Cassandra Voices

Tag: 1960s Ireland

  • A Brief History of My Father

    In 1960 when I was seven, before TV, Radio Éireann was our window on the worId. I understood the gist of rumblings on the news over breakfast in the kitchen. The Congo. It used to be called the Belgian Congo now it was just the Congo. My father intimated, buttering a piece of toast at the kitchen table before whacking the top off a boiled egg with the knife, that the Belgians were still sticking their noses in.

    His remark was to no one in particular, almost sotto voce. Over the years on matters of the Irish nation you’d be listening out a long time without a single revelation concerning his party-political pedigree. Years after his passing, my adult siblings had no idea was he a de Valera man or a Michael Collins man.

    On global affairs he was only marginally more loquacious. Maybe, I inferred in this case, the Belgians were the Congo’s version of the English only not as big. Over the radio newly familiar names resonated across our kitchen. Patrice Lamumba- he had something to do with it. Lamumba was the new man in charge over there and he didn’t want any English or Belgians or outsiders of any sort coming over and interfering in the newly decolonized country. That seemed fair to me.

    Katanga, that was another new name on the news. It was a province, like Leinster. They wanted to rule themselves; the Katangans didn’t want Lamumba running things at all. Tshombe was the big man in Katanga. Congo, Lamumba, Katanga, Tshombe; distant names were rendered close by the radio, formed part of the backdrop to the morning kettle steaming, bobbing eggs boiling in a pot on the cooker and toast smoking aromatically under the grill.

    Source: http://www.curragh.info/congo/congo1960/UN1960.jpg

    Balubas

    Irish lads were to be sent off with other U.N. troops to keep the peace; stop the Katangans and Lumunba’s army from getting stuck into each other. The Baluba tribe in Katanga, it turns out, were also very unhappy about the whole situation – so we heard another new name on the radio. Baluba.

    Two Irish battalions were being dispatched. I hadn’t a clue what a battalion was only it was a lot. My father took me into town on the 13 bus to see them off.

    Our journey started at the terminus behind Beechwood Avenue Church, officially the Church of the Holy Name. I loved hopping onto the open-backed bus, straight up the narrow stairway to the front seat at the top, to wait a few minutes for the busmen to finish their cigarettes and start her up to head into town via Ranelagh, Appian Way, Leeson Street, Stephen’s Green and Dawson Street.

    The soldiers’ journey from Ireland to the Congo started with a march down O’Connell Street (picture above) to mark this moment of significance in our national life. After marching, the troops were to be loaded onto gigantic transport planes along with armoured carriers at Baldonnel airfield outside Dublin.

    We got off the bus on Dawson Street near the Hibernian Hotel and joined the masses walking along Westmoreland Street, kept going and got across O’Connell bridge. Near Daniel O’Connell’s statue, in the middle of the street where cars usually parked, up toward Clery’s department store, my father was trying to squeeze me up to the front row but he couldn’t get by with me so we sandwiched in as best we could, he lifting me up from time to time.

    Throngs crammed the streets and footpaths to gawk or cheer the column of soldiers marching by, their hob-nailed boots clattering along with a metallic after-sound. A man said the Garda Band had led the way with big brass instruments but we missed it. We couldn’t get near the GPO; people were jammed ten thick or more. Dignitaries, someone said, were on a platform in front of the GPO reviewing the troops.

    A woman said there were Guards and soldiers holding the crowds back. Some lads had climbed up near the top of lampposts – to the part where two iron handles stuck out near the light. How they got up there was something of a marvel; I envied them the birds-eye view.

    “They’ll roast in them outfits,” one woman said presciently. (It transpired that the troops were woefully unprepared – with not enough gear or the wrong gear, wooly dark green uniforms that would hamper them in the ferocious equatorial heat).

    A man asked if they’re walking all the way to Africa and people laughed. Another wag said they’d be getting a free trip in a Yankee plane blessed by his Holiness John Charles McQuaid, a reference to the fearsome Archbishop of Dublin.

    Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973)

    I joined my father in frowning at that bit of disrespect for the lofty bishop while wondering did we not have our own planes. I was a bit confused by the parade, unsure what the Army was doing parading down the middle of the street – though I got a look in between the adults in grey coats at bands of red-faced soldiers bunched together swinging their arms, stomping their way down O’Connell Street with intent. There were swarms of them – hundreds- and they had guns over their shoulders, real guns. I had never seen real guns before, never mind so many.

    It was a new thing for Irish soldiers to be sent off into the middle of an African civil war. The last civil war any Irishman took part in was our very own one in 1922 and the contemporary national army, such as it was, hadn’t seen combat of any kind. But they were dispatched off anyway because everyone knew Irish people were respected the world over.

    Irish Army Jokes

    As a boy, I only heard of the Irish Army in jokes – passing around the one gun like a shared cigarette; halting maneuvers in the Furry Glen because the missus forgot to pack the sandwiches.

    That we were Irish I knew, but there was an accompanying feeling that Ireland was barely a country. For decades government ministers made an art of going on the radio insisting that nothing could be done about anything ailing the nation: dire poverty; a shite economy; high unemployment; mass emigration.

    Sure Ireland is a small country, they’d say, the message being we should not get our hopes up about ever approaching England’s standard of living, never mind row in with the U.N.

    We’re a small country – for years that was the party-political consensus for upholding and excusing a mediocre status quo. We were scarcely a country so every family, including ours, had relatives who had been forced to climb aboard trains, boats or planes, to England, America or as far away as Australia. American wakes they used call the send-off parties for emigrants in towns and villages across the country.

    UN Membership

    Despite being underdeveloped, Ireland the fledgling republic had joined the U.N. at the end of 1955 just like a proper country. England had nothing got to do with it this time. The troop deployment bypassed England and the uncomfortable fact of our complete economic dependence on trade with and emigration to England.

    This was U.N.-led, strictly international. Our soldiers representing the U.N. were to wear blue helmets. I had a plastic replica of a blue helmet for playing war down the end of the back garden with a bit of rifle-shaped ash.

    Though I couldn’t know it, this was a big moment in the emergence of Ireland into nationhood. As relatively new members of the U.N., we were taking on an international commitment, helping out in a fight not of our making.

    For my father among the many who turned out, to go and bear witness in O’Connell Street must have been important. He was born in 1906 into the last throes of the British empire in Ireland, bore witness to the civil war as a teenager.

