Last weekend, at a friend’s wedding, I got hemmed into the inevitable are-you-going-to-have-kids corner. Normally, it’s a well-meaning aunty who asks sweetly, laced with a dash of impatience, hinting that rather than all this chit-chat I should just get on with it. This time though, I locked horns with a former classmate (famous for proselytising about parenthood), who signalled the end of discussion by stating: “You know, it would do you good,” as if having a child was like taking up meditation or parkour.
Which is why it was such a delight to stumble upon this new anthology—Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, edited by Meghan Daum. In her introduction, Daum explains that she wanted to reframe the dialogue, “which so often pits parents against nonparents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income.” The contributors (thirteen women and three men) come at their childlessness from different angles—sad, hilarious, poignant, irreverent—but they all essentially confirm what I’ve always suspected: that people who decide not to have children receive a disproportionate amount of flack for what is essentially an ethical decision not to further overpopulate the planet.
Reading the anthology also confirmed that most conversations around the decision not to have children tends to put those going against the biological imperative on the back foot. As, one of the essayists, Courtney Hodell put it, “When you talk of not wanting children...it is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself.” Hers is the essay I most identified with—never militantly against the idea of children, but never experiencing any real baby lust, she writes about dithering and angsting and about the complicated emotions she experienced when her gay twin brother decided to become a parent with the help of a surrogate mother; how among some primates (marmosets and langurs) there are “aunts” who don’t have children of their own but who feed, groom and hold other people’s children, which is called “allomothering”….“This is what I’m doing, I and all my sisters of the genetic dead end.”
There’s Lionel Shriver talking about declining birth rates in the Western world, but how this wasn’t impetus enough for her to have a baby, and Michelle Huneven, who suffered a difficult upbringing—“Children seemed as far off as false teeth, and interested me about as much.” And then there’s the standout essay by Geoff Dyer, for whom “any exultation of the writing life is as abhorrent as the exultation of the family life,” who takes umbrage at the argument that children give life meaning—“I’m totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose”— and who neatly deflects the number one move put to us by the “parenting lobby”—that you should have kids because you might regret it later. “Life may not have a purpose,” he writes, but “it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-per-cent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen.”
Next time I go to a wedding, I’m taking copies of this book with info@tishanidoshi.com