My husband wants a baby. I don’t

For all this, I had reasons. They ran the gamut from, “Don’t want to be pregnant,” to, “Don’t want to make someone deal with me when I’m dying.” (And, for the record, I’ve never met a woman of any age and any level of inclination to have children who doesn’t have names picked out.) Chief among them was my belief that I’d be a bad mother. Not in the Joan Crawford mode, but in the mode of parents you sometimes see who obviously love their kids, but clearly do not love their own lives. For every way I could imagine being a good mother, I could imagine ten ways that I’d botch the job irredeemably.

More than that, I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic. It felt like not what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

When my husband and I married, we both saw ourselves as ambivalent about having children. Since then, aside from a brief interlude of semi-willingness, my ambivalence had slid into something more like opposition. Meanwhile, my husband’s ambivalence had slid into abstract desire. A marriage counsellor would surely advise a couple in such a situation to discuss the issue seriously and thoroughly, but, wrenching as it was to not be able to make my husband happy in this regard, it seemed to me that there was nothing to discuss. I didn’t want to be a mother; it was as simple as that. And as if to prove that my reasons weren’t shallow or rooted in some deep-seated antipathy toward kids, I decided to become a court-appointed advocate for children in the foster-care system. It was there I met Matthew.

There is very little that I am permitted to reveal about Matthew, starting with his name, which is not Matthew. I cannot provide a physical description, but for the sake of giving you something to hold on to I’m going to say he’s African-American, knobbly-kneed and slightly near-sighted, and had just turned 12 years old when I met him. I cannot tell you about his parents or what they did to land their son in the child-welfare system, but I can say that it’s about as horrific as anything you can imagine. Matthew lived in an institutional group home with about 75 other kids. He’d lived in quite a few of these places over the years, and, bleak as they were, they’d come to represent familiar interstices between the pre-adoptive placements that he inevitably sabotaged by acting up as soon as he began to get comfortable. Like many foster kids, he felt safer in institutions than in anything resembling a family setting.

During our first visit, he told me that what he wanted most was for me to take him to McDonald’s. (The Happy Meal, it turns out, is the meal of choice for the unhappiest kids in the world.) But I wasn’t allowed to take him off the grounds of the group home, so we sat in the dining hall and hobbled through a conversation about what my role as his advocate amounted to. (He already knew; he’d had one before.) In my training sessions, I’d learnt that it was a good idea to bring a game or a toy. After much deliberation, I had settled on a pack of cards that asked hundreds of “would you rather” questions: “Would you rather be invisible or able to read minds?”; “Would you rather be able to stop time or fly?” Matthew’s enthusiasm for this activity was tepid at best, and when I got to questions such as, “Would you rather go to an amusement park or a family reunion?” and, “Would you rather be scolded by your teacher or by your parents?” I shivered at my stupidity for not having vetted them ahead of time.

“We don’t have to play with these,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Matthew said. This turned out to be his standard response to just about everything. It was delivered in the same tone regardless of context, a tone of impatience mixed with indifference – the tone people use when they’re waiting for the other person to stop talking.

The next time I saw him, I was allowed to take him out. I suggested that we go to the zoo, but he said he wanted to go shopping at [discount store] Target. For his recent birthday he’d received gift cards from his social worker and also from his behavioural specialist at the group home. He seemed upbeat, counting and recounting the cash in his pocket (he received a small weekly allowance from the home) and adding it to the sum total of his gift cards, which included one worth $25 that I’d picked up at the advocacy office. He wanted something digital, preferably an MP3 player. The only thing in his price range was a Kindle. I tried to explain the concept of saving up a little while longer, but he insisted that he wanted the Kindle, even after I reminded him that he’d said he didn’t like to read and that he would still have to pay for things to put on the Kindle. He took it to the checkout counter, where he was $25 short anyway. Matthew cast his eyes downward. He wouldn’t look at me or at anyone, and I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or fly into a rage. There was a line of people behind us, so I lent him $25 on the condition that he pay me back in instalments.

I found myself basking in the ecstatic glow of altruism. When I dropped him off at the group home, the promissory note tucked in his Target shopping bag with the Kindle and the greasy cardboard plate that held the giant pretzel I’d bought him, I felt useful. I felt proud.

It had been a long time between accomplishments. At least, it had become hard to identify them, as most of my goals for any given day or week took the form of tasks, mundane and otherwise, to be dreaded and then crossed off a list or postponed indefinitely (meet article deadline, get shirts from dry cleaner, start writing new book). Little seemed to warrant any special pride. And although I wanted to believe that I was just bored, the truth was that the decision not to have children was like a slow drip of guilt into my veins.

My husband was patient and funny and smart. In other words, outstanding dad material. Wasting such material seemed like an unpardonable crime. Besides, I’ve always believed that it is not possible to fall in love with someone without picturing what it might be like to combine your genetic goods. It’s almost an aspect of courtship, this vision of what your nose might look like smashed up against your loved one’s eyes, this imaginary cubist rendering of the things you hate most about yourself offset by the things you adore most in the other person. And, a little over a year after we married, this curiosity, combined with the dumb luck of finding and buying an elegant, underpriced, much-too-large-for-us house in a foreclosure sale, had proved sufficient cause for switching to the leave-it-to-fate method of birth control. Soon enough, I’d found myself pregnant.

