The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  The child wish can be so strong, sometimes good people who want to be parents do desperate things. A week earlier, I had read a blurb in the U.S. news section of my local paper about a man and woman who traded an exotic bird for two children. The guardian of the children wanted $2,000, originally, for the boy and girl, four and five years old, respectively. But the couple, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for years, did not have two grand, so they gave her $175 in cash and their $1,500 pet cockatoo.

  The “adoptive” parents, according to the case detective, “had good intentions from what we see.” But I had trouble believing this, that to buy a child, even to raise it as one’s own, was not tainted with the same unlawfulness as to sell one. An economic transaction seemed no way to start a family. Weren’t the buyers as much at fault as the sellers? After all, if there were no demand in the first place, there would be no supply. Isn’t that the law of economics?

  Dutch philosopher Paul van Tongeren has written that a paradox arises when “the manner in which we want something is in conflict with the nature of the thing we want.” Although he seems to be writing primarily about the use of assisted reproductive technology, I can see how adoption also applies. According to van Tongeren, the child wish hinges on elements of surprise combined with unmatched love; we don’t choose our children and we love them unconditionally. What we desire when we desire children is actually a wild unbridling from choice and control—the most intense astonishment and rapture the universe can provide. Yvonne Denier, of Belgium’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and Law, agrees: when we wish for a child, she notes, we want something that by its very nature escapes us, something we are unable to control attaining. We cannot decide to have a child, she writes, in the same way we might decide on a holiday destination, by weighing pros and cons and choosing the characteristics we do and do not want.

  Compared to the heat of passion in which one normally produces children, assisted reproductive technology and adoption can at times feel rather calculated. Beyond sex, fulfilling the child wish naturally is passive, a nine-month unraveling from womb to world governed only by imagination. It takes just two people. ART and adoption, in contrast, usually take much longer and involve crowds of stakeholders. Both feel deliberate, premeditated, a long road of things changing hands. ART can feel like playing God, disrupting natural selection, messing with the rhythm of the universe. We measure adoption’s progress not by sonograms and tiny knit caps, but in fits and starts of legalese and paperwork. At times one worries that adopting means participating in a system that exploits the poor. One unhinges at the phrases child laundering and human trafficking.

  My husband and I left that day without filling out any paperwork, unable to pinpoint exactly what it was we wanted or to reconcile that with how we were going to get it. We also never set foot in a fertility clinic. Five years passed. We met a couple who did not want to become parents, a friendship that did not require bracing ourselves for the inevitable phone call or dinner announcement that would change every second spent with them to a reminder of our inadequacies. We took up wine and mojitos and went to Paris. We got advanced degrees. Every month we buried the possibility of a child, until we had no more room for grief.

  Once, teaching that herpetology session at the environmental education center, surrounded by fifth-graders, I held a northern red salamander we’d just found. As I relayed some fact or another the salamander began to writhe, opened its mouth, and out popped another, smaller salamander.

  “It just had a baby!” one of the children shouted.

  “No,” I said after a moment, gently correcting him, “I think that was dinner.”

  Many salamanders, including the northern red, engage in cannibalism. The tiger salamander—the country’s most widespread species—actually produces larva that can develop to be either cannibalistic or not. When populations are dense, the cannibalistic morph appears. Through smell, it can tell whom it’s related to and how closely they’re related, preferring to prey on non-kin.

  The fifth-graders and I knew that amphibians don’t have live births, and births don’t originate from the same place as words. But what had happened seemed perfectly natural, expected even: something smaller had come from something larger. So I have to admit, looking down on what had occurred, feeling topsy-turvy from the moment, birth was also my first thought.

  The tendency to see death as birth, or link the two in some way, is not all that unreasonable a leap. For an organism programmed for survival, recognition of mortality results in all kinds of tricks of the mind to reduce our anxiety, including, according to one study, increasing our desire for children. It makes sense: children offer both literal and symbolic immortality. They can carry on one’s genes, one’s beliefs, one’s business, one’s memory. Part of our wish for having a child is really about reducing our fear of no longer existing.