    To have me along was to teach me about Ireland, to affirm that we had our own place among the nations of the world. To the legions of gallant nuns and priests that routinely went off to Africa on the missions to spread the one true faith, we could now add battalions of our very own troops.

    Outings with my father for big occasions were rendered all the more significant by their rarity. He was distant though affirming and not lacking in affection for his offspring; unquestioned Lord of the household, ministered to and royally fed by my mother, who mediated and did what she could to prevent occasional eruptions of his anger, though it simmered like a bubbling stew more often than exploded.

    Always impeccably dressed, his black brogues shined to a sheen, he was not around much during a work week, just one evening and week-ends.

    Weekday Routine

    The family just got on with the weekday routine, ended the day listening to Radio Éireann, later it would be watching American TV shows on Telefís Éireann.

    When it arrived into the house, my mother thought the TV was no harm, a bit of diversion. My father worried quietly to her that we would get notions from American rubbish like the Donna Reed show with its idealized portrayal of privileged, prosperous suburbia. Luckily for me, cowboys like Bonanza were fine all around.

    Appointed County Manager of Meath, adjacent to Dublin, in 1959 he had moved the family from Sligo where he had been manager to 42 Merton Road in Dublin’s Rathmines, down the road from our grandparents Joseph and Margaret Hynes of 72 Cowper Road.

    Commonly, houses were given names – Ivydeane, Cospicua. As we were moving in a man came to paint the name on two concrete pillars by the front gate, black Gaelic lettering on a white painted background – Dún Mhuire, the fort of Mary.

    I suspect my mother was the instigator but it seemed natural enough. We were a Catholic household in a Gaelic Catholic culture. Clear but unspoken messages were conveyed to me – nobody sat me down to declare it explicitly – that being Irish and under the auspices of a dominant church whose parish Mass we attended faithfully every week along with crowds of our neighbors, offered a form of protection, a kind of psychic immunity, from the seeping depravity of England.

    People in England, unsanctioned, could get a divorce and skip Mass if they were Catholics or not even attend church at all if they were Protestant. The English were more likely than the Irish to be in danger of falling off the cliff edge we all traverse that overlooks the fires of hell.

    Middle Class Respectability

    My father had landed us squarely in the emerging professional middle class respectability of 1960’s Dublin, my siblings and I in the best schools. Gifted with brains he had forged his own road, starting off as a lowly clerk in the Port and Docks Board in the Custom House, going to night school in Rathmines Tech to qualify as an accountant.

    His big break into the civil service as County Secretary in Kildare came after winning the 1938 Gardener Gold Medal for attaining first place in Ireland in accountancy subjects – I still have the medal. He progressed from County Secretary to an appointment as County Manager of Sligo, a place I still love deeply having been born there, then Meath.

    Throughout the 1960’s, unprecedented in those days, he commuted along country roads to Navan, the County seat, taking the guts of an hour to get there. Nowadays, thanks to urban sprawl, Navan is a dormitory suburb of the capital.

    Throughout the 1960’s he would stay one or two nights a week at the Headford Arms hotel in Kells, “the Manager” becoming a well-known local fixture. We had no idea what his life there was like. Instead of watching TV in the bosom of his family he would, no doubt, be in the hotel bar nursing a pint or a snifter, getting the full Irish served up for his breakfast of a morning before driving over to the town hall in Navan.

    I remember precious little dinner table conversation about his work. Meath had the richest grassland in the country – cattle would be moved from the West to fatten them for export, we were told. Sure, wasn’t Irish beef the envy of the world? The inference being that it was a more prestigious County to manage than Sligo.

    He would arrive home on Wednesdays and on Fridays with a prime side of beef for the Sunday roast, set aside by the butcher especially for the Manager. At Christmas, he would land home with seasonal fruitcake, the kind it takes ages to make with marzipan and white frosted icing to look like snow courtesy of the nuns who ran the hospital. There was never a question, let alone a debate, about whether he should be home more often.

    Though absent a lot, he seemed no more distant than the fathers of my friends who were always at home. That was the way things were; the mothers were warm, the fathers diffident, to be addressed formally. Without exception my pals’ fathers were cut from the same cloth. Like my own, most of them were not native Dubliners but were making it in Dublin.

    Entrepreneurs, lawyers and civil servants, they had roots in rural Ireland, including rugged Western counties like Mayo and Kerry. They wore greatcoats and sported hats, didn’t smile much and enquired how we were doing in school, thinly disguising a suspicion that there was too much playacting going on and not enough knuckling down to study.

    A weekend stayover in a small caravan in Donabate North of Dublin by the perpetually grey-clouded seaside – a treat hosted by my mate’s old man for a couple of pals – involved a degree of tension as the ogre-like father complained crankily about the poor quality of the boiled egg served up by his son at breakfast, while the other guest boy and I stifled tense giggles behind the curtain drawn across the caravan.

    We were accustomed to our eggs and toast or cornflakes being served up by our mothers; we weren’t called upon to service our fathers. We surely didn’t envy our mate his role as butler to his old man. Shortly after breakfast, relieved, stepping out the caravan door into the morning wind, we scarpered and stayed gone for most of the day.

    1903 Gordon Bennett Trophy. Athy. Alexander Winton in the Winton Bullet 2.

    Athy

    It was far from the middle class that my father was reared. He was the seventh of nine to be born in a single room in a one-up-one-down two roomed place, 15 Leinster Street, Athy, Southwest of Dublin in County Kildare, for years a British garrison town where the grand canal from Dublin meets the river Barrow.

    My grandfather Michael was a carpenter employed as casual labor in a local factory while my grandmother, a Doyle, labored at home, trying to manage the scarcity of necessities including food and shoes, her home caught in abject poverty.

    As an adult, I stood in the claustrophobic upstairs room with my Aunt Patricia and two cousins, one who had bought the place, another who grew up and still lived in Athy. You couldn’t swing a cat in the place.

    We cousins shared awed glances as my devout aunt Patricia sprinkled holy water about in honor of her parents. “They were great people, God bless them,” she said as the hair raised along my arms.

    A cousin recalled a story his mother – another aunt of mine – had told once about remembering as a girl a visit from a priest who offered a blessing to the household – perhaps someone had been newly born or more likely was very ill as a clerical visit would have been rare to a poverty stricken household.

