Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  For many people, having and raising a child is the most fulfilling thing in their lives. Quite a few friends who’d been indifferent to having kids found that once the plunge had been taken, often accidentally, their lives had a meaning and purpose that they previously lacked. People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that they just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear.) Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life “meaning” is the one to which I am most hostile—apart from all the others. The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose! I’m totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose. It would be a lot less fun if it did have a purpose—then we would all be obliged (and foolish not) to pursue that purpose.

  Okay, if you can’t handle the emptiness of life, fine: have kids, fill the void. But some of us are quite happy in the void, thank you, and have no desire to have it filled. Let’s be clear on this score. I’m not claiming that I don’t need to have kids because my so-called work is fulfilling and gives my life meaning. To be honest, I’m slightly suspicious of the idea of an anthology of writers writing about not having kids. Obviously any anthology of writing is, by definition, full of stuff by writers, but if this is a club whose members feel they have had to sacrifice the joys of family life for the higher vocation and fulfillment of writing, then I don’t want to be part of it. Any exultation of the writing life is as abhorrent to me as the exultation of family life. Writing just passes the time and, like any kind of work, brings in money. If you want to make sure I never read a line you’ve written, tell me about the sacrifices you’ve made in order to get those lines written. If we were able to go through history and eliminate every single instance of sacrifice, the world would be a significantly better place, with a consistently increased supply of lamb. Sacrifice is part of the parent’s vocabulary, as Isaac discovered when Abraham pressed the knife to his throat, though it usually works the other way around, with parents sacrificing themselves for the greater good of their children. I was about to start ranting on about this when I remembered that I’d ranted on about it years ago in my book Out of Sheer Rage, the writing of which involved sacrifice on such an epic psychological and financial scale that I hope I’ll be forgiven for quoting from it here:

  Life for people with children is crammed with obligations and duties to be fulfilled. Nothing is done for pleasure. The child becomes a source of restrictive obligation. Even the desire to have children is expressed in terms of fulfilling a biological duty. The lies people lead!

  The perfect life, the perfect lie … is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it. That’s why children are so convenient: you have children because you’re struggling to get by as an artist—which is actually what being an artist means—or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself. Before you know it desire has atrophied to the degree that it can only make itself apparent by passing itself off as an obligation. After a couple of years of parenthood people become incapable of saying what they want to do in terms of what they want to do. Their preferences can only be articulated in terms of a hierarchy of obligations—even though it is by fulfilling these obligations (visiting in-laws, being forced to stay in and baby-sit) that they scale the summit of their desires.

  A decade and a half later, I don’t see any need to change this substantively, though I would perhaps change the tone to make it less forgiving, more vehement. Especially since I no longer mind missing out on the things that having kids might have prevented me from doing, like going to discotheques, which I used to enjoy enormously when I was sixteen, even though I pretty much hated every minute I spent in every disco I ever set foot in. All I really want to do these days is sit around feeling sorry for myself, and it’s not like having a kid would interfere with that, unless extreme tiredness is some kind of antidote to self-pity. Parents are always saying how tired they are, and I believe them; I’m sure they are, even though I find it hard to believe that anyone could feel as tired as I do. I’m tired all the time, absolutely exhausted, from the time I wake up to the time I flop into bed a couple of hours later for the first of the day’s reviving naps. Over the years these naps have lost their capacity to revitalize, in fact have lost their capacity to do anything except increase the need for more naps. There might be a moral here—there is in most things—but I’m too tired to work out what it is.

  Going back to the missed-disco opportunities or forgone pleasures argument, this would be entirely valid if we were discussing the reasons I’ve never had a dog. Whereas it’s never even occurred to me to have a child, I would love to have a dog but am put off by the burden of responsibility involved. And while not having a child is a source of pleasure, not having a dog is a source of constant torment and endless anxiety for my wife and me. We keep wishing that we could arrange our lives in such a way that it was possible to have a dog, but we keep coming up empty-handed, empty-pawed.

  Does this mean, as parents might claim, that I’m just too selfish? Now, there’s a red herring if ever there was one. Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours. People raise kids because they want to, but they always emphasize how hard it is. “You think it’s hard bringing up children?” asked the comedian David Cross. “No. Persuading your girlfriend to have her third consecutive abortion, that’s hard.” It was a joke greeted with shrieks of laughter and horror. “I call that joke the Divider,” he conceded once the howls had died down.

  The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win. I think I was about fourteen when I was obliged to swallow my first substantial helping of regret. I would like to claim that it was also my last, but it turned out to be the opening course of a never-ending feast. If I’ve never forgotten the taste, that is because under- or overcooked regret is the main dish—the very taste—of adulthood.

