Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

by Meghan Daum

there are just as many ways of being a nonparent as there are of being a parent. You can do it lazily and self-servingly or you can do it generously and imaginatively. You can be cool about it or you can be a jerk about it.

My mother’s body was indistinguishable from mine—to me, at least. I owned it. I poked at the constellation of freckles on her arm while sitting bored in a church pew; I dragged on her hand, swinging, when she walked down the grocery aisles, my brother the counterweight on her other hand. “Stop hanging on me,” she would say, fretfully, despairingly. We would gape, shocked that she didn’t consider us all a single being, like a grove of aspens is said to be. Then we would resume our tugging.

At college, I was delighted and relieved to find that he was loved. Potheads, sorority girls, supercilious professors, and ROTC cadets adored him for his absurdist wit and his air of having trailed a little bit of splendor behind him, like the bright winter smell that follows you in from outside.

But what’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the “natural” had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces up to the real harshness of nature can feel very benignly about its tyranny. Sure, we like nature when it’s a beautiful day on the beach; less so when a tidal wave kills your family or a shark bites off your arm. If it were up to nature, women would devote themselves to propagating the species, compliantly serving as life’s passive instruments, and pipe down on the social demands. It’s only modern technology’s role in overriding nature—lowering the maternal death rate, inventing decent birth control methods—that’s offered women some modicum of self-determination. If it comes down to a choice, my vote’s with technology and modernity, which have liberated women far more than getting the vote or any other feminist initiative (important as these have been), precisely by rescuing us from nature’s clutches.

But the real reason I’m against the romance about maternal instincts is that what gets lost amid this fealty to nature is that nature hasn’t been particularly kind to women, and I say we owe it no favors in return. If women have been “ensnared by nature” as Simone de Beauvoir (no fan of maternity herself) put it, if it’s so far been our biological situation that we’re the ones stuck bearing the children, then there should be a lot more social recompense and reparations for this inequity than there are. The reason these have been slow in coming? Because women keep forgetting to demand them, so convinced are we that these social arrangements are the “natural” order of things. The willingness to call an inequitable situation “natural” puts us on the royal path to being society’s chumps.

At night, I lay awake, trying not to feel trapped, invaded, hijacked by this thing inside me, this rapidly growing person who was simultaneously independent of me, entitled to me, wholly dependent on me, and part of me. My body, which all my life had been my own, inhabited solely by me, free to do whatever it wanted, now felt entirely given over to the task of growing this stranger.

I picture my life without children as a hole dug in sand and then filled with water. Into every void rushes something.

My days are so busy and full and yet so calm and uninterrupted and self-directed, I can’t imagine how kids would fit in. Kids talk so much. They require their parents’ undivided attention on demand. They are expensive. They require oceans of energy and attention. And so forth. No matter how much you love your kids, they’re always there, and you are entirely responsible for them, and this goes on for many, many years. Meanwhile, I’m an introvert and so is Brendan. Children exhaust us, even the ones we love most. Our solitude is the most valuable thing we have, and we cherish it above most other things and work hard to maintain it.

Instead, we have this life, and we are these people. We get to go to bed every night together, alone, and wake up together, alone. Our shared passions thrill and satisfy us, and our abundant freedoms—to daydream; to cook exactly the food we want when we want it; to drink wine and watch a movie without worrying about who’s not yet asleep upstairs; to pick up and go anywhere we want, anytime; to do our work uninterrupted; to shape our own days to our own liking; and to stay connected to each other without feeling fractured—are not things we’d choose to give up for anyone, ever.

“If people like me don’t reproduce, civilization may be the worse for it. On both my mother and my father’s side, I come from generations of academics, historians, diplomats—thinkers and doers—and as the years go by, I begin to see that far from being an exception or a maverick, I am in fact the very obvious carrier of a certain genetic inheritance. I am a typical product of my family; I can see the thread stretching back through the generations. Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes, I do. I’m arrogant enough to actually think that the world will be a poorer place without my genes in it. But the fact is that I don’t care enough to do anything about it. There wasn’t time to do that and the other things on my list.”

