The Kids Are Alright

I do not have a child, and to tell the truth have not yearned much for children in my years. When I was younger I regarded children as an albatross -- the path chosen for me, a clever and successful male, by society (not just by the parents and the aunts and the uncles and the cousins but also the citizens, folks who would regard my ambition for public office as a little cold, a little naked and self-serving, if it didn't come wrapped up in a family, a pretty wife and some smiling tots in tow.) Sometime last year a friend sent me this essay from the Web site Salon.com, and I remember thinking that the writer summarized perfectly what I felt:

The daily depredations of child rearing, though, seem so viscerally real that my stomach tightens when I ponder them. A child, after all, can't be treated as a fantasy projection of my imagined self. He or she would be another person with needs and desires that I would be tethered to for decades. And everything about meeting those needs fills me with horror. Not just the diapers and the shrieking, the penury and career stagnation, but the parts that maternally minded friends of mine actually look forward to: the wearying grammar school theatrical performances. Hours spent on the playground when I'd rather be reading novels. Parent-teacher conferences. Birthday parties. Ugly primary-colored plastic toys littering my home.

The horror this female writer feels is not very different from what I've long felt as a male.

But -- but but but how to put this? The heart is a curious thing, friends, and recently, to my surprise, my heart has ached. And after considering for a while the possible reasons for this hurt I realized with a start that the ache I feel is for children, for little ones of my own. It's a dull, ever-present hurt, not unlike the pain attendant at the death of a loved one -- in my more introspective moments I see it clearly as the pain brought on by the closing of my options before me, the setting of the sun upon my wasted fertile years, and with it the sudden realization that I would have been an especially good father, that my children would have become very successful, that the world would have smiled upon their faces.

This morning the bus was filled with children and their happy mothers on the way, I imagine, to shop for Christmas. As I sat there amidst the cherubs I tried to make my through the bitter, serious news of the New York Times, but I cannot tell you that I was successful, I cannot tell you that my mind didn't wander to thoughts of children and what might have been....