I have just returned from a week at the beach with my good friend CC, my mom, my "Aunt" Carole, my sister, my brother-in-law, and, most notably, my two little nieces, ages 5 and 3, who are truly delightful girls and about whom more will be said later.
This was the first time in many years I've made this trip without wife in tow and the first time in about as many that I didn't disappear every day to a golf course (a practice that may at least in part explain why I am today a reluctant bachelor). CC filled in for my future ex and was a passable substitute during sunlight, providing sharp repartee and useful insights, but, charming though he may be, was of no value at all when bedtime came, because that's not how we do. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
I do not much care for the beach, especially a beach beside a bay, which is where we vacationed, because I have shpilkes and the whole point of the beach is to sit around and do nothing. Occasionally you pretend to read but all the kibitzing around you makes that pretty much impossible, especially when there are young children about (over the course of the week I knocked off only about 30 pages of The Intuitionist, which is a pretty easy read; good too, at least so far). Ocean beaches are better because oceans have waves--I love bodysurfing--but a bay offers up little more than tranquil, cold, jellyfish-infested waters. Which is why I usually end up at a golf course, I suppose. This year I passed my days shopping for and preparing meals, taking long walks with CC, and getting to know my nieces a little bit better. I don't get to see them so often because they live in western Massachusetts and I in central North Carolina, so getting to spend a week with them was a rare treat.
The older girl is very much a first child, thoughtful and cautious and very bright. The three-year-old is what I think of as a classic younger child; she's watched her older sister and her parents carefully enough to figure out which rules must be obeyed and which can be transgressed with little or no penalty, and consequently she is the freer and less predictable and funnier of the two. They spend a surprising amount of time naked and inspecting their own crotches, reminding me once again of the fine line between small children and dogs. They are both willful, but the older one is willful in a stubborn, moody, defiant sort of way, whereas the younger one just seems to know what she wants and doesn't much care what anyone else thinks. This trait was driven home when I returned from the toy store with a sock monkey for her. She took one look at it, frowned, and pronounced, "I don't like it!" My sister seemed worried that I was hurt by the rejection, but I thought it was hilarious, and I was tremendously impressed by her candor and self-assuredness. I also took it as a challenge to get the kid to like the sock monkey. Knowing that she loves Manny Ramirez--she's about the only one these days--I dubbed the sock monkey "Manny." She embraced the name but not its new owner. Strike one.
We bond over Miyazaki movies, my special nexus with the girls as I had given them a copy of My Neighbor Totoro for Hannukah, which is the Jewish Christmas in about the same way that Purim is the Jewish Halloween. This time around we watched Kiki's Delivery Service, which the girls both loved, and so did I. I hope to see them both grow into anime geeks; it'd go some way toward convincing me that I've had a positive impact on their lives.
All this hanging around with the girls got me to thinking about how my future ex-wife and I had kicked around the idea of kids for a while. It was one of the reasons we left New York City for North Carolina, in fact; we couldn't imagine raising kids in so cramped and expensive a place. My ex had said she'd eventually want kids when we married, and I was totally up for the challenge even though I felt no compelling need to add my spawn to the Earth's population, but we never got past the talking stage and eventually decided we would be perfectly happy without. I suppose we might still be together had we had kids--I can't tell you how many folks I've spoken with who've implied or outright said that having kids has kept their marriages from falling apart during the rough stretches--and if we had, we might well be recapitulating the unhappy marriages from which we arose and which we swore we had learned from. So I guess that all worked out for the best.
While I think I'd be a competent parent, I don't understand the need to become one. I can come up with selfish reasons to reproduce, but not good ones. The former include: having someone who will care about you and perhaps for you when you are old; having a project you share with your spouse that takes your attention off of each other and focuses it on people who are much more compelling; and, having a responsibility that keeps you so busy that you can't stop to think about whether your life is going the way you want it to, whether you are as happy as you could be, etc. etc. I suspect that all parents ever think about is when they will be able to steal a few moments for a nap, and the number of days until they can pack the kids off to college.
When I left the shore, the younger girl still had a pretty lousy relationship with Manny. I was heartened the night before when she had included Manny in her game of 'Duck Duck Goose' and even hugged him a few times, but then as she headed off to bed she turned to face Manny and proclaimed, "I STILL don't like him!" Strike two. On the morning I left I explained to her that I'd like to come visit Manny in western Massachusetts, which was about the only way I could get out the door without having to take Manny with me. And I haven't given up yet. I'm seriously considering sending her a Jiji doll--Jiji is one of the main characters in Kiki's Delivery Service--along with a note explaining that Jiji is looking for his best friend Manny, in hopes of achieving affection by association.
