by Meghan Daum
In 1996, when the first wave of baby boomers turned fifty, I recounted the testimonies of some of my childless subjects for an op-ed in The New York Times and reported that none of those who had made a conscious choice was grief-stricken by reaching the end of the line; in fact, they expressed satisfaction with their decision and its consequences. In 2014, the last cohort of that generation—my generation—reached fifty. I have every hope that the intentionally childless among them will be just as much at peace with the path they took.
Nonmotherhood is forever. Making a conscious choice about something so fundamental, and so intertwined with one’s own past, with society’s expectations, and with notions of femininity and the purpose of life, takes every ounce of will you have; going against the grain always does. After the childbearing years pass, unless you opt to adopt or use a surrogate, you cannot reconsider. How did this critical decision, which of necessity I made intuitively, affect my destiny and sense of self? How, now that I am sixty-seven, does it continue to reverberate?
Revisiting the issue after a quarter century, I am relieved and delighted to report that I have never seriously questioned that the life I chose was right for me. In the five years it took me to come to my conclusion, I endured intense anxiety, self-doubt, sorrow, and a great deal of ambivalence about my future. But I realized in retrospect that most of that time was actually spent recognizing and accepting what I had already implicitly decided. The turning point came when, after seeing that I had run out of excuses and still wasn’t enthusiastic about pregnancy or motherhood, I finally said to myself, “I don’t really want to have a baby; I want to want to have a baby.” I longed to feel like everybody else, but I had to face the fact that I did not. This meant that I had to work through the implications of being radically different from most other women in a fundamental way, that my requirements for happiness and fulfillment actually precluded the things they found crucial. I tried to confront every feeling I had, no matter how excruciating. Taking this route to self-fulfillment required that I pay attention to what I really felt, as opposed to what I was supposed to feel, or wished I did. Only then could I grieve for the lost possibilities that lay in all I was ruling out; grieving for the road not taken is a healthy thing to do. That has served me well.
I was also extremely lucky to have a husband who backed me up. He could have gone either way about having a family, but felt, realistically, that since motherhood was more all-encompassing than fatherhood, it ultimately had to be my decision. He made it clear that sharing his life with me was what mattered most to him. His attitude was one of the reasons I love him as I do. As a result, we have enjoyed a rare intellectual and emotional intimacy for the thirty-five years we have been married.
In the ensuing years, I have accepted that I might actually have made a better, or a happier or wiser, mother than I feared I would be. But I could not have predicted how much the things I merely suspected I needed turned out to be, in fact, exactly what I needed: freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted (traveling the world, sleeping until noon, or going out to dinner or the movies at midnight on occasion); to concentrate on my relationship with my husband; to give myself completely to the dual careers of psychotherapy and writing. I realized that my initial instincts were right; I didn’t want to be torn between my needs and those of another, particularly someone I had brought into the world. Trivial as it may sound, I’m thrilled I never had to set foot in Disneyland (or feel guilty about not taking someone there), or worry about playdates or, down the road, online pornography and all the other scourges of adolescence. I don’t miss any of it. Neither do I feel selfish or “barren,” as childless women used to be called (it is telling that there is no parallel term for childless men). Thanks to that conscious decision I made in early middle age, I can respond undefensively to the universal conversational gambit from strangers, “How many children do you have?,” that embarrasses many childless women. “None,” I say with a smile. “Motherhood was not for me.”
The decision process itself has influenced me both personally and professionally in ways I couldn’t have imagined, in ways beyond the issue of whether or not to become a mother. It led me to a stance I call the “Affirmative No.” I define this stance as the refusal to pursue a course of action that, on serious reflection, you discover is not right for you.
Asserting an Affirmative No means rejecting attitudes and courses of action (for example, always forgiving wrongs, or reflexively following doctors’ orders) that most people treat as gospel. It also often means saying yes to points of view that may be unpopular but are in fact authentically in line with your own thoughts and feelings. Such conclusions are reached only through relentless self-awareness. Any decision made in this way is not an act of rebellion; it is an act of willed self-assertion, of standing your ground on your own behalf.
Refusing to act against your sound inclination is a profound action, not simply a reaction to something external. And to claim the benefits that come from advocating for the person you truly are as opposed to the one you think you’re supposed to be, you must face your own reality no matter how it feels or what its implications may be.
