Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  Having children is self-evidently the less rational decision—hugely expensive and inconvenient, consistently demonstrated in studies to increase stress and reduce happiness both in individuals and between couples. A friend who’s currently writing a novel about the widening divide between people who have children and their friends who don’t, and who is himself childless, asked his friends with kids to help him out and explain to him the appeal of having children. The cons were evident; what, he wondered, were the pros? They admitted that yes, it was exhausting, they drove you crazy, you never had a free moment, but, they’d say, “When your child smiles at you, it just makes it all worth it somehow.” He had no fucking idea what they were talking about. To be fair, he said, they all seemed aware that they were groping for the goopiest clichés to describe the experience: “They were like someone trying to explain an acid trip in which It All Made Sense, even as they realized that you had to be there.” It’s apparently something either so ineffable or primal that it resists articulation.

  Of course most people are inarticulate on all subjects, especially the profoundest ones; it may be instructive to listen to what some of our most hyperarticulate artists have had to say about parenthood. Even that old sourpuss Cormac McCarthy seems to have been transformed by fatherhood; his novel The Road, best known for its unrelieved bleakness (it includes flayed babies roasted on spits), is the first in which he’s written convincingly about a truly loving relationship (as opposed to an obsessive Liebestod for a beautiful doomed prostitute or the enduring bond between a boy and his wolf): the love the nameless protagonist feels for his fragile, ineducably decent son, a love that redeems the world even in the face of extinction. If he is not the word of God, God never spoke. The book’s fundamental question is, what, if anything, makes life worth slogging on with, given the fact of inevitable and universal death? His only answer is: this child does.

  Most people’s operating motive in life is pretty obviously not the pleasure principle, given the joyless choices they make; what they want is to be needed, to have a compelling reason to get out of bed every day. If having children doesn’t necessarily provide meaning, it’s certainly an effective way to obviate, or at least postpone, the question of meaning throughout the prime years of life. You may wake up at four A.M. panicked about the mortgage payments or want to hang yourself rather than go in to work one more day, but too bad, it doesn’t matter; you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, because your child is depending upon you. Whereas there’s really nothing stopping me, on any given Tuesday morning, from taking up heroin. All this maundering about What Is Life for, Anyway is a luxury of the unencumbered. Children serve as an inarguable rebuttal to all those existential anxieties and doubts. As one noted American philosopher put it: “You’re nobody ’til somebody loves you.”

  It wasn’t until relatively late in life, when I met people I was biologically related to for the first time, that I had some glimmering of how parents must feel about their children. I like my half sisters enormously as human beings; they’re smart, funny, kindhearted girls, and we’re similar in ways that feel deeply familiar to me (I’d never noticed the obvious etymology of familiar before). But I also adore them in a gushy, ferocious, unconditional way that has nothing to do with who they are but with what they are to me. I would love them just as much if they were junkies or Republicans or thought I was creepy and wanted nothing to do with me. When I look over at one of them next to me in a car or at a party I secretly thrill with a warm, narcotic love. If one of them needed a kidney, I would give her one; if the other one needed one, I would, with some regret, give her the other. It makes me so happy just to know that they exist that I can almost empathize with the weirdly ecstatic reactions of grandparents to the unremarkable toddlers produced by their own children. It gives me a glimpse of what having children might be like, and also of what I would be like as a father—doting and indulgent, pathetically mushy with love. And I have to admit to myself that although I have plenty of sound reasons for not being a father—I know I would also be inconsistent and moody, alternately smothering and neglectful, plus I will never, ever be able to afford riding lessons or braces, let alone college—one of the reasons I don’t want children is fear. I’m afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them. Some friends of mine lost their young daughter a few years ago; most people, me included, recoil from even trying to imagine what they’ve suffered.

