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I finished Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids just as a harried mother and her children rushed from a taxi to meet an intercity bus that, as it turned out, was running late. Within seconds of her asking if she’d missed her connection, the two boys–six and nine respectively–were chatting with me as well, the youngest especially eager to share what he knew about hybrid electric cars and his desire to be an engineer when he grew up. As we waited, the fretful mother tried to get her eldest to put his hood up against the cold, but he had gel in his hair and didn’t want it mussed. The younger of the two, keenly observing his older brother, had no gel but followed suit when she tried to get him to so much as put his jacket on; as he declaring through chattering teeth, his ears were “just perfect the way they are.” Instead, the two boys debated what the intercity bus would look like when it showed up, the youngest moving from “I hope it’s a double-decker” to “keep looking for a double-decker” and the eldest insisting, “it doesn’t need to be a double-decker; it just needs to be green”, though this didn’t stop him from twice chasing in front of blue-and-orange city busses that eased up to a neighbouring stop.
This mundane little encounter proved a striking reminder that to be around children is to engage in a very different set of conversations–ones that can swing in a heartbeat from coherent and forward-thinking to a battle of wills over life-preserving basics, like “don’t run in front of a moving bus” and “it’s below zero and drizzling: put your dang-blasted coat on.” I’ve been around a lot of children in my life–I love children–and engaged in hundreds of conversations with parents about their children and child-rearing in general. But Meghan Daum’s book was the first time I really felt like I’d been in lengthy conversation with “people like me”–people who have made the conscious decision not to have (or who have otherwise come to accept not having) children of their own.
What I didn’t expect from this collection was how lovely so much of the prose would be; putting aside the deep resonance I found in their content, many of these sixteen writers–thirteen women and three men–show a tremendous knack for weaving vivid personal anecdote into broader reflections on being childless-by-choice. I suppose that partly comes with the territory, though, because the book expressly addresses the intersections between choosing to write and choosing to be childless. Moreover, for some of these writers, it was indeed a binary choice: They felt that a woman can write (and even if she parents, be a lesser parent for it), or a woman can invest her physical and emotional energy in parenting, at cost to her literary ambitions. As Sigrid Nunez puts it,
Another fact hard to ignore: motherhood is one of the most significant as well as one of the most widely shared of all human experiences. In Western culture, it has always been essentially synonymous with womanhood. Yet who can name a major novel by a canonical writer, male or female, that takes motherhood for its main subject? (105)
There is some irony to this question, though, because I certainly thought of one book right away: We Need to Talk About Kevin, by the author of the preceding chapter–but I highly doubt that’s the kind of narrative Nunez suggests should easily spring to mind, if good motherhood and good literature could coexist. Granted, mother and acclaimed author Alice Munro is mentioned in this chapter, but Munro has serious regrets about neglecting her children when they were young in order to write, indicting herself as “hard-hearted”, while the mention of Anne Sexton brought to mind a book I read last year–Half in Love–by Sexton’s daughter, who struggled with her own suicidal behaviour in the wake of her mother’s manic depression and ultimate suicide.
Suffice it to say, the central lesson of this collection could be that all lives have their concessions–but since the concessions for each of these writers differ considerably, this book is more significant as a reminder that no two childless-by-choice people are exactly alike. Some in this collection, for instance, even came to their choice after becoming pregnant–after either wanting children in theory for years, or at least wanting to want children at some point down the road–and they speak plainly about the relief following their miscarriages and abortions.
Others never imagined (or wanted to imagine) children as part of their lives, and explore a wide range of explanatory factors, including: the idea of instinctive motherhood as a social (and therefore non-universal) construct, the flaws in modern feminism’s “you-can-have-it-all!” rhetoric, and the negative perceptions of children given to them by their own, utterly failed parents. Many also struggle to untangle the very fact of their broken childhoods, though they generally conclude that, since plenty of people who suffered growing up go on to have children, their own disinterest in bearing children is not an intrinsic result of past trauma. (It’s just a really messy detail that tends to exacerbate already tense conversations with people who press for reasons “why”.)
Lionel Shriver takes the most ruthless approach to justifying her childlessness–treating the decision as, yes, ultimately about selfishness; about being part of a Be Here Now movement that prioritizes personal happiness above all else, cultural consequences be damned–but other authors take stances that ring far truer to me. One (a gay man sexually active in the ascendancy of the AIDS crisis) relates his sense that children were a remote and bizarre luxury, part of an outlook on life that could only belong to people who felt they had a future themselves. Meanwhile, as Rosemary Mahoney puts it, parenting is the “hardest art”–inasmuch as truly understanding and feeling the agonies of childhood can make some of us wholly inadequate for helping others through it. To this end, she writes:
I’m strong in many things, but when it comes to children and their struggles I have no strength. I cannot stand to see a child I love suffer. When I see my teenage nieces and nephews cry because of some insult or slight or rejection, I feel a terrible cold pain that turns hot and then cold again in the span of a few seconds … I would not be able to let my child leave the house without a helmet on his head until he was thirty years old. … I would be unhinged by the dangers he faced and would be so overprotective I fear I would destroy him and myself in the process. (239)
Though my own bout of fatalism wasn’t driven by a belief in the inevitability of eventually contracting HIV, I certainly spent my adolescence and most of my twenties convinced I wouldn’t make it to 30 (next January!) due first to the PTSD from childhood incidents and then to the unmanaged downswings of bipolar II. And, yes, I have been thrown into powerful existential terror for my nephews on many occasions, haunted by all the hurts past, present, and future that I can do nothing to fix or prevent. And like M. G. Lord, whose chapter filled me with overwhelming relief that I wasn’t the only person for whom the perception of colour was literally diminished during severe depression, I recognize that I am “not a hypothetically perfect person but a flawed mess, who is trying, however inadequately, to leave behind a better world than the one through which I have had to make my way” (225). Like Lord, I hope to be a good mentor where I can.
The title of this post comes from my own experience of social pressures to conform, to have children, because it would “make me a better person” or was the “natural” thing to do. Like people in this collection, I’ve had a range of folks who didn’t know me try to tell me motherhood should be a priority in my life: cab drivers, hair stylists, bus drivers, trainee counsellors, store clerks, fellow students, and of course, family. When I was in my late teens, and firm even then in my view that I would not have children–that I would, at best, adopt–I occasionally fell into heated “discussions” with my father over this matter. To this person I love, both childlessness and adoption were nothing less than a “failure of the genetic code”–which, while true in the strictest sense, I now know how to counter by arguing for the value of passing on memes as much as genes, and invoking research around the idea of kin selection: that people without kids, by virtue of having more resources of their own to share, statistically improve the life outcomes of their siblings’ children (thus ensuring the passage of one’s genes in other ways).
Nevertheless, a lot from my childhood still informs my behaviour in negative ways, so I can’t pretend that my choice not to have children isn’t at least partly informed by my personal experience of mothers and fathers. As Michelle Huneven writes, “[e]ven as I learned that not all families were like [mine], I didn’t trust myself not to re-create what I had known” (143). I read that sentence over and over before pressing on in Daum’s collection, so true did those words feel to my own experience of growing up believing that familial love was intrinsically tethered to a profound lack of physical safety or emotional security.
This was not the only time, either, when I caught myself ruminating over specific lines in this book–so rich, so diverse, and so nuanced is this collection of personal narratives around writing and the sometimes simple, sometimes complicated choice to decline parenthood. I rarely read memoir, let alone promote it, but Daum’s Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed is one book I can already see myself placing in dozens of hands, hoping that the long-overdue sense of community I felt while reading it proliferates in a way I know I never will.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
