Everything's a done deal

On being reluctant to have children, via Hannah Black, Sheila Heti, Helen Garner, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

A year ago I was going to write here about a book, What Are Children For?, by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. The book deals with the arguments people might make for or against having children, addressing itself to the ambivalent and undecided, and ultimately suggests that these arguments are beside the point. It tries to offer a kind of companionship to those who aren’t sure, showing them they are not alone in finding it hard to decide – and also makes this part of its argument, that this is not a decision that is made alone, but in collaboration with others.

I was not going to write about any of this, however, but instead focus on the uncanny way that they appeared to be hiding their actual position throughout, and how this got picked up on in reviews, which called them crypto-conservative and pro-natalist, and how they responded with bafflement, because it had all been in good faith and they believed themselves to be on the left. All of this seemed a rehashing on a slightly larger scale of a previous accusation of crypto-conservatism in The Point, the magazine they are both involved with, which I’d wanted to write about for a long time, because I’d come to believe that people in Chicago didn’t believe in the idea that language could do anything other than say straightforwardly what it meant, which was identical with what its author had meant. From this position, the accusation of being crypto-anything made no sense: the authors had stated their intentions and their wider political commitments, and there was nothing else to see, no way that style or language or context might be betraying them unawares. (I understood the accusation against the book, but thought it was uncharitable to the point of paranoia – which is not to say that I thought the book was good.) I was going to deal with the actual content of the book in a brief aside at the end.

I didn’t write the piece for a few reasons. The argument was a bit above my pay grade. I had to find work, or at least money, and reading literary theory felt an indulgence when there were countless possible jobs to apply for. But perhaps most importantly, the subject of the aside itself had begun to play an outsized, and constantly developing, role in my life, and I no longer felt able to write about it with the distance I had planned. One of my closest friends was pregnant. Another close friend, who is also an ex, was going to have a second child. I found out I was going to be an uncle. And, for more or less the first time, I had to frame my position about children to another person in terms of my desires. The fact that I didn’t have children was not just something that had happened, but a kind of decision, in that other decisions I had made were implicitly, and perhaps unconsciously, also decisions not to have children, even if just about prioritising meaningful work or intellectual projects over making money and having a stable job and housing. Other people, who did hope to have children, had chosen similar paths to me, and that had previously made my decisions seem unremarkable; but now the differences were becoming more apparent, and I had to avow them.

The problem with Berg and Wiseman’s book, as I saw it, was that it took – apparently as read – a question for its framing that seemed very alien to me, and to my understanding of how my friends saw things. The central question in the book was not really about deciding whether or not to have children; it was about deciding whether or not you wanted to have them. And this was presented almost as a question of identity: am I the sort of person who wants children, or not? As it happens, the authors eventually argue against this framing. But I felt that nobody I was close to saw it in these terms at all. That’s not to say that the idea of parenthood didn’t elicit strong feelings around identity. It’s just that the deliberation and self-reflection were downstream of an existing set of feelings and instincts. There was nothing to find out, just practical problems to solve or things to come to terms with. I can see that this is probably to do with the people I choose to be close to, and perhaps more importantly, the ones who talked about it. But I’d never heard anyone express anything like the idea that the book opens with, the desperate wish for clarity on whether or not one wanted children. My sense was that they either wanted them, and were in some way doing something about it, or else they didn’t, and were doing something about that, whether by trying out being a nun or working out how to set up a commune. If there was difficulty, or anxiety, fear, uncertainty, it was mostly to do with concrete situations, or lay in some kind of mismatch, whether between two people in a couple, or a person or couple and their circumstances, or, like me, between what they believed and what they wanted.

I didn’t think I wanted children. But I also didn’t think that children were the kind of thing that you wanted or didn’t. They were something you were in a position to have, or weren’t, or perhaps more accurately, they were something you were up for – up to – or weren’t. If you weren’t, there were other things you could do, and should do, to live in a way that bound yourself to others. The idea came partly through Catholicism, but was articulated most forcefully by non-Catholic leftist friends. Having children was a form of resistance towards (neo)liberal ideas of individualism and choice, an impoverished vision of freedom as consumption. It was also an embrace of a properly human life – was perhaps the central human experience, to reject which was a rejection of one’s own humanity.

I had never encountered any overt pressure to have children from anyone – society, family, friends – only ever the opposite. I think that a lot of people of my age and class and social worlds have had a similar experience, in which the norm is that you won’t, or won’t until later, or won’t until you are in the kind of material situation many people my age will probably never be in. I’m pretty sure that if I did have a baby right now, many people would see me as something like a teenage parent – irresponsible, wilful, improvident. And so this attitude appeared to me the novel, the countercultural one, the attitude in which you did have children, because that’s what humans do.

