Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  In the psychiatric hospital, it was a relief to see the other patients as crazy. I must be sane, I thought, because I couldn’t recognize the behavior around me. In my first group therapy session with the other teens, I said nothing. I didn’t want to share my feelings with a roomful of strangers. The doctor told me I’d never get out if I didn’t speak “in group.” When my parents came to visit later that day, I demanded my release because I knew I didn’t belong there. My parents must have known the same thing, because just two days after they checked me in to the hospital, they checked me out. That was my first and last stay in a psych ward.

  My mother warned me never to tell anyone I’d been in the asylum. She was afraid of the stigma. My mother valued reason above all. She sometimes said of her own mother, “She’s too emotional” or “She’s not rational.” I worshipped my mother, and knew that my intense emotional responses to the world were a disappointment to her. I don’t blame her for sending me to the hospital. She was scared; if my child were that depressed, I might react the same way. But when she committed me to the psych ward, I felt exiled. And when she warned me to keep the episode secret, I felt deeply ashamed. I’ve felt, ever since, like something is wrong with me. My view of myself as fucked up comes less from the actual hospitalization than from my mother’s reaction to it.

  * * *

  I had other depressive episodes. In tenth grade, I couldn’t write my English term paper. I had stacks of index cards filled with my notes and quotes from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but I couldn’t focus enough to write the essay. It was my first long paper and I wanted it to be perfect. As the deadline approached, I panicked. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night watching black-and-white reruns on Nick at Nite. I watched Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show and other innocent programs from my parents’ childhood. At dawn, when my younger sisters got up for school, I was still on the couch downstairs in our sunroom. As they sat down to breakfast, I turned off the TV and went up to bed. The term paper’s due date came and went. My parents told the school I was sick, and I was. But it was not a physical ailment; it was my mind that was in torment. For weeks, I stayed up all night and then slept all day. I never wrote that paper, so I got a D in English that semester. I was certain that I had destroyed my future. And during one rocky semester in college, on an art history exam for which I was not prepared, I filled the blue book with the lyrics from “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles, which strikes me now as lunatic behavior. I thought it was funny at the time.

  But then I spent all of my twenties and most of my thirties in remission. I worked, successfully, at ad agencies in Moscow, London, and New York. I got my MFA in fiction writing at night, at Brooklyn College, while working full-time at a Manhattan agency during the day. I met all my deadlines, got promotions, and won awards. I had melancholic periods, but I never collapsed under the self-doubt that paralyzed me as an adolescent. Even when my mother died of cancer, when I was thirty-one, I did not succumb to depression. I was grieving, but I was functioning. (This is largely due to the antidepressants I starting taking right after she died. Going on antidepressants was, for me, a revelation. If only I’d been medicated sooner, I’m sure my GPA would have been higher. I function so much better on Zoloft that I will never go off medication again.) The reality is that depressed people often function well in their twenties and thirties. As they age, however, depression becomes harder to treat. As Peter D. Kramer put it in Against Depression, “bouts of depression recur with greater frequency. Later episodes can appear spontaneously, without apparent reason. They last longer, respond poorly to any intervention, remit (when they do) more briefly.” Now that I’m forty, my depression has the potential to be increasingly dangerous to my health. And as a woman with a history of anxiety and depression, I’d be at risk for postpartum depression. Suicide is the leading cause of death in new mothers. I’d rather not take that chance.

  * * *

  Recently, when I was giving my four-year-old niece a bath, she said, “I’m not sure I want to have kids. I just want to be an aunt.” What sparked this remark, I don’t know. Does she sense how much sacrifice is involved in raising children? Like me at her age, my niece spends most of her time making up stories and songs. She has an unusual dexterity with language. She is a natural storyteller, with an innate sense of pacing. She is already constructing artful sentences. I wonder if she, too, will devote herself to writing. “You don’t have to decide that now,” I said. “Someday you can have kids if you want.”

  What kind of mother would I have been? A worried one, no doubt. My sisters and I often joke about how high-strung I am. When I was in my early twenties, my youngest sister said to me, “You can only have kids if you go running every day.” For me, exercise has always been essential to managing my moods. (I stopped running regularly during that last ill-fated relationship and I’m quite sure that if I had started again after our breakup, I would have been far less depressed.) I thrive on routine, so I would have insisted on a structured existence for my children: precise bedtimes and lots of scheduled activities. I’m sure I would have fretted about developmental milestones (“Shouldn’t she be reading already?”) and, like my own overachieving parents, taken too much pride in my children’s accomplishments. I’m a perfectionist, so I fear that I would have expected too much of my kids. But I would have read to them every day, even when they were infants. And I would have sung the lullabies my mother always sang to me: “Dona Dona Dona” and “Me and Bobby McGee.”