    Protocol dictated that the priest be offered money when leaving, money he had no hesitation in accepting despite the blindingly obvious. He was pocketing the last note and bits and pieces of coins from the household cash tin. The little girl looked on knowing they would miss a meal as the priest stuffed the note and coins into his pocket on his way out the door. Such callous treatment would have been the norm; people were “read out” from the pulpit at mass, poor families shamed as donation amounts were publicly announced by the priest.

    “I’m going places.”

    There’s a photo – a family portrait (see featured image above) – grandfather looks resigned, grandmother holds a vacant stare; to me they appear defeated. A sheet hangs precariously forming a partial backdrop to the scene. One of the standing elder sisters rests her arm on my father’s shoulder who sits in the center with arms crossed – twelve years old maybe- as he beholds the camera with a confident look as if to say, “I’m going places.”

    Indeed, he was and he did. But growing up we knew little of his roots or the road he had travelled from poverty to the middle class. I had an inkling, a feeling that he felt he had escaped, broken free of Athy, and wanted to leave all that behind him.

    For years I never knew how many siblings he actually had. We had lots of contact with my mother’s family – I knew all of my cousins on her side.

    Silence enveloped the partial story emerging about our Kildare roots. He was close with Patricia in Dublin and her husband John O’Brien of Kimmage Road West, a gentle uncle to us who, smoking Sweet Aftons, held court in their dining room at the top of a large table squeezed into the room, with barely enough space for chairs and a sideboard.

    My hospitable aunt doled out scaling tea, sandwiches and fruitcake. We grew up connected to our O’Brien cousins. Visits from them or my mother’s family were occasions of joy and celebration, especially the Christmas night gathering around our piano played by my aunt Ita and lubricated by my father as barman, conductor and on rare occasion warbler in chief.

    River Barrow, Athy.

    Kildare Connection

    The Kildare connection though was opaque. As a boy, I remember from time to time – once or twice a year – my mother and father would get all dolled up and go off for a Sunday drive to Athy.

    No account of their day would later be offered. As an adult, I learned that one of the nine siblings had been institutionalized – but where, more to the point why? Were they put in the county home or mental hospital? We never knew.

    As children we had overheard whispers. The lore I picked up as an adult was that one sister had unspecified mental health issues but was really put away for falling in love with a British soldier. That didn’t add up. Such romance would hardly have been an aberration in a garrison town, surely?

    Despite emerging Home Rule and fledgling republican movements Athy had, per capita, one of the highest rates of young Irishmen volunteering themselves into the British army for the great war of 1914 – 1918.

    For the survivors, participation would end up placing them on the wrong side of Irish history.  Whether generally tolerated or frowned upon, surely at least a few local young women were forming liaisons with working class squaddies in barracks in the town. Or perhaps the very presence of soldiers billeted in the town lends plausibility to the narrative I received – Irish families clamped down on liaising with British troops, even locals. To this day, a blank canvas remains where that story should be.

    Ardagh Chalice

    In Dublin, rare paternal expeditions are preserved to me as wisps of memory, incomplete fragments encased in my mind like the gold ornaments in the glass cases of the archeology section of the National Museum in Kildare Street, where he took me and my sister once or twice when we were eight or nine to see the Ardagh Chalice.

    Some young lad dug it up out of the ground over a hundred years ago, he said. I was thinking I would have held on to it if I were him, or maybe flogged it for a new bicycle. At least once he dragged us around the National Gallery, frog marched us past white marble sculptures on plinths to a gallery beyond to eyeball the Jack B. Yeats paintings.

    Jack B. and his more famous brother the poet had Sligo connections, developed a love of the county while spending youthful time with relatives there. Jack had painted Memory Harbour in Rosses Point and was known as the painter who chronicled the emergence of Ireland into nationhood, representing Sligo fishermen going about their hard labor as “men of destiny.”

    As County Manager, my father had walked behind the painter and Yeats family members in the procession to reinter the remains of W.B. Yeats in the churchyard at Drumcliff. Whether on approaching our pre-teen years we balked or he abandoned the cultural outings based on a sense of having completed our cultural education or maybe felt it a waste of his time “casting pearls before swine” was never clear.

    Impromptu Visit

    The blank page of his family narrative dramatically came alive in three dimensions one routine winter early evening enshrouded in the usual darkness and damp. I was around ten, waiting for my mother to dish up the tea when she, my sister and I were stunned into incredulity, the lot of witnesses.

    I answered a ring at the door to find an uncle from Kildare, brother of my father, smilingly arriving for an impromptu visit. The doorway banter drew my mother from out of the kitchen. She welcomed him in officially and directed me to sit with him in the living room to the left off the hall while she improvised a pot of tea and a few of her prized home-made sweet buns.

    The brother, a bit disheveled, sat in front of the fire in one of two chairs with the red covers; asked me how was school going, wasn’t completely sure who he was looking at, not distinguishing me one hundred percent from my older brothers.

    I got that a lot; my elder brothers were six and seven years older; occasionally relatives lost track of me. I was happy enough to pour him a cup of tea, the better to get my hands on a one of the old dear’s prized buns; after baking she typically hid them to prevent their rapid disappearance.

    He took a sip of tea from his mug; kept smiling with a slightly vacant, almost wondrous glint in his eyes. My mother excused herself, explaining that she was in the throes of cooking the teatime meal, though she didn’t automatically invite him to stay for it. That would have been the usual protocol; insisting over the mild protests of guests that of course they’ll stay for a meal; we wouldn’t hear of you stepping out the door on an empty stomach. We were anticipating my father’s arrival for tea – our supper; dinner was the midday meal.

    I heard him pulling the black Ford Cortina in the front gates and was waiting in the hall when he turned the key in the front door, eagerly on hand to give him the good news, “Dad, your brother is here!”

    Far from the joy I was expecting, his jaw dropped as the news registered. Failing to acknowledge or greet me, he brushed by without removing coat or hat, almost dived in the living room door.

    Left behind in the hall, suddenly without warning I could hear him erupt on the brother, shouting and roaring at the top of his lungs. I poked myself just inside the door as my father continued unloading, upbraiding him from a height, what the hell was he doing here, how dare he, get out this minute, called him a right blackguard showing up in that state – an uninterruptable diatribe that went on for several minutes.

    “Sure, I only stopped by to see you,” the taken aback brother said defensively. My father had completely lost the plot. I froze in shock, wanted to head for the hills.

