Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  I did get pregnant later. I was nineteen, and in love, and having the sort of constant, frenzied, and, yes, unprotected sex that many of those in the midst of early adulthood know not to engage in but engage in anyway. (I would become pregnant twice more, once when I was twenty-four, and again when I was twenty-seven.) The first termination took place at a Planned Parenthood in downtown Sacramento, California, and I was terrified but resolute: there had never been any doubt in my mind as to whether I would go through with the pregnancy, and little concern as to whether I might later regret the removal of the mass of cells embedded in the walls of my uterus. I didn’t, and I didn’t regret the next abortion, or the next one, although I did marvel, in later years, at the fact that had I taken these pregnancies to term, I would, at thirty-five years of age, be a mother to, respectively, a sixteen-year-old, a ten-year-old, and an eight-year-old. I found the idea amusing—and utterly, completely terrifying.

  That terror, that utter horror, had very little to do with my feelings about children and everything to do with my feelings about myself, namely, my hunger to do things, and meet people, and carve out a special space in the world in which I could find my authentic self, whatever that came to mean. Motherhood had never been of particular fascination for me—my one and only youthful foray into performative parenting involved a Baby Wet & Care, a doll manufactured by Kenner that was designed to break out in a diaper rash after being “fed” a bottle of water and wetting a diaper. In fact, from the time I was a young girl until well into my thirties, I did not fantasize about having babies, or find others’ babies of much, if any, interest. (My own baby sister, born when I was four, was met, I am told, with a warmth and affection one notch below my reverence for things like Sesame Street and illustrated children’s encyclopedias. But maybe that’s the way it is for every kid with a new sibling. Regardless, I love her very much.)

  Part of this was, no doubt, a function of the era—the 1980s—in which I was raised, a time when the birthrate of the United States was in the midst of a lull that had begun back in the mid-’70s economic recession. And though the country’s conservatism was reflected, to some degree, in its popular culture, which still relied on depictions of functional, conventional, nuclear families in order to sell time to advertisers, the female heads of households in those narratives—Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Elyse Keaton on Family Ties, the eponymous heroines of Kate & Allie, to name some television examples—were more than just moms: they were also, for the most part, career women. (Allie stayed home and took care of housekeeping and the kids until the show’s fifth season, when she and Kate started a catering service.) As such, their fealty to their kids was profound but not prohibitive: one got the sense that they did not locate their successes, and certainly not their senses of self, within the comings and goings of the minors under their care. In fact, sometimes children of ’80s-era television women were so ancillary to their mothers’ identities as to be almost beside the point: after the high-powered Murphy Brown decided to go it alone and give birth to a baby she would raise as a single mom, her son all but disappeared from the series writers’ radar.

  * * *

  Mothers who are able to successfully combine work and family are all around me, yet the compatibility of career and kids remains a concept I understand intellectually but seem emotionally unable to accept. And so when I tell people—usually female friends—that, at age forty-one, I “don’t know” if I want children or still feel that I’m “not ready,” what I’m really saying is that I don’t believe I can do the things I want to do in life and also be a parent to kids, nor am I willing to find out. Fueling this tension is a deep and paralyzing fear, a fear that, again, is not so much about children but about my own latent caretaking instincts. I suspect I would be a good mother—a fantastic mother, even—thanks to the gifts bestowed upon me by my own parents: the ability to give and express love, the indulgence of curiosity, and the prioritizing of imagination, education, and personal integrity over societally approved successes like financial or social achievement. (I take an inordinate amount of pride in my own emotional intelligence, but that particular gift has little to do with my parents and almost everything to do with the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on psychotherapy over the past twenty years.) But 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.

  My therapist would describe this as magical thinking—and she might be right. But the example set by my own mother is one that informs much about my decision to not have kids, and her story fills me with both pride and guilt. A skinny, curious Midwestern girl who escaped her insular, tiny Ohio town and headed east to New York City, where she earned the first of two graduate degrees, worked in social justice, and traveled the world, my mother found herself, a decade and a half later, trapped in a wholly unremarkable suburb ten miles west of Sacramento, California, teaching typing skills to snotty thirteen-year-olds and supporting two grumpy daughters desperate to be left alone in their rooms except for occasional shopping trips to Macy’s in search of Guess? jeans.

