Cassandra Voices

Tag: thing

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World III

    To tell you the truth, I could easily have been a father, and I would be a father now, had my wife J not miscarried a baby we once made. This was in 2002, so he or she would have been eighteen by now. So strange to envisage it: another life – for me, for J, and for that life. And had that bundle of multiplying cells survived to become an independent living being, would it have fundamentally altered the attitudes I am expressing now? Or confirmed them? Although I have to confess that for the most part I was just going along with the whole plan for J’s sake.

    Women feel motherhood from the time of conception. Men don’t feel fatherhood until they are holding their child. I even remember a trip to Holles Street Maternity Hospital to make a sperm donation, so that it could be tested for any abnormalities, due to side effects from other medical treatment I had been receiving. The next time I went to that place was to visit J in a ward when she was recovering from losing the baby. She hadn’t even known that she was pregnant.

    I said terrible things to her, while she’d been campaigning for me to father her child, before I acquiesced. I’d told her she was only making love in order to conceive. I’d told her she would be a terrible mother.

    Despite having her own human foibles, I was wrong – if for no other reason than the fact that she is nothing like my mother. Just as I am nothing like her father – a fear she speculatively expressed early in our relationship. Of course, she could have been a bad mother for entirely different reasons than my mother was, but, just as equally, possibly not. And how will we ever know, now?

    All she ever wanted was for us to be a family. All she wanted was to nurture, to have some extension of herself to love. I was not mature enough at the time to grasp that. Instead, I’d asked her, fearing for our freedom, “What will you do with this baby?” To which she’d replied, not seeing any problem, “Love it.” (‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’ T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, II. A Game of Chess. Companionship, Tom?) I can only excuse such wretched behaviour by pointing to Paul Stewart’s study of Beckett, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (2011), where he deflects accusations of misogyny in the maestro’s oeuvre by positing that because for him women represent the threat of progeny, they are therefore simultaneously desired and reviled.

    Reincarnation?

    Speaking of women, not to be upstaged, my mother chose to end her time on Planet Earth while J was miscarrying (which began before but ended after Mam died). Had J gone on to discover that she was pregnant, and had we given birth to a healthy baby, I would have read that as my mother giving us a parting gift, almost a reincarnation of her spirit.

    As it turned out, I see it as my mother robbing us of our unborn child, taking our unformed baby away with her, instead of leaving it to us – as though we were unworthy, as though she didn’t trust us with it: the last thing she took from me. My mother was always terrified that I’d get someone pregnant out of wedlock. Hey Ma, not to worry: I didn’t. But when I did get married and make my wife pregnant, nothing came of it. Is that some kind of subtle revenge? And if so, by who on whom?

    I could still be a father now. But not if I can help it. J can no longer be a mother. If this is still a source of sadness and regret for her, I apologise profoundly and profusely.

    Foreign Adventures

    Freedom?

    ‘Fearing for our freedom.’ Did we do so much more with it, than the breeders in our circle of friends and acquaintances? Sure, we were able to holiday in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Morocco and India, while they had to settle for annual summer trips to the Aran Islands; and we were able to take weekend city breaks to Paris, Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges, Ghent, Prague and Tallinn, while they were not kicking back but rather gearing up to arrange play dates and other activities to keep the children occupied during the days off, and ferrying them to and fro  – because we didn’t have to worry about getting kids on and off aeroplanes, and because we had more disposable income.

    Not that we had that much more: we just didn’t have to make as much, and what we had went further. I certainly got to go to way more gigs than my peers, not having to worry about sourcing competent and reliable babysitters and being able to afford to pay them. I’ve probably read a lot more books than someone preoccupied with childcare.

    If you think the trade-off wasn’t worth it, then prove me wrong.

    Paternal Bonding

    Son or Daughter?

    If I had had children, would I have preferred a son or a daughter? The latter, hands down. Fathers favour daughters, mothers favour sons (and, generally, vice versa) – or rather, a parents’ relationship with a same sex child is usually more complex and fraught than it is with a child of the opposite sex.

    Shakespeare was fond of daughters as redeeming of all fathers’ misdeeds, at least in the later ‘romances’ (Pericles’ Marina, The Winter’s Tale’s Perdita, Cymbeline’s Imogen, The Tempest’s Miranda). However, his earlier King Lear, that most mistreated of parents – even if he did bring much of it on himself – also had daughters, and it didn’t really work out so well with the first two.

    Admittedly, he did have one loving, dutiful daughter, notably getting it right with the youngest, to compensate for the elder two cruel, self-interested termagants he also spawned. One out of three ain’t bad. But Cordelia dies anyway. That’s the difference between romance and tragedy. But while there may be some slim hope for a daughter, becoming a father of a son instantly marks you out as a bad guy, to be rebelled against and toppled – even, if we are to take the story of Oedipus literally rather than metaphorically, to be killed.

    While much depends on the extent of your offspring’s sedition, it is kind of impossible to win, as a Dad. No way am I re-enacting that particular little domestic yet universal drama. Some may say I am merely operating out of fear of failure as a father, and am crippled by such anxiety, which is itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: because I think I will fail as a father, I will fail as a father. But all fathers, and mothers, fail, to a greater or lesser extent.

    To recast a favourite formulation from Beckett: to be a parent is to fail, as no other dare fail. Then again, ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’ But how many0 chances do you get in one life to succeed? Maybe better not to try at all. Others may posit that my lack of progeny, because of distaste at the world, because of its inherent unfairness, is also a self-fulfilling prophecy: that is, because I view the world as distasteful because it is unfair, having progeny would have turned out to be distasteful and unfair too, for me and also for them – rather than redemptive. And, indeed, it is true that one has to somehow believe in life, and the future, to have children. Or, at least, it helps. But for those who identify with Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense Of Life, the whole enterprise can seem somewhat futile. In any case, I view the failure of parenthood as inevitable – because even the most conscientious of parents will tell you that you can look after your children only up to a certain point, and you can’t stop them from making all those stupid mistakes that you made (even those you know about).

