by Meghan Daum
* * *
As with overcoming my childhood abuse, choosing not to become a parent means that I’ve had to redefine my concept of family. I consider my family to be a cobbled-together group of friends and people I’m related to, all defined by the fact that I can count on them. My grandmother is my family and so is my older brother; my husband is my family for sure, and through him I’ve been able to count his mother, father, and brother among my family. My best friends are my family—Alexis, whom I’ve known since sixth-grade science with Mr. Waleski; Sarah, whom I met through blogging when we were aimless twentysomethings; and Sandra, whom I met at a concert in New York City when I was twenty-two and who immediately felt like a missing link to happiness.
I am the person responsible for my grandmother’s well-being; I manage her medical bills, arrange all her monthly payments, call to check in with her doctor about his plan for her to manage her diabetes, and fix her iPad when she wants to upgrade her games. She lives across the country in New York and I am in Seattle, but I’m the one caring for her—not my mother. As I watch her age, I want to shield her against anything that makes her feel scared or unmoored, and I can’t help but wonder who will do the same for me. Though I’ve often said I’m not afraid to get old without the built-in support system most people find in their children because I’ve created my own chosen support system, the truth is that I won’t know for sure until I get there. What I do know is that I have nieces and nephews whom I’m proud to see growing into interesting, thoughtful people. I have friends whose children I adore—even children I haven’t met yet. As I write this essay, three of my closest friends are pregnant after years of uncertainty as to whether they even wanted to have kids. I call all these buns-in-ovens “Porkchop,” and I look forward to passing along my own wisdom and being part of their lives.
Those who hear my story might be tempted to assume that my desire to be childless is rooted in loss—the loss of my mother’s protection and loyalty, the loss of faith in family, the loss of childhood itself. But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate. It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify. But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole on my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory. It’s a victory I celebrate every day.
Every day, I try to be my own parent—the parent I never had. Every day, I learn new ways to treat myself with compassion and patience. I’ve made a life that centers around writing and that gives me freedom to travel and to construct my day around my moods and thoughts. Yoga helps me alleviate stress and get out of my head a bit. A couple times a week, I like to sit and have coffee with my neighbors on the back porch. We catch up on each other’s lives and talk about the world, or our place in this city we love so much. My husband and I spend a lot of time together, reading or going out to eat or just talking about the dreams and goals we have for the future, like buying and renovating a house, adopting a dog, or retiring in Paris. My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it’s enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.
THE TROUBLE WITH HAVING IT ALL
by
Pam Houston
TWO HOURS AFTER President Barack Obama was reelected, I sat on the top floor of the SFO parking lot in the pouring rain listening to his acceptance speech and bawling my eyes out. I had a ticket on the red-eye to Houston, connecting to Indianapolis, where I had a three-day engagement, reading to, teaching, and getting to know the creative writing students at Butler University. It was just under an hour till flight time, but I was going to sit in that car until the president finished speaking even if it meant I missed my plane. He finished, and I made a run for the terminal, still crying. It was all I could do not to hug the six other people in the security line, as well as all the TSA employees.
What I felt most strongly that night was relief. Relief that the attempts to keep African Americans away from the polls had ultimately not been successful. Relief that people weren’t, in the end, quite as stupid as Karl Rove gave them credit for. Relief that in 2012 in the United States of America it was still true that no amount of money could buy an election. Relief, above all, that the people who spent the 2012 presidential campaign waging a war on women and their various freedoms had—at least in this round—lost again.
At Butler University the students were smart, engaged, and engaging. At dinner, the young women did all the talking, mapping out their lives and expressing their hearts’ desires, while the young men sat quietly, some combination of shy and polite, paying close attention to the women as if they might have something to learn. In honor of the election results, one young woman—the liveliest at the table, and the funniest—was wearing all red, white, and blue, and by that I mean that nearly every piece of clothing and jewelry she had on was all three colors. She even had all three colors of fingernail polish on every fingernail, and each nail was appliquéd with a tiny American flag.
Every woman at the table had big dreams about her career; most also intended to have children, but not for a while, not until they had written novels and won Pulitzer Prizes and visited fifty or sixty countries and learned how to surf. “I want to have it all” was an expression that flew around the table, and it was clear that these women had every intention of doing so.
One of the quieter women spoke with admiration about her sister who lived in New York, making a quarter of a million dollars a year at Lehman Brothers while raising two children under five. The sister managed, even with her sixty-hour workweek, to post to her home blog every night about the cookies she had found the time to bake for the kids or the handmade yak-wool couch covers she had ordered from a Kiva start-up in Tibet.
“My fiancé wants to start trying for kids right after graduation,” said another woman, glancing down at the chip of diamond on her left hand.
Two kids was the agreed-upon hoped-for number around the table, except for one woman who wanted “at least three,” and another who was an only child and enjoyed the special treatment that had afforded her.