  My sisters are good mothers. The one with three girls is a stay-at-home mom. Her days are, like so many parents’, parceled into drop-offs and pickups, from school, from birthday parties, from swim practices and soccer games. She is the reluctant pilot of a minivan. My sister’s devotion to her kids is partly a reaction to our childhood; she is trying to give her own children the emotional stability we lacked. I offer my three nieces an entirely different female model: a career-focused artist, with no financial security, who will probably never own a house. My nieces have seen my novel in bookstores. The oldest proudly told her first-grade class that her “aunt is an author.” I want the girls to understand that it is possible to be both a professional woman and a parent, but I can’t be the one to set that example. As the four-year-old already understands, not all girls grow up to be mothers.

  If I hadn’t felt abandoned by my own mother, if I’d been more lucky in love, if I’d published my first book when I was younger, if I were, by nature, less sensitive and more confident, perhaps I would have tried to have children. But I can’t complain: I’m alive and thriving. And even without kids, I have plenty of perspective.

  At St. Elizabeths, one of the women in the writing group took my hand. “What are you afraid of, the dark?” she asked. It was her first question. She didn’t ask me where I went to school or what I do for a living. She didn’t care if I was married or had children. In the psych hospital, we immediately got down to the raw, unfiltered business of being human. On some level, aren’t we all afraid of the dark?

  THE END OF THE LINE

  by

  Tim Kreider

  I RECENTLY SAW a New Yorker cover drawn by my old colleague Ivan Brunetti that appeared to illustrate the nonexistent situation of a couple of hipsters in a chic eatery looking wistfully at a middle-aged couple schlepping home with their children in Halloween costumes, carrying a boxed pizza for dinner. At first I assumed this was a kind of naive wish-fulfillment on the part of parents, incorrectly imagining that anybody envies them. It took me a day or two to understand that although the cover was drawn from the visual point of view of the hipsters, it was drawn from the emotional point of view of the parents, who are relieved to be looking comfortably schlubby and going home for a night of candy and takeout with their kids instead of having to get all dolled up and go on a date at some fashionable tapas bar for an overpriced gourmet morsel. This I can understand.

  Parents may frequently look back with envy on the irresponsible, self-indul
gent lives of the childless, but I for one have never felt any reciprocal envy of their anxious and harried existence—noisy and toy-strewn, pee-stained and shrieky, without two consecutive moments to read a book or have an adult conversation or formulate a coherent thought. In an essay, I once described being a parent as like belonging to a cult, “living in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, subject to the whim of a capricious and demented master,” which a surprising number of parents told me they loved. It’s hard to imagine the electively childless responding as warmly to an equally unsympathetic description of their own lives. This is because parents still remember what it was like to be us, but we can’t imagine what it’s like to be them; their experience encompasses ours. I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me. Raising children is one of many life experiences I’m happy to die without having had, like giving birth, going to war, spending a night in jail, or seeing Forrest Gump. If I could get through life without experiencing death, I would gladly do that, too.

  All living things on this planet have a simple two-part mission: to (1) survive long enough to (2) self-replicate. It is a complex animal indeed, arguably one too highly evolved for its own good, that consciously declines to fulfill one of its few basic biological imperatives. The only act more perverse and unnatural than purposely not reproducing is suicide. Some philosophers—the really crabby ones, like Schopenhauer—define suicide as the ultimate act of moral choice and free will. And, some ambiguous anecdotes aside, it appears to be the exclusive prerogative of Homo sapiens. I suppose you could argue that choosing not to have children, like suicide, is uniquely human. In fact, if anything can be said to demonstrate the possibility of free will, it is this: human beings willfully thwarting their one predetermined function in life.

  Admittedly, calling not having children the ultimate act of free will may be a little grandiose. People on both sides of the reproductive divide tend to be self-congratulatory about choices that are, let’s be honest, completely beyond their conscious control, like people who’ve inherited wealth thinking they deserve it. Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they’ve condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood’s ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you’ve had children, that it is life’s ultimate purpose, et cetera.

  Reproduction as raison d’être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what’s the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 × ∞ = 0. It would seem a pretty low-rent ultimate purpose that’s shared with viruses and bacteria. The current human population is descended from a relatively low number of ancestors after a series of population bottlenecks in the late Pleistocene. Most human beings back then presumably felt their lives to be just as important and meaningful as we do ours. Is their existence negated just because they left no descendants?

  In any case, children are no guarantee of immortality—they’re only a genetic reprieve or extension at best. Eventually the species Homo sapiens will die off, and even if we escape the sun’s expansion into a red giant and colonize another star system or download our consciousness into machines or evolve into pure energy life forms, eventually (according to current consensus) the universe itself will undramatically gutter out in a boring heat death and everyone—your kids, their kids, your great(23)-grandchildren, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Lincoln, Nietzsche, Akira Kurosawa, and me—will be even more utterly nonexistent than completely forgotten, since there won’t even be anyone around to forget us.

