by Meghan Daum
To the above three case studies, I would add myself. There is no generalization in this article, no matter how harsh, that would not apply to me. I care about my own life in the present. I think I should be, but—doubtless because I don’t have children—I’m honestly not very fussed about what happens after I die. I’m proud of the Shriver family, but not enough to help to ensure that it outlasts me. As Nora pointed out, my genes are swell. But like my friends’, my sorrow at having neglected to pass them on is vague, thin, and abstract, and no match for Be Here Now. I fancy I work very hard, but in socially crucial respects, I am lazy. Like Gabriella’s, my stunted progeny are eternally eight inches high and made of pulped trees, and if they keep me up at night I can quiet them by rewriting a lousy chapter in the morning. If I feel, oh, a little wistful about the fact that the country of my birth, the United States, will probably within my lifetime no longer be peopled in majority by those of European extraction like me, that passing dismay has never been considerable enough for me to inconvenience myself by giving lifts to football practice. Frankly, if I can’t be troubled to replace myself with a reasonable facsimile, immigrants willing to nurse sick little boys through their fevers have truly earned the right to take my place.
Of course, that “wistfulness” of mine is political dynamite. Yet maybe the immigration debate has sufficiently matured for us to concede that white folks are people, too. We encourage minorities of every stripe—Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews—to be proud of their heritage, as well they should be. We don’t assume that if immigrants from China cherish their roots and still make a mean moo shoo pork they are therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet. So can Italians not champion Italianness? The native British their Yorkshire pudding? White Americans their apple pie? Indeed, the tacit PC consensus—that every minority from Australian aborigines to Romanies should be treasuring, preserving, and promulgating their culture, while whites with a European heritage should not—is producing a virulent, sometimes poisonous right-wing backlash across America, Britain, and the Continent. In the interest of civil, rational thinking on this matter, we should at least allow ourselves to talk about it. Collectively, a long-dominant population is contracting, and maybe by the time we’re minorities in our own countries we will have rights, too—among them, at least, the right to feel a little sad.
Meanwhile, as the West’s childless have grown more prevalent, the stigma that once attached to being “barren” falls away. Women—men as well—are free to choose from a host of fascinating lives that may or may not involve children, and couples are opting for the latter in droves. My friends and I are decent people—or at least we treat each other well. We’re interesting. We’re fun. But writ large, we’re an economic, cultural, and moral disaster.
There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” we’d both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy—a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now—to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there’s someone around to inherit the place when the party is over—has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction writers portray when imagining the end of the world.
Not to disparage old people, but senescent is not a pretty word. Large sectors of the Western population have broken faith with the future. In the Middle East, birthrates are still quite high, whereas many Europeans, Australians, and European Americans cannot be bothered to scrounge up another generation of even the same size—which would presumably mean fewer holidays, more tedium, less leisure time—because children might not always be interesting and fun, because they might not make us happy, because some days they’re a pain in the butt. When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the West of being decadent, degenerate, and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they’ve got a point.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
by
Sigrid Nunez
THERE WAS A TIME during my childhood when I believed that all children were unwanted. My own mother, a German war bride whose first child had been born out of wedlock, made no secret of the fact that having three children had not been planned, nor was it, for her, something happy making. She and my father had met at the end of World War II, when he was a soldier stationed with the occupying forces in her southern German hometown. She was eighteen years old when the first of her three daughters was born. Not until two years later, when she became pregnant again, did my parents marry (a delay that has never been explained). By the time their second daughter was born, they had moved to New York, first to the Fort Greene housing project in Brooklyn, and a few years later to another, newly built project, on Staten Island, which would be my home from the age of two until I went off to college. The circumstances of her own youth (the war, the too-early pregnancy, the immigration to America with a husband who was in all ways an unsuitable match and whom she considered beneath her) ensured that she would always see herself as unlucky, as someone who had been cheated. Whatever good might come her way from having had a family (and that good would not come before the children were grown), it was the bad that marked her, that made her life what it was.
Part of it—a very large part, surely—was that, like her own mother, she was not a maternal woman. To her, a child, any child, was a brat.
Speaking about one of the neighbors, she would say, “She’s pregnant again,” rolling her eyes in contempt. About someone she’d run into at the mall: “Her stomach is out to there.” As if this were some kind of disgrace. To hear my mother, you would never think expecting a baby could mean anything good, let alone a bundle of joy.
But she was not one of a kind. When I think of the people among whom I grew up, it’s as if I were looking back not fifty but more than a hundred years, to an era before modern beliefs in the sacredness of childhood and children’s rights had emerged, before childhood had come to be seen as a time of innocence deserving protection, the part of every person’s life that should be carefree and full of fun.