I realize now that I have devoted a considerable amount of time and thought to trying to figure out how to outsmart a three-year-old. During that time I haven't once wondered whether my life is going where I want it to or whether I'm as happy as I could be.
Maybe I am parental material after all.
So there you go.
PS For those with 10 minutes to waste, check out this Louis CK bit on kids. It's only OK at the start, but be patient. It builds to a pretty fabulous ending.
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9 comments:
Interesting that you used the term "selfish reasons" when discussing why you could imagine having children. For me, it's the selfish reasons that never made me feel very parental.
I was lucky that husband #1 and I didn't accidentally get pregnant.
And while husband #2 probably isn't too old to be a father, my reproductive years are gone. Neither of us has any regrets.
Why? Because we've realized that we're too selfish with our time, as a couple, to have been good parents.
My grandmother once told me something to the effect that things work out as they should. I guess I believe that most of the time.
I enjoy other people's children - in small doses - just as you obviously have!
Janet
It's Teri, the mother of 3 daughters with your old pal Steve.
I never wanted kids at all - the desire to have them was just part of our relationship. Certainly that doesn't happen in every relationship, and I'm not saying it should. But without having given it a lot of thought, I found myself wanting a baby with this guy, for no particular reason I've ever tried to articulate. And also we thought it would be fun.
There is so much going on when you have kids that you can't imagine till you have them. Selfish/unselfish isn't really part of the equation for me. Certainly I wish naps were part of the workweek, and grocery shopping alone becomes cause for celebration. With the help of assorted babysitters and grandparents (a/k/a free babysitters) we've maintained a pretty active entertainment schedule and keep a social life going (not exclusively, but to a great extent, with other parents of young children who respect bedtime just as much as we do).
But I think about those kids all the time, and with no regrets. I want to know what they ate and who they played with and how they slept, and they drive me nuts but they're better than television (which is good because we don't have cable). They amaze me and make me happy and piss me off. And make me happy. And we think that they're pretty decent human beings, so far (the eldest is only 7 so there's plenty of time to mess that up).
I would never tell anyone to have kids who just didn't have that urge to have them. But it's not one of those things that lends itself well to analysis. It's just nature.
Final comment: you nailed the older/younger child thing - the middle child is inscrutable, though.
The rb himself is solid evidence of the inscrutability (to put it mildly) of middle children.
For the record, I didn't know he was a middle child!
~Teri
By now you've probably started thinking that you're being overly analytical about something that's a many-billion-year-old (or perhaps 5,768, depending on whose story you believe) part of nature with a self-contained perpetuation mechanism, not unlike eating, taking shelter, or self-defense. However, if you are not yet thinking about this, shift gears and start.
First of all, it's a sign of how far gone we are as a civilization, as well as the role we each play in its continuing degeneration, that anyone is wondering whether they need to manufacture for themselves a distraction from whether or not their life is going the way they want. We're animals. Until very recently, just a nano-second in the history of human existence, all we had to do was eat, crap, stay warm, sleep, screw, and protect ourselves from getting killed. Somewhere in all of that results offspring, just like any other animal. In fact, based on the laws of nature, the selfish act is consciously blocking the natural outcomes of all those acts. It could even be downright dangerous. Nature has created serious consequences for defiance. Imagine if you ate whenever you were hungry, but refused to take a dump. Imagine if winter was coming and you couldn't find personal fulfillment gathering wood or knitting a sweater, or decided that spending time doing these things would only be a distraction from what you might be doing to have a more fulfilling life. Sometimes you just have to be a vertebrate, no matter how hard it is to admit it.
In most instances, having heterosexual sex eventually causes conception, and we only avoid that by physically interfering with nature's plan for all species -- in other words, by being selfish. OK, I'll stop on that point. You get the idea.
If you were to say that you don't want kids because the world is too awful, and you don't want to perpetuate the species because it does not merit perpetuation, that would be a logical, albeit subjective, argument. That argument is well-countered by the awareness that the really awful people of the world never voluntarily abstain from reproduction, and those of us who abstain on moral grounds are really surrendering, not simply choosing to not take part. We're not making badness go away, rather just putting good on the slow path to extinction. But why do humans even entertain these thoughts? We never see cheetahs stop reproducing just because all their offspring grow up to be ruthless killers of pacifist vegetarians. They just screw and make baby cheetahs, and nurse them toward self-sufficiency. However, we have been equipped by nature with a brain that not only produces tools but suffers moral dilemmas, so somehow nature allows for the abstention on moral grounds. You just have to seriously contemplate whether you're opting out of the risk for either creating evil or at least creating someone who will be suffering under the evil of others, or whether you're disarming and eliminating good. Let's move on.
