Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  * * *

  (5) Not every man of that time was caught in the same fog. There were R and J, for example, who had been together since they were undergraduate roommates at Harvard. They professed to having slept with no one but each other. I’m not sure that meant that their sex lives were any wilder than anyone else’s, but to make love to each other without the threat of caution, precaution—it was just unimaginable to me. Futurity for them had to be different from futurity for me. The same could also have been said about N and O, monogamous for twenty-two years. When they talked about having a child with a surrogate mother, I was as disoriented as if they were talking about fusing a goat with a hen. Gay men in the 1990s were just not doing that yet. It was still unheard of, and when M, my ex, and I talked about their plan, we couldn’t help wondering whether it was corrupt, a doomed attempt to please some needy parents. And so much money—couldn’t they be giving money like that to the poor, to animals? Men like us were supposed to be utopians; men like us were supposed to be reinventing the future, even if there wasn’t exactly a future to inhabit. M and I talked about them with bewildered faces, both superior and a little sorry for them, as if they’d somehow missed the obvious answer to the quiz. We thought of them as if they weren’t members of the tribe. We talked about them as if they were little old ladies. Obviously sex did not matter enough to them. Somehow they got stunted along the way and were too afraid of what lay ahead for them. They should have been wearing lumberjack shirts. They should have been taking their protein powders, working out, making their bodies massive with shoulder shrugs. Were they not looking around? It was time to get busy, investing in the business of looking healthy, healthy, healthy.

  * * *

  (6) Did A sense how rare and valuable she was to N and O? Did she manage to turn the intensity of their love—she’d become the sole project of her parents’ relationship—into pressure? Did she feel she had to be better, smarter, brighter than the other kids in her preschool? Did she have to be cute just one more time for her parents’ friends? Maybe that explained why A was unbearable, almost comically unbearable, whenever her parents took her out on the town. She threw tantrums; she scratched and grabbed and spit out the sauce on her pasta. Once, from the other side of the restaurant, we watched her parents pick up the pieces of the teacup she’d slammed against the chair. M and I took to referring to her as the New Rhoda, for the evil child played by Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed. The stories we made up about her turned out to be parables about the folly of parents taking on a role they weren’t meant to take on. In these stories, everyone played the expected parts—the exasperated, embarrassed parents and the self-righteous, fussy acquaintances—while the New Rhoda bombed cemeteries, tore up trees, knocked toothless old men off their crutches.

  * * *

  (7) Treatments change, lives change, and though the world still looks pretty much the same, it isn’t the same at all. People who think they have six months to live end up thriving twenty years later. These days there’s even a drug you can take to prevent seroconversion. I like to think I’m not a person who’s welded to my generation. I like to think that the full range of my character is available to me, simultaneously, at any moment: the me I was, the me I’ll be. But in crucial ways, I’ll always be someone wired by growing up during that siege.

  So maybe that’s why choosing a child (or not, for that matter) feels like an incredible luxury. As soon as I entertain the question, a door opens, and I’m too flooded to think. How many other choices have I not considered because it seemed that they weren’t mine to make? What have I accommodated and settled for simply because I came into adulthood in a dark, alarming time? It is easier than you think to be indifferent to what you’ve been told you can’t have. People do it all over the world, all the time, for reasons that are usually imposed on them. As soon as I stare through that open door, I want to close it right away. There isn’t any point in feeling defeated by the empty room inside. I’d rather keep building the house I’ve already been building, even if it’s crooked, faded at the roof, with a cracked foundation.

  * * *

  (8) Why, Child-Who-Never-Was, am I feeling a little down as I assemble these thoughts? I never thought that you were someone to miss until I began looking at the empty chair where you might have sat. Who would you have been? Would you have had big ears like me, big nose, big head? Would you have had my long feet? Would you have been a loner one day and a social person the next, the guy who loved the party so much that he’d be the last to say good night? Would you have loved animals? What about music? The sea—would you have wanted to be near it, in it, and evaluated every place in terms of how many miles it was from the water? Would you have carried my essence forward in ways I couldn’t have known? Would you have taught me how to ski or to care about football or to make a devil’s food cake from scratch?

  * * *

  (9) When my relationship of sixteen years ended, I left New York for the Nearby State, where it soon became clear that you were considered odd if you went to a restaurant or a movie by yourself. I’m talking about the subtlest signals: facial reactions from a waitress instead of anything spoken. Solitary men were a special cause for concern, their aloneness the outward sign of a hex. I couldn’t help but wonder whether people chose to have families to avoid some stranger’s inscrutable projection. If the desire to have children is just a way to build some noisy tribe of distraction around oneself, then I’d rather be alone.

  * * *

  (10) On a foggy spring night in Provincetown, I’m sitting in a bar with three straight friends: two men, one woman. We are celebrating I’s fortieth birthday, and he is here—though he didn’t come out and say this—because he didn’t want to spend it alone. He is not so many months out of a breakup, so he drove fourteen hours and nine hundred miles to spend it in a place that he loves. Though we are laughing and on our second round, the evening is saturated with the possibility of melancholy. Aloneness is the unspoken story of the evening. Time, too. I’m looking up at the portraits of lost local fishermen over the window; the dash and flair of each sketch gives each fellow the aura of a 1980s art star.

