poliphilo | Parenthood

Parenthood

I want to say thank you to everyone who responded to my post about surrogacy. It's been really interesting.

Here's a related issue. At the beginning of her article Melanie Thernstrom writes, "to be childless felt like being deprived of something essential: the primal human experience." This niggles me. To begin with I simply disagree. Parenthood is not the "primal human experience". The primal human experience is engagement with the world- and whatever it happens to throw up; a childless life is not a second-class life. Secondly it comes dangerously close to asserting parenthood as a "right"- which I don't believe it is. Parenthood is a privilege- which many abuse. Children are not property or playthings or an extension of the parent, but autonomous beings whom the parent is never going to fully understand. The greatest thing a parent can do for their child is to let it go. As Khalil Gibran wrote, "Your children are not your children."

I'd like to know what you think...

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In my personal experience, a childless life is a second-class life, no matter how you or I feel about it. C and I are childless. I feel it was the best decision, for many reasons, but we are treated differently by family, by society, and likely as not will suffer for it in our twilight years.

Parenthood should indeed be a privilege, I agree, and ironically had my parents been a bit less abusive in exercising that privilege I might have kids myself.

I remember my first wife- who came from Kentucky- telling me you could "never trust a man who didn't want children". I imagine that's a specimen of the kind of folk wisdom you have found yourself up against.

Kentucky was originally a Virginia county. Much of the state was settled by folks that either came from here, from the western reaches of the Commonwealth, or else passed through here, so the tribal mindset is essentially the same.

but when you want to have a child and can't, it does feel like you are being deprived of a human experience like walking or talking. Maternal instincts run very deep - they have to, or none of us would look after the children we do have. I speak from experience here, I had five years of hell over infertility. I do feel i have missed out, and the worst thing is that most people assume we are childless by choice.

My own experience has been utterly different.

I have three children from a marriage that broke up when the youngest was four. After that I became a part-time parent- endlessly ferrying the kids between my house and their mother's. I was also- for two or three years- stepfather to a couple of kids who resented me deeply.

I did my best. I kept falling short.

I agree with you, though I certainly don't mean to downplay the pain caused by infertility amongst those who wish to have children.

I'm suspicious of any attempt to identify something as "the primal human experience", as if there has to be just one, and the same for everyone - with those who haven't had it being by implication somehow not quite as completely human. It reminds me of the childish obsession with making ranked lists - best friends, second best friends, third best friends, etc. - which serve one halfpennyworth of validation to such an intolerable deal of point-scoring and divisiveness. That kind of insecurity may be a primal human experience itself, but I particularly dislike the human habit of setting up shibboleths to separate those who are in from those who are out, rather than enjoying and valuing experiences for what they are.

There have been societies- medieval Christendom for instance- in which not having children has been seen as a high calling. A catholic priest forgoes paternity in order to become everybody's father in God.

Or that's the theory, anyway...

I'm suspicious of any attempt to identify something as "the primal human experience", as if there has to be just one, and the same for everyone

Well put.

I think having children is *a* primal human experience. It is not the only one, nor is it necessary to be completely human.

Secondly it comes dangerously close to asserting parenthood as a "right"- which I don't believe it is. Parenthood is a privilege- which many abuse.

I didn't quite get round to responding to your previous post about surrogacy, so I'll comment here instead. I wholeheartedly agree with what you say above. Childless people do seem to be regarded by many as second class citizens and that is wrong. Not all people are cut out - either emotionally or financially - to be parents, yet too many embark on this course due to societal expectation: ticking boxes on the checklist of life, rather than because they really want to be parents and that is wrong too. Children deserve parents who really, really want them and there are simply too many of us on this planet already for anyone to feel forced into producing more due to societal expectation. Yet I know very many people who do feel pressured in exactly that way.

Although I admit I do not wish to become one myself, I'm not saying that I'm anti-parents, I'm not. I've been delighted for the many people I know who are happy parents. Equally I'm not saying that it isn't very sad for people who've wanted kids and not been able to have them but parenting is a privilege and not a right. I know we are lucky to have been free to make this choice but my husband and I do not feel in any way that we're missing out or somehow second-class because of that: there are many ways to reach out, make a real difference and a human connection, starting a family is just one of them.

Edited 2011-01-04 11:54 (UTC)

It's only since I became Menopausal that I've stopped hoping -every month - that, although it couldn't happen - it might. Being childless - when you want one - hurts.

I understand that, and hope my comment didn't come across as insensitive, I absolutely didn't intend it that way! Sorry if it did. But I just wanted to put across my view as somebody how has been lucky enough to have been able to choose and who gets frustrated when her choice is frowned upon.

Sorry I meant to reply to Tony rather than you personally - no your post didn't come across as insensitive. Opinions are just that opinions and I don't think it right to take them personally unless they are designed to try and alter my behaviour.

Parenthood is very hard work. Creative people often give it a miss- or do it badly- because they don't have the energy to spare.