I am talking about people whose lives were harder than most, people with low-paying jobs or dependent on welfare, people with limited education, foreign accents, poor English, bad teeth, dark skin—people who were all too aware of being at the bottom of the ladder. Their inevitable frustrations were, inevitably, taken out at home. Husbands beat wives; parents beat children; big children beat little children. (Don’t let’s think about the pets.) And just because a child was too young to earn a living didn’t mean he or she couldn’t be put to work. I remember children who spent far more hours doing housework and other chores than at play. In some families, unlike our own, it was understood that such chores took priority over reading, schoolwork, or any kind of study.
Though I can recall many who were good-hearted, I can think of few women in our neighborhood who’d bring to mind the word maternal. The dominant emotion toward children, from mothers and fathers both, seemed to be anger. It was part of the chaos of that place and time: you never knew when some grown-up was going to fly off the handle. Children were forever being screamed at, sworn at, slapped around, or worse. (Goddamn kids: heard so often we could have been forgiven for thinking that if the Pied Piper of Hamelin had come to town, our parents would not have wept.) The berating or whipping of a child in public, often before a smirking crowd, was nothing rare. And the suffering of anyone subjected to that particular humiliation was so obvious and so dreadful that it was hard to believe the parent inflicting it could possibly also love that child. One girl I knew was so devastated by the experience that she later jumped out a window (thankfully, one low enough that she survived).
My mother was not alone in her habit of attributing almost all errancy on the p
art of children to malice rather than to carelessness or weakness or ignorance. Children were manipulative; they were little con artists, masters of sophisticated cunning. Outpourings of childish emotion were often dismissed as faking, or just a bid for attention. Even getting sick was viewed with suspicion: You could have made it to the bathroom! In elementary school, many of the teachers also appeared to be stuck in a darker age when children—boys, especially—were seen as nasty by nature, short adults who, unless relentlessly shamed and disciplined, above all corporally (usually by paddling, but I can recall countless episodes of more serious roughing up), were sure to grow up rotten. (The existence of ample proof in that increasingly crime-ridden community that this kind of punishment was having the exact opposite effect of deterrence went ignored.)
At some point, of course, I came to understand that not all children had been unwanted, and that, like people everywhere, most of the parents I knew, the mothers in particular, had counted having a family among their life’s sweetest dreams. The problem for many of them arose from being unable to prevent having more children than they’d wanted, or from having them come along at times when they couldn’t help being more burden—Another mouth to feed! Where’s he gonna sleep?—than blessing. And I began to understand how a person could love his or her children and at the same time deeply resent them. I didn’t ask to be born! How familiar is the defensive child’s self-pitying cry. But I have known many whose lives were formed—or deformed, perhaps I should say—by having been made to feel guilty for all the trouble they caused by coming into the world.
Yet none of this meant that I didn’t want to have children myself. More accurately, I took it for granted that I would. Motherhood was like school; it was inescapable. It went along with marriage—and I didn’t know any girl who imagined a future for herself that didn’t include marriage. It’s true that you could always point to one or two women about whom it was said, “She never married; she was a career girl.” But such women were never held up as models, and if there was something about being a secretary or a teacher or a nurse (pretty much the only careers open to women back then) that was more wonderful than being a wife and mother, it was hard to see what it was. (The oddball female who was content to be married without having kids was invariably described as being too selfish for motherhood, an occupation seen as demanding such great self-sacrifice that it was second only to taking the veil.)
And besides, I liked babies. There was one in particular, the youngest child of the family that lived next door, with whom I was even obsessed. I remember thinking little David was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Whenever he appeared I would stop whatever I was doing to stare at him, wondering equally at his Gerber-baby perfection and at the tumult of wrenching tenderness within. Love. I was eight years old. His mother indulged my plea for a photograph, which became a prized possession. In school I made him the subject of a writing assignment, not a word of which I can remember today. But I never forgot the response—from my teacher and from the principal, to whom she showed it, and from my mother and from David’s mother, to whom my mother showed it. This might have been the first time I understood that if you cared passionately about something and you managed to express it by putting down certain words in a certain order, you could touch people; you could win their praise.
And I would always love children. In fact, I find those who do not strange and even frightening. I get flustered when a person says to me, “I don’t like children.” I was a child, I want to say.
Once, when I was six or seven, walking with my mother down a certain mean Brooklyn street, we passed a group of surly-looking boys gathered on a stoop. As my mother quickened her steps, dragging me along, one of the boys threw something at me: the wooden stick from an ice-cream pop he’d just finished eating. I tugged my mother’s hand. “Mommy, that boy hit me!” Marching on, staring grimly ahead, she addressed me in a voice that was like a slap: “And what do you think I can do about it?” At which a certain knowledge sank into my bones, and with that knowledge a fear that would never wholly leave me.
In Book Three of his autobiographical novel, My Struggle, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about the terror his father made him feel—“every single day of my entire childhood”—and how he would console himself with fantasies of dying. About raising his own children, Knausgaard says, “I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.”
