Meghan Daum is on the “read everything she writes” list for me. I loved her essay collection The Unspeakable. She recently edited a collection of essays from other writers titled Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not to Have Kids. It’s a set of wise, authentic women and men who decided not to have children and who share their reflections on the matter.
Daum writes in her introduction, “It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption — and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.” I agree. I don’t have a decisive view on the having kids topic myself, but I found these essayists refreshing and different. We live in a culture that rarely provides air time for their points of view.
Some highlights below.
Paul Lisicky confesses, “I’d probably say yes if I ever become involved with someone who wanted to be a parent…though I might be saying it with the same level of commitment with which I’d say, ‘Of course I’d move to Tokyo.'”
Courtney Hodell’s essay is one of the best. Some quotes from her: “When you talk about not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence. It is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself.”
“I, too, was sometimes aghast at the short-fibered thoughts of my friends whose small children beseeches or bellowed as their stories were begun again and again and never finished, whereas I got to spoil myself with long hours of unspooling daydreams.”
“All the flailing around, the mad activity — going to parties, falling in love, buying houses, striving at work — could be smashed like a soda can into this flat fact: we have children so they can have children so they can have children. I had a blast of vertigo, as when you look into a puddle and see the stars falling away behind your head.”
On her childless boyfriend holding her niece for the first time: “When Nathan, my boyfriend of five years, held Elsa for the first time, he wept — big sparklers caught in his lower eyelashes, too light to drop. ‘Not sadness,’ he said, ‘just big feeling.’ Now the decision is made. But the decision is not past. No matter how it came about — was it my procrastination; disinclination; anxiety; self-absorption? — we live with its consequences every day.”
Laura Kipnis, on the idea having children is natural:
“But what’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the “natural” had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces up to the real harshness of nature can feel very beningly about its tyranny. Sure, we like nature when it’s a beautiful day on the beach; less so when a tidal wave kills your family or a shark bites off your warm.”
The idea of maternal instinct is an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history — circa the Industrial Revolution.
“The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win.
“Who could blame anyone, child or adult, for wanting to enrich his experience by sharing it with a friend, a caring witness? We all want that. We wall want someone to say, “That thing you love is so interesting and worthy that I have to love it, too.”
“Children learn quickly that they can expect unconditional love only from their parents. To reassure themselves that they are secure in that love, they test it, push it, measure it, and test themselves against it. The parent is the only person they can cross and vex with such volume and constancy without getting an injunction to go to hell and never come back.”
It sounds so amazing. Thank you for sharing. “Who could blame anyone, child or adult, for wanting to enrich his experience by sharing it with a friend, a caring witness? We all want that. We wall want someone to say, “That thing you love is so interesting and worthy that I have to love it, too.” just so love this one.
There is also searcher intent to consider. When you keep searching the same keywords over and over, it’s a little unsettling.