LAST OF A SERIES
Nobody's Father: Some of us just don't want kids
September 19, 2008
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Jack Hughes
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
This week, TouchWood Editions publishes Nobody's Father: Life Without Kids – a collection of essays by childless men. Today, the conclusion of a five-day series of reprinted essays from the book.
I suppose I've always viewed fatherhood, a state which only exists in relation to someone else (someone who, unlike a spouse, you can't check out before you enter into the arrangement), as a diminishment rather than an enhancement of one's identity. I know the power of the patriarch, and I can vaguely see the allure of the whole Burl Ives thing, but I don't feel an iota of that possibility within myself.
I'm 41. My wife is 44. So, if we had any thoughts of having kids, it would be getting late in the game. But we're just letting time run out. We're not tired of this life we're living. Often, it feels like we're just getting started. We go out, we travel – to Japan this year, China last year.
Sure, we feel aging and creaky at times. But we don't sense a biological clock. We don't sit around musing about what it might be like to have kids, or whether we should at least think about it. Maybe we've done that once or twice, just as we've talked once or twice about living in Africa, or the prospects of seeing Joni Mitchell live. They were abstracted, passionless conversations, like proud Southern Baptists paying lip service to Muslim heritage. We just don't feel it.
Contrary to what some childless couples say they experience, we're not deluged with queries on the road we're taking. People must pick up on something – certainty, arrogance, cluelessness, who knows? We're not forced to justify ourselves to others, and so we keep going.
When I go out drinking with pals after work, they usually have to co-ordinate and schedule and cancel and reschedule and (often times) apologize at home afterward for staying out too late. I only have to make sure my wife isn't doing the same thing, so that someone can walk the dog.
I'm not skeptical about notions of community and society though. I need no persuading that life comes with obligations other than to hedonism. If you look at the aging population, the demographics, the inadequate replacement rate and you accept that we're all in this together, then you can't avoid a sense of duty. I don't really believe people are meant to have as much leisure time as I have, certainly not at this income level anyway.
So, sometimes I do wonder if I didn't put something over on the system, in which case I await my inevitable reversal of fortune, like a Conrad Black called to account for an evolutionary kleptocracy.
I do worry sometimes about the prospect of a miserable end. I find myself reflecting on obituaries in which the 20 or 30 final years pass by in a few desolate final sentences. After a life of excitement and achievement, he retired at 70. His wife died two decades ago and, for the past 15 years, he lived in declining health in some out-of-sight-out-of-mind enclave.
When I read something like this, I think fleetingly about the day-to-day length of that final postscript, a major chunk of what I've lived already, stripped of most of its diversity and colour, welded between me and a presumably welcome exit.
Children would hardly guarantee avoiding that. But I suppose they might narrow the odds a bit.
Being 41 severely confuses me – I don't know if I'm in start-up mode, at some plateau of maturity or even in decline.
There's nothing unique about middle-aged uncertainty, yet most people I know, people with kids, seem at least relatively more sure of their bearings. Has the discipline of fatherhood anything to do with that? Without the constant preoccupation of overseeing the maturing of children, of ticking off birthdays and Christmases and intervening milestones, perhaps I'm that much more aware of my own demarcation points.
I feel the beat of time passing but, happy as I am, I'm not sure I'm catching the tune. There must be, will be, greater drama and upheaval than this to come, but I keep thinking it can only be for the worse.
Extrapolate from me, I know, and it yields only The Extinction Of The Human Race. But no one does extrapolate from me. Life, reproduction, will go on, until they don't. What I do doesn't matter.
I suddenly feel a nihilistic chill in here. Except for the truly powerful, the crusaders or those who live drastically outside the box, like assassins for example, maybe parenthood is the only means of significant influence that exists.
But I'm not even a ripple. I'll be gone, and my wife, too. Everything we've accumulated will flow back into the economic ocean and that will be the end of our story. He left no survivors, it'll say.
So, one can muse, just occasionally, about having fired that biological arrow into the future and, perhaps, of living long enough to see it hit a half-worthy target. But, on the other hand, what if the kid ended up in jail?
I mentioned we went to China. One day, in a city called Chengde, we must have been near a kindergarten at quitting time, because we saw streams of bicycles carrying 4- or 5-year-old passengers (no helmets) and other youngsters walking home with their parents. It wasn't until later that I registered the general absence of children the rest of the time we were there.
But the impressions of a couple of weeks spent disproportionately in hotels are hardly a reliable measure of an imbalance. And in any event, China's other well-known problems – overindustrialization, poor air quality – force themselves on you much more wilfully.
The point is that we didn't notice. The sudden flurry of children impressed itself on us that day, but only as one of dozens of fleeting phenomena. We noticed and reacted, as we did to imposing temples and rock formations, but also to particularly deadly looking eating establishments or public toilets. And that's all it was.
Jack Hughes lives in downtown Toronto and works for an international accounting firm. He writes weekly film reviews for The Outreach Connection.
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