Selfish, Shallow, And Self-Absorbed: Writers On The Choice Not To Have Children

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Writers on the Choice Not to Have Children

"A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions," Italo Calvino wrote in his magnificent letter on reproductive rights, "but through an act of will and love on the part of other people." Thirty-five years earlier, in 1940, Anaïs Nin made the same point with even greater precision and prescience when she wrote in her diary:“Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.” And yet here we are decades later, with millennia of human civilization under our belt – aspirin to Austen, Guggenheim to Google, bicycle to Bach – still subscribing to the same primitive biological imperative that a life unprocreated is a life wasted; still succumbing to the tyrannical cultural message that opting out of parenthood is a failure of ambition or magnanimity or social duty, or simply the symptom of a profound character flaw. Being childless by choice – like being alone, like living alone – is still considered by unspoken consensus the errant choice.

A potent and sorely needed antidote to this toxic myth comes inSelfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (public library), edited by the brilliantMeghan Daum – a writer of rare aptitude for articulating the unspeakable. The contributions – sometimes witty, sometimes wistful, always wise – come from such celebrated authors as Geoff Dyer,Anna Holmes, and Sigrid Nunez, whose reasons for going not having children range from the personal trauma of difficult childhoods to political convictions about everything from reproductive rights to overpopulation and income inequality to the increasingly hard-to-meet requirement of undivided attention that is the hallmark of great parenting.

With an eye to Tolstoy's famous line from the opening of Anna Karenina – "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." – Daum writes in the introduction:

Of course, [Tolstoy's] maxim isn’t exactly true, since happy families come in all varieties, and unhappy families can be miserable in mind-numbingly predictable ways. And since most people eventually wind up becoming parents, whether by choice, circumstance, or some combination thereof, my version isn’t necessarily an airtight theory either. Still, in thinking about this subject steadily over the last several years, I’ve come to suspect that the majority of people who have kids are driven by any of just a handful of reasons, most of them connected to old-fashioned biological imperative.

Those of us who choose not to become parents are a bit like Unitarians or nonnative Californians; we tend to arrive at our destination via our own meandering, sometimes agonizing paths. Contrary to a lot of cultural assumptions, people who opt out of parenthood ... are not a monolithic group. We are neither hedonists nor ascetics. We bear no worse psychological scars from our own upbringings than most people who have kids. We do not hate children (and it still amazes me that this notion is given any credence). In fact, many of us devote quite a lot of energy to enriching the lives of other people’s children, which in turn enriches our own lives.

Daum considers the many ways in which one can come to stand in one's truth as a nonparent – an act, essentially, of standing at the crossroads of Should and Must, in the eye of a sociocultural hurricane, with the absolute stillness of deep self-knowledge – Daum writes:

For some, the necessary self-knowledge came after years of indecision. For others, the lack of desire to have or raise children felt hardwired from birth, almost like sexual orientation or gender identity. A few actively pursued parenthood before realizing they were chasing a dream that they’d mistaken for their own but that actually belonged to someone else – a partner, a family member, the culture at large.

And yet despite the wide array of paths to the willfully childless life, the cultural narrative about this choice remains strikingly myopic. In a sentiment that calls to mind Susan Sontag's admonition that polarities invariably impoverish the nuances of life, Daum points to the primary purpose of the anthology:

I wanted to lift the discussion out of the familiar rhetoric, which so often pits parents against nonparents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income. I wanted to show that there are just as many ways of being a nonparent as there are of being a parent. You can do it lazily and self-servingly or you can do it generously and imaginatively. You can be cool about it or you can be a jerk about it.

[...]

It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption – and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

This begs the necessary question of gender balance – in the larger cultural conversation as well as in the particularity of this volume – which Daum addresses with no-nonsense elegance:

There are notably more women than men here – a thirteen to three ratio, to be exact. That ratio felt to me more or less proportionate to the degree to which men devote serious thought to parenthood (at least before it happens) compared to women, who are goaded into thinking about it practically from birth. Still, I thought it was essential that the collection include male voices. Too often, this subject is framed as a women’s issue. But men who are disinclined toward fatherhood must contend with their own set of prejudices; for instance, assumptions that they can’t commit to a partner, that they wish to prolong adolescence indefinitely, or that they’ll be intractably (and gratefully) domesticated as soon as the right partner reels them in.

But for all its diversity of perspectives on and paths to nonparenthood, the anthology is underpinned by one obvious self-selection bias – all sixteen contributors are writers, and as Martin Amis memorably observed, "the first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone." What's more, in addition to a greater need for solitude and higher tolerance for financial uncertainty, artists and writers have in common one other key differentiator from the general population: We tend to measure legacy in memetics rather than genetics – in the ideas rather than the infants we seed into society. (In one extreme, writers who do choose to procreate end up designating their children like they do their works – with a byline: Take F. Scott Fitzgerald and his daughter, Scottie.)