  Is this why, at age thirty-eight, sitting in an airport waiting for our plane after visiting my family at Christmas, watching worn-out parents trying to corral their spirited children, I turned to my husband, who had over the past five years often brought up adoption, and said, “Let’s do it”?

  Fear of death is hardly the only motivator for having children, and certainly not a totally conscious one. There are a multiplicity of factors, measured by many tools: the “Reasons for Parenthood Scale,” the “Parenthood Motivation Index,” and, my favorite mostly because of its title, which sounds like something a six-year-old might create to interview Santa Claus, “The Child Wish Questionnaire.” I muddle through the research: a whole host of causes for desiring children exists, ranging from happy early childhood memories to the influence of organized religion and traditional female sex roles to the belief that having a child around is “nice,” makes one happy, and provides a unique relationship. Nothing is that surprising. What actually surprises is the reality of parenthood, which, most research suggests, decreases happiness. Much has been written about it. Roy F. Baumeister, in Meanings of Life (1992), called this the “parenthood paradox.” Perhaps the most cited indicator of the lowered sense of well-being felt by parents is the fact that on one survey, women rated taking care of their children only slightly more positive than commuting and doing housework. This makes the great lengths folks using ART or adopting go to even more curious.

  By April the snow began to melt. I knew the time was approaching for Big Night. At work, vernal pools strung through my mind like the trail of shiny white pebbles laid by Hansel and Gretel. One night I took the dog to the woods. In the past she had stumbled upon a spotted salamander or two when we weren’t even looking. But that night, when the beam from my headlamp, aimed at curious holes in the mud—probably openings where squirrels had buried and dug up nuts, or rained-out tracks from deer hooves—crossed before her in the dark, in the rain, she just looked confused.

  If even the dog was flummoxed, I thought, what would a baby do? We had received a return letter from the adoption agency confirming our entry in the May lottery, but with no information regarding when or where it would happen, or how they would deliver the results. I worried a little bit. Could a baby do this? I wondered.

  Could you bring a baby to the woods in the rain on a cold night? Sit it on your hat or gloves laid side by side—like you sometimes do yourself—on top of the wet grass while you moseyed around looking for amphibians? A fear overtook me. How would I change as a parent? Would I leave my baby at home with my husband while I went on amphibian hunts? Would I stop hunting altogether? I didn’t find any salamanders that night, but when I got home and took off my clothes to shower, I did find the first tick of the season. Ticks don’t faze me. But how would I feel if I found this tick crawling over the pudgy little kneecap of my amphibian-hunt-spectating baby?

  A certain level of ambivalence toward parenthood is common. A 1997 study in the Journal of Marriage and the Family found ambivalence toward childbearing in 20 percent of young couples. A 2010 Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology article concludes that
some ambivalence toward childbearing is “widespread.” And the 2012 National Center for Health Statistics reports that 37 percent of U.S. births are unintended, meaning mistimed or unwanted—more than a third. Particularly for women, to whom most childbearing and -rearing responsibilities still fall, and who more accurately anticipate all these responsibilities, whether or not to have a child is a complex issue.

  And statistics show the social pressure to have children may be changing. One study followed 12,700 U.K. women born between 1950 and 1960 to their midforties. Seventeen percent are childless. That number was 10 percent for those born in 1946 and rose to 19 percent for those born in 1960. Delaying parenthood has birthrates down in multiple countries: Greece, Switzerland, Britain, Japan, Canada. While delaying parenthood doesn’t necessarily mean couples will remain childless, it does alter the idea that childlessness is selfish, shameful, or to be pitied.

  A married friend of mine who decidedly does not want children—never has, never will—once asked her mother, who also had two boys and another girl (all healthy, all successful), what she thought about having children. The reply: “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t.” My friend was pleased with the answer, which vindicated her own feelings. And yet, of course, she would not exist if this very woman had not conceived her.