  The childless, on the other hand—or childfree, as the more aggressive ones like to be called (a formation apparently derived from the uncomplimentary smoke- and disease-free)—like to claim that they’re living more fully conscious lives than those brainless docile hordes helplessly breeding at the dictates of their DNA. They cite the imminent threats of overpopulation, global warming, peak oil, and, don’t let’s forget, nuclear war, still very much on the table—all of which are perfectly valid and persuasive reasons for not procreating, and none of which do I believe for one second is anyone’s real reason. Our real reasons may be less obvious than those of parents—or the child-curs’d, as we like to call them—but I have no doubt they’re just as unconscious and primal. The rise in voluntary childlessness, like the decrease in fertility and the increase in homosexuality, may be an evolutionary adaptation to overpopulation.1 Or, since the phenomenon is more prevalent in the West, maybe it’s an effect of wealth and plenty. (Having more offspring is to an individual’s evolutionary advantage in impoverished conditions, even though it’s disastrous for the species as a whole and has made places like Rio and Calcutta some of the least desirable real estate in the solar system.) Or perhaps it’s a symptom of a civilization in its decadence, a loss of vitality or optimism. Or maybe bad parenting, like vampirism, grows exponentially with each new generation, and we’ve finally reached a critical mass of people whose own childhoods were so lousy they’ve taken Philip Larkin’s famously dour advice: “Don’t have any kids yourself.”

  All the best arguments that parents and the childless muster about which of their lives is the more rational, satisfying, and/or morally superior are about as interesting to me as the ongoing debate about Which Are Better: Cats or Dogs. Our most important decisions in life are all profoundly irrational ones, made subconsciously for reasons we seldom own up to, which is why the worst ideas (getting married for the third time, having an affair with your wife’s sister, secretly going off birth control as your marriage is collapsing) are the most impossible to talk anyone out of. It’s pointless to refute all the rhapsodic slop about how kids make your life meaningful, since it’s all pretty obviously rationalization, like the perfectly sensible reasons people offer for carrying out posthypnotic suggestions. There is one reason people have children: they’re programmed to. Whatever reasons they may offer for it—selflessness, wanting to pass something on, having so much love to give—I don’t believe they choose children any more than naked mole rats decide to start tunneling. Human beings are basically big complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions constructed by genes to copy themselves, and only as an unintended side effect build mosques, make screwball comedies, and launch interplanetary probes.

  I know, for my own part, that not having children wasn’t the consequence of some carefully deliberated decision, taking into account the world population, my bleak economic future, or my incapacity to take care of anything more demanding than a cat. It simply never even once occurred to me to have children, any more than it ever occurred to me to enlist in the Coast Guard or take up Brazilian jujitsu. I never understood why anyone else was doing it; I did not get what was even supposed to be fun or fulfilling or whatever it was about parenting that compelled everyone else to do it. Everyone seemed to have agreed, on some day of class I missed, that this was obviously the thing to do. Who knows why I’m devoid of such a nearly universal human impulse? I always intended to be an artist, and never imagined a wife or children in any future I envisioned—though this is such a pragmatic rationale it’s obviously suspect, and, after all, plenty of other artists have had families and been just as indifferent and distracted as parents with day jobs. My own upbringing was fine, although I was given up for adoption when I was a few days old, which, I’ve since read, can do something of a number on a kid. My mother tells me I never liked babies, even when I was one. To this day, whenever someone asks me whether I’d like to hold the baby, I always answer, “No, thanks.” I have been advised that this is an impolitic response. Not long ago my friend Zoey made me hold her one-year-old and took photos of me. Wincing gamely with the kicking child on my lap, I felt the way I imagine women do when their boyfriends
cajole them into dressing up as Catholic schoolgirls or Princess Leia, indulging some fantasy that has nothing to do with them. Later she sent me the photos as “proof” that I am not such a bad man after all. To me, I look in these photos as if I am holding some South American animal I have never heard of before that I’ve been assured is not dangerous.

  Suffice it to say this has sometimes been an Issue in relationships with women, most of whom sooner or later seem to want kids. Somewhere in my thirties I started preemptively letting women know that I had no interest in having children, had never considered it, not for one second, and there was absolutely no chance I was ever going to change my mind, not even if the Right Person were to come along. It must’ve seemed as if I was being gratuitously blunt about this, but in my experience people have a bottomless capacity to delude themselves that their partners will eventually change. This policy didn’t exactly end any relationships, but it did obviate some potential ones, and/or kept others circumscribed. But whatever awkwardness it’s occasioned me is nothing compared to the suffocating societal pressure that women who don’t want children are subjected to. After all, there’s a sort of role model or template for a man who doesn’t want kids—the Confirmed Bachelor, roguish and irascible in the W. C. Fields tradition. At worst, we’re considered selfish or immature; women who don’t want to have children are regarded as unnatural, traitors to their sex, if not the species. Men who don’t want kids get a dismissive eye roll, but the reaction to women who don’t want them is more like: What’s wrong with you?