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Childless by Choice
By MICHELLE HUNEVENMARCH 13, 2015
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Credit Aidan Koch
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ALTADENA, Calif. - I WENT to a fortuneteller when I was 25. Her house was on a busy street, its shingled siding a strange, marigold orange, the trim a clashing bright red and blue. A banner advertised: “Special: $5.”
A pale, sharp-eyed woman in her 40s with wild black hair, she ran her operation in a dark front room crowded with furniture. Lampshades were draped with scarves. A milky, cantaloupe-size crystal ball rested on a stand in the middle of a round oak table, but the fortuneteller made no move toward it - clearly, the befogged ball was not for bargain shoppers.
Turning my wrist, she studied my palm. “You might as well get used to being poor,” she said. “Money is coming, but it’s a long way off.”
Also, she said, I would contend with a disease, serious but not necessarily life-threatening. And I would have one child.
I had broken up with my last boyfriend almost three months before. An agoraphobic actor who lived week to week in a fleabag hotel, he’d already faded from my thoughts. So I was stunned when, during a routine pelvic exam, the doctor palpated my uterus and announced that I was pregnant. I had very few days left, he said, to decide what to do.
My best friend said, “Don’t get an abortion - you’ll wreck your karma!”
I worried about my karma, but I had no partner (and I certainly couldn’t be tied to the last one) and no money. I was working part-time in a coffee shop while trying to write. Children seemed as far-off as false teeth, and interested me about as much. Nevertheless, the decision was wrenching.
That Monday, I wrecked my karma. It was a few weeks after that when I sat with the fortuneteller, palm upturned, and wondered if I still had one child in my future, or if, along with my karma, I’d blown my one chance. Time would tell. I was in no hurry to find out.
My late 20s and early 30s were spent in a series of time-consuming, life-swallowing love affairs. A great deal of drinking was also involved.
Meanwhile, my friends married. Nobody was making the great love match of the century. Nor was anybody in a great hurry to have children. Birth control had been a big game-changer in that regard; we boomers could put off having children. And we all did. But then, in our 30s, a shift. By the late ’80s, babies began to arrive.
One friend said that buying a house made her want to fill the rooms. Another friend was so in love with her much older husband, she had to have his babies.
Two friends had difficulty conceiving. After years of frustration and heartbreak, they both tried in vitro fertilization; one couple produced a baby, the other couple ended up adopting the daughter of a 15-year-old from Bakersfield, Calif.
Still-single friends longing for children lowered their standards for mates; one took on the town drunk, rehabilitating him long enough for him to marry and impregnate her. Another friend, at 41, seduced a 20-year-old bagger at the local supermarket, and raised their beautiful son as a single mom.
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“You should have a baby,” a friend reported the day after giving birth, “if only to feel the great tidal wave of love that crashes through you.”
I didn’t want to feel such love for someone else. I still wanted to be the object of that tidal wave.
For as far back as I can remember, I was nonplused and somewhat horrified by the family I was born into. My first clearly articulated thought - it came to me when I was probably 2 and a half or 3, standing in the front yard by the myoporum hedge - had to do with my parents: Who are these people? Why are they acting that way? And how is it that I’ve come to live among them?
My mother was a diabetic whose pancreas intermittently produced insulin, which made her moods fluctuate wildly. Trained as a concert pianist at the Oberlin Conservatory, she was bored stiff as a stay-at-home mom. She went back to school for her teaching credential when I was 6, and went to work when I was 7. She was less bored then, but far from emotionally stable. Her voice trembled with self-pity, and she often teetered between fury and sobbing. She nursed grudges - at one point, she didn’t talk to my 10-year-old sister for over two weeks.
My father was distant, uninvolved, mild enough for long stretches, only to explode into violent verbal rages if milk was spilled, or we asked for spending money, or, heaven forbid, he found coins on the floor. We neither knew nor cared about money, he’d yell, and how hard he had to work to support us, and how expensive we were.
They did not know how to play with us, or be close, or converse amicably, without criticism. But they did want us to be well educated, and they exposed us to a wide range of experience. We had music lessons, swimming lessons; my sister learned to ride. There was never any question but that the two of us would go to college. From the outside, our family looked adventurous, fun-loving. Were we more convivial, happier, in those tents, cars, campers and cabins? Rarely. In close quarters, our mother and her moods still dominated, and we girls withdrew, each into her own solitude.
I have friends from families long ridden with addiction, abuse and poverty who have become loving, responsible, sober parents and made safe, calm homes for their children. So why did neither my sister nor I ever want to “do it right” and live in a family of our own making? Even as I learned that not all families were like this, I didn’t trust myself not to recreate what I had known.
I believe it was no coincidence that I waited to marry until it was biologically impossible for me to have a family. Again and again, I fell hard for remote, often unavailable men and tried, unsuccessfully, to make them love me. My drinking slowly slid into excess, until, at 34, I had a moment of clarity: I realized that I could improve neither my writing nor myself if I was getting drunk every night.
That year I went into therapy, got sober and landed steady work, which together set me firmly on the long, twisting ascent to my present contentment. En route, I abandoned my efforts to make the uninterested love me, and I learned to recognize and appreciate the genuinely interested. With years of therapy, I did outgrow my resentment toward and impatience with kids, and I got a handle on that driving need for parental attention and love. I understood more about my parents, too, about diabetes and mood swings, and about how my father grew up in a home where bruising beatings and potentially mortal combat took place.
I became more able and even somewhat willing to be a parent, but by the time that happened, and by the time I met a man who might be a wonderful father, I was 50. We were too old and, as he likes to say, too set in our ways.
The fortuneteller I saw at 25 proved correct in all her predictions. I was poor for decades, finally getting comfortable in my 40s. In my 20s and early 30s, I grappled with alcoholism, a serious but not necessarily fatal disease; I have been sober now for 27 years. I know, too, how the fortuneteller’s cosmic source did its calculation. The one chance at motherhood fate allotted me, I chose not to take.
I can live with that.
Michelle Huneven is the author, most recently, of the novel “Off Course.” This essay is adapted from a forthcoming collection, “Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.”