    My sister remembers hiding in another room scared by the roar of unrestrained anger. Our household followed the Irish norm, emotions were kept bottled up tight, corked. Like the seafarers of the Aran islands, their curraghs bobbing on a rolling sea, we lived with the awareness, unspoken, that a storm induced wave could any minute sweep us away without warning.

    But a deadly wave was a rare phenomenon, feared yet far from the normal run of things. My father’s emotion was a storm unleashed, out in the open, triggered we’d call it today, and landing not only to sting him and his brother but collaterally to unnerve my mother, sister and I. M

    y upset father marched out of the living room, disappeared up the stairs, his part in the drama for now complete, to stew in his own upset. Mother was left to pick up the pieces. She had to drop everything – never mind the meal. She surely felt rattled, perhaps herself annoyed at having to mop up after him, because she asked me to accompany her as she loaded my uncle into her brown Austin A40. I sat in the back.

    We never did this, drop our daily routine to drive into town in the darkness of the early evening. She drove down Palmerston Road, then over the canal and into town via Camden and Georges Streets, around by College Green and Westmoreland Street where animated neon advertising lit up the city, to turn left down the quays near McBirney’s department store where he could get a bus back to Kildare.

    There was quiet in the car but tension had abated. She was concerned for him. “Are you all right,” she asked him as he alighted, “do you have enough for a sandwich and the bus?” He thanked her and got out to walk across to a parked bus. I hopped into the front seat wondering if that was the right bus, who would meet him at the other end.

    We drove home wordlessly through the Dublin rush-hour, ate our teatime meal in silence, my father quiet, not a word out of anyone. The visit, the anger, nothing was alluded to. He turned to the newspaper. A calm had redescended.  Later that night I came upon her practically whispering into the phone, ringing a relative to make sure he had made it home in one piece.

    Baluba militiamen in 1962.

    The Niemba Ambush

    Having seen the soldiers off to the Congo my father made it his business to take me up to Phibsboro in November 1960 for the second massive gathering in Dublin in a single year. Once again, we joined thousands, this time crammed along a funeral route to Glasnevin cemetery. Nine Irish soldiers from the Congo were to be buried, the first to be killed in combat in the modern era. The Niemba ambush.

    I thought that nobody was supposed to really attack or shoot at soldiers with blue helmets- not guns nor poisoned arrows nor anything of the kind. Yet, eight of them had been wiped out in Katanga in a Baluba-led ambush, smitten by arrows we were told, in what was thought to be a case of mistaken identity, the assailants having possibly mistaken Irish U.N. troops for European mercenaries.

    A survivor wandered in the wrong direction only to be caught and killed later. The funeral after a solemn high mass led by the archbishop was massive. I’m not sure how I got chosen to accompany my father; my elder brothers tells me he would have made his own way there on the bus.

    My father and I set out in the Ford Cortina. I watched him closely as he as he worked the wheel-mounted gearshift. Crossing the Liffey near the Four Courts, he parked on a residential street before we walked to join legions of others gathering from all directions near Dalymount Park.

    The closer we go to Glasnevin the thicker the crowds got, thicker even than at the send-off parade only much quieter. When we could get no further, he huffed and puffed, tried to lift me up to see. Soldiers with blue UN shoulder patches and guards saluting solemnly lined the route in front of the crowds.

    Eventually, slowly, quietly, as the cortege drew nearer, all the men took their hats and caps off. A green jeep appeared pulling a gun carriage for the officer, with an honor guard astride at walking pace.

    The slowness of it, respectful, solemn, gave me a sad feeling, like a pang of hunger in my belly. Someone whispered the officer’s name, Gleeson. God be good to them, a woman intoned. Four huge open top lorries followed at that same slow pace and flanked also by the uniformed comrades of the dead.

    Four lorries with two coffins each for the ordinary soldiers. Nobody remarked on the different treatment for the officer and enlisted men. The coffins had Irish flags, with flowers and soldier caps on top, along with blue UN insignia.

    They were crawling toward Glasnevin cemetery and there was no talking or bantering going on this time– just silence in the crowd, everyone blessing themselves, straining to get a look at the coffins, then staring at the ground, a few people working rosary beads, reciting away in murmurs.

    The cortege passed in slow motion; slow marching soldiers’ accompanying the lorries to the sounds of their own boots and the low hum of engines. I got a really good look at the gun carriage. Gleeson.

    The mournful funeral procession gliding by, honored by the presence of thousands standing in respectful silence, made sense in my young boy’s world, a blend of reality and fantasy – national solidarity expressed in Catholic prayers.

    Glasnevin Cemetery.

    “You couldn’t get near Glasnevin with the crowds and dignitaries,” Dad told my mother later.

    “Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, is buried up there,” he told me, “the soldiers will be up there with him.” I used to get mixed up between the multiple patriots across the seven centuries we were under the thumb of the English, except for the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising at the GPO – Pearse, Connolly, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Tom Clarke and all. They issued a proclamation to Irishmen and Irishwomen – lots of people had it framed on their walls but I never read the whole thing. “Imagine shooting a sickly poet or a wounded Labour man; that’s what the English did after the Rising. The gobshites,” I heard people say, even fifty years on.

    The crowd thinned away slowly after the last of the procession passed but my father lingered, knowing the funeral was still going on up the street at the cemetery where the Taoiseach, Lemass, and government ministers awaited hats in hand. Finally, we started the long trek to where he had parked the car, near the North Circular Road. He threw his shoulders back and walked quickly. I had to take big steps, nearly run, to keep up.

    When we got home, my mother doled out scalding hot tea, a rasher, egg and fried bread in the dining room. “God rest them and keep them, the poor divils,” she said. Later, the old man would  read the paper and smoke a Carroll’s Number One at the table when she cleared off his plate. I would have scampered out the back garden to kick a plastic ball with my black brogues or maybe donned the plastic blue helmet and marched in the twilight along the path to the bottom of the garden, keeping a sharp eye out for Balubas or Belgians.

    We hadn’t talked in the car on the way home – there was nothing to say. As the light faded in the garden, I was wondering if the soldiers would still be up there in Glasnevin now that everyone had left; were they glad to be home in Ireland; would they be lonely, miss being at home for their tea; were they in heaven or Glasnevin or where were they?

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  • The Most Natural Thing in the World (I)

    Build me a cabin in Utah
    Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
    Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
    That must be what it’s all about
    That must be what it’s all about
    Bob Dylan, ‘Sign On The Window’, from New Morning (1970)

    When I was eighteen, during a summer spent working as a bus conductor while waiting on Leaving Certificate results, I thought I’d got my then girlfriend pregnant. Through a warm, endless July, she crept from two to three to four weeks ‘late’.

