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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Most people have a powerful wish, a yearning, for children. My wife and I don't.
May 8, 2003 | To begin thinking about having kids I first asked myself, "Do you want kids?"
"No, not especially," I answered. "Do you?"
"No," I answered myself. "Me neither."
Being in agreement, we wrapped our arms around our knees in a Thorazine squat and rocked into a state of relative calm.
But what does that mean exactly, not to want kids?? What does it feel like when I run my mind over the contour of an absence? Where is that place in the body where most people have a desire for children? I can't describe the absence; I only know what it feels like to really want something. I only know the things that on my deathbed I might regret not doing.
The novel. The book of poetry. The songs. The playing of music. The marrying of my wife. If I had not tried to do those things, I would wonder if I had missed out. They are small things, perhaps, when weighed against having children, but they are as dear to me as my own heartbeat, my own eyesight. There was no defining moment when my wife and I decided not to have kids. In fact, we have not ruled it out completely. What is notable, though, is the absence of that storied urgency. Each time we circled around the question, poked at it, tried to see honestly what we felt, each time, and there have been many, we came up strangely empty. That might sound uncomfortably literal, but what I mean is that there does seem to be a powerful wish, a yearning, for children, that most people who have them will tell you they have felt, and we don't have it. I know what it feels like to have a lifelong yearning for something. I have plenty of lifelong yearnings. But not for children.
We don't know what it means about us, but we accept it as true, and we trust it to mean that we should not avidly pursue parenthood. Perhaps it's a little like being gay: You're just this certain way and it doesn't feel strange to you but it's different from the way most people are. And you might be curious to have what they have, but you're not driven to strive for it. I can say only that it feels completely normal, except when we become small-minded and start comparing, when we weigh what we've got in our hearts against what they've got in their strollers.
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When I met her, my wife was on the pill, but her doctor told her she should discontinue it because she suffers from migraines. I came of age sexually before the advent of AIDS and had never become accustomed to using condoms. So my wife used the diaphragm, but after several years of the habitual pause in the proceedings that their use requires, we noticed that there was more going on in that moment than simply the mechanical preparation; something troubled us about our refusal to accept the possibilities nature offered; our practice of prophylaxis seemed, in a word, sterile. Although we didn't crave kids, we weren't terrified of the possibility either, and we began to feel that we were rather rigidly standing in the way of one of life's natural outcomes. We had never categorically and utterly ruled out becoming parents. And there was something else, some whiff of the mystical, in our decision to stop using birth control; it wasn't entirely rational or absolute. In a sense, it was mischievous, the way two kids will explore a vacant house, not because there's something in it that they want, but because it's just there and they're curious about what it would be like to walk around inside it.
We wanted not necessarily to try to have a child but to be open to the idea, to stop foreclosing on this potential within us. We became willing, at that point, to have a baby if that should occur. We knew, if it should happen, that we would respond to it as humans have for ages. But we were not attracted to the notion of trying to have a child. It was not something that, as though running a small manufacturing concern, we wanted to produce.
Nevertheless, with a certain giddy sense of revolution we opened ourselves to possibility. It felt virtuous. It felt like facing reality. It felt like we were in tune with some larger force.
But that excitement and sense of rightness soon faded for me. In its place came a subtle kind of dread. And into the previously carefree ritual of lovemaking crept a grave discipline of acceptance of the possible consequences. I have begun to wonder how I could summon a lifetime of daily parenting to sustain a moment's philosophical inspiration. Since deciding, in a sense, to perform without a net, we live with its lifelong consequences, even though they are as yet only hypothetical.
And this has begun to weigh on me; at least it was weighing on me until I found myself sobbing with grief and joy at the end of the film "25th Hour."
In "25th Hour" a young man has pushed his luck too far and is about to go to prison. But the movie shows us what it might be like if he got a chance to start over. His father, who has come to drive him to prison, could instead drive him out of the city and just keep driving. It would mean exile and a secretive life; he would have to resist contacting anyone from his past for years to come. But it at least would be a chance at freedom and a chance at a life. And someday in the future, his beautiful lover would join him, and they would raise a gaggle of children, and life would be beautiful.
And there I was, sobbing in the dark, because those children represented salvation, and the father's action represented mercy. It would be the ultimate act of fatherly devotion, of rescue and protection, for this father to rescue his son from complexity and fate and consequence, from all his sins, to put him in his car and drive him down highway after highway, past city and town, past corruption and temptation, past fate and irony and money and identity, past justice, beyond the system and the harsh hand of law, to say goodbye and good luck in a tiny anonymous town where maybe his son could get a job as a bartender and nobody would know his name. I found it deeply moving that the father, traditionally the upholder of laws, would defy his caste and side with his son against the state, that he would take him out of that world rather than see him suffer at the hands of a vengeful system. I came home shaken, thinking maybe we ought to make some kids, but my wife was asleep and the poodle was on my side of the bed.
