The most difficult endeavors are often also the most rewarding. Climbing Mount Everest, surviving Marine boot camp, raising children, are taxing but also fulfilling. Well, I can’t vouch for the first two. But that third one — I have considerable direct personal experience. Trust me: being a parent is hard. And exhilarating.
Back when my friends were having babies, I sometimes greeted the happy news of a pregnancy by describing what I called my “parenthood epiphany.” It went like this:
The week we brought Ross home, I was sitting in the new blue rocking chair about 3 a.m., staring numbly down into his red, distorted, howling face. And a startling thought formed in my exhaustion-sapped mind: Ohhhhhhhh, so this is why those teenagers kill their kids. Now I understand. We’re 35 years old. We have all the money in the world. We desperately wanted this baby, for years. It’s the third night. And we’re going OUT OF OUR MINDS!
I told that story because I wanted the expectant newcomer before me to realize that they were embarking upon a rocky journey. That if they found it difficult at times, it wasn’t because they were bad parents, necessarily. It was just the nature of the beast.
This came back to me when I saw Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance being pilloried on social media for his remarks from 2021 that people without children do not have a “direct stake” in the country, but are, “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg … the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
There’s a lot to unpack there.
First, he’s completely mistaken. Harris has two stepchildren, and the suggestion that they somehow don’t count is simply wrong, as anyone who knows anyone with foster or adopted children — like Pete Buttigieg and his partner— or stepchildren knows.
Second, not everyone without children is miserable — just the opposite. Many people for whatever reason don’t want to have children, the same way most people don’t climb Mount Everest or join the Marines. The challenge isn’t for everybody. And children can be a source of enormous unhappiness and tragedy.
Third, it’s not always a choice — some people can’t have children, physically. Some never find the right relationship. Though a spouse is not required, either. The best parent I know — diligent, energetic, loving — is a single mother who adopted her child.
Suggesting that childless people — and about 16.5% of American adults never have children — aren’t invested in society is the kind of performative cruelty at which MAGA specializes. That “direct stake” crack of Vance’s is spoken like a man with an inherently selfish view of life. You need kids, because you can only care about your own kids and what affects them. Everyone else can go hang.
The tragedy is that children don’t create much of a stake for many. Plenty of climate change deniers have children. The presence of those glittering young people who will live in a baking, burning, storm-ravaged world doesn’t make their parents one degree more ready to acknowledge the man-made changes going on all around. Instead, they use their children as a pretext to beat up on trans youth.
To end on a prettier epiphany about children. There’s a beautiful passage in Adam Gopnik’s book “Paris to the Moon” about having a child in the City of Light. Gopnik gazes into his newborn daughter’s face and realizes:
“The world is a meaningless place, and we are weird, replicating mammals on its surface, yet the whole purpose of the universe since it began was, in a way, to produce this baby, who is the tiny end point of a funnel that goes back to the beginning of time.”
Which would almost seem to support Vance. Except for one crucial distinction. Gopnik is lauding his own decision, not condemning the decisions of others. This is how it was for him. And for me. But it might not be that way for you, or someone else. The liberal superpower is to realize that there are other people, who do other things, and the existence of someone different who, through accident or design, takes a different life path is not an intolerable refutation of my life.
It’s a big beautiful world. Kids are one way to experience it most deeply. But not the only way. You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise. Alas, the world also has no shortage of those.