Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  Now, we could account for the orgasm gap between men and women by simply concluding that women are anatomically constructed in such a way that a certain amount of sexual dissatisfaction comes with the territory, and leave it at that. But mostly we don’t say that, because even though the anatomy in question can be enlisted to tell that story, it’s not the socially favored narrative at the moment. The preferred story is that women and men are entitled to sexual equity; sexual pleasure is as much a woman’s right as a man’s—even the men’s magazines say so! In fact, it’s now such a mainstream view that network sitcoms make jokes about it. Pretty much everyone these days knows that with a small amount of reeducation and patient communication, men can be schooled into becoming better lovers. A lot of men these days even take pride in developing such skills—I’ve seen T-shirts to this effect.

  My point is that women have been a lot more inventive at demanding sexual pleasure than at demanding maternity reform. When it comes to sexual pleasure, whatever inequities nature has imposed on women can be overcome: in other words, culture overrides anatomy. Yet when it comes to maternity, somehow everyone’s a raging biological determinist. Not only are women fated to be the designated child bearers in this story, but this mostly still translates into their taking on the social role of raising them, too. Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it’s not a dichotomy; it’s a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one. There would be all sorts of ways to organize society and sexuality that don’t create false choices if we simply got inventive about it—as inventive as we’ve been about equity in sexual pleasure—but there has to be the political will to do it. There has to be the right story going in.

  It must be said that women themselves haven’t helped much here, at least not those who go around touting our mystical relation to nature—maternal instincts, mother-child bonds, and so on. According to Diane Eyer’s Mother-Infant Bonding, the concept that bonding has any biological basis is “scientific fictionalizing.” Bonding research has been dismissed by most of the scientific community as an ideological rather than a scientific premise, Eyer says, driven by popular concepts about natural womanhood and a woman’s place being in the home. No one ever talked about such bonds before the rise of industrialization, when wage labor first became an option for women. Note that the bonding story got revved up again in the early 1970s, as women were moving into the labor market (screwing up traditional conceptions about the natural female role), popularized by child development experts like pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, who said that mothers who don’t stay at home bonding with their children for the first year spawn delinquents and terrorists.

  So the question we’re left with is this: What’s the most advantageous story to adopt about female biology and nature? If we keep telling the one about nature speaking to women in a direct hookup from womb to brain, then guess what? This will parlay into who should do the social job of child rearing and under what conditions. Men will have less reason to sign up for child-rearing equity (assuming there’s a man in the picture), day care will never be a social entitlement like public education, and the issue of how to manage a child and a job will continue to remain each lone woman’s individual dilemma to solve, even when that job is an economic necessity, as is certainly the case for the majority of mothers today.

  * * *

  At one point, in my late thirties, I thought for a bit about having a child on my own. I was no longer with the musician boyfriend. My next boyfriend and I occasionally fantasized about having a kid—he even once proposed during such a reverie, on a romantic boat trip—but though we were together for years, we couldn’t get along for a sufficient stretch of time to accomplish either marrying or procreating. After we split up, I wasn’t in anything very serious with anyone for a while, though there was a man I used to roll around with on a casual basis. When I told him I was thinking about having a kid, he said he’d be happy to try to get me pregnant if I wanted, though he didn’t want to be involved in raising a child. So that was one practicality taken care of, at least. I approached my sister, the one who’d borne my beloved niece and nephews, to ask whether, if I had a kid, it could sort of lodge with her while I was at work or out of town—she had so many kids underfoot already, one more wouldn’t be that noticeable. I’m sorry to say that she laughed in my face (though in a kindly way, she instructs me to add). When she got done laughing, she explained that it was a well-known fact that no nanny or babysitter would work in a house with four children; three was the limit. I tried guilt-tripping her, but she wasn’t biting. The single motherhood idea faded away a short time later.

  When I hear pundits going on lately about the declining birthrate and the graying of the population, I know that it’s all my fault. In case you haven’t heard, birthrates across the industrialized world have been in steep decline ever since the advent of the Pill. (While an overpopulation crisis looms in the developing world, underpopulation hits this part of the globe.) Though it wasn’t due to the Pill alone: once women started entering institutes of higher education in increasing numbers, and the job market opened its arms (if not its coffers), birthrates plummeted even further. As much as women talk the talk about maternal instinct, fewer than ever are walking the walk: the fastest-growing segments of the female population now have either zero children or one child by age forty. According to demographers, the consequences down the road will be seismic: an aging citizenry unable to sustain itself economically (Social Security is already basically a national Ponzi scheme, some are calculating).

  Though no one exactly says it, women are voting with their ovaries, and the reason is simple. There are too few social supports, especially given the fact that the majority of women are no longer just mothers now, they’re mother-workers. Yet virtually no social policy accounts for this. Interestingly, women with the most education are the ones having the fewest children, though even basic literacy has a negative effect on birthrates in the developing world—the higher the literacy rate, the lower the birthrate. In other words, when women acquire critical skills and start weighing their options, they soon wise up to the fact that they’re not getting enough recompense for their labors. In trade union terms, you’d call it a production slowdown, though in places like Japan the birthrate has fallen so drastically it’s more of a full-fledged strike. Over there it’s prompting national soul-searching, appointed commissions, and even some discussion of a previously unheard-of option: more social welfare spending on mothers and children.