  Is this the life she imagined for herself? My mother would no doubt take issue with what I’ve just written. She would flinch at the idea that her two children are anything but beautiful blessings, beings made from love between her and my adoring father, conduits through which she was able to channel all of her love, and to experience and further indulge her curiosity and wonder at the world. (Not to mention her politics.) She would deny that she lost something of herself in motherhood, and, though she might concede to having felt the occasional bout of frustration, and maybe even acknowledge a relationship between child rearing and ambitions left unfulfilled, she would maintain that she had never communicated this to her children with any specificity. She’d be right; she did not. But my sister and I did not need to hear our mother acknowledge how much parenting—much of it single parenting—limited her life; we saw it every day. We understood that by devoting her life to us, she was, in some ways, giving up herself. (As for my dad, well, let’s be clear: this neglect of self in the service of children, while not wholly specific to women, is at the very least highly specific to them. Women have long been responsible for a disproportionate amount of the child care.)

  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. (Those who inquire after my plans for parenthood often interpret my childlessness as a function of my dislike for kids, when, again, nothing could be further from the truth: the barrenness of my womb 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.

  Times have changed, of course, and men are shouldering more of the responsibilities of parenting—and tethering themselves to the Snuglis and BabyBjörns—but the demands on and expectations of women, at least in the highly educated and relatively affluent milieu I inhabit, have not so much disappeared as shifted to other things, namely, a set of insidious though by no means unprecedented expectations for the maintenance of outward appearances. (The term MILF, which, for the uninitiated, is an acronym for the phrase “Mother I’d Like to Fuck,” only gained widespread popularity some fifteen years ago.)

  Nowhere are these hoary ideas about womanhood—this performance of perfect femininity—more routinely on display than on the streets of the South Brooklyn neighborhood that I inhabit, which is lined with low-cal frozen yogurt shops
and yoga and Pilates studios and overpriced boutiques filled with one-of-a-kind maternity clothes and hundred-dollar sets of receiving blankets made of “all organic cotton.” One recent Mother’s Day, on my way to meet two friends for an early dinner of pizza and beer, I walked by an apparel shop displaying a sandwich board exhorting (presumably unintentionally childless) female passersby who felt sad about the holiday to come in and buy a dress that would get them “knocked up in no time.” Add to that the creeping commodification of childhood in the form of must-have status symbols—baby carriages, sleeper clothing—and the economic inequalities and educational failures that find parents signing up their toddlers for placement in private elementary schools years in advance and you’ve got yet another reason for some of the aversion I have for the demands of modern American parenthood.

  In the end, maybe my ambivalence about motherhood comes down to the fact that I just don’t trust myself enough. (Or that I need to move somewhere far, far away from New York, where kids can play safely in the dirt, and grocery store aisles are blessedly free of four-dollar single-serve pouches of sweet-potato-and-pear puree made from organic vegetables gathered by exoticized indigenous populations living south of the U.S. border.) But I believe that there is something else going on here, a societal discomfort not just with women who choose to remain childless but with those who decide to become mothers and dare to confess to feelings of frustration and exasperation over the choices they have made. In the spring of 2014, just five months after becoming the first lady of New York City, Chirlane McCray was excoriated by the city’s tabloid newspapers for having the gall to suggest in an interview that the arrival of her first child, Chiara, was celebrated with anything but complete and utter devotion. “I was forty years old; I had a life,” Ms. McCray told New York magazine. “But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it … I’ve been working since I was fourteen, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.” (The editors of The New York Post interpreted these comments to mean that Ms. McCray was a “bad mom” and said as much, in huge type, on the cover of their paper’s May 19 edition.)

  * * *

  What McCray left unsaid, but what I suspect she was also getting at, is that it often takes a long time for women to “get into” taking care of themselves, and that her need for autonomy was as much about basking in her hard-won self-actualization as it was a reaction to the exhaustion that comes with tending to a child’s every need. These days, 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.) Despite (or because of) my single status right now, becoming a mother would feel like a devolution as much as an evolution, and 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.

  AMATEURS

  by

  Michelle Huneven

  I WENT TO a fortune-teller when I was twenty-five. Her house was on a busy street, its shingled siding painted a strange marigold orange, the trim a clashing bright red and blue. A banner advertised, “Special: $5.”

  The fortune-teller, a pale, sharp-eyed woman in her forties with wild crow-black hair, ran her operation in a dark front room crowded with furniture. Lamp shades were draped with red and purple scarves. A milky cantaloupe-size crystal ball rested on a stand in the middle of a round oak table, but the fortune-teller made no move toward it—clearly the befogged ball was not for bargain shoppers. She had me sit at the table beside her, and she took my right hand. Turning my wrist, smoothing back my fingers, she studied my palm.