People shouldn't feel pressured into having children. Bringing life into the world is an awesome responsibility. I've got three children and I'm all too aware of my many failings as a parent.

I think the important part of that sentence is "felt like" and I'm not sure one can really disagree with how another person feels or with the phrases they use in an attempt to communicate their pain.

I agree with you about what the "primal human experience" actually is, but the don't agree that feeling as though childlessness cuts one off from it is at all dangerously close to asserting that parenthood is a right.

After all, privilege or right, for the vast majority of us parenthood does form part --I would argue a huge part-- of our "primal human experience" and it does so without us ever having to come to terms with not being able to do it naturally (or at all) or even face that possibility.

Edited 2011-01-04 13:20 (UTC)

Parenthood is an awesome responsibility. I have three children- all now adults. Raising them was the hardest work I ever did- and I'm very much aware of all the ways in which I let them down.

I'm sorry, your statement seems to be coming a little bit out of left field as they say. I'm not sure how it relates directly to anything my comment or if it's meant to.

You're quite right. Put it down to tiredness.

I don't believe Thernstorm raises herself above criticism by writing "felt" instead of "thought". There's an idea there- and ideas exist to be debated.

Nor do I think she can hide behind her "pain". We have all suffered pain. It's the human condition. If pain excuses everything then nothing's right and nothing's wrong.

It's only since I became Menopausal that I've stopped hoping -every month - that, although it couldn't happen - it might. Being childless - when you want one - hurts.

This is my personal feeling. Everyone has a right to their own opinion - no one opinion is greater than another. It has to be personal choice whether to use all ways possible to have a child or not. I didn't. I went for infertility tests and then gave up. I feel now that in my 20s I would have made a lousy mother - now I'd probably be pretty good - except for the health issues.

Parenthood is a minefield - unfortunately so often childhood is too.

Yes.

We do what we can with what we've been given...

The primal human experience is about making choices - which is engagement with the world and what it throws up. If you cannot have children you have lost the ability to choose. It is thrust upon you.

And you choose how to handle it.

I do feel that children are a primal human experience, but as part of Family. Family--that connection with other human beings, whether you were willing to be part of it or not--has always seemed to be one of the defining human experiences. To me, anyway. I try to conceive of being human without having family, and I fail. We did not evolve in solitude; interaction with others is part of survival.

Whether or not a single individual chooses to become a parent, the human chain created by parents and children who become parents who have children who become... that is an essential part of being human.

Is it the only primal experience? No, I don't think so. But reproduction is a pretty big deal, from a strictly mammalian point of view. :)

We have made a shibboleth of the nuclear family- mother, father, two and a half kids. It's a very constricting model. My neighbour- Samina- is part of a huge extended family- heaven only knows how many of them there are. I don't think I'd like it- but I can see the benefits. In a family the size of a village no-one need ever be lonely, or unsupported or utterly destitute.

In every society, as long as humanity has existed, there have always been childless people. Sometimes they've been unmarried and thus required by social norms to remain ceilbate, like Victorian maiden aunts; sometimes they've been biologically unable to reproduce; sometimes they choose not to reproduce. The childless, like the poor, will always be with us.

I didn't get around to replying to the surrogacy post because I have such complex issues around childbearing and infertility, and I had such a complex response to the article. On the one hand, the author came across as a privileged, wealthy yuppie who just wasn't willing to face the hand that life had dealt her and was willing to do anything and spend anything to buy what she wanted. While I was reading, I wanted to tell her, "Suck it up, buttercup, and stop whining." On the other hand, having had three miscarriages and one stillborn child, and knowing the pain of wanting children and being unable to have them, I can sympathize with the desire to find a way somehow. I would never have chosen surrogacy, but that's my personal response, not a dictate of what others should do.

Ultimately, the article reminded me of the abuses possible in a surrogacy situation, and of the extent to which surrogacy is mainly an option for the well-off. The author's airy assumption of privilege, her princessy ability to demand the perfect egg donor and perfect surrogate and get the perfection she demanded nicely obscured the actual moral and ethical issues involved.

Those maiden aunts and bachelor uncles had their role in the family. And, of course, every so often one of them would turn out to be an Emily Dickinson or an Edward Lear.

My mother's family was well supplied with Victorian maiden aunts. They were formidable people- campaigners for women's rights and disarmament and other Quakerish values.

Not having children frees one up to do other things.

Most of my queasiness about surrogacy would evaporate if it was a option open to the poor.

Or indeed a Jane Austen...

Or a Lewis Carroll...

One of my pet rants is the one that goes, "No, having children is NOT 'just a part of life that everyone should experience'", and, when Tom and I questioned our decision to have children, I reacted quite strongly against people who suggested as much. (It's actually a thread in my LJ from way back, since Will is five years old now.)

Now, from as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a mom. I was a born nurturer. I was developing my own ideas about how I wanted to parent, in a very concrete way, all throughout my own childhood.

Of course, when the time finally came that I was married and ready, it turned out to not be so easy for me. I was infertile for about eight years. I went through two miscarriages and a stint on fertility medication before I got Will. (And, before Finn, another two miscarriages.)
It was when I was going to use the fertility drugs, I think, that I, I of all people, decided to reconsider having children at all.