  I don’t know how the conversation gets around to the differences between how men and women age, but U talks with determined frustration about the fact that men have more years than women do. By that she doesn’t mean longer lives—statistics tell us that that isn’t true, of course—but a longer time to be fertile, desirable.

  L and I mention that they’re attracted to women younger than they are because, yes, they still want to be fathers, and they could never expect such fertility of anyone their own age.

  Their response makes U’s eyes smolder, but quietly. The left corner of her mouth turns down. This is not what she wants to hear. Maybe she was hoping that one of us would say this idea is full of shit; men and women are not so radically different after all and it’s never so useful to make generalizations like that.

  The potential conversation that this topic provokes is so combustible it is collectively cut off. We are here to have fun. We are smart enough to see that this subject might have the power to burn up the night. And we couldn’t do that on I’s birthday. We order a third round.

  As for me? I make a joke about not knowing what they are talking about. My manner of delivery makes everyone laugh, but I’m masking a deeper confusion. I thought I could imagine what it could be like to be in my straight male friends’ skin, to be swept and stopped by some beautiful woman as she walks down the street. But the sexual allure of reproductivity? Really? Could they be serious, or are they just reproducing what their fathers might have said, back when they were kids?

  I’ve never felt more alien from the men I thought I’d known.

  We say our good nights. We walk out into the mists of Commercial Street. On my walk back to my studio, I pass some intense-faced guy with thick brows and a full beard right out of the nineteenth century. I turn around and check out his hard butt as he walks past a tumble of roses. Imagine, wan
ting to get to know him for the width of his hips, the dream of the little wet monkey growing inside him!

  * * *

  (11) My questions lead back to the mother, my mother. Did she even want to be a parent? Well, she had to, on some level, though I imagine she would have preferred to be our friend. The only thing I can truly remember her wanting in her life—aside from the house in Seven Hills, and maybe an Ethan Allen living room set—was a girl. This was years after my brother Bobby and I had come along. She’d talked about this girl so much that Bobby rebelled by saying he wanted a duck. The more he wanted a duck, the more my mother wanted Diane Michelle, the name she’d given to the baby growing inside her. Diane Michelle accumulated pink: a pink baby blanket, a pink mobile above the crib, a mound of pink toys. But when Diane Michelle turned out to have a penis in the delivery room, my mother broke down and cried for a couple of days. She adored Michael after those couple of days passed, but we always had the sense that boys weren’t her first love and we could never give her what she’d wanted. “I used to have long eyelashes before I had you kids,” she said more than once. Troubling words, part fairy tale, part fever dream, spoken in the voice of sweet disappointment. For years I couldn’t get that picture out of my head: our once beautiful mother, ruined by us, her eyelashes eaten away by the acids of her body.

  * * *

  (12) When she was alive, I distinctly remember pressures from my mother: the pressure to go to college, the pressure to do well in college, to make money, to be a doctor or a lawyer. Strangely, there was never any pressure to have children. I’m not just talking about my mother here, but my father, too. Perhaps they wanted us all to themselves. Perhaps if we were parents, we’d no longer be just their children, and they’d be one step further from being children themselves, an honor they probably weren’t willing to give up just yet. Honestly, I think they would have been happy for us to live on in our childhood bedrooms until we were well into our forties and beyond. My mother seemed to know that children were only meant to be lost, and once she felt us pulling away from her, she pulled away, too. Yet she burst into tears whenever I stood by my packed car on the driveway, ready to leave for another semester. She behaved as if there had always been the One Great Leaving and each iteration of it brought the same welling up. A love that big could only create havoc, and I hurried out of her arms, ashamed to be the one who could stir her up like that.

  When Michael brought his baby daughter to meet her for the first time, it was assumed she’d finally get her Diane Michelle—or at least the New Diane Michelle. I’m sure she was delighted to hold Jordan close to her, as Michael stood watching, smiling, waiting to bask in her approval, but she handed the baby back to him a little sooner than he expected. By then she was losing herself: parts of her language, parts of her memory. The old idea of manners was gone. She’d already had enough of children. And, more often than not, she understood herself as a child: “Where’s my mother?” she’d say. “Where did she go? Have you seen her?” On the dining room table sat Jordan’s presents. My mother’s eyes drifted over to the pink-wrapped boxes, as if she’d just decided it was her birthday and wasn’t it time to tear one open?

  * * *

  (13) In spite of my doubts, I’d probably say yes if I ever became involved with someone who wanted to be a parent. I’m not saying that lightly, though I might be saying it with the same level of commitment with which I’d say, “Of course I’d move to Tokyo.” How do we even talk about the future when there’s less and less of it every minute? Who are we kidding when we speak of planning the time ahead? So I’ll just talk to the Child-Who-Might-Never-Be instead: It is too late for me to be the kind of parent you might want. I will not be like the parents of your friends. I will probably hang out with your friends, and when they come to the house to visit, they’ll probably want to see me as much as they want to see you. My mother was just like that, remember? We will squeeze chocolate syrup onto our yogurt. We will take the stereo out into the backyard and turn up the volume too loud, disturbing the next-door neighbors. We will name the birds in the branches and on the lawn: song sparrow, house finch, marsh wren, cardinal. I will probably embarrass you by the way I dress. (Skinny jeans again? Dad!) No, I will not put on another pair of pants. You will get used to my awkwardness, my kisses, my dropped keys, my trying to be present with you, now and now and now and now.

