Late Parenthood

Yesterday a friend of mine posted a link to a piece in The New Republic about late parenthood, The Grayest Generation. It's been making the rounds for the last couple of days, and it's so hot on the interwebs right now that I had already read a critique of it on Slate before I read the actual article. The title of the critique when I read it: Why It's a Terrible Idea to Wait Until Thirty-five to Have Kids. I've got to hand it to the editors at Slate. From the very beginning of this journey, when we were considering whether or not to try to have another child, their writers have been there, every day of the week, always ready with the fear-mongering and the judgment. Today I see Katie Roiphe has a new screed about the "feminist fertility myth."

How can I blame them, though, when I lap it up? Looking for statistics to bolster my position; looking for arguments that add to my guilt. Late parenthood: yes, I have a dog in this fight, I'm just not sure which dog. Do I defend it, because it's what I "chose"? Or condemn it, because this last time it went wrong?

I use scare quotes around the word "chose" because one of the things Judith Shulevitz, the author of the original essay, seems to be questioning is the extent to which we all choose our choices. Children are conceived, born and raised at the intersection between personal choice and social and economic factors that are outside of our control.

Of course no one likes to think about that. We all believe in personal responsibility, and it's comforting to think we have control over our lives, especially when things go well. It allows us to feel we deserve it. To write about this makes me feel like a big whiner explaining why all of this is not my fault. But I spend every day thinking about how this is all my fault. Today, I will spend at least part of the day thinking about how it's not.

The single most important factor in any discussion of late parenthood is contraception. Talking to Jasper a couple of months ago I realized that he thinks you have to try to have a baby. In his universe, parents make the decision to have a child, then they try to have one. Which is, of course, what Jonathan and I did, both times, so it's no wonder he thinks that. He has no idea how radical a notion that really is. That for most of history and in many parts of the world today, children are something that happen to you, whether you want them or not. Whether you can feed them or not. Contraception has altered everything. And I just want to say, thank God for that. All of the politicians who want to return us to a time when women were at the mercy of men and of our reproductive capabilities can go fuck themselves.

When I was a kid I fully expected to be a young mother. But I noticed a long time ago that the trajectory of my life is much more similar to my father's than to my mother's. I got a graduate degree before marriage. I bought my first house at 34. I had my first child at 34. I had my second child at 41. For my mother, all of those milestones happened a decade earlier, except for the grad school part. She went to graduate school at around the same age I did, except that she was already married with a small child.

I didn't make any of my choices in a vacuum. Based on the massive economic expansion that occurred when my parents were young and their relative affluence when I was growing up, certain risks seemed to make sense. For instance, I married someone I was emotionally compatible with but whose financial prospects were uncertain. My grandmother would not have done it. Charlie was a nice guy, I hear, but Dan was the one who was going places. Which is not to imply that my grandmother didn't love my grandfather. It's just that economic calculation absolutely factored in.

I've already talked about how a writing career never made sense, financially. Someone like my father, who grew up poor at the tail end of the Depression, could not have become a writer even if he wanted to. That choice was made possible, again, by the relative privilege of my upbringing. Not because of actual financial support, but because of the (misguided, it turns out) belief, born of comfort and stability, that things will go well and that, if not, a safety net exists.

I wanted to have a child at thirty. But our writing careers were nowhere at that point and it was pretty obvious that if we had a baby the books we were working on would likely be stillborn. We bickered about it, but neither of us was willing to allow that to happen. The moment I sold my first book, having a child became our top priority.

The books I published didn't sell. Was it bad luck, poor marketing, or the fact that they sucked? It's impossible to untangle the various pieces. Then the economy collapsed, which affected whether or not our subsequent books would sell (or not) and whether or not we could find other work in the absence of book sales. All of which played into our delaying B until 40. There's no guarantee we wouldn't have lost a child earlier, because stillbirth can and does happen to women of all ages. But if he had died when I was 32 there would have been time to recover. There's no time now. And maybe we wouldn't have lost him. Who can say?

I've got no problem, personally, with being an older parent. I don't feel or look old, though maybe that's just because I live in Portland and all the moms are my age. The grandparents don't figure into our equation, child-care wise, but that's a function of distance more than age. I'm not longing for an empty nest. I don't want to spend more time going to the symphony. I'd much rather step on Legos in the middle of the night until I'm 50. When, according to Jasper, I will be officially old. And I'm not sure that my living until Jasper is 70 would really be the boon to him that Shulevitz seems to think.

I'm also not a fan of judging people for how they make their families. Adoption, surrogacy, IVF, single mothers by choice, same-sex partners, child-free, early, late, I'm happy that people have so many choices now. I can't speak to the medical problems that arise with older parenthood. For that I refer you to my brother, the pediatric geneticist. A big issue, though, as Shulevitz identifies it, is that in America today, people are being pushed by economics into later parenthood, which she believes is bad for children, families and society, when it's not even what they want.

It is clear that through a combination of my own (debatably poor) choices and outside forces, I will likely not reach my "intended family size." I intended to have two, and I don't have two. Which may not seem like a big deal in a dangerously overpopulated world. No one will miss the child I didn't get to have, except for me. But on a personal level it's pretty heartbreaking.