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T A B L E_T A L K
I'm your baby and I'll cry if I want to. Exchange your experiences with infants who wail in the Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Is that all there is? Blarney for bairns Baby on board Bring in 'da noise, bring in 'da rat killers Kiddie pants or kiddie porn? BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION | PAGE 1, 2
It is hard for any woman who has chosen to remain child-free (as distinct from women who unwillingly remain childless) to pass up the chance to feel socially acceptable. And while I occasionally like to pretend that I am in the vanguard of what will become a sweeping sea change, there's little evidence that this is really the case. Although birth rates seem to have declined (a 1988 U.S. census reports that 18 percent of women 35 to 39 were childless, up from 12 percent in 1976), in reality this may merely reflect another trend: Women are waiting longer to have their first child. In fact, the arc of childbearing is nearly impossible to extrapolate. Reliable birth control has only been around for some 30 years, and the idea that a woman could be "complete" sans child is still little more than a whisper in the cultural consciousness. More likely, birth rates will rise and fall cyclically for decades to come, based on factors that are economic and technological as much as cultural or philosophical. Then, too, these factors often cut both ways. If we had a sexual revolution in the 1970s, with birth rates at a 30-year low, we experienced a counter-revolution in the 1980s: Public opinion changed, the economy boomed and birth rates shot back up. Some more political friends of mine believe that such a reversal was inevitable, given what they darkly refer to as the "forces of pro-natalism" (a phrase that inevitably leads me to picture a flying phalanx of supermothers, descending on New York City in a cloud of talcum powder). These same friends can point to the absence of childless couples on TV sitcoms and the role of Glenn Close as the crazy childless Everywoman in "Fatal Attraction." Perhaps more significantly, they note that billions of dollars in research money has been poured into technologies that allow infertile women to have children, while similar efforts to improve the quality and ease of birth control are, comparatively, scraping by. For whatever reason (perhaps because I've never been a major consumer of popular culture), I never felt particularly pressured by these seemingly ubiquitous forces. Instead, in my late 20s, as the question of children became the sticking point in an otherwise happy three-year relationship, I did what any self-respecting academic would: I went to the university library and searched the card catalog for books that addressed the question of non-motherhood. It was a disappointing survey. In the end, I found only three that even sounded promising: "Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective" by Jane Price Knowles and Ellen Cole, "The Retreat from Motherhood" by Samuel Blumenfeld and "Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity" by Mardy Ireland. Lying on my bed that night, I chose "The Retreat from Motherhood" to look at first. Written in the mid '70s, it turned out to be one man's diatribe against the anti-natalist forces that were supposedly brainwashing women away from their natural inclination to make babies. Clearly alarmed, Blumenfeld went so far as to assert that "the 44,340,000 potential mothers in our country have become the target of an immense amount of propaganda urging them not to have children," and added that mothers were beginning to be regarded as "villains" and "contributors to 'people pollution' [rather] than givers of the gift of life." Would that it were so! The idea that pro-natalist propaganda has been both ubiquitous and at a giant ideological advantage by virtue of its long-standing cultural preeminence is one that eludes Mr. Blumenfeld -- whose view is, after all, rather reductionist. (The 44,340,000 women in our country are all potential mothers? Why not potential astrophysicists or poets?) Nor was the anthology "Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective" much better, despite being compiled almost 20 years later by a pair of feminist scholars. The sole chapter devoted to childlessness, written by one Anita Landa, begins: "Since I am a developmental psychologist rather than a therapist, I do not feel competent to advise clinicians on the treatment of voluntarily childless women ..." and goes on to characterize voluntarily childless woman as "androgynous" and "atypical, but not abnormal." There are, of course, many reasons why these atypical women have ended up childless. The "difficult childhood" is Landa's favored hypothesis, and she specifically cites the "death or disabling of sibling, the institutionalization of parents, divorce, the disruption of war, the insecurity of economic setbacks and the upheaval of major geographic moves" as likely causes of voluntary childlessness. It is a strange list. Taken together, the first two causes point to very deep psychological trauma indeed, while the latter four are so general as to be meaningless. Surely not all women whose families were "disrupted" by World War II went on to be child-free. And one likewise doubts that women whose families suffered "the insecurity of economic setbacks" eschewed motherhood purely out of financial fear. Strangely, after perpetuating any number of stereotypes herself (that childless women are somehow mentally ill and require treatment; that they are more masculine than "normal" women and related more to their father than to their mother), Landa goes on to say that "nowhere in the literature is there evidence to support the stereotypes" about childless women. "While manhood is not defined in terms of fatherhood, the female archetypes