The Affirmative No is the basis of authentic individualism. It has become the foundation of my philosophy of life and the cornerstone of my work with patients. It has inspired me to articulate the against-the-grain positions on the “taboo topics” that I have championed in all five of my books; it has also helped me preserve my identity through two serious illnesses. Beyond Motherhood paved the way.
So how does a woman who has chosen not to have children relate to a world that is full of them? I will probably never be as important to anybody—even my patients—as every mother is to her offspring. I gave up precious experiences and relationships so that I could have others that I needed even more. But I have found my own ways to be important to the next generation. Some women who made the same choice I did delight in being aunts to their siblings’ children, or special adults in the lives of their friends’ children, neither of which I have had the opportunity to do, but such roles might have suited me. In general, though, I have never been comfortable around young children, with the exception of a memorable seven-year-old girl whom I connected with when I worked in a children’s psychiatric hospital in college. To be a model, mentor, and teacher of younger people in my field is a source of gratification for me. I especially enjoy working in therapy with young women, helping to set them up for a life of self-awareness and self-expression. I am glad that being childless has not prevented me from helping many women make decisions—in both directions—about motherhood, or from empathizing with mothers. I love the children of my patients from afar, and I feel deep satisfaction that I can give their parents good counsel about how to understand them.
* * *
When I reread my teenage diaries recently in preparation for a book project, I came upon a startling fact: I actually had begun to consider a voluntarily childless life in 1963, at age sixteen, when I wrote, “I’ve decided to live my life disproving that women’s only creativity is bearing children.” I didn’t remember writing this, but my prophecy came true. I knew even then, well before I had to confront it. I just didn’t remember that I knew.
When Beyond Motherhood was published, I was worried that my mother, whom I identified with in most other ways, would feel spurned and repudiated by the book that proclaimed my decision, and analyzed her role in it. Instead she was overjoyed. She had always, it turned out, wanted me to be a writer more than she wanted me to be a mother, and her pride was boundless. As much as I’d always felt she had oppressed me with her own needs, I realized then that she’d done even more to encourage my independence of mind. The book is dedicated to her.
* * *
How has the landscape changed for women who are childless by choice in the quarter century since I joined their ranks? Their numbers have increased—the percentage of women who opted out of maternity hovered around 10 percent of women of childbearing age when I wrote abo
ut it; now the number is rising, and they are more honest, more outspoken, and less apologetic and defensive—at least publicly. But I don’t imagine human nature has changed dramatically; private anguish persists, as I discover from patients who come to me to help resolve their motherhood dilemmas. Most of them have discussed it with nobody and are plagued by the same distress and unanswered questions I remember so vividly. If you haven’t rejected the possibility in advance, or embraced it automatically, you have to do the hard work of figuring out where you stand, and why. It is never easy.
Some things are definitely different—for both good and ill. In August 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story on the topic of deliberate childlessness, a first for them. The title was “The Childfree Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children,” and it was illustrated with a photograph of a glamorous, sexy, smiling (heterosexual) couple in bathing suits lying on the sand, unencumbered. I was glad that the subject was finally getting attention. Back in 1996, an editor at Time, who was childless by choice herself, interviewed me about Beyond Motherhood. But her supervising editor killed the story because he apparently could not accept my depiction of nonmothers as fruitful and feminine. He believed no woman could, or should, feel good about such a life. To my recollection, the magazine didn’t cover the phenomenon again until 2013.
But while I was pleased to see the story, I was perturbed by the message, and by upbeat catchphrases like “having it all” and “childfree,” which seemed to imply that denying a loss makes it disappear, or that acknowledging it means one feels incomplete. “These women,” the author cheerfully asserted, “are inventing a new female archetype, one for whom having it all doesn’t mean having a baby.”
The problem is that there is nobody alive who is not lacking anything—no mother, no nonmother, no man. The perfect life does not and never will exist, and to assert otherwise perpetuates a pernicious fantasy: that it’s possible to live without regrets. There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.
A thoughtful mother I know, who put her law career on hiatus to raise two sons, captured that truth in a note she sent me after she read my book: “I think of you often—your travels to exotic countries, your professional pursuits: in short, your adult life. Suburban motherhood is wonderful in many respects; there are moments so golden that they take my breath away. This is, however, also an extremely circumscribed existence. Not surprisingly, part of me craves your life.”
