Heh. I searched for existentialism and this is what came up. Via lordsutch @ Flickr.
Lately I’ve been contemplating – and actually planning, and taking concrete steps toward – taking my life in another direction altogether. This direction is, to put it bluntly, rather more risky than anything else I have heretofore decided to do with my life. Which makes it definitionally terrifying, and I’m sort of trying to keep it all together about the fact that I am about to toss all of my safe little chips into the air and… well, you know the rest.
This takes both deep breaths and big thoughts, of course. Because the (corporate, professional) path I am currently on has always felt wrong on any number of small fronts – I hate offices, I hate office wear, I alternately find businessmen delusional or hilarious (and not in a good way). These are not necessarily, either of themselves or in the aggregate, reason enough to Be A Writer (which is the risky thing for me, here) instead of just about anything else. Particularly something that I currently seem to be good at, which is lucrative, which locates me in my city and country of choice… I could go on.
But in both the pro and con columns, what I have are small things. What’s tilting the calculus is the big thing: what is my Purpose? Pretentious, I know, but there you have it.
Which brings me to the childlessness issue because for so many people it seems that the answer, at least partially, is Children. Which I only think about having as a sort of giving up, as the last resort at a fuller life than the one I lead now – and I know you’ll all say that means I shouldn’t, then, have them, and I agree. But then, I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood that has children just everywhere, and it does make me wonder, more than I think I’d otherwise be inclined to, about what I’m going to miss by way of that decision.
I read this essay by Sonya Chung in The Millions, a book blog/webmag, recently. Chung is childless, and she is addressing a rather throwaway remark in an excellent “Why I Write” essay by Stephen Elliot (of The Rumpus and I hear an excellent book called The Adderall Diaries). Here is the relevant quote from Elliot’s essay:
When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.
I’m going to hit the pause button here a second because I’m a bit worried even this quote, without context, may make some of our readers angry. Please keep reading; let’s talk about that. Indeed, Chung notes, in her essay, that she was a bit surprised that this didn’t immediately blow up in the comments:
I’ve lived that scene, more or less, countless times. In Elliot’s position, that is. The implication slips out in different ways, but it’s unmistakable. I’ve never “snapped.” Part of it is that I’m chicken. Part of it is that my conversations are usually woman to woman, and (yes, I am essentially reinforcing a horrific stereotype here) women my age tend to be a bit, um, irrational, when it comes to outside perspectives on anything related to their children.
When I read Elliott’s essay myself, I didn’t hear anything wrong in the anecdote. And I think that’s partially because I agree with Elliott, and I admire that last sentiment of his: no one is owed anything, least of all Being A Writer Who Actually Makes A Living, that rare and elusive creature. I think in context, his entire view of writing as it relates to material things is that anyone who thinks of it as a steady income, granting the writer access to some kind of middle class economic stability, is a bit of a fool. One of the key themes of the essay is writing as art vs. writing as career path.
In any event, I don’t know that I’d say Chung is right about women being particularly irrational about children (the person in the anecdote is, after all, male), but I do know why she is afraid. We are at a point in the culture (and let me be clear: I mean the “non-feminist,” dominant Western culture here) where, though the impossibility of Having It All is largely agreed upon, and given lip service, the suggestion that we might have Given Something Up – and that it might have been something we really, really wanted for ourselves – is a bit hard to take, emotionally speaking. You can make some mental peace with your choices, of course, but not all big life decisions feel like choices at the time they are made. This, I completely understand. It can go both ways, after all.
But that still leaves us with the thorny question of whether or not one really does give up something – either by the decision to have children (i.e. professional ambitions) or by the decision not to have them (i.e. family life, support as you are older). In professions other than artistic ones it seems to me like the math is easier to do. But writers, for example, write about the things they see, and the things they know, and not knowing having your own family: doesn’t that seem like a pretty big chunk of life not to know? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that anyone have a kid as an experiment in expanding their aesthetic boundaries. Rebecca Walker has written about her estrangement from her mother Alice on grounds that her childhood was a low priority next to the other things her mother wanted: fame, travel, work. I don’t want anyone to wake up and read that kind of article about themselves in the paper.
