There's no one way to live a good life, is what I say to friends considering whether to have children. This is a diplomatic thing to say. I also believe it, and when I'm begging my 2-year-old daughter to stop throwing food on the floor or reviewing the latest bill from her daycare, I occasionally find myself yearning for all the other good lives I might have lived instead of this one.
It's understood among my cohort of college-educated millennials that becoming a parent closes the horizon of possibility in your own life. Your partner may have their own complicated feelings about parenthood. A child makes international travel much more difficult. Not a lot of free time to finally finish that novel. Your career may take a hit.
These were solvable dilemmas for me, in my mid-30s. In the first place, it needs to be said, I'm a man. Less skin in the game, physically and socially. My wife was ready. Our finances were relatively stable. I had no plans to go much of anywhere out of town and, if I can briefly endure the undignified pain of total candor with myself, I was never going to write that novel anyway. As for my career … What career?
That's me. Other people have jobs they care about, the discipline and talent to pursue artistic interests, absolutely rad vacation plans. For these people, a kid might be a real drag. Leaving the many possible social and economic reasons for declining birthrates in the United States aside, a person's personal reasons for not having children are compelling enough on their own. Is this selfish? At whose expense? The children who won't ever exist? The would-be grandparents will get over it. I congratulate the child-free on their independence and envy their freedom to do lots of cool and enriching things with it.
I also say to friends engaged in the great debate of child-having that there are perfectly good personal, even selfish, reasons to bring a child into the world. There's a whole arena of human experience that only becomes available to you when you haven't slept in a week and you're washing jet-black baby shit off your hands following the morning's third diaper change. Emotions that I didn't previously know existed, and that I still wouldn't feel confident naming, now fill me several times a day: when my child laughs, when she narrates my movements as I pour coffee in the morning. I led a small life for many years, but I feel it becoming larger as my daughter grows older and I get closer to the birth of my son.
I say something else to these friends too, because I am very annoying and can say a lot of things when I get going. I say that it doesn't really matter what you decide. Having a child is what the philosopher L.A. Paul calls a "transformative experience." The person you are while deciding whether to have a child is not the person you will be after having a child.
Having a child is a fundamentally irrational and uninformed decision on two fronts. You don't know what the experience of parenthood is like, and you don't know the person on whose behalf you're making the decision — in other words, your future self. Make it three fronts, if you want, since you can't exactly consult your potential child on how they feel about the whole subject of existence. (E.M. Cioran, my favorite antinatalist, famously equates fatherhood to a criminal act in The Trouble With Being Born). Either way the decision is an act of revelation, of self-discovery. Whatever you decide, the other lives you might have lived will continue to haunt you.
I believe that selfhood is, if not illusory, at least in constant flux. We are different people today than we were last week, in a million small but significant ways, which accrue over the years until it sometimes seems like our most distant memories recall events that might have happened to another person entirely. And then there are those moments where everything about who we are changes. There is a before and there is an after. I can't offer insight on this, only experience.
I am in the delivery room, more in love with my wife than I've ever been, feeling a kind of awe at what is happening to her, at what she is doing. My perceptions are contradicting each other. I am calm and panicked, trying to match my breathing to my wife's, and my heart is slamming against my chest. There is brightness and noise and total peace. I gather later that it takes hours, but I feel no time pass until the doctor says she's almost here.
I see her hair first, then more and more of the top of her head. This takes years. Everything is silent. It hasn't happened yet. Minutes pass. All at once, there she is, all of her, slippery in the doctor's arms. Still silence. Not yet. Seconds. It happens now. My daughter cries, more of a tentative peep really, a warm-up for a voice that has never been heard before, a life making itself known for the first time.