  And what about here? Maintaining the species is something the United States, too, would appear to have a stake in. But until there’s a better social deal for women—not just fathers doing more child care but vastly more social resources directed at the situation, including teams of well-paid professionals on standby (not low-wage-earning women with their own children at home)—birthrates will certainly continue to plummet.

  * * *

  In retrospect, not having children feels to me like having dodged a bullet. I think the lifestyle would have felt too constraining, too routine, though I do sometimes encounter women who seem to manage it with panache. (Usually these are women with the resources for lots of child care.) Still, I confess to feeling an unseemly little pleasure at having eluded nature’s snare, saying “fuck you” to all that, though nature’s going to get us all in the end, obviously. It’s also my little “fuck you” to a society that sentimentalizes children except when it comes to allocating enough resources to raising them, and that would include elevating the 22 percent of children currently living in poverty to a decent standard of living.

  If “maternal instinct” is a synonym for wanting to devote your life to something, or be absorbed in someone other than yourself, then fine. But its having been invented in the first place means there’s no reason such an instinct can’t be invented differently, including in men. Men may not yet be able to biologically bear chi
ldren (though how far off can that day be, or Firestone’s dream of test tube offspring?), but when women no longer have an exclusive relation to such things, no doubt raising children will become a more socially valued enterprise, and everyone will be far happier about the situation.

  But that’s not “natural,” you say? While I’m confessing things, I must further confess that every time I hear someone use the word natural in conjunction with women and maternity, I want to rip them limb from limb. How’s that for “natural”? I’d like to say. That’s how nature likes it—brutal, painful, and capricious. So please shut up about nature already.

  A THOUSAND OTHER THINGS

  by

  Kate Christensen

  I DON’T HAVE KIDS, and I’m very glad I don’t, although there was a time when I wanted them more than anything.

  These days, I live in a nineteenth-century brick house in the gritty, beautiful, easygoing seaside town of Portland, Maine, with my boyfriend of almost six years, Brendan, and our sweet old dog, Dingo. Brendan is thirty-two; I’m almost fifty-two. Despite or maybe because of our age difference, we’re deeply happy and contented in the way of best friends who can’t bear to be apart and yet maintain an inextinguishable spark of mutual attraction.

  This isn’t a life I thought I would ever have, especially ten or fifteen years ago—not even close. Back then, I thought I’d never leave New York; I was embedded in a long-term marriage, and believed that I was past any major upheaval.

  But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that nothing is permanent. Everything can change unexpectedly, and it’s a good idea never to get too complacent. My childhood was marked by change and loss, as was my adolescence; my father abandoned my sisters and me when we were young, and our lives were peripatetic, marked by saying good-bye to people every year or two and starting over in new schools, houses, neighborhoods. My adulthood has followed suit; this seems to be a major theme in my life. Brendan and I are both writers, so our income varies wildly from year to year. Sometimes we’re broke, sometimes flush, usually somewhere in between. We’re glad not to have to worry about supporting anyone but ourselves. We lavish our caretaking energies on each other and Dingo, and that’s all we seem to require.

  Brendan has never wanted kids, and I believe he never will; he knows himself very well. He has no desire to be a father, no interest in having a family. Seeing other people with their kids, no matter how cute they are, only reinforces his knowledge that he doesn’t want them. That I don’t want them either is probably moot by now, since I’m likely too old to conceive. But it’s not over till it’s over. And so we’re careful.

  * * *

  Years ago, when my then husband and I were in our mid-thirties, we’d been married for two years and I felt forty approaching fast. We had weathered our rocky first years together. Our marriage finally felt stable and solid. We’d had a wild, carefree, decadent four years of courtship and early marriage, and now that we were getting older, it felt like time to settle down, or at least it did for me. And on top of it, my best friend and sister were both pregnant.

  Suddenly, I had baby lust: deep, primal, a shockingly animal yearning I’d never experienced before. It was like being on some weird and powerful new drug. I could feel my baby in my arms; a girl, I imagined. I could see myself becoming a mother. I longed for the tectonic shifts motherhood would bring. I fantasized about nursing her, rocking her to sleep, leaping out of bed in the night when she cried. I craved that sense of importance and completion, the passionate focus on something outside myself. All my life, I had assumed I’d have kids, and now it was time: I was ready.

  The fact that my husband didn’t have these feelings at all, didn’t remotely share my excitement about settling down and growing up and changing our lives, came as a further shock. But I wasn’t deterred. Frankly, it felt like my decision to make, unilaterally, as the wife. Didn’t wives always tell their husbands when it was time? Wasn’t that how this was supposed to go? And didn’t husbands give in, reluctantly, then fall madly in love with their children and rise to the role of fathering and never regret a thing?