Real self-acceptance, real liberation, involves acknowledging limitations, not grandiosely denying them. It is true, and should be recognized, that women can be fulfilled with or without children, that you can most definitely have enough without having everything. How fortunate we are to live in an era when we can make deeply considered choices about which life suits us, and that now the world looks slightly less askance if we go against the flow. Making the less common choice has its gratifications but also its drawbacks. Having enough—and having the right stuff for us—is all we can get, and all we need. For me, what I hoped in 1989 that I could achieve has come to fruition: my womb has always been empty, but my life is full.
OVER AND OUT
by
Geoff Dyer
I’VE HAD ONLY two ambitions in life: to put on weight (it’s not going to happen) and never to have children (which, so far, I’ve achieved). It’s not just that I’ve never wanted to have children. I’ve always wanted to not have them. Actually, even that doesn’t go far enough. In a park, looking at smiling mothers and fathers strolling along with their adorable toddlers, I react like the pope confronted with a couple of gay men walking hand in hand: Where does it come from, this unnatural desire (to have children)? It comes, I suppose, from wanting to have sex. During the early 1970s, when I first became theoretically interested in sex, there was a considerable body of evidence to suggest that unless you were extremely careful, having sex could lead to unwanted pregnancy. Teen pregnancy was a bad thing, to be avoided through various “precautions” (a word that seemed deliberately chosen for its anti-aphrodisiac qualities). Maybe those early sex-education classes worked on me more powerfully than I realized: I’m fifty-six now and am still convinced that if I fathered a child it would be a belated instance of teen pregnancy.
I may be immune to but I am not unaware of—how could I be?—the immense, unrelenting, and all-pervasive pressure to have children. To be middle-aged and childless is to elicit one of two responses. The first: pity because you are unable to have kids. This is fine by me. I’m always on the lookout for pity, will accept it from anyone or, if no one’s around, from myself. I crave pity the way other men crave admiration or respect. So if my wife and I are asked if we have kids, one of us will reply, “No, we’ve not been blessed with children.” We do it totally deadpan, shaking our heads wistfully, looking as forlorn as a couple of empty beer glasses. One day I might even squeeze out a tear as I say it, but I haven’t had the nerve yet. It’s a touchy subject. People are surprisingly sensitive about these things.
The second: horror because by choosing not to have children, you are declining full membership in the human race. By a wicked paradox, an absolute lack of interest in children attracts the opprobrium normally reserved for pedophiles. Man, you should have seen what happened a couple of years ago when a friend and I were playing tennis in Highbury Fields, London, next to the children’s area where kids were cavorting around under the happily watchful eyes of their mums. It’s quite a large area, but it is, needless to say, not big enough. A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.” Certainly at that moment, the threatened love these mums felt for their children seemed ferocious and vile, either a kind of insanity or, at the very least, a form of deeply antisocial behavior. I stress this because it’s often claimed that having kids makes people more conscious of the kind of world they’re creating or leaving for their offspring. That would be why, in London, a city with excellent public transportation, parents have to make sure they have cars. Many of these cars come speeding along my street on their way to the extremely expensive private school on the corner. You can see, from the looks on these mums’ faces as they drop off their kids at this little nest of privilege, that the larger world—as represented by me, some loser on his bike—doesn’t exist, is no more than an impediment to finding a parking space. Parenthood, far from enlarging one’s worldview, results in an appalling form of myopia. Hence André Gide’s verdict on families, “those misers of love.”
There’s something particularly abhorrent, by the way, about that little school on my street. As I was walking past one day—i.e., skulking by like a fucking nonce—I saw an almost unbelievable sight: members of staff holding open the doors of cars for these kids so that at the age of seven they could start developing the sense of being visiting dignitaries. Another time I offered a shopping bag full of used tennis balls to a kid on his way there; he declined as though he were the aristocratic offspring of John McEnroe. To be presented with anything other than an unopen
ed tube of tournament-standard Slazengers was clearly a polluting experience for this little English Brahmin. In the interest of fairness, I’m happy to report that they were gratefully received by the teachers and kids at one of the state schools around the corner.
What these episodes make clear is that my feelings about kids are inseparable from deep-rooted class antagonism. I sometimes wonder if my aversion to having kids is because if I did have one he or she would be middle-class, with all the attendant expectations: the kind of child on whose behalf I’d make calls to friends at The Guardian or Faber and Faber about a possible internship after he or she had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. It’s actually rather vile, the nice part of London where I live. You can see the batons of privilege, entitlement, and power being passed smoothly on from one generation to the next.