But at the same time I couldn’t imagine having children, and I’d made sure I wasn’t in a position to have them. Since my late 20s, I had been basically single, and my life revolved around work, friendships and intense activity undertaken alone. I had thought a lot about children, and about how I might live in a way that involved them, or involved other kinds of care and dependency. I liked spending time with my friends’ children, whose ways of being I found fascinating and of an intensity that was easy to connect to, but also a bit exhausting. I sometimes imagined becoming a stepparent, which seemed, while obviously difficult, to involve a form of difficulty I felt more able to deal with; similarly, I sometimes imagined myself as co-parent to a child a notional female partner might have. But becoming pregnant, being a ‘mother’, was something I only ever imagined as a kind of disaster.

So I could see that on some level there was a kind of difference in experience between me and the friends who had plans for children – a difference that was psychological but almost physiological in some cases, a friend memorably once saying that her broodiness was a physical feeling, like hunger or needing a wee – but that was not a kind of heuristic. I took comfort in it nonetheless, and was also relieved that I didn’t have to experience the kinds of disappointment, perhaps even a sense of cosmic incorrectness, that attended this feeling when, for whatever reason, it was frustrated. But it seemed clear that the difference was not about some kind of neutral preference, and my feelings or lack of feelings towards having children were not isolated from other aspects of my psychological life. To identify with it, as if that were the end of that – to tick the box saying ‘don’t want kids’ – would be a rejection of all of my other commitments.

The reason the question became outsized about a year ago was all of the things I mention above, then two more. The first was that, when I was 21, someone told me that they thought I would have a child when I was 22 or 37. The numbers were not chosen at random – they were the ages of his father and mother respectively when they had had him – but essentially they were arbitrary ages signifying ‘younger than usual’ and ‘older than usual’; nonetheless, I remembered them. By coincidence my father was 37 when he had me. And so, since I was 21, this age had taken on a kind of private meaning, and, in the context of my friends’ pregnancies and children and the greater openness of people in their mid- to late-30s to talking about their hopes and anxieties about children, became a subterranean point around which my own feelings began to coalesce, as if it truly were now or never. Then, around my 37^th birthday, I fell in love, something I’d begun to think wasn’t possible.

The reasons I had thought it wasn’t possible were the same as the ones that meant I didn’t think I would have children. I found this very movingly expressed in Hannah Black’s recent essay on motherhood, ‘Mother, Maybe’, in a way that made very painfully clear to me that on some level I am right in my diagnosis of my problem. She writes of falling in love while pregnant:

It had not occurred to me that one thing I had not been brave enough to do—have a child—could relate to another thing I had not been brave enough to do fully—have a sustained intimate relationship in which I allowed myself to be made uncomfortable, to be changed, by my desire for the relationship’s survival.

Now I had to contend with the idea that it might work the other way around, too.

I recently spent a weekend with my friends and their baby, and was forcefully made aware of how unpleasant I found the idea that anyone had ever paid as much attention to me and my needs and my passing feelings as all of us did towards this child. I’ve been told that this has changed since we were little, that children are more attended to now than they were then. But even so, the child becomes a focus – of plans and problem-solving and frustration – that I found it painful to imagine I had ever been, and I found it insane to imagine wanting to force another new person into that position. By the same token, the idea of bringing someone into being for whom I would be psychically present for the rest of their life is intolerable. Hannah Black writes, ‘The reality of my daughter is beyond my wildest dreams and dominates every mundane detail of my life. Dumbly, like water proud of being wet or a bird that thinks it invented flight, I am amazed that I am her mother.’ Or, more simply, Helen Garner, of her daughter: ‘Fact: I love her more than anyone in the world.’ I find it horrifying and a bit disgusting to imagine either loving someone that much, or ever having been loved that much, and can only hope that I wasn’t. I had panicked slightly about that weekend, because it was when I was meant to be finishing my novel, and I couldn’t imagine being able to do it around a child. I had actually been hoping to be completely alone, but at least with friends, with adults, you can say ‘look, I need to work’, and in most cases they understand. With a baby, it’s not just that you can’t say to them ‘look, I need to work’ and expect to be understood; it’s that they show up the need to be working as the escape from relation it always was.

