- So I felt a little sheepish, when, a year and a half ago, the writer Meghan Daum asked me if I’d be interested in contributing to the book that would become Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. I wrote back to tell her that I couldn’t: My son had just turned 1
I found this part fascinating I had no idea this was a thing.My own transformation didn’t begin with an unbidden outbreak of baby lust or a sudden longing for domesticity. It began, weirdly enough, when I learned about corpses becoming fathers. In 2011, I reported a piece for Tablet Magazine about the strange Israeli campaign for posthumous reproduction.
Ok, first impression Holy shit we should not be doing that.
So in this case having a kid was NOT, and fairly emphatically NOT a choice. It was an accident. A miscarriage is a terrible thing, but she doesn't say a damn thing about what actually changed her mind, and changed 'I accidentally got pregnant' into the affirmative 'I am going to try to get pregnant again.' Her mind changed, but what seemed to have changed it was getting pregnant on accident. Which I would cynically attribute to hormone induced brain changes coupled with the trauma of miscarriage. I have mixed feelings about making dads out of dead men, particularly if they hadn’t donated their sperm while living
Then — in a development that shocked me despite being completely predictable — I got pregnant,
Thank you for saying it before I did. I am a father to a nine-week-old boy. My wife and I went through the exact same stuff as this writer. I feel better knowing this is, if not normal, at least a pattern. I did not want to bring a child into the world until I felt I would not resent the time I would lose. I traveled as much as I could, I tried lots of different relationships, I had different careers and lives. So did my wife. We met in our thirties. We already had fully-formed personalities and lives. She had just gotten her PhD when I met her. We were married before the two-year anniversary of our first date. My son was born nine days after I turned 40. You change. That's not just okay -- that's GOOD. I'm still a panty waist liberal. I still want to punch greedy people. I do miss getting the free time I had. Then again I'm already getting slightly more time than I did the first month. Soon enough that baby will have his own personality. I have no resentments. Also, I went to Belgium twice -- and I'll be back. We don't live in the world that our parents had. Mine couldn't afford to send me to a public university (in the early 90s) whereas they each went to private colleges in the 1960s. I would hear my mother's demands, then look at her as if she were crazy... ...because it's not like she was holding the purse strings. People that pay for you can tell you what to do. I resent that the Reagan Revolution left us without funded social resources, but I don't mind that this means they can't tell me how to create my own communities. Having a child has been the next step in my exploration of the world. Now you'll have to excuse me, as the wife needs a nap and the baby can sleep on me.
Pardon me. The dangers of speed reading I guess. But it still doesn't say what changed her mind. If you stop using birth control and continue to have unprotected sex, you're going to get pregnant. Discontinuing contraceptives is the functional equivalent of choosing to have kids.
maybe you sped passed this paragraph.
Looking back, the fact that my faith needed shoring up was a sign that something was changing. As I got older, the constant travel that once thrilled me became wearying. My work still meant a lot to me, but while I once thought that publishing a book would make me feel that I’d arrived, publishing two taught me that arrival is elusive. Where I’d once seen family and intellectual life in opposition, over time I started worrying that it was an intellectual loss to go through life without experiencing something so fundamental to so many people’s existence. Meanwhile, 35 was creeping up on me. I’d been led to believe, falsely, that this is when most women’s fertility collapses. I still wasn’t sure that I’d be a good mother, but I had no doubt that my immensely kind husband would be a good father, probably good enough to make up for me
That's retrospective though. It doesn't sound like that's how she was feeling at the time, it sounds like that's how she THOUGHT she felt at the time, and we all know how bad humans are with the whole 'accurate recollection' thing. This is really the crux of the argument for me. What things were they discussing that made them ambivalent, and what factor(s) specifically at the time made them choose to have kids? It just all strikes me haphazard, as most conceptions seem to be. Have a baby, and the choice is made for you and then it's up to the writer in this case to justify it after the fact. I'm not writing this as a critique of parents as a whole, but of a person in specific. Imagine that instead of being able to continue to jet-set around to various exotic locations with a 6 month old, she had suffered intense postpartum depression, or else suffered the things her earlier negative examples had gone through. This article would have been a very different one.Matt and I went back and forth, and back and forth some more. We both felt like we were atop a fulcrum and could be pushed either way if only the other knew what to do. At some point, we decided that I’d go off the pill and see what happened.
“through no act of his own, but because of a careless, inconceivably frivolous and selfish act of mine, making life untenable.”
A 40-year-old mother of twins wrote, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an exhausted, nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him.”
Trying to describe the love one feels for their child to someone that hasn't had children is like trying to describe color to a blind man. I want to save this comment as a draft and add to it later but I don't see the mechanism by which to do so.... mk. More to come...
Here's some other things that are hard to describe: - how it feels when they grow up and leave home, linked to you only tangentially and you know this is what they have to do - how it feels for a parent when your child's heart is broken for the first time - how it feels for a parent to totally accept your child's choices and life because you know that they will only hear what you say nondefensively when they feel accepted. I can go on, but I won't.Trying to describe the love one feels for their child to someone that hasn't had children is like trying to describe color to a blind man.
ok tng - there's your line.
Not related, but kind of related. My daughter just said this: Daddy, do we go to another land when we die? I replied, "I'm not sure, what do you think?" She said, I think we go to Canada. Thought you'd appreciate that lil.
Indeed. I might already be dead. I mean, what am I doing sitting here reading old hubski posts? What am I avoiding (I actually know the answer to that.) I hope you do take her and her mother to Canada sometime, so she can decide for herself whether we're all dead up here. (Road Trip!!!) Oh wait - you are oh your way to Vancouver, the live part of Canada.
Yes, we will be in heaven soon enough. No kids though, just me and mrs. Green. I'm excited.
I get insanely excited think of my kid as an independent actor someday. I look at it as my job to give her some of the tools she might need. Hopefully mental flexibility (ideas, ethics the ability to imagine other points of view), A love of learning, the ability to swim, and good manners will see her through her darkest hours. I hope my wife is ready to field this one because I don't think I have any idea what to do. I'm really good when people lose loved ones, hope it transfers to broken hearts. Never happen. I'll always love the sinner and hate the sin. I also know people make mistakes and that my judgement is often mistaken. At least I think I won't beat her over the head with it like my parents did to me.- how it feels when they grow up and leave home, linked to you only tangentially and you know this is what they have to do
- how it feels for a parent when your child's heart is broken for the first time
- how it feels for a parent to totally accept your child's choices and life because you know that they will only hear what you say nondefensively when they feel accepted.