    Actually, I think I would be – or rather – would have been, a pretty good father, all told. But what if, for a myriad of unforeseen reasons and circumstances, I wasn’t? I see no reason to make an irreversible bet on finding out. I don’t think the odds are great, and I still don’t see the percentage in it.

    The Act of Parturition

    I have always found the thought of the act of parturition, that is giving birth by pushing a baby out into the world, vaguely repulsive, definitely messy and probably very painful.

    How do women do it? Maybe I’m just a wimp. Or maybe not, since quite apart from all the blood and guts involved, you can even die while doing it. (Is it really any wonder that 10 to 15 per cent of women suffer some form of postnatal depression, and that one in a thousand develop puerperal psychosis, given the utter physical trauma attendant on forcing yet another member of the next generation out into this hostile world?)

    It has always reminded me of the chestburster scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a sequence specifically designed to prey on male fears, according to critic David McIntee in his Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Alien and Predator Films (2005). ‘On one level, it’s about an intriguing alien threat. On one level it’s about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important to the writers and director, it’s about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it’s about this happening to a man.’ He notes how the film plays on men’s fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.

    Similarly, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) taps into themes of tokophobia and fear of fatherhood, while Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) envisions pregnancy and childbirth as a form of Satanic possession.

    But birth is where we all come from (unless we’ve been cloned, or are the products of in vitro fertilisation, without the subsequent implantation in a uterus – a far safer and more sensible way of doing things, in my opinion), so there must be nothing to it. (Ducks and runs for cover.) I’m joking, of course.

    Any account of giving birth I’ve heard or read makes it sound like it takes place in a low circle of hell. (‘They don’t call it labour for nothing’, etc. ‘Push! Push!’ Adam’s – and, more’s to the point, Eve’s – Curse.) Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Sinead Gleeson and Jessica Traynor have all written eloquently on the vicissitudes of accouchement (some more affirmatively than others), but the prize for most visceral description must go to Shulamith Firestone, who in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1971) wrote that ‘…childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)’

    Always allowing for the possibility that those describing the process are exaggerating for effect in order to elicit kudos, there still has to be a better way of doing the thing – if doing the thing must be done. Indeed, it is the same Firestone who was an early proponent of cyberfeminism, that is the idea that women need technology in order to free themselves from the obligation of reproducing, thus pointing to a future in which individuals are more androgynous and views of the female body are reconstructed. Her arguments have been subsequently developed by Donna Haraway, who in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) sought to challenge the necessity for categorisation of gender, positing that gender constructs should be eliminated as categories for identity.

    About the many and various sexual acts I have performed, I can attest to no corresponding squeamishness, or horror of bodily functions, on my part.

    Stroller or Buggy?

    I also have a morbid fear of the vehicles known variously as Buggies (European English), or Strollers (American English). Can we settle on the more universal and neutral Pushchairs, or the perhaps posher Perambulators? – although which term we employ can create some ambiguity as regards signifier and signified: are we referring to the smaller, fold-up apparatuses where the baby sits facing away from the pusher; or the larger, more solidly built contraptions resembling nothing so much as a Sherman tank going into battle, where the little stranger faces their means of locomotion?

    Whatever you care to call them – and in any case it is both I have in mind – I defiantly distance myself from them in the street and in supermarkets, full sure that they have no other purpose or mission than to nip at my heels, or crash into my shins, or crush my toes. Those in charge of them should really be more careful. Perhaps these ‘go-cars’ and ‘prams’ should come with a health warning; or better still, be licensed.

    Cyril Connolly famously singled out ‘the pram in the hall’ as one of his Enemies Of Promise (1938), a phrase, along with ‘the tares of domesticity’, that has been seized on by a subsequent generation of feminist criticism as blatantly misogynistic (although maybe not so anti-women as previously thought: vide the reference to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood above). ‘The overarching theme of the book…’, according to that ever-reliable critic Wikipedia, ‘is the search for understanding why Connolly, though he was widely recognised as a leading man of letters and a highly distinguished critic, failed to produce a major work of literature.’ And we think we invented ‘creative non-fiction’? The full quotation from Connelly reads: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ Me? I don’t even have that excuse.

    Bouncy Castle

    While we’re on subject of loathsome objects best avoided, here are two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any prospective parent: bouncy castle. Also, on the positive side, it’s an unalloyed boon that I will never be obliged to read the Harry Potter books, and pretend to like them. For these small blessings, much thanks.

    Most young parents of my acquaintance seem to spend their lives merely running a busy creche with someone they used to go out with (or ‘date’, as the Yanks say). More generally, openly declaring oneself an anti-natalist from the outset (out of the closet!) does help to circumvent that tiresome “Where is this relationship going?” discussion, raised at a certain point in most fledgling liaisons – at least by people whose main objective in their amatory affairs is to conduct a round of interviews for potential husbands and fathers (or wives and mothers); while furthermore, in the longer term, contributing to the avoidance of the workmanlike rigours of ‘trying for a baby’ (those daily doses of folic acid!), which can only turn what should be a spontaneous pleasure into a meticulously planned duty roster.

    Imagine even having to attend a Parent/Teacher Meeting – as a parent or as a teacher. To listen to your hope for the future be praised or blamed by a jobsworth who probably hasn’t as broad an education or as much life experience as you.

    Or to listen to a pushy parent, convinced their little tyke is a genius, and that the fault for any deficiencies the scamp may manifest is to be placed firmly at your door. That’s the difference between school when I was going through it, and school now: back then, parents deferred to teachers, and sat there and took it; nowadays teachers are constantly on trial by parents, and everything their little darlings say is believed. Rate My Teacher? Nah, Rate My Student, more like; or, more’s to the point, Rate That Parent.