“I’m an atheist. I’m a solipsist. As far as I’m concerned, while I know intellectually that the world and its inhabitants will continue after my death, it has no real meaning for me. I am terrified of and obsessed with my own extinction, and what happens next is of little interest to me. I certainly don’t feel I owe the future anything, and that includes my genes and my offspring. I feel absolutely no sense of responsibility for the propagation of the human race. There are far too many human beings in the world as it is. I am happy to leave that task to someone else.”

I suspect I would be a good mother—a fantastic mother, even—thanks to the gifts bestowed upon me by my own parents: the ability to give and express love, the indulgence of curiosity, and the prioritizing of imagination, education, and personal integrity over societally approved successes like financial or social achievement. (I take an inordinate amount of pride in my own emotional intelligence, but that particular gift has little to do with my parents and almost everything to do with the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on psychotherapy over the past twenty years.) But herein lies the rub: as it stands now, I suspect that my commitment to and delight in parenting would be so formidable that it would take precedence over anything and everything else in my life; that my mastery of motherhood would eclipse my need for—or ability to achieve—success in any other arena. Basically, I’m afraid of my own competence.

These days, as I enter my forties, I find that I am only now beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin, to find the wherewithal to respect my own needs as much as others’, to know what my emotional and physical limits are, and to confidently, yet kindly, tell others no. (No, I cannot perform that job; no, I cannot meet you for coffee; no, I cannot be in a relationship in which I feel starved for emotional and physical connection.) Despite (or because of) my single status right now, becoming a mother would feel like a devolution as much as an evolution, and the irony is that if and when I reach the point where I feel able to give my all to another human being and still keep some semblance of the self I’ve worked so hard to create, I will probably not be of childbearing age. Them’s the breaks.

“You should have a baby,” a friend reported the day after giving birth, “if only to feel the great tidal wave of love that crashes through you.” I didn’t want to feel such love for someone else. I still wanted to be the object of that tidal wave. I knew better than to voice this, of course. Ashamed of such a selfish, infantile craving, I kept it secret. But I knew that so long as I begrudged a child love and attention, I would never be a good parent, and it was wise not to become one.

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.

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.

Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity. It is quite possible that I would be a less generous teacher, a less supportive partner, a less available friend if I had children of my own to take care of. Love is not a pie, the saying goes, but it is also true that there are only so many hours in a day.

A student sent me an e-mail telling me she was dropping out of my private writing group: “I love the group and will really miss it,” she wrote, “but I can’t see spending the money I ought to be spending on my children’s education on my own.” I pictured her imagining, as she wrote the e-mail, a bunch of women standing around giant pieces of brightly colored plastic playground equipment in the town where she lives nodding sagely at her sacrifice. But what I wanted to ask was, Why not? Why is their education more important, inherently, than yours? You are a very talented writer with immense potential. What if your children turn out, even after that expensive education, to be just a couple of dolts? The median home price in the town where she lives is $904,000, so we can rest assured that her kids are in no real danger of remaining uneducated. I do understand that it is noble to want what is best for one’s children. But I worry that we have taken a big step backward if it is perceived as nobler still when doing for one’s children comes at great expense to oneself.

I love the physical world and the experiences I get to have in it so deeply and completely that it threatens to break my heart every minute, and I have made countless life choices—in addition to childlessness—to ensure that I can be out and in the world on my own terms almost all the time.

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 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.

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.

The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose! I’m totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose. It would be a lot less fun if it did have a purpose—then we would all be obliged (and foolish not) to pursue that purpose.

If you want to make sure I never read a line you’ve written, tell me about the sacrifices you’ve made in order to get those lines written. If we were able to go through history and eliminate every single instance of sacrifice, the world would be a significantly better place, with a consistently increased supply of lamb. Sacrifice is part of the parent’s vocabulary, as Isaac discovered when Abraham pressed the knife to his throat, though it usually works the other way around, with parents sacrificing themselves for the greater good of their children.

People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it.

So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself.

The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win.

After I broke up with my partner, a friend told me something that was inadvertently cruel. “You would have been a great parent,” she said, “if all those tragedies in your childhood hadn’t happened.” But they did. They made me who I am—not a hypothetical perfect person but a flawed mess, who is trying, however inadequately, to leave behind a better world than the one through which I have had to make my way.

Reproduction as raison d’être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what’s the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 × ∞ = 0. It would seem a pretty low-rent ultimate purpose that’s shared with viruses and bacteria.

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.

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.

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 ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.