I noticed Ms. Red White and Blue had fallen a little silent when the talk turned to children. “And you?” I said, to reengage her, missing the way her big laugh had become the timpani completing the symphony of female voices at the table. “Where do you stand on children?”
She raised one eyebrow a full inch above the level of the other and said, “Not if hell froze over and hair grew out of the palm of my hand.”
Our eyes locked for a minute and I felt the corners of my mouth rise involuntarily.
“I used to feel that way,” said the soft-spoken woman, “but my sister says having a baby is the only way a woman will ever stop being all about herself.”
“The worst thing of all,” said the only child, “would be not to do it, and then realize you had totally missed out.”
“I don’t know,” said Ms. Red White and Blue, not aggressively. “I’m pretty sure that having it all might not be. I think maybe having it all is chopping yourself into too many little pieces, taking care of everybody’s needs except your own.”
The other girls leapt to reassure her, “Oh, you’ll feel differently when you get older. Sometime around thirty your hormones will kick in.” They said this with great authority, as if they weren’t all nineteen themselves.
“They won’t,” she said, without a hint of rancor, and I believed her, because take away thirty years and the American flag nail appliqués and Ms. Red White and Blue was me.
* * *
I am fifty-two years old, a writer, a teacher, and a traveler in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning I have been to seventy countries and I don’t really feel I can claim a destination until I’ve gotten lost, gotten arrested, or thrown up. I got my first period the same month the Supreme Court ratified Roe v. Wade, and p
erhaps it was therefore my destiny not to have children.
I never wanted a child—that much was clear—and yet I had lots of friends who said they didn’t want them but then all of a sudden had them, which here in the first world, post Roe v. Wade, must mean that I didn’t want them even more than my friends didn’t.
The closest I ever came to wanting a child was while writing an article more than a decade ago questioning my own adamancy on the subject in response to all the people—many but not all of them strangers—who told me, uninvited, that I was in some kind of denial. But by the time I finished the article, I was pretty sure I wasn’t. Ten years later I’m even more sure. Or at least confident that if I am in denial, I am never going to know. These same people always told me that I would make a great mother, even if they had only known me for five minutes. For all they knew (as we like to say around my house in response to uninformed assumptions), I could have been fucking the dog.
* * *
It wasn’t all that long ago that we thought Mitt Romney had a decent chance of being elected president, and it seemed clear that at least one of his missions in that role would be to overturn Roe v. Wade. A lot of crazy things were said during that election year, but perhaps none of them crazier than when Representative Todd Akin said that if a woman experienced a “legitimate” rape, she wouldn’t get pregnant because the female body has ways of “shutting that whole thing down.” It is hard to enumerate all the ways Akin’s suggestion is insidious, but let’s try. First, his comment blows right past the usual accusation that women “ask” to be raped by their provocative clothing and behavior and moves on to suggest that any rape victim who didn’t take nefarious pleasure in the actual procedure could avoid abortion altogether by employing her witchy womanly ways to terminate the resulting pregnancy. Abortion would become unnecessary, except perhaps in the case of a very weak woman whose secret powers were not cutting the mustard, inversely proving, in Todd Akin logic, that she had not been “legitimately” raped. And what, one shudders to ask, does that mean, precisely? Is it “illegitimate” rape if you wore fishnet stockings to the bar? Is it illegitimate rape if your car broke down in a shitty part of town? How about if it’s all in the family? Does Uncle Charlie get one free go at the twins at the New Year’s Eve party? Is it illegitimate rape if the rapist is your dad?
* * *
In the 1970s and ’80s it had not yet become critically unfashionable for writers to be concerned about the environment. We didn’t even know about global warming, and yet the average citizen—at least in the circles I ran in—felt considerably more pressure to reduce the impact she was making on the planet’s ecology than she seems to feel today. A woman could say she didn’t want to have children because she didn’t want to contribute to the overpopulation of the earth—that already teeming planet—and while some people may not have believed her, it was an acceptable, even admirable, way for her to take a pass. My friend the writer Terry Tempest Williams made such a claim at the time, which caused a stir, for obvious reasons, in the Mormon community from which she originates. I looked up to Terry—I still do—and loved the natural world with a similar passion. I wanted nothing to do with diapers made out of petroleum products, wanted to take no responsibility for one more dream home being built on wild land.
I have a photo of Terry and me at the Salt Lake City Book Festival in 1992 where, between us, we don’t look drinking age. We are sitting at a table behind stacks of the newly released Cowboys Are My Weakness and Coyote’s Canyon, and behind our eyes I see nothing but excitement and wildness and delight. We are living the lives our mothers’ generation couldn’t even imagine, and we know it. We are architects of our own destiny. We are free.