I remember that when the time came to think seriously about whether or not to have children, the same idea occurred to me: the crucial thing would be to make sure that they not be afraid of their mother. It was a goal I believed I could achieve. But there was something else. As a child, I never felt safe. Every single day of my entire childhood I lived in fear that something bad was going to happen to me. I live like that still. And so the big question: How could a person who lived like that ever make a child feel safe?
The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there was nothing harder to accomplish in life than being a good parent. The store of patience and wisdom and kindness that seemed to be required was truly daunting; I wasn’t sure that I myself possessed even the minimum to prevent catastrophe. But when I looked around, from what I could tell, this could have been said of a lot of people.
It was not that I thought most people were bound to make terrible parents, only that the group that would make ideal parents was surprisingly small—especially given that those who chose to have children far outnumbered those who did not.
I remember a woman, a mentor, who once asked me if I thought I’d make a good mother. When I told her honestly that I didn’t know, she was mightily displeased. It was as if I’d confessed to being a bad person. But I am astonished at those who are unfazed by the prospect of child raising. A male friend of mine, childless but confident, once assured me, “You just give them lots and lots of love.” Perhaps only a man could believe it is as simple as that.
I belong to that generation of American and European women who, having come of age in the 1960s, discovered that so great a gap existed between our mothers and ourselves that we had almost nothing in common. And for us, the lucky daughters, reliable birth control, legal abortion, and changes in attitudes toward a woman’s rights and her place in society brought about possibilities the likes of which women before us could only dream. She never married; she was a career girl (like I see you girls are all alone tonight) was now something to laugh at, a line from some scathing feminist joke.
If I had grown up shaky about the kind of parent I’d make, I believed from early on that I had a vocation to be a writer. Although in my youthful, naive way I gravely underestimated how difficult such a life would be, I stuck to it, and I was steadfast in not letting other things distract me.
No young woman aspiring to a literary career could ignore the fact that the women writers of highest achievement, women like Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, did not have children. Colette, who wrote beautifully and piercingly about her own mother, gave birth to an unwanted daughter whom she neglected. Doris Lessing declared herself “not the best person” to raise the two young children she left behind when she moved from southern Africa to London to pursue her career. Why? “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”
Another fact hard to ignore: motherhood is one of the most significant as well as one of the most widely shared of all human experiences. In Western culture, it has always been essentially synonymous with womanhood. Yet who can name a major novel by a canonical writer, male or female, that takes motherhood for its main subject?
If you were a girl who loved above all to read and write and who could not imagine an adulthood in which these activities did not hold a central place, you probably knew even before puberty that you were headed for conflict. For is it not a truth universally acknowledged that, for a woman, the central place is reserved for her kids?
/> “And then my children were born,” writes Natalia Ginzburg, in an essay called “My Vocation,” “and when they were very little I could not understand how anyone could sit herself down to write if she had children. I began to feel contempt for my vocation. Now and again I longed for it desperately and felt that I was in exile, but I tried to despise it and make fun of it. I spent my time wondering whether there was sun or not or wind or not so that I could take the children out for a walk.”
There must be thousands of gifted, ambitious women who have been haunted by the case of Sylvia Plath, perhaps none so much as those who came of age around the time of her transformation from a gifted, ambitious, and tragically self-destructive woman into a celebrity feminist myth. The American edition of The Bell Jar, Plath’s only novel, appeared in 1971, eight years after its (pseudonymous) publication in England, where, a month later, at the age of thirty, Plath had killed herself. From that highly autobiographical book and from her many confessional poems, as well as from a collection of letters to her family that was published in 1975, and from the reminiscences by various people that came out in the wake of her death, a horrible-fascinating story emerged.
Here was a woman who could not have been more sensitive to the competing demands of career and family, a woman who appears never to have been without an anguished ambivalence toward motherhood, about which she wrote brilliantly and sometimes hysterically, morbidly. Though genius and pathology set Plath well apart from most other literary aspirants, as from most people in general, it was, for many women, an irresistible temptation to read lessons into that doomed life. That she had wanted to have it all was indisputable. (“I am the girl who wants to be God,” she told her diary.) Fierce ambition was there from the start, the determination to “whip” herself “onward and upward.” Always, the desire to write great things, not merely to succeed but to be famous, immortal. But the rest of life must not be left out. The promising poet must also marry (and the man, it goes without saying, must be someone even smarter and more talented than she) and start making babies while still a dewy young thing. And in all matters having to do with the role of wife and mother, such as cooking and housekeeping, she must also shine. Plath could not bear the thought that her intelligence and ambition might take away from her womanliness. On the other hand, even as a schoolgirl she had worried about future motherhood holding her back from literary achievement, which, for her, meant not just sitting down to write, but being prolific, winning prizes, publishing a best seller.