    Finally, one evening, a phone call came with the good news that she was happily surfing the crimson wave, and there was great relief all around. It must have just been prolonged exam stress, we agreed. But the strange thing is, while obviously not quite ready to be a father then, I have never really been as open to the possibility of parenthood since.

    During the extended period of waiting for her period to arrive, we discussed what we might do if worse came to worst. She contemplated an abortion – a big deal in Ireland in 1979, even if she was, rather too neatly symbolically, nine months older than me, and already in college; as was, if you can believe it, the very fact of having premarital teenage sex itself – while I was prepared to abandon all immediate plans for further studies and instead get a job to support her and our offspring. Never such innocence, or foolhardiness, again. It must have been Love.

    Throughout my twenties, I hardly ever gave much thought to reproduction, unless it was as to how to forestall it. Of course, there were girlfriends, but I was never with anyone with the underlying agenda of ‘getting married, settling down and having a family’ (or any combination thereof). That was something I put off, along with having a proper career, until my thirties – if at all. The procreative function of sexuality would have come a severely poor second to the pleasure involved, and its pursuit. Enjoy yourself while you’re young. (Or at least give it your best shot.) You won’t be young for ever. (So get your kicks before you get too old.) You can’t have fun all your life. (So have as much as you can now.)

    Perhaps such attitudes are not so unusual among the under-thirties, and even more so now than then (in the 1980s’). Yet, as I approach my sixtieth birthday, and having even experienced the establishment of a stable relationship which led to marriage, I can confirm that this viewpoint has still not changed significantly and, if anything, has only solidified into a worldview.

    While my sexual needs may be marginally less clamorous than they were when I was a younger man, it is time to make the bald, bold declaration: the urge to replicate one’s genes is an impulse I don’t understand. The reflections that follow are an attempt to understand why that might be, to unravel the reasons for this mindset within myself, in the context of the culture which surrounds me.

    Extraordinary Lengths

    Walk down any street, enter any populated space, public or private, go anywhere where there are people: almost every person you see is the result of an act of sexual intercourse, and a subsequent pregnancy and birth. Propagation of the species is clearly popular. Or, at least, sex is. Multiplication/That’s the name of the game/And each generation/They play the same.

    Some people go to extraordinary lengths to have children, if they find it doesn’t come easily, what with the rigours and disappointments and sometimes multiple pregnancies associated with IVF treatment. Observant Christians, Muslims and Jews will all tell you that their God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply”.

    Indeed, for strict adherents of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, procreation is the only function of sexuality, and sex for its own sake, much less as a good in itself, is sinful. Atheists will argue that child-bearing and child-rearing are more basic than that: they are biological imperatives. The drive to reproduce is part of how scientists define living matter.

    Why do I not feel this biological imperative? It is, apparently, the most natural thing in the world. So why do I feel such a general indifference, and even a personal aversion, to the concept? And in how much of a minority am I, in this regard? But also, conversely, if the topic doesn’t really matter all that much to me, why do I care enough to spend time thinking about it, and go to the bother of trying to write something cogent about it, in the first place?

    My choosing, or at least accepting, a child-free existence must worry me, at some level, if I feel a need to defend my position. Is that because it has now become part of my biography, even my identity? Perhaps, but the more obvious answer probably lies in the familial and societal pressure and expectation that one will reproduce (“Do you have any kids (yet)?”), and should very much want to reproduce.

    This ‘to do’ list approach to human existence – albeit the result of cultural mores, religious teachings, socially engineering legislation, economic necessity or prosperity, and a myriad other prisms through which it can be viewed – becomes internalised, no matter how unconcerned with or questioning of society’s norms and agendas one regards oneself as, and is by all accounts felt even more intensely by women than men. (Forget about the biological imperative, what about the biological clock?) But a little reading around reveals that the naysayers are no longer such a tiny minority, if they ever were. To be anti-natalist is not to be unnatural. Nor is being child-free.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    Misanthropic and Philanthropic

    Before we go any further, and risk becoming mired in ambiguity or contradiction, let’s define our terms, and where I would locate myself in the current state of the debate. Being ‘child-free’ (as opposed to the involuntary ‘childless’) is a choice that could be made for financial, physical, emotional, or any other number of reasons, whereas the more extreme ‘anti-natalism’ is a distinct philosophical position, as argued for by South African philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Anti-natalists feel it is unfair to the children who are born and then left with the mess we leave behind.

    There are two general categories of anti-natalism: misanthropic and philanthropic. Misanthropic anti-natalism is the standpoint that humans have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing new members of our species into existence because they cause harm.

    Ecological anti-natalism (sometimes called environmental anti-natalism) is a subset of misanthropic anti-natalism that believes procreation is wrong because of the inherent environmental damage caused by human beings and the suffering we inflict on other sentient organisms.

    The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is representative of this type of anti-natalism. Philanthropic anti-natalism is the position that humans should not have children for the good of the (unborn) children because, in bringing children into the world, the parents are subjecting them to pain, suffering, illness and, of course, eventual death. Why become a cog in this endless cycle? Of course, there is a lot of room for misanthropic and philanthropic anti-natalism to overlap.

    Furthermore, far from being the purview of some weirdo outliers, this essentially tragic worldview is a perfectly respectable literary-philosophical tradition, espoused to varying degrees by writers and philosophers as diverse as Sophocles, Flaubert, Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Beckett, Cioran, Larkin, Peter Wessel Zapffe and the anhedonic Thomas Ligotti. (Season One of the HBO series True Detective (2014) drew heavily on Lovecraft’s and Ligotti’s pessimistic, anti-natalist philosophy, as expressed by the character Rust Cohle.)

    In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus posits that the only serious philosophical problem is that of suicide: having been born, is life worth living? One could counterargue that perhaps an even more serious philosophical problem is that of parenthood: rather than deciding whether or not to end a life that is already in existence, to decide whether or not to bring a life into existence in the first place.

    Of course, most people don’t even give such a weighty problem a second thought. Or, if they do, it’s all part of their plan.  Nor is it only men who can be less than enthusiastic about propagating the species, for social or personal reasons. Apart from obvious examples like Simone de Beauvoir – for whom marriage, child-rearing and family life represented a prison house for women – thirteen of the writers who contributed to Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids (2015), edited by Meghan Daum, were women.