    Again, I have personal experience of this phenomenon: my mother wouldn’t talk to me for a week after my educators informed her at one such confab that “He’s only using half his ability.” I wonder whose fault that was? The teachers’ or my mother’s? The school’s or my home’s? It certainly wasn’t mine, at that age.

    ChildrenofMen

    Children of Men

    The literary and filmic genre most concerned with human extinction is dystopic science fiction. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) (based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name, with the addition of the definite article) envisages the world of 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse.

    The narrative arc of both book and film is a journey from despair to hope, sponsored by the notion that any such hope depends on the birth of future generations. Otherwise, all we can look forward to is despair, chaos and anarchy.

    It is, in many ways, a modern-day nativity story, where the birth of a child is elevated to the status of The Coming Of The Saviour, who will redeem humanity from its many sins and vices. James herself has referred to her book as ‘a Christian fable’.

    Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1992), which was in turn based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) makes great issue of fertility as a prerequisite for, or at least an indicator of, humanity: the ability to reproduce makes replicants more human-like, and therefore more sympathetic and relatable.

    Thus, if Deckard (whose standing as human/replicant is left ambiguous) has fathered a daughter with Rachael (a replicant), it renders the termination of replicants not only futile, but unethical and murderous. In the novel, the android antagonists can indeed be seen as more human than the human (?) protagonist. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity (that is, ‘humanity’ taken to mean the positive aspects of humanity).

    Klaus Benesch examined Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in connection with Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’. Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in a mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not an individual, level.

    Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society itself, just as in the original film the administration of an ‘empathy test’, to determine if a character is human or android, produces many false positives. Either the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed, or replicants are pretty good at being human (or, perhaps, better than human).

    This perplexity first found an explanation in Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential essay The Uncanny Valley (1970), in which he hypothesised that human response to human-like robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as a robot approached, but failed to attain, a life-like appearance, due to subtle imperfections in design. He termed this descent into eeriness ‘the uncanny valley’, and the phrase is now widely used to describe the characteristic dip in emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human.

    But if human-likeness increased beyond this nearly human point, and came very close to human, the emotional response would revert to being positive. However, the observation led Mori to recommend that robot builders should not attempt to attain the goal of making their creations overly life-like in appearance and motion, but instead aim for a design, ‘which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a non-human design.’

    Brave New World

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) paints a dire picture of society in 2540, rendered selfish, consumerist and emotionally passive through the (mis)application by a ruling elite of huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology (prefiguring that tabloid terror, ‘test tube babies’) and narco-conditioning.

    But what if these grim prognostications about the disappearance of humanity, either literally or metaphorically, could be turned on their head? In fact, they have been. This horrifying dystopia could without too much trouble and just a little finessing be flipped into a much-to-be-aspired-to utopia, as Huxley himself attempted in Island, the 1962 revision of his more famous work.

    This exploration of the possibilities opened up by biochemistry and genetic engineering for curing man, the sick animal, of his desires, violence and neuroses, sometime in the distant future, is taken up in more depth by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island (2005). The distant descendants of Daniel have been culled from his DNA, with all the annoyingly rancorous human traits ironed out of the mix. So, we are transported to 2000 years in the future, where Daniel25, like the rest of these ‘neohumans’, passes his days in neutral tranquillity, adding his commentary to his ancestor’s personal history, striving to understand what could have made him so unhappy, while the remnants of the old human race roam in primitive packs outside his secure compound.

    It’s a startlingly beautiful planet, Mother Earth. But we are royally fucking Mother Nature up, big time. We don’t deserve it, or her. An analogy can certainly be drawn between the harm humankind has caused to its own environment, and the harm that parents do to their own children. High time we terminated those relationships; or, at the very least, radically recalibrated them.

    How do you explain to a child a world in which Donald Trump was the President of the United States of America for four years? And that his cabal of ghouls, grifters and vampires – many of them members of his own brood – held sway? And that seventy million people still voted for him a second time around? Worse, what if that child grows up thinking that state of affairs is somehow normal? Worst, what if s/he grows up into the kind of person who would vote for him or his ilk themselves, despite your best parental efforts at instruction, guidance or influence? That such people are even permitted to exercise the franchise, let alone allowed to breed, is deeply disturbing (because they would seek to curb your voting and reproductive rights). What if you, however inadvertently, breed one of them?

    But, irony of ironies: to my father, I would be a failson, in terms of passing on his values and beliefs, the thing he held most dear: his Roman Catholic faith. Devotion to God sorted everything out for him, made sense of his world. God never meant much to me, after a certain age, except for the hassle encountered if you admitted to scepticism regarding his existence.

    Donald Trump is a person who could have an infinitive number of pejorative adjectives affixed to his name, but none of them are necessary: everyone already knows what he is; yet many people voted for him regardless, either because they endorse this, or in spite of this. The same is true of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, where 40 per cent of the British electorate will always vote Tory, no matter what! Tell that to the children. Or, given the questionable quality of the main opposition to either Trump or Johnson, try telling them that two-party democracy is somehow a good idea. Perhaps I am just losing it. Maybe I am at the end of my tether.

    Have I missed out? Undoubtedly, parenthood is a common human experience I will not share. But I don’t feel particularly bad or bereft about it, especially when I look at the hassles of child-rearing, and the often fractured relationships and tensions between my peers and their offspring (although I will concede that I estimate that this generation is making a better fist of fostering good relations with their children than the previous generation did – a vast generalisation, I know, but something in the air due in some part to less authoritarian parenting styles. I’m thinking here about witnessing a good friend of mine taking a phone call from his thirteen-year-old son, and promising when prompted to send on a copy of Led Zeppelin IV for his boy’s delectation). I read in an interview with poet Michael Longley where he said that having children was the most profound thing he’s ever done, more so than all the poetry. But would I have felt the same way? There is no guarantee.