  Chances of becoming pregnant through ART, one cycle of which costs, on average in the U.S., $12,400, an amount rarely covered by health insurance, are 40 percent for women aged thirty-five and under, 32 percent for women aged thirty-five to thirty-seven, 22 percent for women aged thirty-eight to forty, 12 percent for women forty-one to forty-two, 5 percent for women forty-three to forty-four, and 1 percent for women forty-four and older. Despite less than promising odds for even the youngest age bracket, each year more than 85,000 women choose ART, on average requiring three cycles (over $36,000) to have a “live birth,” a clinical-sounding term which also includes babies born alive, preterm, who won’t survive.

  Adoption may seem like less of a gamble: if you have unlimited funds, inconceivable patience, and openness to a child with any type of needs, you will end up a parent. But most people do have boundaries. When I looked at the numbers, I was comfortable with the $3,000 required for a home study and initial fees, even though I knew we might never be chosen by an expectant couple considering adoption; but I worried about the unpredictable amount we might pay for prenatal care, legal fees, and counseling to an expectant mother who could understandably change her mind at some point during the pregnancy or (in Wisconsin) the thirty-day period after birth (called a “false start”—for the majority, 72 percent, false starts costs less than $5,000); the possibility of this happening multiple times (38 percent of adoptive parents have at least one false start); or, in the unlikely chance a birth mother with whom we were matched gave birth to a baby with serious defects (chances: less than 4 percent), that we would make the decision to walk away. If we did this, our losses would be big: the entire cost of the adoption (usually around $25,000), any hope of ever becoming parents, and our own integrity.

  I wondered how we would fund an adoption should we win the lottery (pardon that irony). I did some research; one article listed hard-to-get grants, loans, and ideas for saving up this large chunk of money, ending, rather ridiculously, with the idea of garage sales and bake sales. Leave no stone unturned, the last line said.

  ART and adoption both involve uncertainty, though hardly the type von Tongeren and Denier describe that characterizes the child wish. Any uncertainty involved in ART and adoption clashes with a cavalcade of consciously and carefully considered decisions, procedures, phone calls, and appointments. Often you must move forward deliberately in the face of crushing defeat. The child wish can become a child obsession. Why do people go through with it?

  I found more insight into the answer to this question not from studies of the motivations of couples considering IVF or adoption (such studies tend to give results not much different from studies of those trying to conceive naturally), but in studies of problem gambling. Research on gambling addiction gleans insight on how we make decisions, how we respond to personal gains and losses, and why we take risks. Humans seem to be drawn to the astounding occurrence, regardless of its likelihood of happening. We are traditionally bad odds-makers. We believe that a win is likely after a series of losses, just as we expect sun after a week of rain, or, if you are looking for salamanders, vice versa—though here our assumptions may be correct, as weather does follow patterns. We abhor cognitive regret—stopping something too early and missing out on the next big reward—and are driven to recoup our losses. There is always the possibility that, although we never know where or when we’ll hit it, a big win is just around the corner. One more rock overturned, one of my sources said, and you’ll find dinner.

  The closer it got to the adoption lottery, however, I found myself no more distressed about losing than I was about winning. I began, salamander-style, to get cold feet.

  The adoption lottery seemed a bit unconventional, despite its being hosted by a licensed Christian social service organization of Wisconsin and upper Michigan. When my husband and I first heard of it, I imagined that if they drew your application, somewhere, instantaneously, a stork that would soon appear above the thatched roof of your own house was plucking a baby from the pond where all little children lie, according to the Hans Christian Andersen tale, “dreaming more sweetly than they will ever dream in the time to come.” It seemed almost too good to be true.

  The prize, though, if they drew your application, wouldn’t be a baby but acceptance into the agency’s domestic infant program, just the start of the sometimes multiple-year process of becoming an adoptive parent. It’s a popular agency, probably because of its long, successful history of providing good counsel to birth parents and adoptive families, as well as its reasonable fees. So instead of dealing with a never-ending wait list, they hold a biannual lottery.