    More recently, Sheila Heti’s autofictional novel Motherhood is framed around a choice between having a child and writing a book. Exhibit Number One, regarding the outcome of this dilemma, is the object we are holding in our hands as we read. We should add the qualification that this dichotomous set-up is at best fallacious and at worst false, since many if not most writers – even female ones – somehow manage to do both. (How do they do it?) However, that the topic provides the focus for a bestseller is in itself noteworthy.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    To Each Their Own

    Where do I lie on this scale? Well, what began as carefree child-freedom has probably hardened over time, and with some thought – as these things often will, into full-blown anti-natalism, roughly equal parts mis- and phil-. However, I should qualify the last assertion by saying that I am not prepared to go to war with anyone who fervently wants to have children: to each their own.

    I am not about to undertake a crusade, or even launch a campaign, against those desperate to reproduce. I have never understood people who want you to be like them, or do as they do, who elevate their personal preferences into a modus vivendi for all.

    I would only question their choices and beliefs to the same extent that they would question mine. The basic tenet of anti-natalism is simple but, for most of us, profoundly counterintuitive: that life, even under the best of circumstances, is not a gift or a miracle, but rather a harm and an imposition. According to this logic, the question of whether or not to have a child is not just a personal choice but an ethical one – and the correct answer is always no. So, if genuine anti-natalism means opposing all births, under all circumstances, then I am still of the merely child-free persuasion. I don’t necessarily consider all procreation to be unethical: I just believe in the individual’s right to choose.

    I have had personal, up-close experience of this pressure to propagate, as applied not so much by my parents – as is generally the case – but by an ex-sister-in-law, and a brother-in-law.

    Aged twenty-six, I had brought my then girlfriend, an Italian woman I had met during a sojourn teaching there, back to the homestead for a visit. In our sitting room one evening, in front of said girlfriend, then sister-in-law chose to launch into what she probably thought of as a homily, but I took to be a tirade, about how I should settle down and start a family, as though this was the only possible course of action now open to me. (Said lady had in the past opined, “I don’t want people like you teaching my children” – although I never quite worked out what was meant by ‘people like me’.)

    She even went so far as to culminate in querying indignantly, “What do you believe?” Is there really any sane, let alone succinct, counter to this line of inquiry? Did she think she was establishing some sort of solidarity with my girlfriend? Similarly, when I was in my forties and married, my brother-in-law, of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian persuasion, while doing some tradesman work in the house I shared with my wife, started pontificating about the necessity of having children if you are married.

    One is, it seems, not respecting the sacrament of marriage if one doesn’t. I subsequently complained to my sister about her husband’s behaviour, not least about the upset it had caused my wife, and we didn’t see him again for a very long time. Again, I ask: why does everyone else want you to be like them? Is it because they feel threatened by, or envious of, other, different lifestyles? Or because they are so sure they are right? Because accepting the same burdens and responsibilities they have taken on will make you a better person (in their eyes, anyway)? Could it even maybe be because they are happy, or think they are, and they want you to be happy too?

    My own reading of these events is that, given the severe socio-religious strictures against pre-marital sex, and the shame and suffering of pregnancy ‘outside wedlock’, I guess in early 1960s Ireland (and elsewhere), when these people were courting, the only way to have guilt-free sex was to get married; and so, given the lack of available contraception, as a corollary that meant no option but to have children – whether you wanted them or not. Hence the Irish Family. So these people became seriously invested in the nuclear family as a universal norm. They had no other choice, except abstinence; and they certainly didn’t want you having something they never had. Heaven forbid, you might even enjoy it.

    ‘The Surprise Baby’ 

    From the foregoing, it will be surmised that my brother and sister are somewhat older than me. This is indeed the case: the brother is twenty-one years my senior, and the sister has seventeen years on me. I am the youngest of three, by a considerable stretch: the afterthought, the heart’s scald, perhaps even a mistake. (And colloquially, in some circles, ‘the shakings of the bag’. Although also known in Swedish, I’m reliably informed, relatively more benignly if not entirely unambiguously, as ‘the surprise baby’.)

    My brother and sister have four kids and six kids respectively. Looking back, I can see now that maybe my place in this familial structure took the onus off me to continue the lineage, and even that my own lack of motivation to have a family could have been an equal and opposite reaction to their extreme fecundity. I also retrospectively realise that, despite my parents’ relative reticence, the act of my bringing a girl home signified to them that my ‘intentions were honourable’, and that I was probably serious about marrying her.

    Now that this essay has taken an unfortunately autobiographical turn, I recognise that the psychologists in the audience (both amateur and professional) will look to my childhood and adolescence, and my experience of being parented, as a revealing explanation for my indifference to procreation, rather than my having a genetic predisposition towards a certain frame of mind and worldview.

    Maybe it’s how I was nurtured, rather than my nature? Perhaps they may even be right. Was my mother a monster? Did my parents have a fractious relationship? Were they neglectful, or did they regard their issue as a luxury they could ill-afford? While I recoil at the prospect of making this meditation on childlessness all about me, it occurs to me that I would have to field accusations of evasiveness were I not to engage with how my own formation has influenced my current thinking.

    My father was twenty-four when my brother was born, and my mother was twenty-one. They were twenty-nine and twenty-six, respectively, when my sister came along. They were forty-five and forty-two when I rocked up. Do the sums. That is quite a chasm in the so-called generation gap. In fact, it is more like two generations, and growing up with my parents was a little like the reported experience of many people who are reared by their grandparents: they may love you, but they don’t exactly prepare you for dealing with the contemporary world, or help you to negotiate it.

    Of course, as a child you are not aware of such anomalies at the time, and even into adolescence and adulthood you mostly just try to get on with things and play the hand you’ve been dealt.

    It is only very gradually that the singularity of one’s own background becomes apparent to oneself, and can be crushing. It many ways, it is a lifelong, ongoing, realisation, constantly refined into old age. We are all works-in-progress.

    Not that my parents were especially old school. In many ways they were more liberal than my brother and sister – who as young parents themselves, married and gone from the family home and starting their own families by the time I was four, were already becoming responsible authority figures, according to their own lights. Actually, it is more appropriate to write of my father and mother as separate entities, since they never exactly operated in tandem.