  Is it possible that I will regret not having had children when I am old and dying alone? People with children love to ask this of us childless types, the way evangelicals like to imagine your tearful deathbed repentance or belated contrition in Hell. Since I already regret every other thing I have ever done or failed to do, I don’t see why this decision should be exempt. Sure: no doubt I will realize, once it’s far too late, as usual, that I have failed to do the one dumb job it was my charge to do during my brief time on the planet, a job countless fungi, flatworms, and imbeciles have successfully carried out for eons. Perhaps at the eleventh hour I will convince a kindly nymphomaniac nurse, such as I understand to be a fixture at most hospitals, to bear whatever child my tattered chromosomes can produce. But I am long practiced at pursuing paths I know lead inevitably to regret. I am much too old and weird and selfish by now to endure the fatigue and anxiety of new parenthood, to feign enthusiasm for recitals and pageants and soccer matches, to be dragged uncomplainingly to Pixar sequels and Chuck E. Cheese’s and American Girl stores.

  Being childless is inarguably saner and more responsible in the present world situation than having children, but let’s not pretend we’re actually doing it for sane or responsible reasons. If the childless really feel a need to claim some moral superiority over the child-ridden, it should be simply by virtue of not kidding ourselves. Let’s be honest: we are unnatural—as unnatural as clothing or medicine or agriculture or art, or walking upright. By not having progeny we are depriving ourselves of the illusion of continuity, and have to invest ourselves more deeply in other, more austere illusions: that our lives matter for their own sakes, or that we’ll secure a kind of immortality through art or ideas or acts of decency, by teaching or helping others or changing the world. Maybe we’re an evolutionary adaptation; spreading memes instead of genes is a more efficient means of reproduction, less destructive to the environment. We’re propagating ourselves throughout the noosphere instead of lousing up an already overpopulated planet with yet more human beings.

  The last century was the first time in history that a sizable percentage of the human race attempted to live without delusions of eternity; it was also the first time that any significant number of us voluntarily renounced procreation, abandoning the false consolation of posterity. (I wonder, sometimes, whether the negative population growth in the secular West might subconsciously be linked to the death of faith.) It’s only very recently, within the last fifty years, that not having children has become a practical option, both medically and socially. Formerly, childlessness was seen as a private tragedy; the only people who chose it voluntarily were clergy, who, in theory, had religion to sublimate their erotic drive. We childless ones are an experiment unprecedented in human history. We are unlikely, for obvious reasons, to take over. Like the Shakers, who also declined on principle to procreate, individually we are doomed to extinction. Although so is everyone else. But as an option, an idea, who knows? We may thrive and spread. We are an object lesson—an existence theorem, which demonstrates that a proposition is possible—to the rest of the species. At the risk of sounding grandiose and self-congratulatory again, I’ll venture to suggest that we childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove to ourse
lves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.

  NOTE

  The End of the Line

  1 The fertility rate has been declining, even in the third world, since the 1950s. Whether the incidence of homosexuality has been increasing in humans is impossible to gauge, but rats in deliberately overpopulated lab conditions exhibit increased homosexual behavior in subsequent generations.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their guidance, wisdom, and careful greasing of various wheels, the editor would like to thank Anna deVries, P. J. Horoszko, Stephen Morrison, and Andrea Rogoff at Picador. Particular gratitude is owed to Hanya Yanagihara for putting this train on the tracks and monitoring its journey to a safe, though never too distant, future.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  MEGHAN DAUM, editor, is the author of four books, most recently The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her other books are the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and the memoir Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. An opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly a decade, Meghan has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Elle, and Vogue, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.

  KATE CHRISTENSEN is the author, most recently, of Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, as well as six novels, including The Epicure’s Lament and The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has published essays and reviews in numerous publications, among them The New York Times Sunday Book Review; Elle; O, the Oprah Magazine; Martha Stewart Living; and Bookforum. Her next book, How to Cook a Moose, will be published by Islandport Press in September 2015. She blogs about food and life in New England at katechristensen.wordpress.com. She lives in Portland, Maine.

  GEOFF DYER’s many books include But Beautiful, Zona, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He is currently living in Venice, California.

  DANIELLE HENDERSON is a freelance writer who works with The Guardian, Vulture, Rookie, Cosmopolitan, and others. She created the Feminist Ryan Gosling blog and book before she left academia forever, and she hopes she is always the first person her best friends’ children call for bail money and prophylactics. Born and raised in New York, Danielle now lives in Seattle.