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All the same, I have found it interesting that, of people who have become parents, it is primarily the partners who haven’t given birth who recommend it, and it is only women who have said to me that it’s not for everyone: ‘it’s not for everyone’, two people have said exactly the same thing in the same words, nearly a decade apart, one more generally, the other with specific reference to me. And as I say it is specifically motherhood that I am afraid of – not just the body horror around pregnancy, although perhaps that too, but the particular intensities and kinds of hate and love that mothers, birthing parents, seem to feel, and people feel towards the person who bore them and fed them. For some, motherhood is mortality. For me it’s dependency, which is presumably another aspect of the same thing, but feels different – something like the way that I’m not afraid of spiders themselves, but of accidentally wounding a spider that is on my body, rendering it incapable of getting away, binding it to me. I care much less about wanting to be killed and supplanted as a figure of authority, indeed often want to be.

I know, and hate, the fact that the whole matter is different for those who can become pregnant, and those who can make someone else pregnant – that, with cis male friends, I am speaking across a divide. For instance, for all that I find it hard to imagine myself a parent, I have sometimes wished that there could be something of the done deal about it. But this is much harder for those who can be pregnant, at least when you have access to contraception and abortion. I was always shocked to find that cis men I knew had slept with new partners, women, without a condom, had had one night stands where they had done this, even. I dream constantly about having to look after a baby I hadn’t known was mine. But at least all this – like the fantasy of falling in love with someone who already had a child – removes the question of having to decide, and decide to do something that sounds awful and nearly impossible, especially in the absence of the feeling of biological imperative that other people I know have felt. Black talks of how she ‘remained in the fog of my indecision for so long, even weeks into the pregnancy, that I had to arrive at the decision multiple times after it was made’. This is not an experience a male parent can have.

Sometimes I feel that there are kinds of willed delusion that attend on parenthood, things people say they hadn’t known or expected in advance, that sound totally mad to me, because they are things that I think about all the time, and feel I have never not known about. This is also how it sometimes feels when the same person can appear to be nearly losing it and then the next day, or the next year, say how much they love having a child – although here I know that it’s me who doesn’t understand. But it does seem to me to be running a huge risk, that is not just an excuse or a pretext, to enter into something so hard when you hate the idea of it so much. That is, I’m afraid, at least as much as anything else, of ruining several people’s lives; the fear of having a child is about being bound to someone else in love and also in resentment and hate and coldness and neglect. This sounds like a way of making a cowardly decision palatable for myself – to imagine that I am protecting others from having to be hurt by me – but I understand that as in itself cowardly, a unilateral withdrawing of trust, a lack of respect. But whatever the case, the fact of actively having to decide makes the risk very low.

It is in this context that I was struck by something Helen Garner wrote in her diaries, ‘having had a child when I did has been one of the major strokes of good fortune in my life.’ I recognised it as something I had, when I was younger, 21 even, thought I might later think. I felt a flash of future regret, a new anxious fantasy unlocked. When my friend repeated the phrase ‘you only live once’ to me as a reason to have children, I knew what he meant, but only in this post hoc form, Garner’s gratitude towards earlier good luck, could I really respond to it, because this was something, I realised, that I already couldn’t say, not really.

There came a point this year when I stopped being preoccupied the question of whether I would ever change to such an extent that I could accept the mutual dependence that parenthood involved, and started thinking instead that it was more about accepting the feeling of guilt that came from the knowledge I would never change that much, at least not ‘in time’. I had thought that meeting my friend’s baby would somehow decide the matter for me, that I would feel something around her that gave me a clear sign one way or another. Instead, I felt nothing but the same intellectual stuff I always have felt around children. I was fascinated and a bit repelled by how alien a newborn baby can be, and fascinated and a bit repelled at my indifference towards her as the sort of being I could also have an intense relation to, if I chose to. A few months later I cat-sat for a friend with older children, which I again privately thought of as a chance to decide the matter, because I knew that this was a house that I could imagine myself living in, and so it would be a chance to try on the material surroundings of this other life for a couple of weeks, to visualise a future with children. What happened instead was that I felt all the more fiercely protective over a life alone, where I could keep my phone on a different floor to my work and concentrate for hours on end without having to interact with anyone. I spent much of the time I was there imagining breaking up with my boyfriend in order to dedicate myself entirely to work.

That month I read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and recognised in the formal gesture of the narrator making decisions through tossing coins the same demands I was making of these external situations, in which they would ‘decide’ for me. And the decision I was asking them to make was not unlike the one I had previously – in my planned essay on Berg and Wiseman – disavowed as a decision at all, because I was not deciding whether or not to have children in the here and now, but something much more vague and essentially beside the point, and really what I wanted was some external presence to excuse my fears of dependence and loss of self and let me off the hook.

