By: Revanche

Time, income and deciding to have children

August 8, 2011

I grew up on a steady diet of books like Margeret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (available free on Project Gutenberg!), Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.  (Also all the sci fi and fantasy I could get my hands on, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation.)  I wondered if I’d romanticize the notion of families and raising children under less than rosy circumstances as a result of that early brainwashing.

I do think families should pull together and do whatever needs to be done to get through tough times, and I do think families should take care of each other. Obviously. But econo-philosophically, I developed in my teenage years a much more “I will never be poor again!” determination a la Gone With the Wind than any willingness to try to lead the loving but impoverished lifestyle.

That’s not to say that I think money is the answer to a good childhood or a happy home life. I grew up poor, as a first generation immigrant kid.  My parents arrived on these shores with nothing but the clothes on their back and a babe in their arms. But we were, in my opinion, still relatively well off: we didn’t have to beg, dig through bins for leavings to put food on the table.  Mom and Dad found just enough opportunity to work incredibly hard, and we kids pitched in as well, we used hand me downs and didn’t shop new until I was a teenager so our basic needs were always filled.  But we did live on the edge of poor, spiral-dancing that line between not having much and poverty.

And we can’t deny that money is one of the major factors that may have significant impact on the outcomes of a child’s life.  While I suspect that much of my sibling’s manipulative and attentive seeking behaviors were natural, I did also see that he was quite affected by having less than others, and not having our parents around enough during those formative years to instill the sense of confidence and gratitude for what we did have certainly didn’t help. If I’m having kids and there’s any external factor that I can influence to prevent the development of risky behaviors, it’ll be my job to do it.

From a purely practical standpoint, there’s no question that having financial freedom does make life more manageable these days.  Leaving aside the luxuries, being able to easily make ends meet and still have time to spend with your little ones are core requirements of having them to begin with, to my thinking.

The thing that was missing from my childhood, though, was a chance to spend real time with my parents. Time “with” Mom and Dad was helping them at work, or doing chores with them at home. Or the talks at night after dinner if they weren’t too busy or tired. While I didn’t precisely resent it at the time, I was always sad we rarely did much as a family. I definitely do regret it now that I’ve lost the chance to truly enjoy their later years with them.

When I envisioned that stage of my life, I simply could not see choosing to start a family at a low-earning point in my career knowing that I would have to miss key years of my childrens’ lives while fighting an uphill climb of long hours and probably political battles to advance. Looking forward, it was just unlikely that our generation was going to be settled into a single and easy career straight out of college.  So far, that’s definitely been the case.

Now that I prepare to move into that stage of my life, it seems like whether or not I’ll be having a family of my own is a question I should have an answer for. But I don’t.

I don’t know if I want children.

That’s basically blasphemy around some of these parts.  I’ve caught the lecture that “children are the reason you get married.” Because you couldn’t possibly want to have a partner without procreation following quickly thereafter. That was a disconcerting moment, coming from someone nearly ten years younger than me.  I expect it from the (specifically judgy individuals of the) older generation: we’re selfish, we’re lazy, and we’re [fill in the blank] if we don’t have kids.  But it’s weird when a youngun judges you for maybe not wanting kids.

I don’t know if I don’t want children, either.

As a teen, I was certain that they weren’t in my future.  Other people’s children were adorable, but every child has obnoxious mode. I babysat them all the time and most of them were cute some of the time but they invariably turned into Gremlins and they did not wait for a predictable trigger like feeding after midnight or being splashed with water so it just wasn’t worth the effort.  And I mean: childbirth. Ugh.

More than ten years later, it’s not the idea of children that is shudderingly bad but rather the concern about motherhood that looms.  My health issues aren’t getting any better so how could I be a fully present, fully capable mother?  And I worried enough about my sibling, could I take on the challenge if I had a kid like my sibling?  With no intentions of projecting that expectation on my spawn, I still have to be aware that there is a chance that one or more children might inherit whatever combination of whatever led to that mess, and do my best to guide him or her out of it before it became a real disaster.

To further complicate things, I can’t be certain that I’m capable of working full time and managing a pregnancy or raising a child. The responsibilities of taking care of Doggle alone, who is fairly low-key, are enough to take up my limited reserves. And I can’t count on getting better. It hasn’t happened yet.

Adoption was always my go-to option but again, children deserve time, attention and require energy.

I wanted this to be my decision, and the right decision for me and my spouse.  But it’s one of those I’ve not felt strongly for or against, other than not making a mistake.  When do you know you’re ready for kids? How do you know that you know, if you were never completely certain from the very beginning that you wanted to have them?

Once in a while, I find myself second-guessing my decisions.  Should I really have waited this long, even though I’ve never felt that driving urge to have children? PiC really wants a family and perhaps I could have physically handled it earlier? I certainly thought I was making the wisest choices at the time, but was it really?

Once upon a time, I swatted away the cautionary notes, the “there won’t ever be a good time”s, the “if you don’t now, then when?”s like annoying gnats.  But I’m finally there. On the cusp of my thirties, I’m at the point where I have to admit that for childbearing, I’m not getting any younger.  It’s time to make some real decisions, even if not yet time to commit.

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