    There is the question, already broached, of who will look after me in my old age? Peasants are supposed to churn out lots of nippers, as the kind of security provided by insurance policies. (Aristos don’t need as many, because they can already rely on their inherited wealth, which will be duly passed down to their heir and the spare, which was all that was necessary and sufficient for them to sire.) But these days, such indemnification is more likely to have relocated to Australia than to be on hand for your decay and demise. They could even predecease you. The idea that your children will be a comfort to you in your old age is at best a cosmic gamble – as is bringing them into the world in the first place. It is fruitless to speculate on whether or not your offspring can or will help to alleviate the indignities and sufferings of your senescence. Such mortifications, and how I manage them, may be something I am only beginning to find out. As I would have had to do anyway, with or without children.

    If I had children, would I be writing this? No, and for more than just the obvious reason (that is, that I don’t have children). Odds on I’d be so busy looking after them and preoccupied about their welfare and their future that I wouldn’t have the time, energy or inclination to write at all (just as Sheila Heti speculates). Which leads to a further consideration concerning children as a form of sublimation for personal ambition, as a kind of compensation for lacks and voids and failures in your own life up until you have them. You may believe that they complete you, but is that fair on them? Or on the world? For whom, or for what, do these proud parents think they are doing a favour? The world, or themselves? Whatever their justification, the answer is neither, I suspect.

    We were all kids once. Would we really like to go back there?

    Maybe it all comes down to Eros and Thanatos. What if the death instinct is stronger than the sex instinct? It always is, in the end. Love doesn’t conquer all. It doesn’t conquer Death. Unless you are talking about what you leave behind, after your own extinction. For many people, for good or ill, that is their children. But there are other things you can leave behind. Even if it is only a form of negative space. I still regard my childlessness as almost unquestionably my greatest achievement. It is part of what I will leave behind. It is my gift to the world. I bequeath to all my unborn children, imagined and unrealised, forever unsullied and unfulfilled, mercifully untainted by human existence, all my Love.

    Feature Image: Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World II

    Are you satisfied now, ladies and gentlemen, you counsellors and therapists of all stripes, with my do-it-your-self-psychoanalysis?

    Despite my disdain for the so-called misery memoir, it is time to declare: my childhood was better than being brought up in an industrial school, or by an alcoholic or physically abusive parent; but, certainly by today’s ideals, only just.

    Often, I am surprised that I even survived my upbringing, if not exactly thrived. It is an achievement, in itself, to be alive. Maybe I’m suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, after all, and have been for most of my life. Which, in turn, has led to a bad case of Imposter Syndrome. Or better still, Postnatal Depression, which cuts both ways, and is a synonym for Life.

    But, as Flannery O’Connor wrote: ‘Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.’ In the long run, you learn that parents are just people who looked after you when you couldn’t look after yourself, with whom you have very little in common – except what they put there.

    ‘misery on to man’

    So, there you have it: I don’t have kids because I didn’t feel wanted as a child. I am just another classic example of the classical Sophoclean tale of the complexity of Oedipus, and how it wrecks. How neat, but how utterly facile – the kind of typically trite conclusion to which a therapist will always jump.

    For the psychological scaring of one’s own upbringing is hardly enough to explain a lack of interest – or rather, an unwillingness to participate in procreation. After all, people with much more unsavoury childhood experiences than I still manage to produce children of their own. That’s part of the recurring cycle of man passing ‘misery on to man’, in Larkin’s phrase, from the one poem of his which everyone can quote from memory.

    It is what he means by ‘Still going on, all of it, still going on!’ to quote from another, less anthologised of his works. No doubt the mind-doctors will predictably claim that I am merely in denial here about the effects of my formative childhood experiences on my psyche. But denial is such a difficult concept to prove in practice. Not that I reject outright the idea that there may be some residual influence – how could there not be? My parents may well have given me ‘all the faults they had’ and added some more, just for me. But does that inevitably make me, in the words of a fictional Larkin biographer from another of his more well-known poems, ‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, the sort who notoriously cautions ‘Don’t have any kids yourself’? Hardly – anyone who knows me will attest to my lively sense of humour.

    Ah, but maybe I’m just trying to cover something up with a jokey, rock’n’roll exterior? Ah, but aren’t we all – with whatever masks work best for us? We all ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, like poor old Prufrock.

    In the end, your relationship with your parents, and your perspective on your childhood, is a bit like your relationship with and perspective on the place where you were born and grew up, or even with your country: some people become expatriates; some people stay close to home; and some people are at peace with whichever arrangement, and some are not.

    One can treat that relationship with as much seriousness or triviality as one likes, although for many professional mental healthcare workers, it will always be serious. In any case, this excavational writing project I am engaged upon vouchsafes that I am not in denial: I have acknowledged the debt the past has burdened me with; what you are reading can be construed as my effort to (clears throat) ‘move on’.

    Sinatra Family, 1949.

    It’s Parents

    (Joke: It’s not the mother and father I blame: it’s the parents.) Except, for me, it’s more a case of

    ‘It’s not children I don’t like: it’s parents.’ For here’s the thing: for someone who appreciates, if not quite advocates, childlessness, I quite like children. Obviously, one cannot generalise about all children, as individual children can differ from one another almost as much as adults do. But, in general, I prefer the company of most children to that of most adults.

    This has something to do with the hope projected on to them: they haven’t quite been beaten down and made bitter by life experience, yet. If there is hope, it lies in the children. But there is no hope, because of the parents. Little people have usually regarded me quizzically, probably because they perceive me to be unlike most other adults in their lives. I can usually speak to them on their own level. I am not an authority figure.

    You can learn a lot from children about looking at the world in an original way, if you listen to them, which so few adults do. But I like being able to give them back to their biological parents, when the fun is over. I only want the good parts. (Joke: I like children, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.)

