Remember That You Were Born
For many young Americans, children and families feel like an abstraction
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A couple of years ago, sitting in a Panera somewhere in Maryland or Virginia, I heard one of those songs that sounds like it was crafted for twenty-something sittings in a Panera somewhere in Maryland or Virginia. Or anywhere, I guess. “Like Strangers Do,” a familiar-sounding tune, voice, everything. One of those pop songs you feel like you’ve heard before. One little bit stood out to me:
I miss the way that you looked in your sundress
The way that you looked when you undressed
The sound of your first steps across the room
We’re far from the era when Ed Sullivan demanded that Mick Jagger replace “Let’s Spend the Night Together” with “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”
It captures that feeling of being single, actually—freedom mixed with expectation.
If I think about it, one thing among many that I love about marriage and homeownership is that they close off some of that. And as I imagine fatherhood, I think about how that would be the final closing of the gate, as it were.
In a certain sense—not in a coercive, political sense—I understand that parenthood is something that must be forced on someone like me: someone who tasted that utterly autonomous, freewheeling, unattached, responsibility-free young adulthood, that amorphous period where 22 and 25 and 30 and 33 all feel like one long wonderful moment of owning and controlling yourself entirely. I’m happy—grateful, even—that marriage and then parenthood put that to an end. The choices that forecloses other choices are probably the ones that really matter.
I am thinking about the weird, ideological pronatalism of the far right. And I’m thinking about the context of childlessness, and what might explain it.
I think, once in a while, which is maybe more than I should, of an odd article in The American Conservative that made the rounds a few years ago, by a young liberal woman who had briefly dated a far-right member of the Proud Boys. And I remember this bit, in between the bit about the wannabe-fascist asking if he could measure her skull:
I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to be an autistic mother. To have autistic children, at whatever level of functioning they may be. I’ve worked with the lower-functioning kids you hear about. I think about how it would feel to watch my child experience pain. About giving myself fully to another. Like my mother did for me. The intensity of her feelings scares me sometimes. It’s easier to sit alone with my weed and the heroes & villains in my head than face the hard stuff.
I’ll be damned if something like that isn’t going on, maybe semi-consciously, in the heads of a lot of people my age. We look at the way we grew up—maybe it was dysfunctional, maybe it was highly functional, maybe we don’t want to replicate it, maybe we don’t think it can be replicated—and in any case just wonder, how the hell did they do it? Literally, how do two parents work full time and maintain the home and property and put dinner on the table and raise kids and make their lunches and get them to school and pay for all the supplies and toys and doctor visits and get the cats to the vet and remember to re-register the cars…
When described, normal family life for most people in most of the country sounds literally impossible.
Add to that that even the idea of being a child, of being around children, of holding a baby, feels like a distant abstraction, after a decade of college dorm life and gentrified neighborhood life. It would be possible to live in a hip neighborhood in a major city and almost forget that children exist. It is possible to forget, in a sense, that we were ever born.
There are certain perks of not having kids. One of them is getting to pretend that you’re better than all the parents. It’s a sobering thing to me to realize that good parenting can look like abuse. I don’t mean child abuse; I mean relationship abuse. At a museum in D.C., I saw a mother who had put her sons on either side of her, both of them upset over what was probably a brother brawl that got out of hand. “We keep our hands to ourselves,” she said firmly, scolding her child at the same time as she gently wiped away his tears.
Making someone cry and then comforting them; classic abuser behavior! Not only do I think that; I like to think that. I loathe, on some level, the idea of giving up the privilege of judging people. Or think of a parent’s go-to explanation for discipline: I’m not punishing you; you’re punishing yourself. I promised you I’d punish you if you did (whatever). I’m not responsible for my actions; you are. Next time don’t make me do this to you. Classic abuser psychology!
In other words, stripped of context and familiarity and experience, parenting looks odd, and kind of mean. Like something a breezy, fun person doesn’t want to do or have done to them. Who wants to be the kind of person that other people look at and say, “Gee, look at that guy making his kids cry at the museum.” I do that; I imagine breaking up a discipline session and saying “Hey, knock this off”—to the parent!
I’m not sure I’d even be able to dish out discipline. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever truly accepted that I ever deserved discipline as a kid myself. I know it, of course, as an intellectual matter—oh, do I know it. But I still keenly remember the feeling that I was an impeccably behaved little angel being set upon for no particular reason. I don’t like the idea of doing that to my own child or of having to definitively give up that fiction.
Maybe we just don’t want to be viscerally reminded that we once wore diapers. That we once threw meaningless temper tantrums. That we once knew nothing about anything and had to be tirelessly raised up to be who we are now. Perhaps it is easier to imagine, as our lives so often seem to suggest, that we have always been exactly who we are today, completely autonomous and self-made. In other words, perhaps on some level, my generation understands that having children will injure our pride and puncture our self-understanding.
Maybe this all sounds ignorant; maybe, frankly, it sounds like moronic navel-gazing, or a brain rotted by online discourse. It kind of sounds like that to me, too. But I realize that I have virtually no first-hand experience of kids or taking care of them—except for my own childhood, which feels increasingly distant, like a story I read about somewhere.
I wonder if one reason for the exploding popularity of pets, and the notion of “pet parents,” is that pets don’t truly require discipline. Sure, you spray the cat, yell “no” at the dog. You train them, you refuse treats or put them in the crate. But they don’t really have to be raised up—they don’t truly understand right or wrong. We imagine that our cat is feeling guilty or our dog is giving us sad puppy eyes, but we know we’re anthropomorphizing. A pet owner never really has to inflict real emotional pain on a pet for its own good, in a way that it cannot understand but which it needs nonetheless. I have to imagine that something like this is an underrated reason for deferring or refusing children.
