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

by Meghan Daum

writers, outliers though they may be, are the ones whose job it is to write. They are the ones charged with putting the world’s complications and contradictions into more universal terms.

It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption—and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that the mother “hates the infant for the child’s ruthless use of her.” My mother’s body was indistinguishable from mine—to me, at least. I owned

So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much.

I love them for their wild experiments with language; for their inability to feign interest in things that do not truly grip them; for their seriousness and total immersion in play.

the caring and the worry was never, ever, ever going to stop, not until death.

we have children so they can have children so they can have children.

If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised.

don’t believe in maternal instinct because as anyone who’s perused the literature on the subject knows, it’s an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history (I’m speaking of Western history here)—circa the Industrial Revolution, just as the new industrial-era sexual division of labor was being negotiated, the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. (Before that, pretty much everyone worked at home.)

what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact—a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature.

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.

weighted down and immobilized, though my ambivalence surely had as much to do with my perception of the social role of “mother” as with diaper bags.

among the factors militating against it was my profound dread of being conscripted into the community of other mothers—

When it comes to sexual pleasure, whatever inequities nature has imposed on women can be overcome: in other words, culture overrides anatomy. Yet when it comes to maternity, somehow everyone’s a raging biological determinist.

motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it’s not a dichotomy; it’s a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.

women are voting with their ovaries, and the reason is simple. There are too few social supports, especially given the fact that the majority of women are no longer just mothers now, they’re mother-workers. Yet virtually no social policy accounts for this.

they’re not getting enough recompense for their labors. In trade union terms, you’d call it a production slowdown,

society that sentimentalizes children except when it comes to allocating enough resources to raising

craved that sense of importance and completion, the passionate focus on something outside myself.

Into every void rushes something. Nature abhors a vacuum.

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.

They were busy turning to some future, but what is the future when you are always feeding it money? Doesn’t it get tiring to give so much away to a world that you’ll never get to touch and see?

What do you have when you don’t have a future? You have gallows humor,

Would you have carried my essence forward in ways I couldn’t have known?

Yet curiously little heed is paid to why the West is aging.

it is the sum total of millions of single, deeply private decisions by people like me and a startlingly large proportion of my friends and acquaintances. We haven’t had kids.

If hardly an endangered species, one population in the United States is contracting: white people. Politically awkward, yes,

At 3.0 (excluding China), poor nations’ TFR is nearly twice that of the wealthier West, and these countries will provide virtually all the extra 3 billion people expected to inhabit our planet by mid-century.

The difference between Germany and Niger isn’t pharmaceutical; it’s cultural.

As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon?

Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from requirement to option, like heated seats for your car.

“watching something [sic—to nonparents, children are often mistaken for objects] growing and changing each day was also an intellectually intriguing process.”

Second, “I live for friendships and family. I have friendships that have gone on for so long and have been so close that I suppose they constitute a form of marriage.”

What makes my life worth living for me and also what, I think, redeems my life is my relationships and interaction with others, be they family, friends, lovers, colleagues, total strangers.

Large sectors of the Western population have broken faith with the future.

she was not a maternal woman. To her, a child, any child, was a brat.

The store of patience and wisdom and kindness that seemed to be required was truly daunting;

“There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”

it is one thing—and an extremely good thing—to be a perfectionist writer but quite another to be a perfectionist wife and mother because, in the latter case, too much lies outside one’s control.

wondering how different Sylvia Plath’s life might have been if she hadn’t chosen to start a family at the same time that she was trying to launch her career.

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out,

Grace Paley once jeered at the idea that had been put over on women that taking care of children was a profession, a specialization, that had to be done perfectly.

“The issue of how women are going to live with men and bring up children and perhaps do the work they want to do has in no way been honestly addressed.”

In fact, there are plenty of working mothers who do 100 percent of the housework.

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If nothing else had made me a feminist, this would have been enough: the fate of women like her, forced by society to give their lives to something they neither wanted nor were in any way suited for.

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.

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.)

Conversations, once our great pleasure, were now sound bites snatched between negotiations over toys and candy.

they did want us well educated, and they exposed us to a wide range of experience.

There’s a near-universal assumption that women who don’t want to have children fundamentally dislike children, but that’s often not the case.