Lives Never Lived

Parenting in a plasticised world

I thought a lot about sharing this. It is deeply personal, and perhaps too psychically delicate to offer to the algorithm, even if it’s the friendly Substack algorithm. But I know some of you lovely people are out there, on the other side of the screen, grappling with the same questions, so why not be straight?

Tread lightly, friend, lest you pique the militant breeders and the militant, umm, what do they call themselves, anti-natalists? You’re on the bony spine between two bloody trenches. But you know your audience, right? I think that’s the path, isn’t it, to struggle back into the righteous, thankless, radically undecided middle. The little wink of light sandwiched between towering polarities. – Justin (after I sent him this and said, ‘is it too much?’)

It’s a taboo topic despite its universality, and people get pretty intense about it. So let me preface this by saying that I don’t think there is an answer or a right answer. There are just answers and then there are none. The choice I’m facing is personal, yet it remains a collective issue, bearing on humanity in the same breath.

The question I’m grappling with is: should I have a child? Now, I’m not expecting the internet to make the decision for me, but it feels like a lonely decision (the big ones always are). I want to hear stories and forage traces of seasoned wisdom among them. I’m not so much looking for ‘the answer’ as much as I’m looking for the ‘how’ in the ‘how did you decide?’. The following is an unpolished ‘thinking out loud’ rumination. It contains things you probably shouldn’t say out loud that I imagine many of us have thought about. ‘What is most personal is most universal’, says psychologist Carl Rogers, and there couldn’t be a more relevant question in light of this given we’ve all thought about it at some point, even those of us who’ve opted to live ‘childfree’, as if we’re alcohol-free or gluten-free, except this time the toxin is children (you have to at least laugh).

Whether or not to have a child is a hard decision at the best of times, but these are not the best of times. I feel a ball of grief expanding in my throat every time I think about it, because it’s highly possible, given the circumstances, I’ll decide not to have a child. It’s not necessarily that I even want to have a child (I quite enjoy my life without one); it’s that I can’t make the decision in a state of… clarity? coolness? Perhaps I’ll be ready to make the decision in ten years, but then it’s too late. There’s a lag between my cultural and professional life and my body clock. Feminism has achieved a lot of good, but I fear ‘girlbossing’ ain’t it.

The grief is for all sorts; the child yet to be realised, the mother I could be, the family I could have, hope for the future, my abandoned mammalhood, a life never lived… the grief also stems from the feeling of being robbed of what apparently used to feel like a natural opportunity. People just did the thing. Simple as. With a subtle nod to the privilege I do have, it feels deeply unfair to be trying to make this decision in the world as it is. If grief is love with nowhere to go, I am full of it. Still, I am not sure I want to have a child. My downfall is that I want to live all lives in one, and soon I have to choose one.

Some friends say, ‘it’ll happen if it happens, just go with the flow’. While I see the value in what they’re saying, I’d like to be a bit more intentional with my decision. You don’t need me to repeat bad news to you. We all know what’s happening in the world. Life is going to get harder, especially if you’re not absolutely minted. This is not catastrophising. This is not ‘doomerism’. This is a fact. And also, beauty and love will still, hopefully, be here with us.

I’m not saying I believe we’re going to become extinct or that nuclear armageddon is on the horizon, but I’m trying to be honest about what our reality is becoming without burying my head in the sand because I want to satisfy my individual urges or because I’m afraid. What we thought was going to happen ‘sometime in the future, somewhere over there’ is happening now and it’s happening here. The decision I’m trying to make is ultimately a gamble. I am gambling with life. This is not to be taken lightly. Of course, it’s always been a gamble.

Some people say, ‘society has always thought it’s the end of the world’, or, ‘people have always lived through hard times, think of WW2!’. While this is true, the reality of climate breakdown is that it is proven, it is not a ‘threat’ like nuclear armageddon, and the effects of ecological collapse we’re experiencing now are from the 70s and 80s. We’ve yet to determine what will happen as a result of our consumption in the following decades.