To be sure, Daum counters this disclaimer by pointing out that if the choice were as simple as “writing versus children,” writers "wouldn’t have much to say on the subject" – and they have a great deal to say, with a great deal of dimension.

Geoff Dyer (Photograph: Jason Oddy)

In one of the funniest essays, Geoff Dyer brings all of his wonderful, curmudgeonly, self-deprecating Englishness to the subject and writes:

In a park, looking at smiling mothers and fathers strolling along with their adorable toddlers, I react like the pope confronted with a couple of gay men walking hand in hand: Where does it come from, this unnatural desire (to have children)?

[...]

By a wicked paradox, an absolute lack of interest in children attracts the opprobrium normally reserved for pedophiles. Man, you should have seen what happened a couple of years ago when a friend and I were playing tennis in Highbury Fields, London, next to the children’s area where kids were cavorting around under the happily watchful eyes of their mums. It’s quite a large area, but it is, needless to say, not big enough. A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched – they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice – and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s.

Illustration by Tomi Ungerer from Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls

Summoning Virginia Woolf in her own most curmudgeonly Englishness – “A child is the very devil,” she wrote in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents." – Dyer adds:

Certainly at that moment, the threatened love these mums felt for their children seemed ferocious and vile, either a kind of insanity or, at the very least, a form of deeply antisocial behavior. I stress this because it’s often claimed that having kids makes people more conscious of the kind of world they’re creating or leaving for their offspring. That would be why, in London, a city with excellent public transportation, parents have to make sure they have cars. Many of these cars come speeding along my street on their way to the extremely expensive private school on the corner. You can see, from the looks on these mums’ faces as they drop off their kids at this little nest of privilege, that the larger world – as represented by me, some loser on his bike – doesn’t exist, is no more than an impediment to finding a parking space. Parenthood, far from enlarging one’s worldview, results in an appalling form of myopia. Hence André Gide’s verdict on families, “those misers of love."

Dyer turns a skeptical eye toward the most common case for having children:

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.

It's worth pausing here to circle back to Tolstoy and point out that although he filled his existential void with fourteen children, he quickly found them to be insufficient filler and spiraled into his now-legendary search for meaning. But Dyer is equally skeptical of turning to "the writing life" for such existential filler as he is of the pro-procreation dogma:

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... Sacrifice is part of the parent’s vocabulary.

[...]

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.

Unmasking this charade of "sacrifice," Dyer pounces at the jugular of the anti-childlessness tyrant:

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.

Anna Holmes (Photograph: Victor Jeffries)

Jezebel founder and epistolary heartbreak-hunter Anna Holmesaddresses another facet of the Me-First myth, considering the choice not to have children as an act of self-caring – of knowing intimately the singular, un-peer-pressured needs of one's inner life and honoring them – rather than one of selfishness:

Herein lies the rub: as it stands now, I suspect that my commitment to and delight in parenting would be so formidable that it would take precedence over anything and everything else in my life; that my mastery of motherhood would eclipse my need for – or ability to achieve – success in any other arena. Basically, I’m afraid of my own competence.

[...]

Some might call my trepidation at the idea of motherhood “selfishness” – I would call it “agency” – but those people are probably either (1) dudes or (2) self-satisfied professional parents, and I’m not sure I care enough about their opinions that I wouldn’t just agree with them and shrug my shoulders in shared chagrin. [My choice] has nothing to do with a distaste for kids, who, along with animals, I like and identify with more than I do with most adults.) But the fact is, it is never far from my mind that the means of reproduction – and its costs – are beasts of burden borne, historically, by the fairer sex.

[...]

As I enter my forties, I find that I am only now beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin, to find the wherewithal to respect my own needs as much as others’, to know what my emotional and physical limits are, and to confidently, yet kindly, tell others no. (No, I cannot perform that job; no, I cannot meet you for coffee ; no, I cannot be in a relationship in which I feel starved for emotional and physical connection.) ... The irony is that if and when I reach the point where I feel able to give my all to another human being and still keep some semblance of the self I’ve worked so hard to create, I will probably not be of childbearing age. Them’s the breaks.

Sigrid Nunez (Photograph: Marion Ettlinger)

In one of the most somber, sobering, and intense essays in the volume, Sigrid Nunez explores...

The Whole Article: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/11/selfish-shallow-and-self-absorbed-meghan-daum/?mc_cid=de29ba37e7&mc_eid=abb8585559