There’s nothing natural or intuitive about parenting to me; it’s an abstraction. The template, the neutral state, for my life and that of most of my peers is college and post-college, years and years of breezy autonomous living, bounded by almost nothing but money and work hours. I probably belong to the first generation for whom holding a baby is more of an abstraction than jetting off to Europe. A baby might as well be a Martian.
When things become optional, they become choices, and choices can be hard. They can subtly alter psychology. Pope Francis remarked, several years ago, that the easy availability of divorce changed the nature of marriage itself. Suddenly there was always an exit ramp, whether or not you ever personally considered taking it. Once it’s there, how can it not at least occur to you to take it? For people in abusive or miserable marriages, that exit ramp is good and necessary. For everyone else, what does it do to you to know that you can always walk away? I think it’s pretty obvious that reliable contraception and a culture that doesn’t explicitly encourage childbearing has done something similar to the idea of starting a family.
Individual autonomy is a good thing. It is not, necessarily, the highest good. For all of its benefits, and for all of the ways in which we should not roll back the clock, complete personal freedom of choice makes doing everything harder, because you don’t particularly have to do anything. It is curious that many people can readily discern this phenomenon, which social scientists call the “paradox of choice,” when it comes to 30 varieties of toothpaste or peanut butter or potato chips, but not when it comes to the deepest and most serious personal decisions we will ever make.
There is something exceedingly difficult about having to reverse-engineer or philosophically justify something that was once just unselfconsciously understood. Getting married and starting a family have succumbed to this.
Amid all of this, it is impossible to know just how freely chosen intentional childlessness really is. It is obviously shaped by a kind of passivity, doing what everyone is doing—as was, in a different era, its opposite. It is shaped by economic challenges, chiefly the cost of housing and childcare, followed, perhaps, by education issues.
We marvel at the ease with which people seemed to start families in the past, as though they were a race of superhumans. They were homeowners and parents at 25; well into our 30s, we scarcely feel like we’ve grown up, yet we can hardly remember our own childhoods.
It takes only one break in the chain for the whole thing to be compromised. Ronald Reagan famously declared that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction.” The fact is, almost everything may only be one generation away from extinction. Look, for example, at how only one or two generations of smaller families and higher ages of marriage and childbirth have made large families far more impractical—fewer grandparents; older parents for in-family childcare; fewer cultural resources; a tacit social norm that large families are a little bit odd. It would not matter if family life had been the same for thousands of years or a few generations; one break is all it takes to make it seem impossibly distant to us.
My problem with a lot of the right-wing pronatalism is that it assumes things like cities are bad for families because people in cities don’t have a lot of kids or women who want 10 cats instead of a child are the problem or whatever. These are facile ideas that fail to discern any of what is going on. Too much of the supposedly pro-family lobby cares more about scorning non-parents than conveying the joy of family life. They make the same error that ideologues of all stripes make: simplifying complex questions and turning the practical into the ideological. They speak as if preferences and behaviors simply exist in the ether, disconnected from the contexts and incentives in which they take shape.
A baby might be an abstraction to a young, highly educated, coastal professional like me. It seems like it might be an abstraction to a lot of pronatalists, too.
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The only baby I have ever interacted with in more than passing is my own. She'll be one year old soon. Growing up, my sister and I were the youngest in our not-very-large extended family, but not by so much that our cousins had kids of their own. After college and later on, even as a new parent, there were/are no situations where I would be interacting with other people's kids. My wife and I don't even live in the same time zone as our own parents. I think our situation is pretty common for upper middle class people our age.
The result of all of the above is that before my daughter was born, we were only exposed to the negative aspects of parenting. When you're a teenager it's "don't have a baby, it'll ruin your life." When you're a bit older it's "once you have a baby, you'll be constantly deep in a well of tiredness and suffering." That's it, that's all the context you have for having children. Little wonder fewer and fewer people do it!
Never once did anyone tell me about the joy I'd feel when I hold my daughter. I don't come home from work dreading having to take care of her. I look forward to seeing her all day. Lately she has started reaching out her finger to boop my nose and saying "ooooooop" as she does it. Yes, it's tiring and there are parts that aren't fun but those things feel so insignificant. When I talk to people about how it has been having a baby I only even find myself bringing up the horror stories you hear to try to tell people that's not what parenting is all about.
The point is, my wife and I took the plunge despite hearing nothing but negative messaging about what to expect. I wish people talked more about the upsides; I would've been a lot less worried about whether I was, at 30, getting myself into something I wasn't prepared for. The pronatal discourse space seems to be dominated by weird far-right types who not-so-secretly just want women back in the kitchen, which is pretty off-putting to me as a liberal, and I think to a lot of normal conservatives too. I don't want those guys to own parenting as an issue and if they do, it's a real loss.
I married pretty late in life (40-ish) and when we had a child our son turned out to be autistic.
My wife and I sometimes joke to ourselves that we should have bought a dog instead, and as much as we're joking, I don't know if we would have agreed to do this knowing the challenges and turmoil that has marked our life since our son was born.
But I wouldn't change it. For all of the difficulties, for all of the sleepless nights, looking at our now 19-year-old, seeing him take his first college class and becoming a man is the most satisfying thing I've ever done.
A couple of weeks ago I won a journalism award. And I mention that not as a humblebrag. But because I pushed off things I wanted to do in my career to focus on helping my son be everything he could be. And while it's hard not to wonder what might have been, I truly believe parenthood - with this child - is where I was meant to be.
Parenthood has made me become a better person. And while it's not perfect and it's not for everyone, putting yourself second sometimes can be a satisfying choice.