  At the meeting required to enter the lottery, we were told that on two unspecified dates—one in early May and one in early November—social workers from the organization’s various offices throughout the state would gather together, number the applications, put the numbers in a hat, and blindly draw a particular quantity determined by their leader. After we mailed in our application, I wondered often about this event. I imagined tiny slips of paper—the one with my number on it, for instance—blowing off a table when someone exited or entered the room before it made its way into the hat, leaving me with no chance at all of being picked. Was there a lottery witness? Did a senior citizen stand against the wall, hands joined together solemnly as on so many states’ televised daily lotto picks, to ensure that everything went fairly and squarely? And if, as the social worker informed us, we would be allowed to reconsider the items we marked on the application again at a later date—whether we could parent a child with microcephalus or one born from a schizophrenic, for instance—why was it even on the lottery application in the first place? Was this really some kind of weeding-out process? I imagined the social workers—all women, most likely mothers themselves—laughing wildly at those whose applications indicated a desire for the perfect child, ripping them up, and trashing them immediately. If this truly was a lottery, why not just have us write our name and number on the back of a raffle ticket and, if our ticket was drawn, consider the hard questions later?

  Some psychologists believe gambling mirrors sexual excitement, with its repeated buildup, climax, and release of tension. Maybe this is why the idea of the adoption lottery excited my husband and me so much, why we chose this agency over others where we could have signed a contract and jumped right into the adoption process. It felt natural to begin parenthood this way: to cast our lot, and then wait a month or two to see what happened.

  Mid-April rolled around. I still had not seen a single salamander. One weekend the forecast was warm and rainy, but I was busy entertaining a friend who had flown in to visit. On Saturday she slept in, and I grabbed an umbrella to walk the dog and check o
ut an overflow area near our lake, finding two deep open holes: turtle hatchlings must have overwintered in the nest and emerged in the last few days. It was a sign of something—but as of yet, I saw no amphibians.

  We stayed indoors all weekend. On Sunday morning we missed a call from my husband’s little brother. On Sunday night it was still raining. He called again, and my husband disappeared to talk to him. He returned to announce that his brother’s wife was pregnant—twelve weeks pregnant, with identical twins.

  I left my husband and guest to hunt for salamanders. Many factors were at work in my decision to go out that night, and I don’t deny any of them. The major mistake in psychology may be the belief that awareness changes behavior. It doesn’t: we like our social pressure, our sorrow, our envy. I knew I should be overjoyed by the prospect of two new nieces or nephews—and I was—but I admit I was also irritated, as if there were some kind of cosmological math occurring that didn’t add up: two babies for them, and zero for us.

  I drove the streets past every pond I knew, looking for slick salamander bodies in my headlights, wondering how many I was running over in my desperate quest. But it began to snow. In the morning five inches would cover the ground. I became dizzy from the windy country roads, staring into the oncoming flakes with my brights on. The seasons ran through my mind, lapping one another. They tangled in my brain and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something, even though I knew it was still early. It felt too late.

  A week or so later I bought a pair of boots—no matter that I should be saving money—at the local Fleet Farm, the kind kids wear to jump in puddles (or obstetricians, I recently found out from a friend, whose son’s birth proved messy and more difficult than the norm). I couldn’t believe I’d been traipsing around the shores of ponds all these years without them. I also couldn’t believe I was still traipsing around the shores of ponds at my age, a kitchen strainer in hand. I knew I should be shuttling kids to soccer practice, piano lessons, laundering the clothes of kids who do this. Was there something wrong with me? Because I didn’t have children I couldn’t stop being one? I felt like a ten-year-old boy, not a thirty-eight-year-old woman. In an old army ammunition plant near Madison, Wisconsin, a reservoir contains a population of tiger salamanders that, in adapting to their enclosed environment, have become neotenic, retaining for life their juvenile characteristics—feathery gills, keeled tails. They still reproduce, but along with their young, never leave the water to live on land as do most adult tiger salamanders. Officials want to drain the reservoir, seen as a safety hazard, but locals are working hard to preserve it and its salamander population.