  So if it was argued that the inability to take responsibility for a dog, together with a refusal to contemplate having children, was a symptom of severely arrested development, of unduly prolonged adolescence, I would agree—and disagree—wholeheartedly. Certainly I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to why I should spend more than about twelve hours a year, max, doing anything I don’t want to do. Is that adolescent? Maybe. But it’s a form of adolescence that is compatible with a highly developed, entirely un-a
dolescent sense of civic responsibility. I am a good citizen (look at the trouble I went to recycling those tennis balls) and a reliable, trustworthy friend. I just don’t ever want to hear someone address me as Daddy, don’t want to live in a house littered with brightly colored toys, don’t want to stand on the opposite side of a tennis net patting the ball to an eight-year-old and saying, “Great shot!” on those rare occasions that he manages to tap it back. Of course if I’d had a kid sixteen years ago and forked out thousands of pounds for him or her to have tennis lessons—like every other privileged brat in the neighborhood—I might now have a perfectly compatible homegrown tennis partner, might not be reduced to lurking around the courts on Saint Mark’s Road like a fucking nonce again, hoping somebody else might be cruising for a partner. Instead, I’m fifty-six and still living like I did when I was fourteen, without brothers and sisters, constantly on the lookout for someone to play tennis with.

  It seems we’ve accidentally stumbled onto or into the heart of the matter. I’m sure that I would not be so averse to having children or so reluctant to take custody of a dog if I’d grown up with brothers and sisters or a pet. But it wasn’t like that; it was just the three of us, just me, my mum, and my dog-hating dad. And now there’s just me and my wife. If there’d been a moment when the urge to have a kid might have manifested itself, that would surely have been in 2011, when both of my parents died. The world reeled and yawed that year and eventually righted itself again. My wife is forty-seven. Her parents are still alive; her sister is forty-nine, single, and childless. So when we die, that’s it for both sides of the family. The immense and complicated lineage, stretching back however long, with all its struggles and setbacks, victories and defeats, joys and pains, births and deaths, quarrels and reconciliations—all of this will come to an end with us. Within thirty or forty years, that will be that. Over and out, forever. The end of history, in a way. If there is such a thing as oblivion, then I’ve got a perfect view of how it might look and feel.

  YOU’D BE SUCH A GOOD MOTHER, IF ONLY YOU WEREN’T YOU

  by

  M. G. Lord

  WHEN MY MOTHER DIED, I stopped seeing in color. I was fourteen years old and afraid to tell anyone. Our lawn, which had never been particularly emerald, became gray-white. Our modest postwar house, once mustard, was now bleached sepia. Our ancient Dodge Dart, which actually was white, remained so—but its glacier-blue interior looked ashen. I memorized the one detail without which I could not survive: red was at the top of the light; green was at the bottom.

  Suspecting a neurological problem, I feared I might have to go to the hospital, which was out of the question. We were broke. My mother had entered Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, California, in March 1970. Her doctors had not expected her to survive until April. But she lasted until Labor Day. My father’s insurance did not cover this length of stay. Oppressed by the bills that arrived after her death, he was forced to sell the one object he and my mother had most cherished: their house in La Jolla. The house where I, their only living child, had been born five weeks prematurely on the kitchen floor. The house under whose avocado trees I was photographed in a sailor-themed hat at Easter and in a red stocking cap at Christmas. The house we’d had to leave when my father lost his aerospace job in San Diego and found another one near Los Angeles.

  In a rented house, the colorless one, I learned the dark side of mothering—caring for the sixty-five-year-old toddler who was my father. He had designed the flight controls for the HL-10, one of NASA’s first lifting bodies, a precursor to the space shuttle. But he claimed not to understand the controls on the washing machine. Or, for that matter, on the stove, vacuum, and steam iron. Not to mention the basic principle of the hamper. He dropped his socks and shirts on the floor wherever he removed them. I honestly don’t think he did this to torture me. For his entire life, some woman—his mother, my mother—had picked up after him. They had cooked for him. He had no clue that another way was possible. We couldn’t afford a housekeeper. After one of my inept meals—some components were burned; others sickeningly undercooked—I asked him why he never even tried to throw together a dinner. “Men don’t do that,” he said.

  A teenager focused on quick solutions might have become a heroin addict. But I plotted. I had greater aspirations than housekeeping and adult-infant care. And my mother had had greater aspirations for me; I knew she had secured a savings account for college that my father couldn’t access. Somehow I found time to edit the school newspaper, serve as senior class president, weather exhausting swim-team workouts, generate endless homework, and get myself into Yale, which, miraculously, was three thousand miles away from Long Beach.