I doubt you'll find too many parents who think having kids helps them not focus on each other. It adds new, brightly colored threads to the tapestry of the relationship, and brings out elements of each other's characters that would otherwise have remained unrevealed, even to yourselves, let alone each other. As we've already explored, heterosexual partners of any life form reproduce, so it's not like you're taking a break from being together as a couple -- it's part of being a couple.
Hey, I just had a really strange idea. What if we were amoebas, and at some point in our physical development we just split in half, and either ceased to exist while becoming two new things, or became two of ourselves, or kept being ourselves while spinning off a twin, or however it works out if an amoeba could be conscious of these things? How cool would that be, to be relieved of the burdens of all these contemplations?
Not repeating the mistakes of your parents can be done in a variety of ways, not just by skipping out. I realize I've only been in this for 7 1/2 years now, but I've definitely avoided most of the things I really wish hadn't been part of my own upbringing. Who knows how long I'll be able to hold out, and who knows how many things I'm pioneering that my kids will want to avoid when they're parents, but that's how the world goes 'round, right?
For all the complications created by having children, there are as many simplifications, so it's a wash. For example, before I had kids, given the kind of life I've always led, it took a lot for any impending event to set me afire with anticipation. Now, as you've observed, just a glance at the calendar that reveals a two-hour stretch tomorrow that could finally be that excellent nap is all it takes. Does that mean my life sucks? Quite the contrary -- it means I'm constantly busy doing really important things that have long-term, life & death, perhaps even eternal consequences -- so much that I rarely have enough time to get enough sleep. How freakin' matchless is that, in the grand scheme of wondering if you're life has real meaning or if it's going the way you want? This is better by a thousand times than being Elvis! OK -- that's hyperbolic. But it's at least ten times as good, and I didn't have a heart attack by failing to take the aforementioned dump at the age of 42, either.
Having something to make you consider whether you're in a bad marriage or perhaps in a good marriage that's just going through an unspectacular rough spot isn't a bad element to have in your life, either. Sure, it sucks to stay in a bad marriage, but it also sucks to be "out there" in middle-age (probably any age, if memory serves, and it serves less every day), so it's good to have some means by which to make yourself look hard at which situation you're in. As long as you don't lapse into using the kids as weapons against each other, everyone will survive, no matter what the result of this more thorough-going examination.
So we're back where we began. The only way having a kid is a selfish decision is if your sole motivation is to turn that kid into everything you desired but failed to achieve, and even then it rarely goes the way you planned. You're over-thinking the situation. Once you have a kid, your primordial animal really kicks in hard, and it takes way too much conscious effort to try to suppress it, not unlike trying to suppress salivation when you're hungry and your neighbor's barbecue is blowing your way. You go with the flow. It turns out that nature has endowed you with the power to hear the differences between hungry crying, poopy crying, angry crying, and injured crying, for starters. So much that nature has buried inside yourself comes out through instinctive reactions to the child's needs and behaviors that you find every moment to be a personal revelation and not a chore derived from personal responsibility for total dependency, however much the latter might seem to be more visible during the pre-parental navel-gazing. It comes from the inside out, not from the outside in, and it's at least as amazing as when you discovered what your body has provided to you in its sexual mechanisms. In fact, that may well be how the two things got evolutionarily tied together in the whole cause-and-effect cycle (or created that way, again, depending on your story).
Your old pal who happens to be the younger of two children,
Steve
wow this post sure did spur some long comments! I suppose the topic of kids is polarizing.
I, for one, decided not to have kids. Oops. Too late. Grrrrr. Wish I'd realized earlier.
Kidding. I love my kids. Mostly as they are becoming more and more individual and independent. It's a joy to see.
And like Janet, glad I didn't have kids with hub#1. (Not that Janet and I had the same first husband. That is not the case as far as I know.)
I also - for YOUR sake, Wendy - hope we didn't share the same ex...!
;-)
Janet
To everyone--
Thanks for your generous feedback. Lots to ponder here, lots of strands in the old Duder's head. I should add that I still haven't ruled out children in my life, although the prospect of fathering a child at 47 is daunting and the eventuality of a teenager in my house when I'm in my sixties is much, much more daunting. Still, kids are awfully cool and making them is fun, so who knows?
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