  My father, for one, hadn’t. After abandoning twin baby girls in Minnesota, moving to California, and marrying my much-younger mother, he’d fathered three more daughters he apparently didn’t want. My mother has conjectured that if one of us had been a boy, this story, and his relationship with us, might have gone differently, but that is moot. He was a negligent, distant, sometimes violent, often heartbreakingly charming father who disappeared forever when we were all still little, along with the child support he’d provided. He’d once told my teenage sister, “When you were little and you’d yell, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ I’d look around to see who that person was. Then I realized it was me. I’ve just never felt like that guy.”

  But I’d married my husband, in part, because I knew he could and would be a good father, even a great one. I’d watched him hold a friend’s baby on our third date, cradling its head, rocking it gently, not missing a beat in his conversation. He was a natural. I thought then, I could marry this man. By which I meant I could have children with this man.

  But the script I’d written in my head went off course. No matter how much I begged and pleaded and raged and wept for more than a year, my husband adamantly refused to have children. He wasn’t ready to give up his youth, all the fun we were having, the freedom to spend all day in his studio and come home late for dinner and be alone with me at night and travel wherever we wanted, to Mexico, New Orleans, Amsterdam.

  He was a musician, photographer, and painter. I was a novelist. I’d finally sold my first novel and was working on my second. But he was struggling to get a show, to market the album his band had produced. Our careers were in different places. I suspect that if they’d been more equal, he might have been willing to have children when I was ready, but again, as with my father, this is all moot.

  A few years later, he finally decided that he was ready to have kids. I was forty by then. I was also no longer happy in the marriage, no longer filled with much optimism about it, in part because of his earlier refusal to have children with me, which had broken my heart irreparably. Along the way, my baby lust had abated along with my lust for my husband, and I now felt somewhat ambivalent about the whole question. Still, I was willing, and he was ready. I had said I wanted a baby—two, actually—and I still trusted the authenticity of my earlier yearning. I also trusted that once I had a baby in my arms, once I was a mother, I would embrace the role and never look back.

  So we started trying. I stopped drinking alcohol, started taking prenatal vitamins. Then my period, which had never been late in my life, was a few days late, then a week, then ten days. My breasts were incredibly, horribly sore. I felt different—puffy, muted, muffled. I scheduled a visit to my gynecologist, and then I bought a pregnancy test from the drugstore. The result was negative, but maybe it was too early.

  My husband, once he realized I might be pregnant, seemed calm, even joyful and excited. He seemed ready to be a father, and I had no doubt about his abilities or commitment. I knew that he would never abandon our child or children. I knew that he would do everything in his power to make sure they were loved, safe, fed, educated, taken care of. He would be the devoted father I hadn’t had. I had done that, at least, for my baby.

  But what kind of mother was this kid getting?

  As I later realized, I was at the beginning of what turned out to be a sort of protracted nervous breakdown that lasted into my mid-forties, until just after I left my husband and moved out of our house. Before this pregnancy, or whatever it was, I had been suffering from out-of-control, despairing crying jags during which I could hardly get out of bed, alternating with manic episodes that involved inappropriate flirting, heavy drinking, and staying up all night, playing online Scrabble and obsessing about aging, mortality, and death.

  The irony of having a new life inside me during this episode was not lost on me.

  My mother, too, had experienced a long breakd
own in her forties. I knew that being a mother had in no way made this easier for her. In fact, because of it, she’d been unable to provide her adolescent daughters the strong-minded guidance and nurturing attention she’d wanted to give us. She couldn’t escape the storms raging in her own skull any more than I was now able to escape mine. I worried that if I had a baby, I’d inflict this on her. I would be a good mother in every way I could, but I’d also be a very troubled one.

  I’d heard other women exult about the magic of being pregnant, the glow of it, the joy and anticipation. I’d expected a sense of completion, fulfillment, the romantic thrill of doing what my body was designed and meant to do. I felt some of that in bursts, but my ambivalence continued unabated. I also felt terrified, displaced. I went around all day with gingerly trepidation, nervous and baffled and neurotic, trying not to inhale truck exhaust, jonesing for a glass of wine, feeling my normally robust sexuality withering into bodily caution, anxiousness about my ability to properly house this interloper for whom I would have done anything, killed anyone, to shield from harm. I was, it seemed, biologically programmed to feel this way. I had no choice.

  At night, I lay awake, trying not to feel trapped, invaded, hijacked by this thing inside me, this rapidly growing person who was simultaneously independent of me, entitled to me, wholly dependent on me, and part of me. My body, which all my life had been my own, inhabited solely by me, free to do whatever it wanted, now felt entirely given over to the task of growing this stranger. All of my choices about what I put into it and what I did with it were made wholly with this other person in mind, no longer myself. Sometimes I was excited. Other times, I was freaked-out. But even as I vacillated, I accepted all of this as a permanent change. I’d never be wholly autonomous again. That’s what motherhood was, in a nutshell.