    Fortunately, this seems to suit most parents, who are only too glad to have their children taken off their hands for a while. I’m thinking of all those poor little rich kids, from all over the place but especially the progeny of Russian oligarchs, whom I taught (i.e. babysat) on summer courses over the years. All the neglected boys could do was play computer games; all the neglected girls could do was go shopping. Of course, they are the issue of the class of people who view having children as a lifestyle choice rather than as a luxury.

    Parents may lavish fortunes on the education of their children, but they actively seek to avoid spending too much time with them. Just as children may look forward to hefty inheritances, but are quite prepared to deposit their parents in residential care homes while they are waiting for their windfall, rather than look after them at home themselves. Family values, eh?

    The 1937 Irish Constitution.

    The Family

    ‘It’s not children I don’t like: it’s parents.’ Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like are families, or rather, the fetishisation of ‘The Family’ as an abstract concept, as for example in monotheistic religions, or in Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of Ireland. (Article 41.1.1. ‘The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.’ Article 41.1.2.

    ‘The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.’ Okay, so. But what about all the citizens who, for whatever reason, have never lived in families, and/or never will live in families – unadopted or unfostered orphans, for a start, or Catholic clergy?) And I reserve a particularly virulent animus against ‘The Good Family’, as in “He/She is from A Good Family” or from “Good Stock” or “Decent People”, ‘good’ and ‘decent’ here invariably meaning church-going, law-abiding, well-connected, prosperous middle-class, and ‘respectable’ – except most of them are not.

    Thus, the origin of the phrases ‘The black sheep of the family’, and ‘Disgracing the family name.’ If I had a fiver for every time I’ve been to a job interview – and even in supposedly liberal operations like newspapers or publishing houses – and been asked “Who are your family?’ or “What is your father doing now?”, I’d have a tidy sum squirrelled away. “Where do you stand on the church?” was also an old favourite when trying to land a teaching job, as recently as the late 1980s.

    Needless to say, the potential employers were not overly impressed with my answers. If it were not for hereditary privilege, many monsters (themselves the offspring of monsters) throughout history would not have got within even an ass’s roar of power. Just think: wouldn’t the world be a better place without contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon, such as Lochlan Murdoch or Ivanka Trump, having easy access to global media and political influence?

    Prashant Shrestha from Kathmandu, Nepal.

    The Dialectic of Sex

    Before you peremptorily dismiss me as a crackpot, please hear me out, for I am not a lone voice crying in the wilderness in this predilection. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), second wave feminist Shulamith Firestone criticised the nuclear family as a construct, arguing that it not only limits women’s independence, but inhibits child development too. In her view, children are hindered in their abilities to develop because of their education, predetermined positions in the social hierarchy, and ‘lesser importance’ in comparison to their parents and other adult figures in their lives, who control all these aspects of the children’s lives. She believed that nuclear families, as a form of social organisation, creates inequality within a family, as the children are considered subordinates to their parents.

    This, in turn, has increased maternal expectations and obligations, which is something Firestone thought society should outgrow. This dependency on maternal figures makes the child(ren) more susceptible to physical abuse and deprives them of the opportunity to work towards being independent themselves, economically, emotionally and sexually. She sought to solve these problems by eliminating families for the raising of children, and instead to have them raised by a collective.

    William S. Burroughs also advocated for the disintegration of the family unit, most vociferously in The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier (1989), since he believed it to be redundant.

    Jean Genet wrote in The Thief’s Journal (1949): ‘In my opinion, the family is probably the first criminal cell, and the most criminal.’ ‘Ah, but those guys were queer’, I hear members of the right-wing Christian fraternity proclaim, ‘so what else would you expect from them?’

    Alright, let’s enlist some good, straight, honest Irishmen as well. Poet Dennis O’Driscoll wrote that ‘Every family has passed its own version of the Official Secrets Act’, and doubtless with good reason.

    Time and again in his work, Samuel Beckett targets parents as irresponsible criminals, by dint of their bringing more life into this sordid and corrupt world, and thus creating families. ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,’ says Hamm to Clov in Endgame, and addresses his father Nagg as ‘accursed progenitor’. Indeed, Beckett could easily be construed as a proto-supporter of women’s reproductive rights, as the narrator of First Love is horrified when his lover Lulu/Anna reveals that she is pregnant: ‘Abort! Abort!’ he says, adding, ‘If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.’

    Furthermore, for Stephen Dedalus in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (even if it can be configured, as Hugh Kenner chooses to do in Joyce’s Dublin, as callow – in contrast with Leopold Bloom’s mooted fatherly maturity), ‘Paternity is a legal fiction’ (or, as my own father used to put it more plainly: “There’s manys the man rocks another man’s child when he thinks he rocks his own.”).

    Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.

    Wealth Accumulation

    It can easily be argued that marriage, monogamy and parenthood exist primarily to foster and protect property and inheritance, and to encourage wealth accumulation. These arrangements sponsor and attempt to justify the greed and acquisitiveness of rampant laissez-faire capitalism, since parents can always claim that they are not acting disreputably out of their own selfish interests, but rather are indulging in seemingly self-serving and nakedly avaricious behaviour merely for the good of their offspring, by endeavouring to give them the best start in life and ultimately securing their future.

    Thus the casting of family formation as somehow having a Stake in Life, or in Progress, or in The Future, or some such nebulous notion. But would people really be so competitive economically, to the detriment of others, if their children were raised communally, and all the children of the nation were really cherished equally – i.e. have exactly the same resources available to them?

    This alternative method of social organisation would certainly give the lie to the oft-repeated right-wing mantra that free market capitalism is a meritocracy – where the harder you work, the more you are rewarded – because all children would be starting life on precisely the same footing. After all, ‘It takes a village’, as even prominent neo-liberals like to tell us.