Additionally, it looks like we’re on the brink of neo-fascism and the biggest mental health crisis the world has ever seen. Babies are now born with microplastics embedded in their skin. Sperm quality is on the decline because of chemical interference with hormones. This is not tinfoil hat sensationalism. This is reality. George Orwell will be turning in his grave.

When people say ‘you’re being fatalistic, buckle up now’, I could cry. And I rarely cry. I have been taught to be strong my whole life. I think of the phrase ‘hard times create strong men, easy times create weak men’ (or something like that). When I contemplate that times are both the easiest and hardest they’ve ever been, I wonder if I’m strong, or weakened by excessive convenience. When people say, ‘this is the best time in all of human history to have a child, look at the medical advancements,’ I think they are missing the point.

‘You can’t wrap your kid up in cotton wool,’ some say. No, and I wouldn’t want to. I like the way I am as an adult. I can trust myself to look after myself, and I hate to admit it’s probably because I had a bit of a rough childhood. It helped me get real, as it were. But there’s wrapping a kid up in cotton wool and then there’s launching them into a world you know is going to be much harder than the one you’re currently living in. So, for me, it’s an ethical decision as well as an emotional and physical one.

A few friends, mostly older men and women in their 50s and 60s, who have children, and who are otherwise perceptive, intelligent, and plugged into the state of things, have said things like:

‘If people like you stop having children, who are the activists of tomorrow going to be?’ (bit of casual eugenics)

‘We’ll only go extinct if people stop having children’ (or, even worse, ‘you’re the reason we’re going extinct’)

‘Don’t listen to the news, just do what feels right’

‘Having a child is the meaning of life. It’s the most love you’ll ever feel for another being. Don’t you want in on that?’

While they are well-meaning, I’m not sure these statements are wise. I do not think having a child is the meaning of life (parents enjoy gatekeeping love for some reason). It’s part of it, sure, but I know plenty of people who don’t have children who are living meaningful lives. I find it unfair that women who choose not to, or who cannot have children for various reasons, are pitied by our society as if their womanhood has not been realised (feminism or no feminism, women are not babymaking machines).

There is the gloating of new parents as well as the smug ‘childfree’ brigade. There is both love and regret on both sides. I have spoken with people who admit regretting having children, even though they still love them endlessly (dissonant, and all too real). There are also the seemingly empowered older women who regret prioritising ‘freedom’ in their younger years. So, is the question choose your regret, or choose your joy? Or both?

There is something in me that really wants to know what this big human experience is about. But is this about me? Or is it about the child? There are many reasons people have children, not all of them ‘good’:

‘I don’t want to be alone when I’m old’

‘I want to leave a legacy’

‘I want my child to save the planet’

‘I’m afraid my partner will leave me if I don’t’

‘I don’t want to become irrelevant’

… and, one I saw on the internet the other day, which I thought was quite funny:

‘I want to know what a hybrid of me and my partner would look like’

What about -

‘I want to create someone with the person I love’

‘I want to nurture new life’

We place enormous expectations on children to be the ‘saviours of tomorrow’. The pressure on young people today to ‘unfuck the planet’ is deeply unfair. The reality is those of us who have thought about having children have some, if not all, of these thoughts floating around in our heads. There’s no point denying ego plays a big role in this decision, but it doesn’t have to be the only factor.

Some people say that having a child is the most destructive thing you can do in terms of the environment. Granted, by having a child, you are creating another lifetime’s worth of consumption; however, we know it’s more nuanced than that, and I’m not here to point fingers. Humans can be tremendous stewards of their environments. It is a profound shame that, as a whole, we are not acting that way.

I do not think people have children for entirely selfless reasons. But I do not think, therefore, that it’s selfish to have children. It’s human. In fact, it’s animal, and that’s part of what attracts me to it. My body and my being feel colonised, violated by the plasticised world we’re currently facing. I am constantly trying to shake it off and defend my freedom. In this context, having a child feels like an act of rebellion - it is primal and raw, an expression of our mammalhood in a world that urges us to become cyborgs. But, I stop myself, it’s not up to an unborn child to satisfy these desires. I stop myself, again, to think about this blessing and curse of self-awareness. Do you think deer in the forest ruminate over all this when Bambi comes bounding? Am I prohibiting life from doing its thing by being too ‘rational’?