    My father was traditional, conservative and dogmatically religious; but he was also kind. It is difficult to conceive of today, but he organised annual pilgrimages to Knock shrine for his colleagues, the busmen of C.I.E. He was praying the rosary in the front room while I was listening to The Sex Pistols in the kitchen. It broke his heart when, in my early teens, I announced that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore.

    My mother was a reader, and therefore could possibly be described as more open-minded and, if nothing else, she probably helped to inculcate in me a love of literature (although, curiously, not music – at least not the kind of music I was interested in: rock’n’roll was the work of Satan, and she put as many obstacles as possible into my path when I was trying to pursue a career in it; of course, she may well have been right, in that rock’n’roll is the Devil’s music, at any rate it is if you are doing it right – but she saw this as a bad thing, while I thought it was great), but she was domineering, exigent, and prone to exaggeration (‘The Queen of Hyperbole’ I dubbed her); she was also strict.

    She was creative – a brilliant knitter and designer – but, like many intelligent and talented women of her generation, frustrated by domesticity, even if she would never have admitted it openly, or even to herself. Plus, we were working-class and poor, with the concomitant money worries and lack of opportunity and limited horizons.

    As well as not having economic capital, there wasn’t much social or cultural capital knocking around either. Neither of them had got beyond primary school. I’m sure they’d had hard lives, struggling to make ends meet, with a boy born in 1939 and a girl in 1944, neatly parenthesising the privations of the Second World War, which continued into the dour 1950s.

    However, while for a small child any given reality is accepted as normal and taken for granted, looking back from an adult vantage point, with some experience of observing other parent/child relationships, I would define my mother as simultaneously both distant and overbearing – or overbearingly distant, or distantly overbearing.

    There is some history here: while expecting me, she moved out of the family home and decamped to a damp flat above Walton’s Music Shop on North Great Frederick Street, Dublin, taking my brother and sister with her (thus disrupting the former’s accountancy studies), apparently amid accusations from my father concerning her ‘clandestine inclinations’ (my old man had a very superior vocabulary, for a busman), the implication being that I wasn’t his child.

    I suspect this was a complete fabrication on my mother’s part, although he would not have been above fits of jealousy. More likely (and for reasons I don’t fully comprehend), he was shamed by ribbing from his work colleagues about becoming a father again aged forty-five. Or perhaps it was these co-workers who, for a laugh, planted seeds of doubt in his mind regarding her fidelity and my paternity.

    While these complexities are shrouded in mystery and the mists of time to me, accessible only through often conflicting second-hand retellings, it is certain she did have some cause for grievance. It is acknowledged that he would come in late from work when the rest of the family were in bed asleep, and bang around the kitchen making as much noise as possible, all the while taking protracted silences with his spouse when they did happen to meet up. (Joke: it was a typical Irish marriage – they spoke to each other once a year, whether they needed to or not.)

    But then again, apart from his workmates preying on his insecurities, maybe he had his reasons too. As a simple working man, maybe he would have just appreciated having some dinner left out for him, after working double-days on the back of a bus. Taking silences was also my mother’s métier, for expressing her frequent displeasure, again alternating with loud, vehement outbursts of anger. I was much subjected to this parenting method, even as a small child.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    ‘Dutch Uncle’ 

    Guilt came early, and was ladled from a great height, for anything construed as misbehaviour – like innocently being too boisterous when playing with my nieces and nephews. It was as though she always, sometimes faintly and sometimes outrightly, disapproved of me at some basic level. (What did she expect an eight-year-old boy who didn’t get out all that much to do when said nieces and nephews were around? Just sit there in silence, minding my own business, or venturing occasionally to make polite conversation?) She talked to me, as she used to say herself, ‘like a Dutch uncle’.

    I used to think the phrase meant someone who talked at length. Only recently did I find out that it is an informal term for a person who ‘issues frank, harsh or severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage or admonish someone…thus, a “Dutch uncle” is the reverse of what is normally thought of as avuncular or uncle-like (indulgent and permissive).’ But, predominantly, silence was the air she moved in, and its ambience extended to all and everything around her, at least when we were home alone together, which was a lot of the time. (Conversely, when in other company, and doubtless as a form of unconscious overcompensation, she could be loquacious to the point of tedium – there was rarely a happy medium.)

    Dad was too busy working long hours, topped up with copious amounts of overtime, trying to keep the show on the road. She would quickly lose interest in being cooped up with a small boy for days on end. Consequently, I spent a good deal of time as a little lad in solitude, more than average for a child of that age, and was left to my own devices. I had to make my own fun. I was lavished with toys, but other humans – even those of around my own age – were strange, otherworldly creatures.

    While I largely welcomed them when they invaded my world, I wasn’t always sure how to deal with them. (‘How do I work this new toy?’) Later, when I was around nine or ten, she went out to work, as a seamstress in the linen room of a hotel, and then as a general operative in a local pharmaceutical factory, and my aloneness was complete.

    I came home every day from school to an empty house. But my mother’s greatest sin, as an extremely manipulative individual, who fought strenuously to control the family narrative (in which my role was to become the rebellious bad boy) was that she sought to turn me against my father (easily enough accomplished, due to his long, work-related absences and her being the chief caregiver – when the humour took her), but then later and depending on her mercurial moods, as if by fiat, she would blame me for disrespecting him. Being a powerless pawn caught in this crossfire between the king’s limited movement and vulnerability, and the queen’s infinite space and resources, would be enough to wreck anyone’s head. I was just another means for them to get at each other in their ongoing war of attrition, collateral damage in our bizarre love/hate triangle.

    I’m thinking of Raymond Carver’s very short short story ‘Popular Mechanics’, in which an argument over custody between a departing husband and his wife concludes thus: ‘She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided.’

    Christmas Morning

    A memory, of Christmas morning, when I was aged about ten or eleven. The scene, my sister and brother-in-law’s house, where my mother had decamped for the duration, with me in tow, in another of her flits from my supposedly tyrannical father. I remember her eyes on me, watching me as I opened my presents from Santa, and I was conscious of the obligation to perform happiness and joy for her, because she was having such a sad life, and as her young dutiful son I was obliged to cheer her up.

    It struck me, even then, that this was not how most of my contemporaries were required to behave, and it marked me apart. But there was always something performative about my mother, and those interacting with her. She spoke frequently of Love, but she used the apportioning of it as a form of punishment and reward. She constantly felt that others – not least her youngest child – should strive to gain her approval. In turn, I felt a constant pressure to show that I was having a happy childhood, and an equal pressure not to be any trouble – at least until adolescence hit.