    Besides which, is the family really such a Haven in a Heartless World, as historian Christopher Lasch had it, in his 1977 tome of that title? Lasch traced over a century’s worth of sociological and psychological theories on the contemporary family, situating his observations in the context of expanding social institutions and their besieging of the family’s power and influence, and taking issue with most of them.

    However, while Pope John Paul II may have opined that ‘as the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live’, surely if the family is a microcosmic unit within the macrocosm of society itself, then the overall health of the family should be a good indicator of the overall health of the culture at large. If the world is indeed heartless, then perhaps the first place in need of reformation is, in fact, the family. In this alternative cosmology, friends may well be God’s apology for family since, unlike your family, you get to choose your friends.

    There is at least as much evidence to suggest that, far from being a haven, families can just as equally be claustrophobic minefields of unbearable tension and resentment. From the patricides, matricides and fratricides of Greek tragedy, to a headline ripped at random from yesterday’s newspaper: ‘Domestic violence by adult children against parents rises as stress peaks under lockdown’, this assertion is incontestable. A recent statement from the Garda Commissioner informed us that domestic violence claims more lives in Ireland every year than gangland crime.

    Of course, you can counter-argue that these kinds of pressures on family life are direct consequences of consumer capitalism (adult kids can’t afford to rent, much less buy, which is why they are living at home), but the fact remains that the concept of the happy and supportive family is an aspirational mirage, with little tangible substance: some parents may get on with each other, but many don’t; some parents may get on with their children, but many don’t; some siblings may get on with each other, but many don’t; some children may get on with their parents, but many don’t; some families may work, but many don’t; some may work at different times, but not at others.

    Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina.

    All Families are Alike

    Here we can invoke Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ But are all happy families really alike? Perhaps their happiness is just as idiosyncratic as the unhappiness of the unhappy. In addition to which, I can’t help but ascribe a degree of conscious irony to Tolstoy’s declaration. After all, we do not encounter any ideally happy families in Anna Karenina. Perhaps he knew, as well as anyone, that the Happy Family is a myth, an ideal to which we may aspire, while having no palpable earthly iteration. But whenever Family Values types start pushing The Family ‘as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society’ at me (unfortunate enough as that phrase is in its easy slide into Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim that ‘…there’s no such thing as society.

    There are individual men and women and there are families’), I usually refer them to the Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which is, if nothing else, a needful corrective to the sentimental ghosts of Dickens, and bolsters Wilde’s epigram to the effect that ‘Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday [e.g. Dickens’ Christmas] of cynicism’. For, despite the episode’s grounding in personal autobiography and the particular politico-religious strife among nationalists in Ireland at the time, the reason for this Yuletide row’s universal appeal is that Joyce wasn’t just writing about his own family: rather, he was writing about everyone’s family, in every time and place.

    There is always something to argue about, and it hurts more to argue with relatives who espouse views diametrically opposed to your own than it does with anyone else. Or will you just sit there and bite your tongue for the rest of your life?

    At any rate, however positive or negative your view of family life, I have no particular desire to be part of the hurdy-gurdy of what a friend calls, speaking of his own familial ups and downs, ‘the great human dance’. Or, at least, his version of family dancing and enforced role-playing. I am more partial to jitterbugging than waltzing, to doing the watusi than executing a quadrille.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    Irish Social History

    These considerations take on a particularly lurid hue in the light of 20th century Irish social history, especially when juxtaposed with the aspirational ‘official version’ rhetoric which is still regularly trotted out around the Irish family (see Articles Article 41.1.1. and Article 41.1.2. of Bunreacht na hÉireann, above).

    The record of incarceration and institutionalisation of Irish citizens in Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalen Laundries, Industrial Schools and Psychiatric Hospitals is grim, and involved the blatant rejection of children and grandchildren by their parents, siblings and extended families, in the name of a church-and-state-sponsored ‘respectability’ based on the notion of ‘legitimacy’. These wounds are still raw in many peoples’ memories. As a younger acquaintance recently put it to me: “I was born in 1993 to a single mother who raised me. The last Mother and Baby Home in Ireland closed in 1998. It could have been us.”

    Therefore, I salute the scholarly tenacity of both Clair Wills, in her article Architectures of Containment (London Review of Books, Vol. 43 No. 10 · 20 May 2021), and Catriona Crowe, in her piece The Commission and the Survivors (Dublin Review, #83, Summer 2021), for their persistence in wading through 2865 pages of what is essentially obfuscating, buck-passing apologetics contained within the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes (Government of Ireland, October 2020), and their deep excavation and dismantling of it.

    Wills refers to the ‘inalienable family logic’ of the system, and speculates that: ‘Arguably the rhetoric of the Irish family was a smokescreen for the absence of the family as a private sphere of emotional and affective ties’, declaring that ‘the Irish church and state, with the passive acceptance and sometimes active collusion of Irish families, was willing to sacrifice its own children – of whatever age – for what it considered to be survival.’ Crowe comments: ‘One has no right to expect dazzling prose in such a document, but it is striking how badly written, argued and organised the commission’s report is. The tone is at times hectoring, at times defensive, at times cryptic – and sometimes all three…’ The cover-up continues…

    While some may read more recent progress in Irish social legislation – such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the repeal of the eighth amendment – as forms of ‘respectability politics’, they at least demonstrably signal significant shifts in attitudes as to what constitutes concepts of the Irish Family, moving on from a theocratic patriarchy to a broader and looser inclusivity.

    Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, imagined here in a Bible illustration from 1897.

    Patriarchy

    ‘Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like are families…’.  Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like is patriarchy. Men can be victims of patriarchy, just as much as women. (Although, even if they aren’t, they should still dislike it, out of solidarity with their womenfolk.) I myself have suffered my whole life at the hands of all manner of male authority figures (e.g. priests and Christian Brothers to whom my parents deferred, and so who consequently had inordinate control over my formative years; teachers too interested in favouring students with more upwardly-mobile parents than mine to pay attention to me; doctors and surgeons who would not admit mistakes when they treated me, when it was obvious mistakes had been made; potential employers who found my performances at interviews too idiosyncratic to countenance employing me, despite abundant relevant qualifications and experience).