On Reddit, which is a good place to go if you want to interact with honesty on the internet (there, or YouTube comment sections), I see people say things like ‘I did not ask to be born’, or, ‘I wouldn’t have a child now, it would be cruel’. Obviously, this is a fraction of opinion, and Reddit is full of depressed people, but I feel for them nonetheless. I suppose at the core of this is an attempt to grapple with the agency of another human being who you will be responsible for and have no control over in the same breath.

An old friend used to say to me, ‘if you don’t have a child by 35, you’ll have your therapist on speed dial’. He’s not my friend anymore. I was always adamant in my twenties that I wouldn’t have a child, but never truly confident that I could override my biology should the time come when my body demanded it. Turning 30 last year gave me a jolt. Not so much a ‘baby, NOW’ jolt, more of a ‘you’re well and truly an adult, now, what the hell are you doing with your life’ jolt. Still, I did not want to default into the ‘house, car, 1.5 children’ paradigm simply because many of my peers were, and that’s what we’ve been told to want. I’ll admit, there’s also a darker story percolating here to do with the currency of youth. It’s been drilled into me by the dominant culture that once I’m over 35 and at the tail end of my fertility, I’m useless. While I don’t agree with this, it is bleak to be surrounded by a society of those who do.

My priorities have also changed drastically in the past year. I realised that, on the proverbial deathbed, I didn’t really give a crap about having a fancy career (though, I’ll treat it as bonus points if it does arise). I care about people, and animals, and the ocean. On my deathbed, I want to know I used my short life well by cultivating other lives and relationships, increasing their aliveness, not increasing value for shareholders. This might not look like having kids, exactly, but it’s creating a home, or homing as verb. It’s belonging. It’s forgetting about yourself in a good way.

I think about how deadly viruses also wish to increase their aliveness, too. I’m not saying this because I think we’re a virus. I’m saying it because it would be a lie to omit it, this blip, this flavour of thought, from this story about my decision-making. Increasing the aliveness of things does not always lead to more aliveness, take cancer, for example. Reality can be a harsh thing. We are experts at pretending things are ok when they are not. Equally, we are experts at pretending things are terrible when they are not.

Despite the declining birthrate (which does not mean a declining population), it also seems as though lots of people from my generation and cultural milieu who were previously ‘very much childfree’ are now pivoting towards having children. To me, it comes across as a valid desire for meaning in a meaning-sapping culture, and a rebellion against the erosion of relational structures. A child is, in many ways, a metaphor for hope for the future. The nuclear family was seen to be a ‘conservative construct’, so it’s interesting that, much like the renewed interest in Christianity, many are attempting to salvage what ‘we once had’ by way of family. This time, however, many hope to do it differently through things like intentional communities, polyamory, and going off-grid.

Perhaps there is an element of peer pressure at play. It’s said that once one person in a group has a child, others often follow suit. However, most people in my milieu do not have mortgages, big families, or a village to raise a child with. Many of us are struggling to make ends meet for ourselves, let alone other humans. Activists and artists don’t make good money. We’re atomised and economically blighted in a post-pandemic world. Still, life will out. We’re resilient creatures, after all.

Perhaps, ultimately, this is about truly knowing yourself. I would say I know myself well, but that self keeps evolving, so I am in this continual process of knowing new selves. I know I still have faith in beauty, truth, goodness, and The Great Mystery. I know I still revere the sensual and animate world. I know where I find meaning, and I know how to create it, even though my attempts are often thwarted by the powers that be. Despite this, I do not know what to do. I am heartbroken by the things I have spoken about, and I wonder what will bloom out of the cracks of a broken heart (puppies, one would hope). After sharing this with Justin (quoted above), he said something along the lines of: ‘I’m afraid the answer is on the other side of the decision you make’. I sat with this for a while, and I think he’s probably right.

lil me!