Getting My Goat

Recently, a friend posted a link to an article, entitled "The No-Baby Boom."  The article was about couples' decisions not to have children.  (Note: Current trends, of course, indicate that more people of a certain persuasion--middle-class, [semi-]professionals are choosing to have only one child or have no children.  This is not news to me.)  Additional articles, including "Why Parents Hate Parenting" and "40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children" were posted by other friends.  "Why Parents Hate Parenting," I thought, was well-written, insightful, and poignant.  The other two articles, not so much, and as far as I can tell, they are part of a trend in published writing.  That trend--well, they are about as savvy and insightful as a freshman composition paper on lowering the drinking age. 

The author of "No-Baby Boom," Bryan Frazer cites Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, where Gilbert writes that "Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home."  It's not that Frazer misrepresents Gilbert, but Gilbert's main argument is that we are really bad at looking forward and determining what WILL make us HAPPY in the future.  (I read this book after my first year in graduate school as a PhD student...why?  Because I THOUGHT graduate school would make me HAPPY.)  It's not just that having children doesn't make people happy in the ways they thought it would--it's that pretty much every time we guess what will make our future selves happy we are mistaken.  (The article, I'd like to note, doesn't consider that many people, without children, often feel less fulfilled by their marriages as time goes on.  I'm going to guess that people forget that they have to work at marriage for it to be fulfilling.)  I may be guilty of reading the article reductively, but the article seems to miss that point. 

Instead, it  seems to propose childless homes as care-free, edenic spaces where everyone gets to do what they want, eat what they want, and drink what they want.  And maybe some of them are, but I doubt all of them are, and I doubt that's what everyone wants.  (Where some see care-free, I see potentially infantile like a bad bromance.)  Also, Frazer's representation of parenthood seems like a bad caricature:

"But for the child-free, the benefits go beyond dollars and cents. There's less guilt, less worry, less responsibility, more sleep, more free time, more disposable income, no awkward conversations about Teen Mom, no forced relationships with people just because your kids like their kids, no chauffeuring other people's kids in your minivan to soccer games you find less appealing than televised chess....Besides, we've never—not even for a heartbeat—envied parents. Our next-door neighbors have kids, and the amount of yelling, stress, and competition for day care, car pools, and a school with working metal detectors hardly seems worth it. As we head out for our after-work hike, followed by yellow curry in Thai Town and then an Arctic Monkeys concert, we wave goodbye and smile, pretending not to notice their faces frozen in exhaustion."

Maybe this is what my childless friends see when they look at my husband and me.  Maybe my need to wash diapers every other day, to pack up my daughter's diaper bag in order to head out to dinner, make them pity me.  But I don't think I pity myself.  I didn't go into child-rearing thinking it would be all sunshine and lollipops.

Further, it just feels like the article's trying to advocate for no-children households and prove that it's the RIGHT way to live.  (And again, I might feel this way because I DO have a daughter, and I did choose to have her, and I don't like being told that my life is now less than ideal.)  I also don't believe that having/not having children is a right/wrong issue.  As my liberal-minded side will tell my conservative friends, "Don't like gay marriage, don't get one...," I will tell everyone, "Don't like/want kids, don't have them."  Trust me, I'm not holding a gun to anyone's head on this one.   

I guess part of my problem is that prior to having my daughter, I didn't say to myself, "This child will make me HAPPY.  She will resolve all of the bad feelings I have about the world, or myself, or myself in the world."  If anything, I probably worried a good deal that I would become a wreck and wreak havoc on both her and myself as well as my husband.  And I don't believe MOST parents go into child-rearing believing a child will fix things (I know some people think children will fix their marriages, but really, I think they are in the minority); that's a lot of responsibility to put on someone so young and little. 

The article "40 Reasons" is a list written by Corinne Maier, a French mom who has had enough with "the myth that having a child is wonderful."    Maier is a mother of two frustrated with France's policies advocating child-rearing and pushing women into defining their lives through reproduction.  I can sympathize with her feelings; I don't think women should be forced to define themselves only through motherhood. or through motherhood at all if that's not what they want.  I think attacking women for choosing not to have children is as bad as attacking them for choosing to have children, which is what Maier's list feels like...an attack on child-rearing as a way of being.  The list includes the following:

"1. The “desire for children”: A silly idea

4. You keep having fun

6. You keep your friends

8. Open the nursery, close the bedroom

14. Kids are unbiased allies of capitalism

25. It takes real courage to keep saying, “Me first”

34. Motherhood or success: Pick one

40. Reject the ten absurd commandments of the “good” parent, such as your children are more important than you, than your work, than you as a couple, than any other child, than all the adults living or dead in the world you live in."

The tone of the list is, I think at least some what sarcastic/humorous, but also indicative of Maier's style in general.  In another book, she explains how to be lazy at work and why it pays off.  But the article, like "The No-Child Boom," just points to the problem of the child-rearing debate: Everyone involved is so gun-ho about her views that she simply reduce the other's view to caricature or absurdity.   "No-Baby"-ers present their lives as more free, more fun, and more cool, and "Baby"-ers argue that they are more fulfilled.  And I'm guessing for each and everyone there's a truth somewhere in the middle.  But the above mentioned articles aren't really looking for complexity.

Except for "Why Parents Hate Parenting," which seeks to examine what happiness, regret, purpose, etc actually mean and how they inform our understanding of having children.  I started pulling quotes out of the article to share.  The document is two pages long.  So, instead, I'll just point you to the last few paragraphs of the article, which pose Gilbert's question, "So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?" or as Segilman puts it “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” Jennifer Senior concludes the article by thinking about the retrospective view Segilman seems to buy into: "It’s a lovely magic trick of the memory, this gilding of hard times. Perhaps it’s just the necessary alchemy we need to keep the species going. But for parents, this sleight of the mind and spell on the heart is the very definition of enchantment."

And maybe that's it for me.  The day to day of human relationships can be shit. I don't like picking up my husband's dishes, the dog's feces, or changing my daughter's clothing for the fifth time in five hours. But I love being with my husband, being with my dogs, and being with my daughter.  My relationships have defined my life, and most recently, my relationship with my daughter has made me think about what it means to love, how much I am capable of loving, and what it means to live both while I'm here and when I no longer will be.  And that makes cleaning up the shit of life worth it.  If it doesn't for you, that's okay too.  I won't define your happiness for you if you don't define mine for me.