Meghan Daum’s “Central Sadness”
If I don’t have kids, will I regret it?
Last night, my fiancé did not come home until 4 am. This is nothing scandalous, nor out of the ordinary: he works at a bar, in a city about an hour away from where we live. On the nights when he tends till close, I’ve learned not to expect him until around 3, maybe a little later if he lingers over shift drink.
The bartending job is a new one, the culmination of a dream of his as well as the commencement of a new life—a life in which he’s able to leave behind a staid office job, escape the tyranny of studying spreadsheets every single day. It’s a dream that I understand, but only in part.
Because I love to work at a desk, and I do so every single day. At the bidding of no one other than myself, I structure my writing life around the cadence of a conventional 9 to 5: I go to bed early; I pause for lunch at noon; I don’t prefer to be conscious during the pre-dawn quiet. It’s one of the myriad reasons, I always thought, why I should not become a mother—late night feedings would be hellish for me, their disruption a domino effect on my entire day.
It’s in these newfound hours that the thought has begun to creep up on me: Perhaps we should have a baby. At the very least, it’d be a thing to do.
But in the weeks since my fiancé started this job, I’ve found myself unconsciously sliding toward his schedule. I work out at 6, eat dinner at 8, and look up from my book about midnight, somehow still buzzing with a few hours of energy to burn. Because we currently share a car, these nights feel like a particular sort of loose end: just me and our cats in a silent apartment, the empty hours stretching ahead of us, not a place in the world to go. These hours, I think, are surplus and therefore emptier than the rest. I don’t have a plan for how to fill them. There are only so many words one can read or write in a day, only so much housework that can be undertaken in a 700-hundred-square-foot space.
It’s in these newfound hours that the thought has begun to creep up on me: Perhaps we should have a baby. At the very least, it’d be a thing to do. And a good thing, moreover—a decision that defends itself. Our society agrees, after all, that procreation is positive, or at least natural. It is, in most respects, the norm.
Will my friends and loved ones tell me that I should have had a baby when I had the chance? Will they diagnose any future feeling of emptiness I might have as the inevitable impact of childlessness?
Choosing not to have kids, however, is another thing entirely. It’s a narrative so non-dominant as to appear aberrant, requiring affirmative explanation. Moreover, in this age of IVF and egg-freezing, it’s become increasingly impossible for women to simply slide into childlessness, accepting, whether with sadness or with relief but always, at least, with some sense of finality, the inherent limits of fertility. Instead, we are encouraged to preserve our options for as long as possible, and often counseled not to disappoint our future selves—who, we are often told, may tragically discover our true desires only once it is already too late.
This emotion, what memoirist and author of the book Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own Kate Bolick calls “the fear of future regret,” is a powerful one, if only for its impossible counterfactuality. The idea that I should now have a baby (or at least a frozen embryo) that I don’t currently want, on the basis of a projection that I may want one in the future, only when I no longer have the choice, is crazy-making at best. At worst, it amounts to an accusation of false consciousness.
This is what I found myself, in the small hours of last night, thinking about: if, as he intends to do, my future husband makes a career of working into the early hours, and I find myself sometimes lonely and aimless, empty in an undefinable way, will I be able to talk about it without the question of children coming up? Will my friends and loved ones tell me that I should have had a baby when I had the chance? Will they diagnose my emptiness as the inevitable impact of childlessness?
*
Essayist Meghan Daum has thought at length about the choice to be child-free. In 2015, she edited an entire anthology on the topic, a book whose title—Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids—sounds tailor-made for the MoM Memoir project. And while I highly recommend that collection (and will probably discuss it in a future post), the work I’m more drawn to is Daum’s essay “Difference Maker,” which was included in her 2014 collection The Unspeakable.
In the piece, Daum writes about realizing, after a decade of ambivalence, that she does not want kids. Though she is sure of her decision, she feels sad about not being able to make her husband a father, and finds that this sadness haunts her, in almost exactly the way that the peanut gallery predicts. She writes:
“From there, a third party was introduced into our marriage. It was . . . a ghoulish presence that functioned as both cause and effect of the presence that would have been our child. It had even, in the back of my mind, come to have a name. It was the Central Sadness.”
The rest of the essay details Daum’s various attempts to dissipate this sadness by volunteering with children in need. Though she sometimes finds the work important and meaningful, it does not abate her emotion, and by the piece’s end, she realizes that she has replaced her ambivalence about procreating with a new kind of uncertainty:
“Were we sad because we lacked some essential element of lifetime partnership, such as a child or agreement about wanting or not wanting one? Or were we sad because life is just sad sometimes—maybe even a lot of time? Or perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling, but the dull ache of aging? Maybe children don’t save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from aging turns out to be the whole point of parenting.”
I’ve always been a person who feels things deeply. I have strong emotions, and I like to examine them, dissect them, account for them. Give them space to breathe. It is, perhaps, part of why I became a writer, and a writer whose subject is herself. Don’t get me wrong, I crave distraction. I court reasons to procrastinate.
But when I read Daum’s words, I think, I want to watch myself age. I want to observe every minute of it, and put it all on the page.