  COURTNEY HODELL is a book editor and the director of the Whiting Writers’ Awards. She has worked at Viking, Random House, HarperCollins UK and US, and, most recently, as executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is the aunt of Elsa Symons-Hodell.

  ANNA HOLMES is a writer and the author of two books, Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair and The Book of Jezebel, which was based on the popular website she created in 2007. She works as an editor for Fusion and as a contributing columnist for The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

  ELLIOTT HOLT’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review online, and the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology. Her first novel, You Are One of Them (Penguin Press, 2013), was a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural John Leonard Award.

  PAM HOUSTON is the author of two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound; two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat; and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W. W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of the O. Henry Awards, the 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is a professor of English at UC Davis and directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers.

  MICHELLE HUNEVEN is the author of four novels, including Blame and Off Course. She is a senior fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, teaches creative writing at UCLA, and lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, dog, cat, and African grey parrot.

  LAURA KIPNIS’s latest book is Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; her previous books include How to Become a Scandal, The Female Thing, and Against Love. She’s a professor in the Radio/TV/Film department at Northwestern, where she teaches filmmaking. She lives in New York and Chicago.

  TIM KREIDER, an essayist and cartoonist, is the author of the books We Learn Nothing, Twilight of the Assholes, Why Do They Kill Me?, and The Pain—When Will It End? He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, newyorker.com, Al Jazeera, and Men’s Journal. He lives in New York City and in an undisclosed location on the Chesapeake Bay. His forthcoming book, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2015.

  PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and Unbuilt Projects. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has worked as a landscaper, a musician, a salesperson in a clothing store, and a professor of creative writing. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers–Camden and divides his time among Philadelphia, Miami, and Provincetown. A memoir, The Narrow Door, is forthcoming in late 2015.

  M. G. LORD is the author of The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, and Astro Turf, a family memoir of aerospace culture during the Cold War. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California. After graduating from Yale, she served for twelve years as the editorial-page cartoonist for Newsday. Recently, she again took up her drawing pen to create a graphic novel set in what she considers a perfect world. It is populated exclusively by anthropomorphic animals.

  ROSEMARY MAHONEY is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Down the Nile, Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, and For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind. She was educated at Harvard College and the Johns Hopkins University and is the recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Transatlantic Review Award, and Harvard’s Charles E. Horman Prize for writing. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Observer, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Rhode Island.

  SIGRID NUNEZ has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.

  JEANNE SAFER has been a psychoanalyst for forty years. She is author of five books on “taboo topics”—the things everybody thinks but nobody talks about: Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life Without Children; Forgiving and Not Forgiving: Why Sometimes It’s Better NOT to Forgive; The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling; Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult’s Life—for the Better; and Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret. She lives in New York City with her husband, historian and political journalist Richard Brookhiser, and is currently at work on a book about the nature of love, from unrequited to fulfilled.

  LIONEL SHRIVER is a prolific journalist and the author of eleven novels, including the best sellers So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and the Orange Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted for a feature film in 2011. Her most recent novel, Big Brother (2013), addresses obesity. Her work has been translated into twenty-eight languages.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Meghan Daum, editor, is the author of four books, most recently The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and the memoir Life Would
Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. An opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly a decade, Meghan has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Elle, and Vogue, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Introduction

  by Meghan Daum

  Babes in the Woods

  by Courtney Hodell

  Maternal Instincts

  by Laura Kipnis

  A Thousand Other Things

  by Kate Christensen

  The New Rhoda

  by Paul Lisicky

  Be Here Now Means Be Gone Later

  by Lionel Shriver

  The Most Important Thing

  by Sigrid Nunez

  Mommy Fearest

  by Anna Holmes

  Amateurs

  by Michelle Huneven

  Save Yourself

  by Danielle Henderson

  The Trouble with Having It All

  by Pam Houston

  Beyond Beyond Motherhood

  by Jeanne Safer

  Over and Out

  by Geoff Dyer

  You’d Be Such a Good Mother, If Only You Weren’t You

  by M. G. Lord

  The Hardest Art

  by Rosemary Mahoney

  Just an Aunt

  by Elliott Holt