Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (25 page)

But with modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer "babies beget matrimony," or even necessarily "matrimony begets babies"; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be nonnegotiable.

I know this from painful personal experience because my first marriage fell apart--to a large extent--over the question of children. My then-husband had always assumed that we would have babies together one day. He had every right to make that assumption, since I had always assumed it myself, though I wasn't entirely sure
when
I would want babies. The prospect of eventual pregnancy and parenthood had seemed comfortably distant on my wedding day; it was an event that would happen sometime "in the future," "at the right moment," and "when we were both ready." But the future sometimes approaches us more quickly than we expect, and the right moment doesn't always announce itself with clarity. The problems that existed within my marriage soon made me doubt whether this man and I would ever be ready, truly, to endure such a challenge as raising children.

Moreover, while the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality--as it approached--only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop.) Every morning, I would perform something like a CAT scan on myself, searching for a desire to be pregnant, but I never found it. There was no imperative there, and I believe that child rearing must come with an imperative, must be driven by a sense of longing and even destiny, because it is such a massively important undertaking. I've witnessed this longing in other people; I know what it looks like. But I never felt it in myself.

Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn't want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf 's
The Waves
, I felt at times "a thousand capacities" spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, "I want to
work
!"--and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart.

I, too, wanted to
work
. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.

How would I manage that, though, with a baby? Increasingly panicked by this question, and well aware of my then-husband's growing impatience, I spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could--married, single, childless, artistic, archetypally maternal--and I asked them about their choices, and the consequences of their choices. I was hoping their answers might resolve all my questions, but their answers covered such a wide range of experience that I found myself only more confused in the end.

For instance, I met one woman (an artist who worked at home) who said, "I had my doubts, too, but the minute my baby was born, everything else in my life fell away. Nothing is more important to me now than my son."

But another woman (whom I would define as one of the best mothers I've ever met, and whose grown kids are wonderful and successful) admitted to me privately and even shockingly, "Looking back on it all now, I'm not at all convinced that my life was really bettered in any way by the choice to have children. I gave up altogether too much, and I regret it. It's not that I don't adore my kids, but honestly, I sometimes wish I could have all those lost years back."

A fashionable, charismatic West Coast businesswoman, on the other hand, said to me, "The one thing nobody ever warned me about when I started having babies was this: Brace yourself for the happiest years of your life. I never saw that coming. The joy of it has been like an avalanche."

But I also talked to an exhausted single mom (a gifted novelist) who said, "Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding."

Another creative friend of mine said, "Yes, you lose a lot of your freedoms. But as a mother, you gain a new kind of freedom as well--the freedom to love another human being unconditionally, with all your heart. That's a freedom worth experiencing, too."

Still another friend, who had left her career as an editor to stay home with her three children, warned me, "Think very carefully about this decision, Liz. It's difficult enough to be a mom when it's what you really want to do. Don't even go near child rearing until you're absolutely sure."

Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, "Just go for it. It's not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can't do anymore now that you're a mom."

But I was also deeply touched when I met a renowned photographer, now in her sixties, who made this simple comment to me on the topic of children: "I never had 'em, honey. And I never missed 'em."

Do you see a pattern here?

I didn't.

Because there wasn't a pattern. There was just a whole bunch of smart women trying to work things out on their own terms, trying to navigate somehow by their own instincts. Whether I myself should ever be a mother was clearly not a question that any of these women were going to be able to answer for me. I would need to make that choice myself. And the stakes of my choice were personally titanic. Declaring that I did not want to have children effectively meant the end of my marriage. There were other reasons I left that marriage (there were aspects of our relationship that were frankly preposterous), but the question of children was the final blow. There is no compromise position on this question after all.

So, he fumed; I cried; we divorced.

But that's another book.

Given all that history, it should not be surprising to anyone that, after a few years alone, I met and fell in love with Felipe--an older man with a pair of beautiful, adult children, who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in repeating the experience of fatherhood. It is also no accident that Felipe fell in love with me--a childless woman in the waning years of her fertility who adored his kids but who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in becoming a mother herself.