What I am saying is that who you are as a person is so intricately connected with what one might write about that one worries more than usual about not getting to do just about everything good there is to do on God’s green earth – so that you can speak authoritatively about what it’s like. I don’t want to denigrate male writers faced with these issues, but when childbearing is supposedly the sum total of what one is, the anxiety for a ladywriter like myself strikes me as much higher. It’s hard not to read something into the fact that Alice Munro began to really find success only after her children were born. It’s hard to write about women, period, without the anxiety of pregnancy and childbirth hanging in the air, somewhere; every character has a mother lurking in the shadows.
But many of the writers Chung knows, and I know, who are mothers, complain of lacking time and concentration for their work. As Chung notes, so many great female writers don’t or didn’t have children: Joyce Carol Oates, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf. If you are Katie Roiphe, of course, you’ve given up the ghost: she would not trade her child for the chance to write The House of Mirth, she says. I’m not so sure I’d come down on the same side of that bargain. I can’t justify it, of course. There’s nothing more selfless about doing art than there is about procreating; both are selfish activities in my worldview, rooted in replicating yourself for preservation. The question is just one of medium: will you be preserved on a bookshelf, or in DNA? I think I’d choose the former, if I could have it. If. Which feels kind of far away and unattainable for me, at this moment, anyway.
All of this is of course rapidly becoming moot. I am getting older, and as I do, funnily enough, the idea of having children becmes less attractive even as it becomes less abstract. This will sound ridiculous, but I genuinely need my time alone, and a child would, of sheer necessity, interfere with that. And they would likely interfere with it to such a degree that bitterness would be unavoidable.
And when I am honest with myself – really, truly honest – nothing in the world has ever seemed as real to me as a good book does. Oh sure, art is ephemeral. But then, so are relationships, and even, in the end, human beings.
PSoul, I am impressed with your bravery for contemplating leaving the safe path, and I respect your struggle.
It sounds to me like you are reluctant to close off any options and that you are unsure that writing professionally and parenting are things you can do simultaneously. So the fundamental question is: which would you regret not doing more?
You know, you don’t have to have kids of your own to enjoy a relationship with them. You can be a big sister or volunteer in some other kid-related capacity or appoint yourself the unofficial aunt of your friends’ kids-all kinds of things. Then you can do it when and where and how it works for you and still dedicate the bulk of your time to writing. Our kids had the benefit of some wonderful”aunts” and “uncles” who loved them and hung out with them, and to whom they are still close as young adults. It’s a win/win!
I’m part of an LJ group for childfree writers (http://la-fields.livejournal.com/), so it’s not an unheard of thing. I’ve never wanted kids and I’ve always wanted books. It was an easy call for me.
Last year I made 50 dollars by writing, and this year so far I’ve made 25 (on the same story, though I’ve published others). I’m still a student and trying to build a name and reputation in my genre, so I give my stories away sometimes for the exposure. I have the luxury of doing that right now because I’m still in school. I’m going to grad school (hopefully) for Creative Writing so that I’ll be able to teach, and so that what I do on my “off” time contributes to the work that’s actually going to make me money. I’ve never considered writing as the job that will make me groceries, that way I’m not disappointed if I have to do other work, and the writing remains a treat.
“It’s hard to write about women, period, without the anxiety of pregnancy and childbirth hanging in the air, somewhere; every character has a mother lurking in the shadows.”
–I agreed with this and spent a lot of time mulling it over. With my own female characters, the least motherly one was the one who was actually pregnant (thus: conflict!), but she was still having a baby. It’s annoying, but there is almost no way around it. None of the male characters ever have to deal with the father within unless they actually have children. It’s more of the idea that women are waiting around for children, that we’re incomplete without them.
Also: “nothing in the world has ever seemed as real to me as a good book does.”
–That’s true for me too. My book series and most of my stories take place in states I’ve never even flown over, let alone been in long enough to know the difference, but I can imagine and research well enough to make a go at it. I can do the same with family. After all, I *was* part of a family once, and I remember all that. In fact, that’s principally what I’m exploring in everything I write.
