Today at a cool chipotle-of-pizza place in Indy called Pieology, Julie and I encountered a delightful young man who was interested in my t-shirt. I have a shirt that Julie bought me a few years ago (it’s one of my favorites) that has a composite face made of 8 Marvel characters on the front of it.
The young man knew everyone but Ghost Rider. Then he asked why Captain America had a wing coming off the side of his head. It was a fun little conversation.
A few minutes later, he turned and said “do a Mario voice now” (but I thought he said “can you keep your voice down”). Julie and I then launched into a Mario and Luigi exchange. Fun times. But the kid’s mom was exasperated, trying to get him to quit fidgeting and climbing on things and “bugging” us.
I enjoyed it, because I work with young people for a living and I had about ten minutes of time with this young man. But if he was my responsibility to keep alive and teach and love… I can see how it’d be different and get old fast. Maybe. Maybe not.
But this led to Julie and I talking about the fact that we’ve agreed to not have kids, and more importantly we lamented the times that people meaning to or not give us crap about it. We know what we are “missing” out on, but we also understand the reality of the world we live in. As someone who had a horrible father and was raised by an amazing single mother, there’s a part of me who would have wanted to be a father. In my 20s. In my 30s. I’m 40 now, and I’m just getting my life together. I chose to be an academic. That means things when you come from nothing. My fellow professors who didn’t get kicked around the way I did early in life don’t understand that, but I was building a life during the time when a person might have raised a child.
There’s more to it, too. I invest in the people I care about. My mother gave all she had to raise me. She is now disabled and needs help. I’m going to be providing that help as long as she needs it. I also chose to be a professor and, unlike some, I don’t see my relationships with my students as an annoyance. I mentor as much as I can. I invest in the education process. If I had a child, I would be bad at my job because MY kid would get all of my energy as a mentor and teacher. I wouldn’t dare neglect my family for school.
And lastly– my view of things just changed. This world sucks. I mean I’m not suicidal or drifting into depression, but I don’t feel safe in certain spaces. Our President is doing his best to crush the poor under his golf cleat while blowing up the outside world. Public schools are given dumpster refuge to teach with. Why would I bring something into this world to love when I’m afraid that before I die I’ll see the world in absolute and unfiltered Mad Max level chaos?
Having said all of that, I want to point out an injustice.
I have been in numerous meetings on campus where there have been children brought in because there was no sitter. I know people who have gone on parental leave that didn’t give birth but rather adopted, so they suffered no physical need for recovery. I’ve had literally a hundred meetings or more with people be delayed, cancelled or cut short because they had to pick up a kid, had a sick kid, etc.
I do not mind this. That’s not where I’m going with it. All of these things are completely and utterly NECESSARY (well, maybe not bringing your kid to work, but I get it). We have to take care of our loved ones. That’s way more important than our “work.” I will fight any chance I have for parental rights in employment. It’s a huge deal.
Here’s the problem I have with all of this: generational bias.
My mother is disabled. She is my dependent. It hurts me to even talk about that because she was SuperWoman when I was a kid, but she needs me financially and literally.
The university won’t cover her on my insurance. I could have like 20 kids and they’d be covered, but not my one dependent mother.
I’ve missed a few things– only a few that were actual work and not extra-or-short-notice things– to help my mother with critical things, like taking her to surgery, getting her into see a specialist who had one opening in a six month window, etc. And when those things happened, it got back to me through back channels that I was criticized. In one case, someone said it to my face.
How is that appropriate? How is it fair that if a person gives birth by choice, they are given (as they should be) all the permissions needed to nurture that life, but when someone is fulfilling a duty of love and family to take care of the person who did all those things for them, they are judged and put at a disadvantage?
I’m constantly judged for not having kids. My wife gets it 100x worse. But I don’t call all of those who aren’t like me breeders and insult them for their choice, even when I see a parent in public treating a child in such a way that they have illustrated perfectly that they should not have a kid. It’s not my place to judge a person’s decisions and motives.
I don’t want to have a kid because I couldn’t introduce it to a just world. And anyone who wants to argue against that needs to show me the justice of my situation with my mother and prove I could have a kid who wouldn’t suffer the issues in youth that I did (bullying, institutional abuse, etc.). I should’t ever get to choose to subject someone to the the things that I consider to have been the horrors or my life. Those were the things my mother labored nonstop to defend me from. I can’t neglect her to take care of an infant now, and society and my employer sure as hell aren’t going to assist me in helping my mom. I can’t even get my employer to give her Medicare gap coverage and dental. I had to take on a class overload to help her get her dentures fixed, and since I had to try to pay for it out-of-pocket we had to go to the cheapest doctors we could find who would assist us in paying and the work sucked and she now has a host of denture issues in addition to her other problems. Meanwhile I work with people who get to send their kids to the best orthodontists for their braces as part of our insurance.
I’m not the one who should be shamed. Society should be ashamed.