The feminism of a few decades ago was far less full of booby traps for the woman who wanted to claim it as a stance than it is in today’s superspecialized jargon-laden academicized version. It was far less likely to strike itself to death over semantics like an overagitated snake. Nineteen seventies feminism declared its ideals in simple sentences one could either agree with or not: A woman had the right to be an artist. A woman had the right to run for office. A woman had the right to attend—for instance—Dartmouth College. A woman had the right not to make babies. A woman had the right not to be a wife.
My women’s studies teacher at Denison University in 1980 wore IUDs as earrings. I had such a giant crush on her it can still make me blush. Nan Nowik was tall and elegant and upright in her feminism. In her class we read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Sula, Love Medicine, The Bluest Eye. She accused us daily—no doubt justifiably—of being slaves to the dominant paradigm, by which she meant, of course, the Patriarchy. She was strange, and she wanted to know in what ways we were strange, and in the super-prepped-out frat-party world of Denison in those days, she was a lifeline. Nan Nowik didn’t once tell us that having it all meant we would win the National Book Award and then give birth to 2.3 babies. Nan Nowik would have found the idea of a blog about baking cookies absurd.
* * *
These days it is widely assumed that a woman who doesn’t want to have children is reacting—perhaps overreacting—to damage that was done to her in her childhood. I can’t refute this claim with any certainty, because the usual trifecta of abuse (alcohol, sexual, physical) did indeed define my own. And yet I become, as I age, less and less convinced that is the whole story. In the first place, thirty years of teaching creative writing has proven to me that my childhood story is as common as a two-car garage. In the second place, I’ve been working my whole life to heal those old wounds and, frankly, I don’t feel that damaged anymore.
Try this on. What if I didn’t want to have babies because I loved my job too much to compromise it, or because serious travel makes me feel in relation to the world in an utterly essential way? What if I’ve always liked the looks of my own life much better than those of the ones I saw around me? What if, given the option, I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies? What if I simply like dogs a whole lot better than babies? What if I have become sure that personal freedom is the thing I hold most dear?
Some of my closest friends love being mothers, live, to a certain extent, to be mothers. It has been the single most challenging and rewarding endeavor of their lives. Others of my friends don’t like it that much, thought they would like it better than they do, are counting the days till the last kid goes off to college so they can turn their attention to their own dreams. A few friends pretend to love it, but everyone within twelve square miles can hear them grinding their teeth. Still others pretend motherhood is the world’s biggest hassle and yet you can tell they love it deep down. And then there are my childless friends, who fit right into corresponding categories: the ones who love childlessness, the ones who regret it, and the ones who pretend to be in the opposite camp from the one they’re in. A childless friend recently said to me, “I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”
It seems unreasonable, not to mention sexist, to suggest that because all women have the biological capacity to have children, they all should; and that those who don’t are either in denial or psychologically damaged. My score on the LSAT indicates that I have the mental capacity to be a lawyer, but I have not gotten one single letter from a stranger or anyone else telling me that I would make a really great lawyer, that the fact that I am not a lawyer must be related to some deep-seated childhood trauma, that if I would only straighten up and become a lawyer, I could pay off some unspecified debt to the world.
* * *
There are quite a few actualities of contemporary American life that despite all the time I’ve had to get used to them still stagger my imagination. It staggers my imagination that so many people who are struggling physically and financially are so resistant to the policies that would provide them with affordable health care. It staggers my imagination
that an angry teenager can walk into a store and buy a weapon that will fire a hundred rounds of ammunition without reloading, but I can’t take my 3.2-ounce bottle of Aveda shampoo on board an airplane embarking on a forty-minute commuter flight. And it staggers my imagination that any woman will vote for a politician who has been up front about wanting to control what does and doesn’t happen inside her womb.
In the years since the Roe v. Wade ruling, conservative lawmakers in many states have whittled away at it, adding laws about waiting periods, mandatory counseling, parental consent, and, bizarrely, in Indiana, the size of the hall and the doorway through which morning-after pills are distributed. At the time of this writing, six states—Utah, Virginia, Ohio, Louisiana, Missouri, and my state, Colorado—have “trigger” laws on the subject of abortion, meaning that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion would become illegal in that state effective immediately. Twenty-three additional states have trigger laws on late-term abortion. Pro-choice activists believe it is only a matter of time before a state writes a bill that effectively dodges the language of Roe v. Wade. In 2012, NARAL estimated that if Mitt Romney were elected president, seventeen states would ban abortion within the year.
There are many controversial issues in contemporary American politics where, in spite of my strong feelings, I have the ability to understand and respect the other side. But the notion that we could ever pretend women have real equality in this country when a man as uninformed about basic reproductive gynecology as Mr. Todd Akin could take away my right to decide whether I want to spend a minimum of eighteen years and an average of $235,000 raising a child—not to mention the significant cost to my own dreams and goals or the myriad ways my child might ultimately suffer for my having been denied the ability to make that choice, the ways so many children suffer every day at the hands of their frustrated, stultified mothers—is an absurdity.