To Want or to Welcome?

I have always been confused by the question: “How many kids do you want?” Or: “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

I can usually respond confidently enough when the drive-thru lady asks how many ketchup packets I want, or when the bagging boy asks whether I want paper or plastic. But how do I define my preferences when it comes to the inimitable world that is every person, each of whom begins as a little child?

The question of getting a child (not quite as in “begetting”)—whether, when, how many, etc.—is often confined to an arena where sterile logic combats feverish emotionalism. The sixteen authors of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed argue bravely in favor of their voluntary childlessness (not resulting from celibacy) to overcome a perceived or real social shame attached to their decision. As the Atlantic article sums it up, “The sooner having children is approached from a rational standpoint rather than an emotional one, the better for humanity.” That emotional standpoint, as a New York Times book review observes, has plunged countless childless women into a “morass of resentment, insecurity, longing, and disappointment . . . an ungovernable tangle of anxiety, confusion and exhaustion . . . a pervasive fog of self-recrimination and angst.”

Were my own three children the outcome of a rational choice, or an expression of my own emotional need for biological motherhood?

I cannot ascribe to either of these reductionist positions, cornering myself between false alternatives. Meghan Daum, the editor of Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed, claims that “people who want children are all alike … people who don’t want children, don’t want them in their own way.” As a matter of fact, said people who “want” children and those who “don’t want,” are “wanting” in precisely the same way. This way sets up a child—like a phone upgrade or a pet—as a commodity, or accessory, to some particular lifestyle one attempts to maintain: an acquisition socially acceptable to dislike and opt out from. Observe this vicious cycle. The Atlantic unsurprisingly notes, “Many of the writers in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed discuss their own traumatic childhoods, and how they were made to feel responsible for their parents’ failed careers, or failed relationships, or unhappy lives.”

Yet, every child knows instinctively that he or she is a gift, to be cherished and to give joy; this is what lies behind that irrational trust, that uncalculated laughter, that uninhibited absorption of the world. But what happens to a child when there is placed on his little shoulders the unbearable burden of securing a parent’s career, saving a parent’s marriage, or solving a parent’s problems? A vague yet inescapable guilt plagues those now “surly, resentful adults,” who “always had the lingering sense their presence wasn’t wanted,” and are consequently unable to break free of the utilitarian mode of their own upbringing, unable then to welcome a child for his or her own sake.

The same failure attends those on the other side of the field who do “want” a child, and consider their own terms to be the best justification. Not only does the modern individual have a right to offspring; he or she also claims a right to eliminate offspring who don’t meet their parental terms. Like their opponents opposed to children, these parents refuse to welcome their child for himself, their desire for progeny instead being fueled by a creeping sense of entitlement.

The question of parental adequacy is a different matter altogether. Who among us parents can eschew failure as we take into our clumsy care the formation of this other little person from her very conception? Every parent rather quickly collides with his or her fallibility following the birth of the first child. The enormous task of seeing my own children safely through their childhood, with a reasonable measure of happiness, can be daunting on a good day. On bad days, I am grateful to remember that my success relies on very different parameters than my own ideas about what makes me a great parent. What are these criteria?

A capacity for marital self-giving is a presupposition for the capacity to welcome and rear a child. Indeed, a stable, loving relationship between a husband and wife, whom each child deserves to have for father and mother, is the minimum we should attempt to provide for a helpless infant in a hapless world. Clearly, those who cannot answer to the demands of married life should not be worried by the question of “wanting” or “not wanting” a child in any way whatsoever. When a person looks around at his or her circumstances and notices, “I’m not married”; “I don’t know how to sustain a stable relationship”; “I haven’t overcome this self-destructive habit”; or “I haven’t healed from this trauma, abuse, neglect in my past”; she ought to feel a measure of relief from either subtle shame or lurid longing in the face of childlessness.