In Black’s essay – which is basically the reason for writing this piece, although it’s also nearly my 38^thbirthday, when the question will be definitively be removed from the realm of superstition – she also questions whether this thing we see as a decision should be seen as such at all:

Having a child was the only decision that I really treated as one, that I struggled with consciously. In retrospect this laborious process seems absurd. Did I think I was conceiving a concept? My daughter is real and herself.

She talks of indecision as ‘a subby tendency, a refusal of sovereignty over your own life, but like submissive desire the goal is to get what you want without asking’. What the essay dramatises is the opposite of how I feel – I need to be forced to do what I don’t want, because I know that by myself I will never choose it. But what I liked about it was the way that she shows up the idea of choosing between two paths as an illusion, because this way of seeing it is a way of not having to choose, of keeping alive the other path as a possibility, both now and in the future.

Regret hallucinates a bridge between what does and does not happen, an anchor securing the unlived life to the lived one. The regret I experienced after my earlier abortion stemmed not only from having made what I thought was a wrong decision, but from my refusal to acknowledge the decision’s total reality. The regret allowed me to live two lives, the life of reality, in which I was not a mother, and the life of regret, in which the baby was still at stake, still an open question and, in a way, I was its mother.

Now, I envy the kinds of experiences that my friends have, in childbirth, in having children – not the experiences themselves, necessarily, but the novelty of it: I am greedy for all of the experiences life has to offer. And the imagined future regret that I felt on reading Garner’s diaries would be something like that, too, a retrospective envy or greed for more. Heti’s narrator, in her concluding chapter, reaches a point of realising that she doesn’t ‘have to live every possible life’, which in this case tells against motherhood rather than for it. I can as little live through worrying I might abandon my child as I can through worrying I might regret not having one. I’ve not in fact regretted any of the major decisions in my life so far – which, I’ve discovered, is not true of everyone I did a PhD with – if this is the first, whatever it is that happens, then that will itself be a novel experience.

The reprieve over the summer came partly from reading Motherhood, and finding that the narrator’s preoccupation dissolves when she goes on antidepressants – and that, by the book’s end, it is shown to be bound up with being the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. This made my own preoccupation seem suddenly groundless. I felt free for the first time in months to be absorbed in other questions, ones that seemed more productive and better aligned with how I saw myself, in terms of gender in particular.

But now it’s a few months later, things I am reading draw me back to the old question, or perhaps because it’s my birthday, and that there are new – newer! – babies around me, and I see myself treating my feelings towards them as something to interpret. And so I thought, fine, I will write the piece after all, but properly, not hiding behind discussions of language and politics (or indeed using the promotion of another poetry pamphlet as a pretext, which is what I was initially going to do here but was persuaded otherwise), even though it’s not something I want to admit I think about.

For a lot of this year I’ve wondered what it was that has kept me from writing. I was thinking of writing a piece about love, and still might, which I have often thought of as one of the main culprits. It would be too easy to say that it was in fact this piece that was the block, but this was nonetheless the main thing that I felt I was ‘not writing’ – both specifically, in terms of the essay on intention that I’d planned, and more generally: the thing that I wanted to think through but was ashamed to, or afraid of. Having written it, it’s hard to remember what it was that I feared.

Perhaps most of the examples of this, what Black calls ‘minor literature’, are written from the other side of the done deal, whether the decision was for or against. But the conclusions are the same either way. Everything is already a done deal: there is no other life that is being held open for you. As my friend says, ‘you only live once.’ Every day you make countless decisions, all irrevocable. And it’s that that’s your life, not the other thing, in the past or future. And, at the same time, nothing is a done deal: all commitments, all forms of love, are made up not of something that was decided once, but is decided every day, over and over. The decision to have children is not made in the abstract, but within a specific context, and in relation. You don’t know what will happen, next month, next year. You also don’t know how much you will change, and in what ways, though probably more than you would think, and less than you might hope.

Whether these ideas strike you as profound or obvious depends on which decision they are being written from, at least in my experience, although also perhaps on how clearly and beautifully they are phrased. Certainly I was more struck by Heti’s book than Berg and Wiseman’s, because it felt novel to hear ideas that I usually encountered as reasons for having children used in a description of life without them. Here they are, from neither decision, this side of the done deal. I thought that writing at length about this might somehow – what – make me a mother? Or perhaps even the opposite, commit me to my fears as a kind of identity. But it turns out that neither of these are true, at least for now.