Some of the best children’s book illustrators-Edward Gorey,
Marilyn Hirsch, and Dr. Seuss, to name a few-had no children of their own and
didn’t particularly like them. It’s the same thing with countless teachers I’ve
known; they love working with children but have absolutely no desire to have
their own. Who knows why, maybe their longing is killed by the availability of
kids in their lives, or maybe they’re “career women” who don’t want to be stuck
with a “second shift.”
Let’s start with
Michelle Huneven’s story “Amateurs,” about her diabetic mother and her terrible
parenting skills. She blames her mother’s nastiness partly on diabetic mood
swings, and the rest on her being deprived of a career. Trained as a concert
pianist, there was little chance of a woman having such a career in the
Baby-Boom era, so she ended up being a teacher, which she hated. Teaching is a
perfectly decent career, but not if you spend your life brooding that you
didn’t get what you wanted. Her experience with her mother left her wary about
parenthood.
Other writers in
this book attribute their “no-child” policy to the desire for pleasure. They
want to write, work, and spend their free time at leisure, and not be stuck all
night with a crying kid who won’t go to bed. Their married friends invite them
to dinner parties, only to have them ruined by clingy children who can’t amuse
themselves. Then again, the French never seem to have this problem, so maybe
it’s really an American thing? Here in the USA, everything in the family
revolves around the children, and the parents end up being held hostage to the
child’s “needs,” which are really just moods. With French parents, the children
aren’t allowed to dictate the schedule, so having kids isn’t that big a burden.
The title of this
book is perfect, because selfish is what people get called when they say they
don’t want to have children. They call us selfish, self-centered, myopic,
uncaring, but what about the people that DO have kids? Are they perfect
parents? Do they teach the kids good habits? I wonder sometimes if today’s
parents (at least the American ones) think of their children as playthings. Do
they view the kids as something they use for companionship? Do they get fed up
when, unlike a dog or cat, the kid actually starts talking and asking for
stuff?
I remember how
years ago, I found that almost everyone in my pottery class had no kids of
their own, and when I brought it up, one of them said “I guess that’s why we
have time for things like this.” There were a few in there that had kids, but
they could afford to hire someone to watch the child. One of the women had a
daughter who was nine, and the girl would sit by herself in the lounge reading
a book. Her parents obviously taught her to amuse herself, not be needy for
attention. In some ways it reminds me of the anthology “Paris Was ours” (I
highly recommend it), where the story “Parenting, French Style” shows the
difference. You have the precocious 11 year old who ruins the dinner party by
hijacking every conversation, while on the other side, the French child sits by
himself with a book.
Though few of the
writers in this book mentioned it, I bet a lot of them opt to have pets instead
of kids. The average dog won’t bug you for money, refuse to take out the trash,
get caught shoplifting, throw tantrums, or bring home a bad report card.