I remember when I knew I was going whole-hog on my writing, that I was serious about it and willing to be poor over it. It’s as big a day as any child-related milestone, and I won’t have my triumphs and tribulations downgraded because I don’t have kids and don’t want any. This is plenty satisfying. Definitely give a shot.
I’d say I sort of have the opposite fear. I fear that having children will suddenly render me unable to write about anything but them. After about a year following the mommyblogosphere, my fear is perhaps a bit overblown, but there are certain words I see far too often that I hope never make it into my vocabulary if you know what I mean.
I will say of Flannery O’Connor, just because I’ve studied her very intensively, that I definitely think her lack of experience in relationships gave her some difficulty in rendering realistic relationships between men and women on the page.
A friend of mine who’s a writer and a mother said that having children gave her a new, invaluable perspective for her work, but is also a major obstacle to really doing her work.
Any life decision you make can add or detract from your wealth of experience, so you could chase that line of thought for ever. Flannery O’Conner said that anyone who survives childhood has enough material to last the rest of her life.
Spark and funnyface, I totally agree that more experience means… easier skill at rendering certain things. What I think I am wondering as well, though, is what kind of implication we make about the lives of people who are childless/familyless when we say that.
Mischief, I have a couple of those relationships either blossoming or promised. Truth is, though, I’m not that great with children anyway. I wasn’t very good at being one!
It is certainly true that lots of those folks in history we consider great, both men and women but especially women, didn’t get married, didn’t have kids – and it is obvious this correlation would exist. But there are also great writers who are or were parents, including women.
I also think it is naive to imagine that having children is the one big suck on time and energy. As a writer (I pretentiously claim) with chronic illness, I have been particularly interested in the number of writers who faced similar challenges. And there are loads. So many it would appear that for much of the last two hundred and fifty years, if you had an education but got sick or seriously injured and couldn’t do anything else, you wrote.
But it would be ludicrous to imagine that someone who couldn’t walk couldn’t write about people who can, or someone who had never had a conventional job can’t write about people who work. Even if we don’t have children, we all were children and we witness parenthood all around us. It is notable how many children’s writers are or were childless; Hans Christian Anderson, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, J M Barrie, Anna Sewell, Louisa May Alcott, Philip Pullman etc.
There are lots of holes in every writer’s personal experience, and of lots of circumstances (chosen or not) which can eat one’s time and energy. As in all art, there isn’t a perfect formula for who the artist is – Oscar Wilde would argue that it was your role to disguise who you are in what you write. Okay, so now that’s really pretentious…
I think every childless person was once a child. I’m not sure why you have to be a parent to write about parent-child relationships. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “what kind of implication we make about people who are childless.” Why is it any different than people who have never had a life threatening illness? Doesn’t mean you couldn’t write about a character with a life threatening illness, you’d just have to do a lot of research.
Ha. What does it say about my mindset that I went from kids to LIFE THREATENING ILLNESS. LOL.
what is my Purpose? Pretentious, I knowPS you are NOT being pretentious here in my opinion. Some people think about this, and other don’t. I have gained insights from your point of view on feminism and other topics.
I think you must already know this: your insights are valuable precisely because you are a woman and childless. If you worry that you can’t portray a large chunk of life, you must also realize that a woman with children can’t portray your life.
Goldfish, I hover somewhere between the “all work is essentially autobiographical” conception of writing fiction and the “my imagination can take me ANYWHERE” one. So I don’t have a really strong view here that says either one can or cannot write about certain experiences.
However! I do think that research, definitionally, can only get you so far. And I think that, say, just living in the world gives me a pretty good conception of the inner lives of white dudes, because the inner lives of white dudes are, after all, what tends to get published and otherwise displayed in art, simply by weight of the historical inertia around admitting other kinds of voices to the scene. I have read fiction/nonfiction from a wide variety of white dudes as a result.
But, like I said in another thread – and this is something I work through all the time – if I wanted to write something like Their Eyes Were Watching God, no matter how many books I read, it would feel wrong. The only way I could see myself doing that is a la Eggers’s What is the What, where someone sort of asked me to write a fictionalized version of their life story. But write, out of my ass and some Google searching and book reading, about, say, the Sudan? Eek. Eek.