It was as if the house itself had impregnated me, as if it had said, “I have three bedrooms and there are only two of you; what’s wrong with this picture?” For eight weeks, I hung in a nervous limbo, thinking my life was about to become either unfathomably enriched or permanently ruined. Then I had a miscarriage. I was 41, so it was not exactly unexpected. And although there had been nothing enriching about my brief pregnancy, I was left with something that in a certain way felt worse than permanent ruin. I was left with permanent doubt.

My husband was happy about the pregnancy and sad about the miscarriage. I was less sad, although I undertook to convince myself otherwise by trying to get pregnant again. After three months of dizzying cognitive dissonance, I walked into the guest room that my husband used as an office and allowed myself to say, for once and for all, that I didn’t want a baby. I’d thought I could talk myself into it, but those talks had failed.

As I was saying all this, I was lying on the cheap platform bed we’d bought in anticipation of a steady flow of out-of-town company. The curtains were lifting gently in the breeze. Outside, there was bougainvillea, along with bees and hummingbirds and turtle doves. There was a grassy lawn where the dog rolled around scratching its back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat on weekends eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about (the cost of real estate, the noise of leaf blowers, more successful peers). And as I lay on that bed it occurred to me, terrifyingly, that all of it might not be enough. Maybe such pleasures, while pleasurable enough, were merely trimmings on a nonexistent tree. Maybe nothing – not a baby or the lack of a baby, not a beautiful house, not rewarding work – was ever going to make us anything other than the chronically dissatisfied, perpetual second-guessers we already were.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant this a million times over. To this day, there is nothing I’ve ever been sorrier about than my inability to make my husband a father.

“It’s OK,” he said.

Except it wasn’t, really. From that moment on, a third party was introduced into our marriage. It was not a corporeal party but an amorphous one, a ghoulish presence that functioned as both cause and effect of the absence of a child. It had even, in the back of my mind, come to have a name. It was the Central Sadness. It collected around our marriage like soft, stinky moss. It rooted our arguments and dampened our good times.

It taunted us from the sidelines of our social life (the barbecues with toddlers underfoot; a friend’s child interrupting conversations mid-sentence; the clubby comparing of notes about Ritalin and dance lessons and college tuition, which prompted us to feign interest lest we come across like overgrown children ourselves). It haunted our sex life. Not since I was a teenager (a virginal one at that) had I been so afraid of getting pregnant. I wondered then if our marriage was on life support, if at any moment one of us was going to realise that the humane thing to do would be to call it even and call it a day.

More than a year passed since my miscarriage and my subsequent declaration that I did not want to have a child. Although my husband had been supportive and accepting, he now began to say out loud again that he wanted to be someone’s father – or, at least, that he might not be OK with never being someone’s father. He wanted to use what he knew about the world to help someone find his or her own way through it. He wanted “someone to hang out with” when he got older. He didn’t necessarily need the baby or toddler-rearing experience. He didn’t need the kid to look like him or be the same race. When I asked if he’d consider mentoring or even being an advocate, he said he wasn’t sure that would be enough.

The seeds of a potential compromise were planted. Maybe we could take in, or even adopt, a foster child. This would be a child old enough that we might actually qualify as young or average-age parents rather than ones of “advanced age”. (If I adopted a 10-year-old at 43, it would be the equivalent of having had him at the eminently reasonable age of 33.)

We knew that any child we took in would surely need intensive therapy. He would have demons and heartbreaking baggage. But we would find the needle in the haystack, the kid who dreamt of being an only child in a quiet, book-filled house. I probably wouldn’t be a great mother, but my standards would be so different from those set by the child-welfare system that it wouldn’t matter if I dreaded birthday parties or resorted to store-bought Hallowe’en costumes.

I knew that this was 90 per cent bulls***. I knew that it wasn’t OK to be a mediocre parent just because you’d adopted the child out of foster care. A few times, my husband and I scrolled through online photo listings of available children in California, but we may as well have been looking at personal ads from a faraway land that no one ever travelled to. There were three-year-olds with cerebral palsy on ventilators, huge sibling groups who spoke no English, kids who “struggle with handling conflict appropriately”. Occasionally, there would be some bright-eyed six or seven-year-old who you could tell was going to be OK, who had the great fortune of being able to turn the world on with his smile. So as the Central Sadness throbbed around our marriage, threatening to turn even the most quotidian moments, like the sight of a neighbour tossing a ball around with his kid in the yard, into an occasion for bickering or sulking, the foster-child option placated us with the illusion that all doors were not yet closed.

One day, while my nerves swung on a wider-than-usual pendulum between empathy for Matthew and despondency over my marriage, I decided to call a foster and adoption agency. Actually, I asked my husband to call. I’d been told in my training that advocates are not supposed to get involved with fostering children, even those who have nothing to do with their advocacy. I didn’t want to do anything that might be construed as a conflict of interest. When my husband and I arrived at an orientation meeting, I signed in using his last name, something I’d never done before.

