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

by Meghan Daum

everyone thinks they have the right to discuss my body and my choices,

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,

Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”

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.

In this house, I am the primary breadwinner and as such make most of the decisions; I fly 100,000 miles a year, sometimes to places she has never heard of. I

having it all is a slogan for ad execs and life coaches. I’ll settle for having freedom of choice.

But I realized in retrospect that most of that time was actually spent recognizing and accepting what I had already implicitly decided.

freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted (traveling the world, sleeping until noon, or going out to dinner or the movies at midnight on occasion);

possible w support

I didn’t want to be torn between my needs and those of another, particularly someone I had brought into the world.

she’d done even more to encourage my independence of mind.

The problem is that there is nobody alive who is not lacking anything—no mother, no nonmother, no man. 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.

on having it all

as they drop off their kids at this little nest of privilege, that the larger world—as represented by me, some loser on his bike—doesn’t exist, is no more than an impediment to finding a parking space. Parenthood, far from enlarging one’s worldview, results in an appalling form of myopia. Hence André Gide’s verdict on families, “those misers of love.”

After a couple of years of parenthood people become incapable of saying what they want to do in terms of what they want to do. Their preferences can only be articulated in terms of a hierarchy of obligations

my fear

“You think it’s hard bringing up children?” asked the comedian David Cross. “No. Persuading your girlfriend to have her third consecutive abortion, that’s hard.” It was a joke greeted with shrieks of laughter and horror. “I call that joke the Divider,” he conceded once the howls had died down.

If I’ve never forgotten the taste, that is because under- or overcooked regret is the main dish—the very taste—of adulthood.