remain bound to reproductive functions," she notes, rather obviously, and adds, "Childless women feel defensive about the confounding of womanhood with motherhood, but they are in continual danger of internalizing the prejudicial stereotypes." Alas, that this is so true. As Mardy Ireland observes in "Reconceiving Women," "It is nearly impossible to think about the adult woman who is not a mother without the spectre of 'absence.' Why?" Why indeed? A friend once asked me whether I would feel differently about having children if I were a man. I agreed that I would, at least in terms of my willingness to go along with the wishes of a procreatively inclined partner. Why this is, is unclear. Certainly it goes beyond the onus of bearing children; nor does it arise purely out of what Ireland coyly calls "the limited role of the traditional father in childcare." Even assuming that I would have a husband who puts in more than his 50 percent, I can't shake a certain conviction: that if a man walks away from his role as a parent, it's considered irresponsible; if a woman does, it's unforgivable. If acculturation is but one component of the woman-as-mother solipsism, however, it is still a broad and subtle one. That afternoon, with my own charge sleeping peacefully in the stroller, I watched a woman who looked to be in her 30s walk quickly past the scattered groups of mothers and children that had aggregated on the park's green lawn. Head down (as I imagine mine would also have been -- the guilty, eye-averting posture that one adopts when passing panhandlers, religious zealots and other groups that make one feel both embarrassed and a little fearful), she hurried along the path. To my surprise, I found myself thinking that this woman -- this woman with whom I instinctively identified -- looked lonely as she hurried by, strollerless and babyless. For the briefest of moments I even felt sorry for her: for the fact that she would never experience the powerful open-heartedness of parenting; the great, weightless relief of dedicating so much of one's time and effort to the welfare of another being. It was an illuminating moment, and a perplexing one. The great stereotype about non-procreators is that they are selfish -- an odd claim given that few people, if any, have children out of altruism. Aside from the most dogmatically religious (who see it as a duty to God) and the most dogmatically nationalist (who see it as a duty to their race), people have children because they want them, because having children has its perks: the chance to create and shape another being, to see one's genetic material continue into the indefinite future, to give one's life a larger sense of purpose. And yet, I understood. Understood how for parents this dedicating of oneself to the greater purpose of one's children can be an almost religious conviction. And how this can lead the "saved" to regard the "unsaved" with both horror and pity -- much the way I look at people who watch a lot of TV. And yet, the fact remains. I have tried to foresee regret, to imagine myself old and alone, the well of my writing run dry, the companion of my life deceased. But even then the idea of children seems neither appealing nor consoling. I cannot imagine that the monthly visits and weekly phone calls would sustain me, nor can I abide the notion of living vicariously: proudly informing friends or, worse, supermarket strangers, that my daughter has just gotten into an Ivy League school, had a baby, earned a promotion. Related to this, if obliquely, is the idea of posterity. The production of a body of work has long been understood as somehow equivalent to the production of a physical body. In this sense, I suppose, I fit the stereotype: a woman who remains childless only because her creative impulse has been redirected. And so I find myself a babysitter. At one point during my temporary appointment, my charge grows drowsy, tips its blonde head against my breast and falls asleep. A magic moment for most parents, and even for most of the progenitally inclined. For me, it is a pleasant moment. Such trust is flattering, and I appreciate the view: the open o-shaped mouth; the strangely adult posture of Baby's arms as they rest on its stomach, like the arms of a middle-aged man asleep in his recliner; the haze of fine, babyish hair curling delicately against fine, babyish skin. Parents, I can only assume, feel something more than this -- a rush of love, a swelling of joy, an inflation in the chest. It is an intense and arguably unique feeling, one that rolls together several emotions of the highest order -- love of one's mate, pride in one's work, the bond with one's kin.
And yet. Even understanding this, I cannot feel that my life will be
less without children. Different, indeed. Without question. But
different as our lives will always be when we make a choice. Do we
travel to Europe or take the summer job? Do we drop out of college,
buy the house, follow the person we love to Alaska? A friend of mine
sagely observed that the decision to have children is never a wholly
rational one. But neither is the decision not to have them. Like all
important decisions, it is a mixture of rational thought, circumstance and a gut sense of what really matters. What we ask ourselves at any
crossroads, if only quietly, is: What will I regret? I do not regret
not having children. I do not think I will come to regret not having
children. But I cannot know. We cannot know. We can only move
forward and hope that in the end we arrive at a place that suits us.
Jennifer Kahn is a freelance writer in Berkeley, Calif.
No baby on board
Why a brush with mortality, and my environmental convictions, made me decide not to become a mom.
Baby hunger
A cynical hipster finds herself dragged inexorably down the dark tunnel of maternal longing by a goofy-faced toddler.
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