"Do you have children?" A simple question and a safe bet for comfortable conversation in the Midwest…except when the gambler loses. "No, I've never wanted to have children." An awkward pause follows, with a stammered evasion of some kind. "Oh, that's too bad" is one of my favorites. So is "Really?" in a tone of disbelief. Amidst the intentional choice by my beloved and I not to have children, we have learned a lot about the extraordinarily powerful and hidden dynamics within this casual conversational encounter. Future posts with this title will explore the learnings about choosing not to have children in a child-focused culture of Midwestern America.
This bit is about the choice. My husband and I married in our early thirties, which is increasingly normal in urban populations, less so in Midwestern suburban or rural populations. We were both ambivalent about having children. We probed the ambivalence deeper in pre-marital counseling. We pushed one another for clarity, in case we were to become a divorce statistic over the matter in the future. But life was simply too interesting in other areas—graduate school, learning the delights and demands of marital bliss, establishing a home in new settings, travel, foodie-culture, movies and outdoor explorations, getting a dog, etc.
About 4-5 years into married life, we did enter a divergence about it, for about 18 months. Wrestling with established norms about wife-hood, I really tried to want to have children but failed. I dared myself into it. I dared us to change our practices of birth control. "Let our bodies decide for us," I reasoned. All for nothing. I could never seem to want to have children, no matter how hard I tried…for him, for me, for family, for cultural conformity, whatever. B faced a different challenge, initially and then in evolution with his vocation. As he settled into his new job—pastoral leader of a Protestant congregation in an economically-declining area of the country—he wanted a child, though his reasons were inarticulate. One of the most articulate men I'd ever met, the man I loved for his tenacious pursuit of informed truth, had reasons and rationales for everything, except for this choice. "I just do," he said. We sought professional guidance, as we had covenanted to do in premarital counseling, upon a definable 'issue' between us.
This is where it got fascinating. His images of raising a child were all outside the home—at playgrounds, zoos, amusement parks, museums. Sometimes these images had me in them, but often they did not. My images of raising a child were all confined to the home—diapers, incessant nurture/care, sleepless nights, change of marital focus from us to "us + an unknown one." Rarely was B in my imagery either. A-ha! We began to re-envision and create new dreams of what raising a child together would look like. I began to warm to the idea of taking a little one to the park with B, having him/her swing between us. He began to imagine the sleepless nights and the realities of care that would change our married life together forever. We talked about who would call the sitter to make arrangements for protected "out" times for us as a couple. We strategized for assured care of my need for solitude and contemplative practice. We found answers for each and every item, hers and his, mostly because each is completely devoted to the other within yet-primary commitment to the Holy One in whom we confess faith. That's not nothing, we've learned.
One wise agreement between us was that each of us had a veto in all decision-making. This particular decision, of course, has biological-differentiation. As a woman, I had ultimate choice about how my body would or would not be a part of this process. As a man, he had ultimate choice about fulfilling his own desires for any family we would raise together. B is more liberated than most, in this respect. He honors the clear biological toll on the woman, moreso than the man. As we listened deeply to one another in these intentional conversations, each of us was changed. Our connection deepened and grew stronger amidst new imaginings of a life shared beyond the marital bond.
I began to be excited about raising a little girl from China or a little one from our area who needed a home. I could see how it fit in with my values for giving back to the world and how we could have a family that did not 'steal my body from me.' Not long into conversations, I was ready to begin this new adventure, as long as my body would remain my own. He began to see the reality of what his life, our life, would be together, in both the anticipated playful times and in the demanding, nurture/guidance times. We found ourselves opened to the real possibility of sharing a family beyond our marital family. Unexpectedly, new awarenesses emerged when the fears were no longer solely mine, but his, and then ours. I'll describe a couple below, for example's sake:
B began to see how some of his assumptions about growing old in the care of his children were unfounded. Serving a largely elderly congregation, he saw time and again how American culture, for good and ill, abandons its elderly. By and large, adult children do not care for their elders, at least in the way that B had imagined. He cannot count the number of funerals he has conducted for whom the majority of deceased died alone. In other words, having children would not prevent him, either of us, from the fearful prospect of dying alone.
I began to think like a mother, which was startling. One of my first questions was whether bringing a child into a two-pastor-parent family was a blessed thing for the child. B's and my marriage in his early years of pastoral ministry nearly foundered, though neither of us mentioned the D word. On my side: it is a difficult thing for a preacher's wife to realize her marriage must always include Mistress Church—the phone calls of confidential content, the late arrivals to evenings at home, the unbidden and intrusive presence in sexual and emotional intimacies. His side: it is a difficult thing for a preacher to sort out whether s/he should disappoint congregation or beloved-partner, because the choice always arises. You learn to reframe it, to value the complexities and delights of serving a congregation while living in a vibrant marriage, but these worlds—church and marriage—regularly collide in their opportunities and demands. What would be the effect of these tensions on a young child, considering its impact on me was so demanding? There is an acronym of diagnosis: PK's or "preacher's kids," who know that their father or mother will always answer to the "higher call" of God, leaving them and their concerns behind as "less important." They are no longer overtly children of God, but preacher's children. They become a role, or act out trying to escape it.
So we sat with a different proposition instead, in the early stages of pursuing a family. What if our calling is not to have children? What if our shared life is to offer back different fruits than our Protestant congregational culture expects?
We sat with that possibility in prayer, in life, in work. Confirmation arose again and again. On the one hand, we loved our life together and did not want to have it fundamentally altered by a baby. "A baby changes everything," a blessed proverb, but one not for us. We looked at the life of our peers who were ensconced in raising children, and realized we did not desire that life at all. We spent time with young children, including nieces and nephews. While we enjoyed them, we had no desire to either create or adopt one of our own. We listened to our life of intentional childlessness and began to learn things we have energy and passion to share.
That's what this page—and future blog-posts—aim to introduce.