (if that word can be used for a term that appears mostly in peer-reviewed philosophy journals) by the late great philosopher Joel Feinberg.

The idea is this: parents have a moral obligation to provide their children with opportunities that give them as many options as possible for creating fulfilling lives. When parents make decisions that foreclose these options, it can be seen as shirking your duty as a parent. If these decisions deal with something like not ensuring that one’s child has the ability to hear, it can be viewed as bordering on abusive or immoral; at least that is how some scholars have put it.

I’m not going to disclose what conclusions I come to in my dissertation with this issue; I’m told that I have to wait until it is signed, sealed, and delivered before I can make any more comments about it. But that’s okay, since what is really on my mind is this journey of parenthood.

When you give birth to a child – regardless of whether that child is deaf or hearing – you have a set of dreams or expectations about what your life with that child should look like. And, as any parent can tell you, the passage of time does something to those dreams. It is not that the dreams change, but that they collide with the reality of that child who is right there before you.

You may prefer to spend your time walking through the woods and examining bugs on trees and tracking animals, but your child turns out to prefer shopping malls and playing around with art supplies. And if you are attentive to your child, you decide one Saturday morning to go to the art supply store instead of the river trail, or to go to the shooting range instead of hanging out at the funky coffee shop with alternative magazines. And it turns out to open up futures that you never would have imagined for yourself as a parent.

And that’s ok.

Actually, it’s more than ok.

To be sure, there’s a difference between making a decision about your child’s physical make-up and deciding what activities you will first pursue with your child. But perhaps the big issue is not so much what you decide you will to do shape your child, as what you do when it first becomes apparent that your child is not you. At some point, you either recognize that you are different people and you accept it, or you resist your differences every step of the way – kicking and screaming through their childhood as the stage mother or Little League father that everyone tries to avoid.

I’m wondering if the proponents of the open future arguments stop too soon by limiting it to physical characteristics that inhere at birth or shortly thereafter.

Is it that we are morally obligated to provide our children with open futures, defined as making sure as many options as possible are available to our children?

Or ought we to focus on the supererogatory duty of parents to go beyond this — nurturing those interests and passions that our children develop, even when they may be antithetical to our own, but so long as they are not causing harm to themselves or others?

Since I’m writing this midstream through the journey of parenting, I cannot know whether my conclusions now will be the same as whatever I reach when my children are fully formed and out on their own. But I’ve got a hunch they might be.

When your children are young, you pour your ideas about the world and right and wrong and good and bad into their little heads, thinking that you are doing the right thing and your duty as a parent, by doing so. Now that I’ve got one child ready to fledge, I find myself pausing to think about just who in the parent-child relationship benefits most from this broadly constructed notion of open futures.

I’ll give you a hint: I don’t think it’s the child.