    This giving and withdrawing of affection, a constant tightrope walk of appeasement, has definitely made its mark on the quality of my adult relationships, especially with women: I associate people loving me with people wanting something from me, and with it arbitrarily being taken away if they don’t get what they want. Perhaps this experience of love is not so different from most people’s – for how often is any love offered unconditionally?

    It is, however, one of the foundational and enabling myths of parenthood that parents are supposed to love their children more than themselves. But how many do? My mother did not love me more than herself. Maybe my father did. If work is love in action, he certainly slogged his guts out to keep us in the comfort to which we had no right to become accustomed. She, on the other hand, far from providing unconditional love, instead veered towards viewing me as a needless vexation and a thankless nuisance.

    I can see now that, as a good-looking and quick-witted young woman, my mother thought she could have done much better in the marriage stakes, but she had been cajoled by her parents into a very early alliance with my father, because he was a kind man and they knew he would do his best to look after her. Which, understandably, wouldn’t have made my father feel great, especially since she was the love of his life.

    Did I mention that she’d given birth to a stillborn girl, carried to full term, a year or two before I was born? She hadn’t expected me to live. When I was born healthy, and did live, I was ‘a miracle’. But then she had to deal with the consequences of this miracle. She left the grubby flat in North Frederick Street, diagonally opposite the Rotunda Hospital where I first saw the light of day (damn, my real dirty little secret is finally out: although I was bred on the Southside, I was born on the Northside – which side of the river is more opprobrious I will leave it to readers, informed by their own personal prejudices, to decide), and returned to the suburban council house I was brought up in, because it had taps with hot running water.

    Did I also mention that she fell ill with double pneumonia after I was born? My seventeen-year-old sister looked after me for the first few months of my life – fed me, burped me, changed my shitty nappies, all the things it is assumed mothers do with their new-borns. I have the impression that my mother never bonded properly with me.

    Despite her previous maternal experience, she didn’t know how to be around me. To a degree that was unhealthy, she wanted to be wooed – by her son rather than by her husband. Or, failing that, she wanted to be placated. I harbour the notion that my mother harboured the notion that she would have had some great second act to her life, had I not been born.

    I also harbour the notion that she was suspicious of those who had ‘notions’ – especially her children – because she had never been given the opportunity to indulge her own notions. She embodied avant la lettre, and would certainly have been an enthusiastic appreciator of, The Cult Of The Difficult Woman. But, as Jia Tolentino astutely argues in her essay of that title, these days it is not so difficult to be a difficult woman. Be that as it may, I can categorically state: as a very small child, having a disappointed menopausal and/or post-menopausal mother, is not a good thing. And not just not good for the child, but also for the mother.

    I very much doubt my mother was up for the sleepless nights, and the many other demands of child-rearing, at her age, in her delicate state of health, and having done it all before and thought it was all over. I was not, as a psychiatrist once asked me – clearly ignorant of the history of access to contraception in Ireland, due in no small part to the acquiescence of her profession in the machinations of the great church/state sponsored lie – a planned pregnancy.

    Candidates for Divorce

    If you love someone, you want to have children with them, it is said. As will be surmised from the foregoing, in my opinion, if my parents had been living now, and been more solvent, they would have been prime candidates for divorce, and very likely much better off for it. Or, at least, I would have been. During a discussion between the Ma and me on contraception and the ‘risks’ of pre-marital sex (still a hot topic in the early 1980s), she informed me that I was the result of ‘one lousy intercourse’.

    Somehow, I don’t think I figured greatly in her plans. In a similar disquisition on the whys and wherefores of abortion (although now at long last safely legal in Ireland, still something of a red rag to a bull in some quarters) she revealed, “You could have been an abortion”, to which, if I’d had enough presence of mind, I should have countered, “Well, if I had been, I wouldn’t have known about it.” (Echoes here of the perennial cri de coeur of teen angst: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’)  What things for any mother to say to her son!

    I have heretofore been ashamed of airing these exchanges for public consumption, possibly in an effort at blocking out the damage they would have done to the still evolving me, and a refusal to acknowledge how singularly and egregiously brutal they were. After all, the first love in your life is supposed to come from your mother. But I am ashamed no longer. I am too old now for it to matter what other people think of me, or of my mother, or of our troubled relationship, or of her memory.

    Apropos: I am writing this as personal memoir because if I tried to write it as fiction, no one would believe it. I am used to not being believed. You decide whether or not you believe me now.

    Defining ‘Natural’

    Was my mother ‘unnatural’ in her attitude to motherhood? Well, that very much depends on your definition of ‘natural’, doesn’t it? In this regard, it is instructive to quote from Laura Kipnis’s essay in the aforementioned anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids, entitled ‘Maternal Instincts’:

    …despite my proven talents at nurturing, I don’t believe in maternal instinct because as anyone who’s perused the literature on the subject knows, it’s an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history (I’m speaking of Western history here) – circa the Industrial Revolution, just as the new industrial-era sexual division of labor was being negotiated, the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. (Before that, pretty much everyone worked at home.) The new line was that such arrangements were handed down by nature. As family historians tell us, this is also when the romance of the child begins – ironically it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.

    All I’m saying is that what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact – a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature. An invented instinct can feel entirely real (I’m sure it can feel profound), though before we get too sentimental, let’s not forget that human maternity has also had a fairly checkered history over the ages, including such maternal traditions as infanticide, child abandonment, cruelty, and abuse.

    I might add, similarly, that belief in a God or the gods was rather more popular in the past – and, in fact, for most of recorded history – than it is today. All life comes from God, the believers tell us: that is why they are ‘Pro-Life’. Are we contemporary godless atheists somehow, then, wrong?

    My mother would have looked askance and jeered at today’s required standards of parenting. One time, when I was around twenty-two, she presented me with an itemised bill she had taken the trouble to compile, for how much it had cost to rear me.

    It was high time I started paying it back. “There’s no return in you” was a common theme. Do I not have kids because I thought they would have cost me too much, because I could not afford them? “We did our best for you,” she told me another time. And perhaps they did. “I reared two gentlemen and a lady,” the Da would often boast. Except you don’t need to be well-off to praise and encourage your children. You just need to love them, and want what’s best for them. Never mind loving them more than yourself.

    Featured Image: Idyllic Family Scene with Newborn by Eugenio Zampighi (1859-1944)