Each of us was asked to say why we were there. When our turn came, my husband spoke briefly about how we were exploring things in a very preliminary way. Then I spoke about how I was ambivalent about children but that this potentially seemed like a good thing to do. I then proceeded to dominate the rest of the meeting. I acted as if I were back in advocacy training. I raised my hand to ask overly technical questions. I asked what the chances of getting adopted were for a 12-year-old who had flunked out of several placements.

“Maybe this isn’t the right setting for these questions,” my husband whispered.

As the meeting wrapped up, the woman from the agency announced that the next step was to fill out an application and then attend a series of training sessions. After that, she said, prospective parents who passed their home studies could be matched with a child at any time and be on their way to adoption.

Her words were like ice against my spine. “We’re not at that point!” I said to my husband. “Not remotely close.”

About eight months into my work with Matthew, a couple who had been visiting him and later hosted him at their home on weekends decided not to pursue adoption after all. He’d been hopeful about the placement, and, when I saw him a few days after things fell through, I found him pacing around his concrete dormitory like a nervous animal.

Through angry tears, Matthew declared that he was never going back inside the dormitory and would sleep on the lawn until he could live in a real home. He said that he’d got mad at the prospective mom for not buying him something he wanted but that he hadn’t done anything too bad. He’d kicked over some chairs but they weren’t broken or anything. He just wanted another chance.

“Let’s go inside,” I said. “And you write down what you want and how you feel.”

He agreed, which surprised me. He got out a notebook and lay on the floor on his stomach, elbows propped up as he began to write. He looked more like a normal kid than I’d ever seen him. He handed me the notebook.

“I want to live with ——— and ———. I’m sorry I got mad. If you give me another chance I promise I’ll never get mad again.”

“Will you give that to them?” Matthew asked me.

“If I can,” I said, even though the decision had been made. Later, I realised that telling Matthew to write that note was the cruellest thing I could have done to him.

There are times when I harbour a secret fantasy that one day my husband will get a call from a person claiming to be his son or his daughter. Ideally, this person will be in his or her late teens or early twenties, the product of some brief fling or one-night stand during the Clinton administration. My husband will be shocked, of course, and probably in denial, and then suddenly his face will blanch and his jaw will grow slack. He will hang up the phone and tell me the news and I will also be shocked. Eventually, though, we’ll both be thrilled. This new relation will breeze in and out of our lives like a sort of extreme niece or nephew. We’ll dispense advice and keep photos on the fridge but, having never got into the dirty details of actual child-rearing, take neither credit nor blame for the final results.

I thought I’d undertaken volunteer work with kids because I was, above all, a realist. I thought it showed the depth of my understanding of my own psyche. I thought it was a way of turning my limitations, specifically my reluctance to have children, into new and useful possibilities. I thought the thing I felt most guilty about could be turned into a force for good. But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflexive idealisation – even obsessive sanctification – of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.

I’d also tricked myself into believing that trying to help these kids would put the Central Sadness on permanent hiatus, that my husband and I could find peace (not just peace, but real fulfilment) in our life together. Instead, we continued to puzzle over the same unanswerable questions. Were we sad because we lacked some essential element of lifetime partnership, such as a child or an agreement about wanting or not wanting one, or because life is just sad sometimes – maybe even a lot of the time? Or perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling but, simply, the dull ache of ageing. Maybe children don’t save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from ageing is in fact much of the point of parenting.

Matthew got transferred to a new group home shortly after he turned 13. It was practically indistinguishable from the old one. I took him to Target to spend a $25 gift card I’d mailed him for his birthday, but, like the other times, when we reached the front of the checkout line the cashier said there wasn’t enough left on the card. Matthew claimed it was defective. On the conveyor belt sat several bags of crisps, a package of cookies and boxes of macaroni and cheese that he wanted to keep in the kitchen at the group home. I pulled out my credit card and paid. I knew he was lying and I told him so. He said he wasn’t. He said no one ever believed him. He said he had nothing, that no one cared about him or ever did anything for him. He said no one ever gave him a chance or cut him a break. He said everyone in his life was useless.

We got in the car and he ate his crisps as we drove in silence. When I pulled up to the entrance of the group home, he gathered his loot without looking at me.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

Back at home, my husband and I sat down to dinner around our usual time of 8.30. We looked through the magazines that had come in the mail. The evening air was still cool, but the daylight was beginning to linger. Soon it would be summer. Friends would start coming over to eat on the deck. After that, it would be autumn and then what passes for winter. I would continue to work with Matthew, and he would grow older in his group home while I grew older in my too-big-for-us house. My husband would make peace with the way things had turned out – except in those moments when he didn’t have peace, which, of course, come around for everyone. Our lives would remain our own. Whether that was fundamentally sad or fundamentally exquisite, we’d probably never be certain. But if there’s anything Matthew taught me, it’s that having certainty about your life is a great luxury.

© 2014 by Meghan Daum. Extracted from The Unspeakables by Meghan Daum. First published in The New Yorker

Shoot credits
Hair and make-up: Birgitte Philippides for Klorane at Sally Harlor