We didn't adopt because I was concerned about whether we would even be able to (finances, mostly, but also our rather alternative lifestyle made me nervous), because I worried about always feeling "watched", insecure that my children might be taken away if I didn't meet someone else's standards, and, finally, my own insecurity about having to deal someday with the complication of birth parents coming into the picture.

Now, in the end, obviously, I decided to have children, but I did actively, actually evaluate it, and I was one of those "always wanted to" types, the kind most people go "of course they're going to have kids" about...I SERIOUSLY encourage everyone to do that kind of assessment, and NOT to think of parenting as something "people just do", every chance I get.

I don't regret my children; I thrive on parenting exactly as I always anticipated. In fact, it's rather fascinating to see how my previously misplaced nurturing drive has utterly focused on my children and changed how I relate to the rest of the world. I was truly a "natural" at this, and I love it with everything I am...and I STILL say that it's actually something that, in an ideal world, only a very small portion of people should/would do. I think most people do it for all sorts of bad reasons, and it's just fortunate that nature has evolved humans to be ridiculously hard to hopelessly screw up; even really bad parenting still produces humans that are basically functional members of society. That's consolation, though, not a reason to keep doing it!

Parenting, done well, is a hugely demanding job whose ultimate goal is to take something you love more than yourself and send it out into the world without you, expecting (though you are free to hope otherwise) nothing in return.
It requires one to take a positively inordinate amount of joy in the happiness and success of someone else, and that's just the first job requirement.

So, yeah. That's my very wordy way of agreeing with you, basically. :)

I've got three children- all now grown up. Parenting was the hardest work I ever did.

The hardship was exacerbated by the break-up of my first marriage when the youngest child was four. For the next ten to fifteen years my life was organised around having the kids at weekends and ferrying them backwards and forwards between their two homes.

I admire the thoroughness of your approach to parenting. You treat it as the vocation it is.

I have been looking at donor conceived children and their rights, what do you think...??

It's not something I've researched. My off the cuff response is that the child's right to know who its parents are trumps everything else. If a donor can't handle the possibility of being tracked down by the child they have helped engender then they shouldn't donate.

i took me four years to get pregnant with my daughter, i cried every month until i got pregnant. shes 30 now, if i knew how much i would love my kids, i'm not sure i would have had them, its too scary.

Yes. Parenting is scary. And we all go into it blindfold.

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There are a couple of quotes from Gibran that are seared into my consciousness. The other one is "let there be spaces in your togetherness".

I'm afraid I don't like the author of the article very much. I think she's a spoiled little rich girl.

I wanted to be a parent for as far back as I can remember. I was just a child myself when I started collecting children's books and cookie cutters and Christmas ornaments to enjoy with my babies.

I became a teacher--and then, it seemed, I was married to my job and all my students WERE my children.

The life I had envisioned for myself never even remotely came true for me. I never married, never had children, never even dated that much.

I always intended that someday I would have kids--even in my 40s--until endometrial cancer led to a complete hysterectomy. No kids for me...not even in the realm of possibility.

I was very sad when the dream died, and I questioned the value and validity of my life. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be alive any more. However, I came to the notion that if I had given birth to my own children, I would not have had the ability to give myself so fully to my students. My attention would have been focused on my family.

As I believe I have made significant differences in many many kids' lives, I decided that the sacrifice of a life of my own in order to make the lives of a lot of kids better was okay.

Now that I am nearing retirement, I wonder what is going to become of me in my old age. I will have no children to come home for Christmas. No grandchildren to bake cookies for. No heirs to pass my books and "treasures" on to.

That makes me sad.

But, life continues. I have cats. They are my children now.

As far as my feelings about children, I like what Kalil Gibran has to say about them:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

(this is only a partial quote of the poem, but it is the part that encompasses my beliefs about kids.)

You have been a devoted teacher- and that is a remarkable thing to have been.

I think of the great teachers in my life- and one in particular. This man never married, he never had children of his own- but he was mentor and role model to many generations of boys. His influence on me was as deep and beneficial as that of my own natural father.

I've always liked what Gibran has to say about children. You can't hang onto them, you have to let them go, you shouldn't expect a return.

That inevitably evokes the final words of Goodbye, Mr Chips, which are relevant to your post in general: "I thought I heard you say 'twas a pity, a pity I never had children. But you're wrong...I have...thousands of them...thousands of them...and all boys!"

The man I'm thinking of was a real life Chips- who served at the same school from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Parenthood is not the "primal human experience". The primal human experience is engagement with the world- and whatever it happens to throw up; a childless life is not a second-class life.

Well summed up, Tony.

I don't understand why more people don't adopt if they yearn for a child; the cost of adoption is probably about the same as surrogacy.

Thank you.

I suppose it's because wanting a child is all bound up with wanting to perpetuate your genes. Also, adoption isn't as easy as it once was.

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