Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Justin answers a question about the choice to have or not have kids.
Anonymous:
This feels more like a major dilemma, but, neither my wife nor I are in any particular rush to have kids. Lots of "if we ever have kids" and not once ever "when we have kids." We're both 42, so actual biological clocks are ticking down even if the metaphorical one isn't.
I've got a bunch of pretty sound reasons why bringing kids into this world seems like a bad idea—the general state of everything is huge, but also I'm not ready to change my life so drastically, could I even keep a tiny human alive, and so forth.
Balance that out on the other side with what feel like, to me, pretty thin reasons to say yes to kids—who will take care of me when I'm older? My parents aren't getting any younger and would like grandkids, my brother isn't having any kids for a number of reasons, so my lineage stops with me.
The caretaking and the lineage keep me up at night, but clearly not enough yet to take that forever plunge. How do you even make a decision like this?
In between writing this blog and popping in and out of editorial meetings, I've been attempting to get a load of laundry done. This morning our 1-year-old daughter started the day yacking up her milk in our bed, only to follow that with a second ejection after we cleaned her up and had her dressed in a cute flowery romper for daycare. Her older sister, 3, has developed a very sharp affinity for wearing nothing but dresses that facilitate twirling, or an unseasonably warm fleece one-piece made to look like an astronaut's space suit. If none of these items are clean our apartment will undergo trench warfare in the hours before school.
Trying to make previously undiscovered blocks of time materialize in the day has become a necessary art in my life. Our days are both structured and highly chaotic. Something like a last-minute tantrum over handwashing or forgetting a change of clothes for school sends ripples across the day. Work gets delayed and dinner prep becomes a sprint to beat the clock before daycare pickup. This is the shape of my life now, and as my partner and I often joke once we are outside the safe minimal distance of bedtime: We signed up for this.
The point in this is not to seek pity or drape myself in parental valor, nor is it to give you the "scared straight" method of family planning. If you are wrestling with the question of having a baby and what that change might mean, let my brief, if harrowing, snapshot offer a partial glimpse of truth. Even when you wanted to have a family, when you love your children more than you ever thought you'd be capable of loving anything, it is without question one of the hardest things you will ever do. To say that it does not absolutely leave me wrecked at times would be a lie.
As you point out, the case against starting a family can seem staggering. Yes, your biological clock can be a factor. As someone who became a dad at age 42, I feel the movement of time much more acutely, the fury in my lower back when I have to carry the 3-year-old home after she's sleepy or simply no longer feels like walking. This is even harder on the birthing partner: No one likes to be confronted with the term "geriatric pregnancy" just because they're over 35 and having a baby.
It is also true that the our world finds fresh depths of hell every day, leaders inspired by cruelty and violence, the unchecked lust for capital and conquest poisoning the ground and water and air. I cannot explain to my daughters in words they would understand why the world is already set against them for the mere fact of their gender or their melanin. It would seem like madness to bring a baby into a world that feels doomed.
But creating a family is not always about logic or circumstance. Love is not always about having a sound mind. We can't choose to become parents when the world is right, waiting for the sun to stay warm on our face or to reach our peak earning potential or the perfect credit score. We can't create a family, or at least should not, out of any sense of lineage, or worse, a desire to tip the scales in a burgeoning war to repopulate the world and remake it into the perfect homogeneous ethnostate. Choosing to have a family isn't about other people, or about the rest of the world.
Having a family was not a great longing for me, I wasn't dreaming of any particular dewy-eyed Americana involving a mortgage and two car garage, enough children to start a family band or fill a starting line up. But I knew I liked kids, I liked the idea of a family. I just figured I would eventually get there some day. Through cosmic circumstance, or luck, but really a friend's Instagram feed, I discovered someone who felt the same way I did about starting a family. As the years went on, and I watched friends have babies and read the outlines of what was becoming my career. When the time came I saw what the choice really meant: Are you willing to say goodbye to some version of yourself for someone else?
If you sit with all these questions, and the feeling that comes back is "check back later," then you probably already have your answer. There is nothing inherently right about choosing to have a baby or wrong about deciding against it. If that feels scary, or like a great relief, or a sense of tension with your broader family, all that truly matters is it's the choice that is right for you. Just know that doubts about having children are near universal, and they do not stop after a baby arrives in this world.
There are days when I feel almost certain that I am screwing up, that one decision is going to seal my children's fate or otherwise ruin their lives. Many days I am being pummeled, heckled or both by them because of many of these decisions. But there are these small glimpses every so often: I see the 1-year-old cackling to herself as she develops her own singular sense of humor, or demanding to be heard among the din of everyone else in the family. Then I see her big sister spinning stories out of thin air, vision beyond my own and an imagination just beginning to bloom. The youngest is just learning how to dance and her sister is happy to teach her. They go wild-eyed every time we step foot in the American Museum of Natural History and that thrill always erases the miles and hours of effort it took just to get them out the door. This version of myself, stressed and aching, constantly in a state of feeling like I forgot something, is happy. I feel lucky that I get to be their dad, even if their futures are unknown and locked away in a time and space I almost certainly will never see.
By the time my partner and I have made our laps through dinner and bedtime—and false bedtime; a 3-year-old can be a master of clock management if property motivated—it will be after 9 p.m., and if my laundry gambit has paid off I will be able to sit down on the couch an hour ahead of normal, where we will likely pass out watching Padma Lakshmi's new show or approximately one quarter of a basketball game. Tomorrow we will get up, most likely at an ungodly hour after uneven sleep, and do it all over again.