  This admission changed my life. In the 1970s, many people viewed New Haven as an emblem of urban blight: crumbling, crime-filled, edged by brutal public housing. But to me it was a Technicolor wonderland. I remember the postcard blue behind the tawny masonry of Harkness Tower. I remember the bottle-green grass on the Old Campus, the verdigris lions guarding Wright Hall, the scarlet foliage that burst out everywhere in October. I remember the frail orange light inside the marble walls of my favorite structure, the Beinecke Library.

  For the first time since my mother’s cancer diagnosis, I saw rainbows—in their full, giddy, ROYGBIV splendor. Each day, I worked hard, astonished that I did not have to plan meals, do other people’s laundry, or scrub the bathroom floor. On the university health plan, I saw a therapist for the first time—as well as a neurologist and an ophthalmologist. We discussed my sight. They found no physiological problems. Acute depression, the therapist speculated, may have caused my plunge into black and white.

  My color vision remained intact for more than thirty-five years, some of which were bumpy. They included professional false starts, a fourteen-year marriage, a divorce, and a breast lumpectomy. They included deciding after my divorce to date women, and conveying this confusing information to some less-than-welcoming friends and relatives. They included a move from New York to Los Angeles for work. But no pothole was so deep—no incident so traumatizing—that it robbed me of color. Until two years ago, when my then life partner unilaterally decided to adopt the fifth offspring of a twenty-two-year-old middle school dropout in Florida, a woman whose biological mother had herself died in her twenties of a drug overdose.

  * * *

  Eight years ago, when I met Helen, which is what I will call my former partner to protect her privacy, we clicked. Such clicking was not, for me, a frequent occurrence. She was smart, well educated, and droll enough to make me laugh. I was fifty; she was forty-one. I responded to a profile on an online site that she had planned to delete but somehow forgot. Its headline, as I recall, was “Soprano Seeks Mezzo.” I think I signed my e-mail “Octavian,” and she knew I was alluding to Der Rosenkavalier, my favorite opera. Having weathered many apocalyptically mismatched dates, I found this knowledge so stunning as to be a sign from God.

  Helen had studied film, music, and art history. She had worked as a music editor for film and television. We obsessed over identical things. Well, almost identical. Even eight years ago, she dreamed that she would one day be someone’s mother. I dreamed that I would one day win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes and a Nobel Prize. I was flippant about my “dream” and assumed she had been the same. But she wasn’t. Three years ago, she became deadly serious. We were collaborating on several projects, but suddenly—and, for me, bafflingly—engaging work took a backseat to a new fixation: securing a human newborn.

  Many women who lost their mothers as children go on to flourish as mothers themselves. Some claim to have healed their grief through parenting. I wanted to be one of those women. When the prospect of a baby loomed on my horizon, I felt pure horror. But I thought I could white-knuckle my way through this and become a different person, a better person. I pictured myself not so much as a co-parent but as a benign auntie, who would take care of Helen—making sure she ate and even occasionally slept—while she took primary care o
f a newborn. The simple acts of diaper changing and feeding might connect me with an infant; I would finally understand and feel an attachment that I didn’t believe was possible. My body, however, was not onboard with this plan. It slowed me down. It gave me weekly eighteen-hour migraines. Then it clobbered me with its nuclear weapon: loss of color vision. It gave me no choice. I had to look back at my past to discern why I could not move into the future.

  Even as a child, I never wanted to nurture. I hated baby dolls, but not nearly as much as I hated actual babies. They stank, yowled, and interfered with my greatest pleasure: reading. In elementary school, my mother helped me memorize multiplication tables and write book reports. She had, for reasons she never made clear, dropped out of graduate school in chemistry. But she loved to explain science. When she squeezed fresh orange juice, she pointed out the molecular difference between ascorbic acid (in citrus) and acetylsalicylic (in aspirin), molding me into the pedant that I am today. She co-led our Brownie troop, and held me hostage in the backyard for a week while she taught me to hit a baseball. She was a natural athlete, a good tennis player, and her daughter would not be the last chosen for a team. (I became the second-to-last.) For all these gestures, and for just paying attention, I loved my mother. I know I survived my difficult years, the years after she was gone, because I had once felt so deeply loved by her.

  At home, she toed the party line: “The greatest calling for a woman is to be a Catholic wife and mother.” But I sensed that she hated the 1960s convention of stay-at-home motherhood. In my thirties, when my father shipped me my old Barbie-doll cases that had been sealed in storage since my mother’s death, I found evidence of her unhappiness. My Barbie stuff was a mirror of her values. She never told me that marriage could be a trap, but she refused to buy my Barbie doll a wedding dress. She didn’t say, “I loathe housework,” but she refused to buy Barbie pots and pans. What she often said, however, was “Education is power.” And in case I was too thick to grasp this, she bought graduation robes for Barbie, Ken, and Midge.