    Bumptious, self-important fools. I could never imagine myself in the role of a patriarch, or even a more benign paterfamilias. Hence, perhaps, another reason why I don’t have children. Not that I hold much brief for matriarchy either – which, curiously, has markedly strong manifestations in Ireland: just look at the ubiquity of mariolatry imagery.

    I myself have suffered my whole life at the hands of all manner of female authority figures (e.g. women in many of the same roles as the men already listed – proving, paradoxically, that equality isn’t always an unalloyed ‘good thing’). Brash, conceited harridans. I could never imagine putting someone in the role of a matriarch, or even a more benign materfamilias.

    Hence, perhaps, another reason why I didn’t want to give a woman a child. So maybe it’s not so much patriarchy (etymology: ‘from patriarkhēs “male chief or head of a family” ’) or matriarchy (etymology: ‘government by a mother or mothers; form of social organization in which the mother is the head of the family and the descendants are reckoned through the maternal side”, formed in English 1881 from matriarch + -y and “patterned after patriarchy”) that I dislike, as ‘archy’ itself (etymology: ‘word-forming element meaning “rule”, from Latin -archia, from Greek -arkhia “rule”, from arkhos “leader, chief, ruler”, from arkhē “beginning, origin, first place”, verbal noun of arkhein “to be the first”, hence “to begin” and “to rule”.’)

    As a good ex-punk (is there really any such thing as an ‘ex’ punk? – no, of course not, old punks never die, they just sign to CBS, and/or get into country music), perhaps the only -archy I like is an- (from Greek, ‘without’) -archy. All rules are arbitrary. They are mutually agreed conventions, employed for as long as those with power consider them useful, until they are convinced otherwise, or in advance of them losing power. As with the power of parents to rule the lives of their children.

    Meet the Parents

    It is plain to see that parents get a bad press, in both popular culture and theoretical discourse. From ‘Mom jeans’ to ‘Dad rock’, from Meet The Parents (and The Fockers) to The Happiest Season, parents are presented as embarrassingly and quintessentially naff. Parental units are decidedly unerotic, and are easy targets for comedic caricature. Sometimes they bring it on themselves: consider Parental Advisory Explicit Content stickers on album covers.

    No offspring wants to sit watching grown-up films or television series with their ‘Old Pair’, or even share their musical tastes and latest tunes with them. Picture Sherilyn Fenn’s iconic small screen epiphany as Audrey Horne in the first season of David Lynch’s seminal series Twin Peaks (1990), where during a job interview at One Eyed Jacks she knots a cherry stem with her talented tongue, and the large cringe factor of your Old Dear piping up from her rocking chair, perplexedly, “What does it mean?” (Mind you, it wasn’t just the Mother; the Sister dissed the show after seeing Audrey swaying around the Double R Diner to Angelo Badalamenti’s theme music “Like she was on drugs”.)

    Hands up if you can remember being told to “Turn that racket down” while losing yourself in the latest punk masterpiece (e.g. The Clash’s eponymous debut album). I even have a more precise memory of ma mère’s shocked chagrin on overhearing the line ‘By the devil’s holy water and the rosary beads’ in The Radiators’ classic ‘Song of the Faithful Departed’, from Ghosttown (1979) – a song “mocking God”. ‘Who were your parents?’ and ‘What was your childhood like?” are the first questions any self-respecting and well-trained psychotherapist is going to ask you in a consultation (€50+ an hour, and they’re fifty-minute hours too), and we all know where the blame for your troubles and woes, your utter fucked-upness, is going to lie.

    Personally, I struggle to listen to any opinion being expressed when it is prefaced by the age-old, ingratiating formula “Speaking as a parent…”. Is there any more grating conversation-stopper, guaranteed to shut down any debate, than “You’d understand if you had kids”? “I have kids to support” is used as an excuse by parents for every unenviable life choice they make, from staying in an insalubrious work situation (“My boss is such a bully”) to, worse, staying in a bad marriage (“Not in front of the children”). For the majority of parents, their children represent hostages to fortune.

    Bonkers Parenting

    Literature furnishes plentiful examples of misguidedly inadequate or blatantly bonkers parenting. Passing over the treatment of daughters by their parents – usually their mothers – in the fictions of Jane Austen, I could also cite Mrs. Kearney in James Joyce’s short story ‘A Mother’, who mortifies her daughter Kathleen, an aspiring pianist, by sweeping her out of a concert hall and irritating the promoters and other artists, with her impatience to get paid immediately for Kathleen’s contribution to a recital series, thus ruining her career in Dublin musical circles.

    But I’m thinking specifically and more contemporaneously of Donald Barthelme’s very short short story, ‘The Baby’, a succinct satire on the arbitrariness of parental discipline and punishment.

    My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in a world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn’t learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone,

    reasons the father of a fifteen-month-old baby girl, sentenced to spend four hours alone in her room for every page she tears out of books. ‘We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.’
    To be fair, fiction is also replete, from a parent’s perspective, with skewering specimens of outrageously uncontrollable children. I’m thinking here of the monstrous Marmaduke, the ten-month-old toddler from Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989), an infant his parents agonised over bringing into the world, given its less than perfect state, who then turns out to terrorise their lives like a violent dictator. But perhaps the most equanimous artistic depiction of parents’ burdensome redundancy to their busy children is Yasujirō Ozu’s unbearably moving Tokyo Story (1953), a masterpiece of such universal resonance that it regularly tops polls as one of the greatest films ever made. Do you seriously believe your parental journey will be significantly different from any of the examples highlighted above?