That relief--the great thrumming relief that we both felt when we discovered that neither one of us was going to coerce the other into parenthood--still sends a pleasant vibrating hum across our life together. I still can't entirely get over it. For some reason, I had never once considered the possibility that I might be allowed to have a lifelong male companion without also being expected to have children. This is how deeply the incantation of "first-comes-love-then-comes-marriage-then-comes-baby-in-the-baby-carriage" had penetrated my consciousness; I had honestly neglected to notice that you could opt out of the baby carriage business and nobody--not in our country anyhow--would arrest you for it. And the fact that, upon meeting Felipe, I also inherited two wonderful adult stepchildren was a bonus gift. Felipe's kids need my love and they need my support, but they do not need my mothering; they had already been beautifully mothered long before I ever arrived on the scene. Best of all, though, by introducing Felipe's children into my own extended family, I pulled off the ultimate generational magic trick: I provided my parents with an extra set of grandchildren, without ever having to raise babies of my own. Even now, the freedom and abundance of it all feels something close to miraculous.

Being exempted from motherhood has also allowed me to become exactly the person I believe I was meant to be: not merely a writer, not merely a traveler, but also--in a quite marvelous fashion--an aunt. A childless aunt, to be exact--which puts me in extremely good company, because here's an astonishing fact that I discovered in the margins of my research on marriage: If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-century Irish, or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a consistent 10 percent of women within any population who never have children at all. The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in most societies is usually much
higher
than 10 percent--and that's not just today in the developed Western world, where childless rates among women tend to hover around 50 percent. In the 1920s in America, for instance, a whopping 23 percent of adult women never had any children. (Doesn't that seem shockingly high, for such a conservative era, before the advent of legalized birth control? Yet it was so.) So the number can get pretty high. But it never goes below 10 percent.

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies. Many of those women
deliberately
elected to skip motherhood, either through avoiding sex with men altogether or through careful application of what the Victorian ladies once called "the precautionary arts." (The sisterhood has always had its secrets and talents.) Other women, of course, had their childlessness thrust on them unwillingly--because of infertility, or disease, or spinsterhood, or a general shortage of eligible males due to wartime casualties. Whatever the reasons, though, widespread childlessness is not quite so modern a development as we tend to believe.

In any case, the number of women throughout history who never become mothers is so high (so
consistently
high) that I now suspect that a certain degree of female childlessness is an evolutionary adaptation of the human race. Maybe it's not only perfectly legitimate for certain women to never reproduce, but also necessary. It's as though, as a species, we
need
an abundance of responsible, compassionate, childless women on hand to support the wider community in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much energy that the women who do become mothers can quickly become swallowed up by that daunting task--if not outright killed by it. Thus, maybe we need extra females, women on the sidelines with undepleted energies, who are ready to leap into the mix and keep the tribe supported. Childless women have always been particularly essential in human society because they often take upon themselves the task of nurturing those who are not their official biological responsibility--and no other group does this to such a large degree. Childless women have always run orphanages and schools and hospitals. They are midwives and nuns and providers of charity. They heal the sick and teach the arts and often they become indispensable on the battlefield of life. Literally, in some cases. (Florence Nightingale comes to mind.)

Such childless women--let's call them the "Auntie Brigade"--have never been very well honored by history, I'm afraid. They are called selfish, frigid, pathetic. Here's one particularly nasty bit of conventional wisdom circulating out there about childless women that I need to dispel here, and that is this: that women who have no children may lead liberated and happy and wealthy lives when they are young, but they will ultimately regret that choice when they reach old age, for they shall all die alone and depressed and full of bitterness. Perhaps you've heard this old chestnut? Just to set the record straight: There is
zero
sociological evidence to back this up. In fact, recent studies of American nursing homes comparing happiness levels of elderly childless women against happiness levels of women who did have children show no pattern of special misery or joy in one group or the other. But here's what the researchers did discover that makes elderly women miserable across the board: poverty and poor health. Whether you have children or not, then, the prescription seems clear: Save your money, floss your teeth, wear your seatbelt, and keep fit--and you'll be a perfectly happy old bird someday, I guarantee you.

Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz.

In leaving no descendents, however, childless aunts do tend to vanish from memory after a mere generation, quickly forgotten, their lives as transitory as butterflies. But they are vital as they live, and they can even be heroic. Even in my own family's recent history, there are stories on both sides of truly magnificent aunties who stepped in and saved the day during emergencies. Often able to accrue education and resources precisely because they were childless, these women had enough spare income and compassion to pay for lifesaving operations, or to rescue the family farm, or to take in a child whose mother had fallen gravely ill. I have a friend who calls these sorts of child-rescuing aunties "sparents"--"spare parents"--and the world is filled with them.

Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world--an ambassador auntie--who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody's family whatsoever. There are people I've been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist's bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.