  “You might as well get used to being poor,” she said. “Money is coming, but it’s a long way off.”

  Also, she said, I would contend with a disease, serious but not necessarily life-threatening.

  And I would have one child.

  I wondered then and afterward about the fortune-teller’s cosmic source: When did that font of future knowledge believe that life began? At conception? Or upon the first intake of breath? Had my one chance at motherhood already come and gone?

  I had broken up with my last boyfriend some months before. An agoraphobic actor who lived week to week in a fleabag hotel, he’d already faded from my thoughts. So I was stunned when, during a routine pelvic exam, the doctor palpated my uterus and announced that I was pregnant. Quite pregnant, actually. Close to three months pregnant, the doctor said, which meant that a regrettable instance of breakup sex had caused this. If I wanted to terminate the pregnancy without going into labor, the doctor went on, I should do so within the next few days. I made an appointment for Monday and took the weekend to think it over.

  I was living in Pasadena in a funky apartment complex filled with old high school friends. When I left the doctor’s office, that’s where I went.

  My best friend said, “Don’t get an abortion—you’ll wreck your karma!”

  I worried about my karma, but I had no partner (and I certainly couldn’t be tied to the last one) and no money. I was working part-time in a coffee shop while trying to write. Our lovely low-rent apartment complex didn’t allow children. And even if it had, and even if I had been flush and happily mated, I didn’t feel ready or remotely capable of raising a child. Children seemed as far off as false teeth, and interested me about as much. In fact, kids aroused my impatience and jealousy, especially when their parents fussed over them or, worse, stopped everything to reason with them. I’d grown up without that kind of attention, and I begrudged it to others, even babies.

  That Monday, I wrecked my karma.

  It was a few weeks after that when I sat with the fortune-teller, palm upturned, and wondered if I still had one child in my future, or if, along with my karma, I’d blown my one chance. I was in no hurry to find out. If motherhood was in the cards, it was still far, far off.

  First comes love. And love is what I craved. A great, transformational love. Love that would fill the nauseating pitch-black void lodged somewhere behind my sternum.

  My late twenties and early thirties were spent in a series of time-consuming, life-swallowing love affairs. A great deal of drinking was also involved. I’d discovered alcohol’s magical properties in high school: here, at last, was a way to feel at home in the world. Alcohol instantly removed my psychic pain. I drank daily (but not, initially, to excess) from age eighteen on.

  Meanwhile, my friends got married. They married each other, or friends of friends, or someone they met at work or at a party. Nobody was making the great love match of the century. Nor was anybody in a great hurry to have children. Birth control had been a big game changer in that regard; we boomers could put off having children. And we all did.

  But then, in our thirties, a shift. By the late eighties, babies began to arrive.

  One friend said that buying a house made her want to fill the rooms.

  Another friend was so in love with her much-older husband, she had to have his babies.

  Two friends had difficulty conceiving. After years of frustration and heartbreak, they both tried IVF; one couple produced a baby, the other couple ended up adopting the daughter of a fifteen-year-old from Bakersfield.

  Still-single friends longing for children lowered their standards for mates; one took on the town drunk, rehabilitating him long enough for him to marry and impregnate her.

  Another friend, at forty-one, seduced a twenty-year-old box boy at the local supermarket, and raised their beautiful son as a single mom.

  I waited to feel what my friends did. Or an inkl
ing thereof.

  I attended the baby showers and loathed the fussy luncheons, the cringeworthy games (condoms unscrolled on bananas, dimes held between knees), and especially the tedious ceremonial unwrapping and passing around of presents, the tiny onesies, hand-knit blankies, baby-food grinders.

  Dutifully, I showed up at the hospitals to meet the new humans. I kissed their hot snuffling faces, gathered them, all bundled in flannel and terry cloth, into my arms; holding them made me deliciously sleepy and relaxed. But it didn’t make me want one of my own.

  “You should have a baby,” a friend reported the day after giving birth, “if only to feel the great tidal wave of love that crashes through you.”

  I didn’t want to feel such love for someone else. I still wanted to be the object of that tidal wave.

  I knew better than to voice this, of course. Ashamed of such a selfish, infantile craving, I kept it secret. But I knew that so long as I begrudged a child love and attention, I would never be a good parent, and it was wise not to become one.