    Some people get to resolve their differences with their parents, usually as they move into middle age and take on the trials and tribulations of parenthood themselves. This will not happen for me. My father died when I was thirty-three; my mother died when I was forty-one. They were both six foot under, and I had failed to produce an heir, to add to their already numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They are united now at last in death, for ever, as they never were in life, decaying together in Deansgrange Cemetery, in the wet, mulchy earth, underground.

    More than Enough

    To look at the broader picture, and to echo some anti-natalist arguments: there are more than enough people in the world. (Roughly 8 billion, give or take a few hundred thousand, and rising by – at a conservative estimate – at least 1 per cent annually: that’s 80 million a year, in plain language. Visit www.worldometers.info for impressive minute by minute stats. There is way more than one born every minute.)

    What kind of bloated egotism does it take to believe that your priceless strands of DNA are going to make any difference whatsoever to anyone other than yourself and/or your partner, much less make that world a better place? Particularly when the species isn’t exactly in imminent danger of completely dying out anytime soon.

    In fact, on the contrary, more people are more likely to hasten the demise of humanity’s living space, Planet Earth, through the devastation that overpopulation brings. To those who would admonish me to the effect that my child freedom is merely an unwillingness to shoulder adult responsibility, I say: in all likelihood I am more responsible than you, by not having any children. To say nothing of the fact that there are huge swathes of people who, for a variety of reasons, have great difficulty or ultimately find it impossible to reproduce.

    Both LGBTQ+ couples and heterosexual couples with fertility issues are required to take circuitous and sometimes difficult routes into parenthood, either through assisted reproductive technologies like IVF and donor insemination, (which detractors would call ‘unnatural’, and which is why, of course, they are considered such an abomination by the Godly ‘pro-lifers’), or via other complicated arrangements such as surrogacy, co-parenting, adoption or fostering.

    Then there is the childcare issue. Despite the good intentions of the aforementioned Constitution (Article 41.2.1. ‘In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ – itself the subject of much controversy and contentiously archaic because of its gender specificity), Irish society has organised itself over the years into the current shambles whereby, under the influence of Anglo-American neo-liberalism rather than European social democracy, both members of a couple are required to work to maintain a roof over their and their potential or actual offsprings’ heads, which in turn means they are required to stump up exorbitant fees for private creches to look after said offspring while they are out slaving to provide food and shelter for them. (So much for Article 42.1.2. of The Constitution: ‘The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’)

    Does that seem like a fair deal? So, essentially, unless you have other family members (usually grandparents) or friends willing to take them off your hands for the best part of the day, or you move to a mainland European country with proper public services, you are snookered.

    The professional classes, i.e. those in the best position to exploit and therefore gain most from the present system, solve this conundrum by availing themselves of au pairs, or by hiring and underpaying Filipino nannies. Here, as with so much else, they ‘go private’ – doubtlessly believing that this is the natural order of things. Here, as elsewhere, my hardwired class antagonism – which some will doubtlessly dismiss as merely ‘a chip on his shoulder’ – burns brightly.

    Alfred Nobel’s will.

    Legacy Issue

    Then there is the legacy issue. If you happen to have done well for yourself, whom do you leave your fortune to? In that case, having some blood heirs might be a good idea – although as previously mentioned, perhaps you have only done well for yourself because you had heirs in the first place. And what of those, the majority, on average incomes, or the poor, who have amassed little or no capital to pass on to their sons and daughters – many of whom, in any case, may be just waiting around for parents to pass on so that they can get their greedy paws on what loot there is? Many people still have children as a form of long-term investment, because they think their offspring will contribute to the household budget – although these days parents are more likely to get stuck for stumping up deposits for their first time buyer children’s houses (in Ireland, we actually have an ex-Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and current Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister), who recommended in the Dáil (Parliament) that young people go to “The Bank of Mum and Dad” as just such a method of securing a mortgage); or because they think their flesh and blood will be a comfort to them in their old age, or at least look after them in their declining years and decrepitude – when in reality they are more likely to be packed off to a care home, so that the ungrateful fruit of their loins can get on with their own mid-life lives.

    In fairness, given the lack of state services for elder care as well as child care (described above) under the present dispensation, and the inter-generational disparity in access to property ownership, the overworked adult children and parents often have no other choice but to outsource caring roles for family members younger and older than themselves, which were traditionally performed by family members.

    Thus, privatisation begets more privatisation, and neo-liberal capitalism actually works to the detriment of The Family, or, more accurately, non-affluent families, which it ostensibly trumpets upholding.

    Americanization of California (1932) by Dean Cornwell

    Enlightened Self-Interest

    In any case, the inheritance question is not one that applies much to me personally, either as recipient or as donor, because amassing a nest egg to make life easier for his litter was not high on my father’s or mother’s list of concerns.

    “There are no pockets in the last suit,” quoth he, perhaps hoping to imbue me with the same fatalistic attitude. I dare say he succeeded. He clearly had no ambitions towards founding a dynasty, at least not one based on the accumulation of financial wealth and economic power. His plans for his bloodline probably extended no further than ‘put them on the right road’ and ‘let them find their own way’, with the Catholic religion, the ‘one true church’, as their guide.

    Naturally, if I were the progeny of a wealthier or landed lineage, perhaps my analysis of inherited wealth would be entirely other. With notable exceptions, altruistic or aspirational, most people tend to espouse the socio-political philosophies and policies which are best tailored to the fullness or emptiness of their own pockets, rather than worrying about an ill-defined ‘greater good’. ‘Enlightened self-interest’, I believe it’s called.

    Who knows, what a great Fine Gael/Tory/Republican Party fascistic scumbag I would have made, and what horrors I could have perpetrated, if only I had had a family fortune to protect and grow.

    Given these considerations, probably the only truly selfless and ethical way of having children and creating a family is by adoption. At least you are caring for already born orphaned or abandoned kids, whose own parents could not or would not look after them. Failing that, get a dog or a cat.

  • 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)