Similarly I haven’t much experience of chronic disability/illness. I have one story about this, but because the protagonist is in the position of not understanding her partner’s illness, it’s a lot easier for me to write about.
Now to bring this back around to childlessness, because I live in a world that talks parenting and “childful”ness (I’m trying to find a neutral term here) I do have some knowledge/proxy experience to inform any research I do, which makes me feel more comfortable about it.
Anyway. All that to say I still think there is a tension between writing what you “know” and admitting what you don’t that most writers have to think about, carefully.
PS, I don’t think saying that childbearing/raising provides you with vital experience means that it’s the ONLY vital experience. You can make the observation without saying that the child-free are lacking.
Speaking as someone who is more than satisfied borrowing other peoples’ mostly-grown children (my students) and who spends a redonkulous amount of time writing for very little recompense, almost none of it pecuniary, I would say that worrying about parenting or not, and what effect that would have on your writing, is probably not as important as figuring out how you’re going to eat. I work two jobs (both of which involve a lot of technical/functional, unsatisfying writing), try to contribute regularly to this blog (which is usually satisfying, when I’m not totally frazzled), and have almost zero time for the writing I have chosen for myself as a result. Writing is my job and my passion and my hobby, but even without kids, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get stuff done. Granted, my “me” writing is of a different sort than yours, but after years of handsome remuneration, I think you’re going to feel the pains, both in your writing and in your life, of an empty wallet waaaaaaay before those of an empty womb.
Ha, PhD, I know. Although I have planned contingencies for this.
There are lots of big decisions we make in life that involve a series of trade-offs. Where we choose to live, what we do for a living, who we choose to partner with or not, having children or not, etc. Each of these choices means there are roads not taken. All of those choices I’ve made in my life have had profound effects on my lived experiences (as well many many things I had no hand in choosing: who my parents are, where they chose to live, etc.), not just my choice to have children. I think we’re all deeply and irrevocably changed by each choice whether we realize it or not. I suppose it’s just the children/no children choice seems to carry so much more weight than all the others in this society. But I don’t think in the end it’s any more profound a choice than any of the others.
When I was pregnant with my first, and feeling kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, whether I was ready for the coming changes, I told one of my mentors and his response was, “Yeah, having kids is like having a hurricane blow into your life. They come in and throw everything into chaos for 18 years or so, then they move out on their own.” I found what he said comforting. Some people might hear “18 years or so of chaos” and think that sounds horrible, but what I heard was that the chaos passes. I’d never heard anyone describe the effect of kids as temporary, only ever as THE MOST LIFE CHANGING, EARTH SHATTERING THING YOU CAN EVER DO!! And really what I’ve found is, eh, not so much with the earth shattering. For me, the chaos comes in bursts. All we hear is that having kids Changes Everything ™, and yeah, I guess, but in the same way that any long-term intimate relationship does. Would I lay down in the street for my kids? Yes, but I’d do the same for my best friend. My kids are 2 and 5 and they’re on independent trajectories that spin out away from me. There are whole chunks of their lives, experiences they have, that have nothing to do with me. But, I digress.
I’m not saying all this to try and convince you to have kids or anything, I’m just trying to say that I don’t see that decision as being any more portentous, any more pivotal, than others you’ve already made and will make in your life that effect your point of view and the experiences you’ll write about.
Or, what Spark said in two sentences.
I felt your extra sentences added something, krismcn.
And Spark, I guess what I was thinking of is more in the context of the real world, where it is posited as something one “misses out on,” as opposed to say, I don’t know, what actually makes sense for individuals. My way of saying I agree, but the fact that the culture doesn’t often makes me doubt myself on this score.
Don’t doubt yourself on this score. The culture disagrees with you, that’s true. But that’s why you should express this pov out loud in any way you can, b/c you are not wrong.
PilgrimSoul,
Your comment about white dudes reminded me of an interview I saw a few weeks back with a very literary, very serious male British writer. The interviewer commented on one of his books which was written with a feminine first-person narrator, and asked about the challenges of being a man writing as a woman.