  BE HERE NOW MEANS BE GONE LATER

  by

  Lionel Shriver

  MEET THE ANTIMOM. When my seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, became a best seller in 2005, the story it told—about motherhood gone dreadfully wrong—drew fire from Catholic web pages for being hostile to “family.” Meanwhile, grotesque distortions of the book’s underlying theme (such as, “It’s all right to hate your own child, and if they turn out badly it’s not your fault”) spoored from article to article like potato blight. Devastated mothers sent me confiding handwritten letters detailing horror stories of hideous tyros just like the boy in my book. Women who’d declined to have children clamored to my readings, raising the novel high as proof that they were right. I earned my own little chapter in Nicki Defago’s Childfree and Loving It!

  Yet by the time Kevin won the Orange Prize that year, when my role as poster girl for “maternal ambivalence” was jacked up to yet another power, something strange had started to happen. I sometimes departed from the script. When a London Sunday Times reporter (who clearly thought me a chilly, typically arrogant American bitch) asked if I didn’t think that declining to reproduce wasn’t essentially “nihilistic,” I said readily, “Of course.” Or a journalist would ask tentatively on a phoner: Wasn’t refusing parenthood a little … selfish? I’d cry boisterously into the receiver, “Absolutely!”

  The truth is, I had started to feel guilty.

  Childless at fifty-seven, I’m old enough for the question of motherhood to have become purely philosophical. But during my reproductive years, I had all the time in the world to have babies. I maintained two consecutive long-term relationships, one a marriage that continues to thrive. I was in perfect health. I could have afforded children, financially. I just didn’t want them. They are untidy; they would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

  Nevertheless, after talking myself blue about “maternal ambivalence,” I came full circle, rounding on the advice to do as I say, not as I did. I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I long ago wearied of being the Antimom, and would gladly hand the part to someone else. For anyone who’s interested, I have a T-shirt of an infant with a big red slash through it that’s going cheap.

  * * *

  Allusion to the West’s “aging population” in the news is commonplace. We have more and more old people, and a dwindling number of young people to support them. Not only health care and pension systems but the working young could soon be overtaxed, just to keep doddering crusties like Lionel Shriver stocked with Depends. Politicians sensibly cite age structure to justify higher rates of immigration. Long periods of look-the-other-way policing of American borders have indeed left the United States with an economically healthier age structure than we would have today without waves of young immigrants and their larger families.

  Yet curiously little heed is paid to why the West is aging. Our gathering senescence is routinely referenced like an inexorable force of nature, a process beyond our control, like the shifting of tectonic plates or the ravages of a hurricane. To the contrary, age structure is profoundly within human control. Remarkably resistant to governmental manipulation, it is the sum total of millions of single, deeply private decisions by people like me and a startlingly large proportion of my friends and acquaintances.

  We haven’t had kids.

  Western fertility started to dive in the 1970s—the same era in which, ironically, alarmist population guru Paul Ehrlich was predicting that we would all soon be balancing on our one
square foot of earth per person, like angels on the head of a pin. Numerous factors have contributed to the Incredible Shrinking Family: the introduction of reliable contraception, the wholesale entry of women into the workforce, delayed parenthood and thus higher infertility, the fact that children no longer till your fields but expect your help in putting a down payment on a massive mortgage.

  Yet I believe all of these contributing elements may be subsidiary to a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for.

  * * *

  Statistics are never boring if you can see through the numbers to what they mean, so bear with me. The Total Fertility Rate is the number of children the average woman will bear over her lifetime. Allowing for infant mortality, the TFR required to maintain a population at its current size is 2.1. In 2013, American women had an average TFR of 1.9—a rate modestly below replacement. Many years could pass before that deficit will make itself felt.

  Thus Jonathan Last’s provocative 2013 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, is either disingenuous or off the beam. Americans are not about to die out. According to UN estimates, from 316 million in 2013, the U.S. population is likely to grow to 448 million by mid-century—although a massive whack of that growth is to result from immigration.

  If hardly an endangered species, one population in the United States is contracting: white people. Politically awkward, yes, which is why Mr. Last’s alarm about low birthrates among “Americans” is a cover for his real alarm: about feeble fertility among people who look like him and me. As of 2010, white American women had a TFR of 1.79—a figure that might not sound terribly low, but one that has remained in that well-below-replacement-rate ballpark since at least 1980. Cumulatively, that shortfall has consequences. By 2043, whites will constitute a minority in the United States, while Hispanics, whose TFR is now a healthy 2.35 and was for decades closer to 3.0, will go from being one in six Americans to one in three. Liberally minded white Americans are not supposed to care. And I’m not claiming here that you have to care.