The guy said (quite seriously), “I believe a writer can do anything. You can write from the point of view of an animal. You can write from the point of view of an inanimate object. And you can even write from the point of view of a woman.”
Goldfish, I think my feminist analysis of that assertion would sound something like: easy for him to say, he’s a dude! (Is he a white dude? That would confirm my hypothesis.) They are brought up to consider their perspective “objective,” and they are told to consider themselves as having access to a universal mode of reasoning. It’s not that much of a leap for them to assume that they are also able to realistically depict anybody’s experience. Obvs I can’t comment on the book in question, but unless it’s by Ian MacEwan, who does seem to have a relatively good sense of what women are like (though I’d still argue in some ways a fundamentally deficient one), I’m not sure I’d think he was speaking from much authority on the subject anyway.
I find that one of the most difficult parts of becoming an adult – and I say this as someone who only joined those ranks relatively recently – is realizing that no, despite what they tell you, you can’t have it all. Worse, whatever you don’t have, might well be through your own choices, which means you have to carry any associated guilt. I’m seeing that in my own life now, but with other issues – where to build up a life being a main one (close to parents, to be able to help them in their old age, or on a different continent?).
In my case, a lot of my angst came from having a sense that there *was* a right life to be led, and that if I didn’t find the Right Path, I would have messed things up completely. A friend helped me look past that with a quote from Kafka (not your usual spiritual guide, I know): ‘Wege entstehen dadurch, dass man sie geht’. It means, essentially, that paths only develop by being trodden. I.e. there is no pre-existing right way to do things.
The idea that having children is the Right Path is one that I think is especially trenchant because we have motherhood portrayed as the meaning of life in so many parts of our culture (see: celeb mags). I know many childless people who have had equally fulfilled lives, though, full of strong relationships, and think it’s terrible that their choice is so marginalized. A lot of people have children who shouldn’t, really – people who don’t like children, or who are selfish or immature and just happened to get drunk and forget a condom, or were trying to save a marriage, or just did it because it was expected. And that is something that is glossed over way too often.
I hope that made sense, sorry it’s so long!
Oops, that should obviously read ‘entrenched’, not ‘trenchant’! Although I suppose it could be trenchant too?
“It’s hard to write about women, period, without the anxiety of pregnancy and childbirth hanging in the air, somewhere; every character has a mother lurking in the shadows.”
I disagree. As others have mentioned, writers will have holes in their experiences. Writing a character who is pregnant a parent should be no harder than writing a character who is male, a POC, disabled, or anything else that you are not. Yeah you probably want to stay away from writing a book that is about pregnancy or motherhood, but that is not the culmination of womanhood. In fact, I think we need more narratives from/about women that don’t revolve around children.
Personally, I like reading about things that don’t revolve around motherhood. It helps keep that individual part of me from drowning in the mother part of me. Just because your writing doesn’t revolve around motherhood, doesn’t mean that it is lacking something.
I like to think that good writers can write from any perspective, which doesn’t just mean men writing women, it means women writing men and writers writing, well, anything. Granted part of the reason I think this is because I seem to drift towards writing strong female characters. I guess I watched Alien, Terminator and Bionic Woman too much growing up. Or maybe I just don’t see writing men as all that interesting.
PS, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the “misses out on” and “makes sense for individuals”.
I’m going to broadly borrow from the philosopher Gadamer and some of his writings about personal histories: we don’t have unlimited opportunities to do everything. Our current time, place and space do have an impact on our personal history, and previous decisions impact on our present and future.
You’re not “missing out” on anything, but making decisions about you and your future based on what you have open to you.
The obvious solution I see is for you to move west and hang with mini-LPs whenever you need a baby fix, and write brilliant prose.
That said, I have been trying to write you a real response all evening, but I keep ending up sounding “oh poor me for being a mother” or “aren’t I so special for being a mother” … and neither of those is what I meant and it has been an INSANELY LONG DAY so I’m just going to say, “GO YOU!” because I am so insanely excited for what you are about to do.