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A review by mcwat
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids by Meghan Daum
Like Kate Bolick's Spinster, which I also read recently, this book gave me a lot to think about (and to discuss with my mother and grandmother). Having finished reading it, I'm now considering whether many guys my age ask the same question I posed to my supervisor at the internship I began last week—namely, "How do you balance your career with your family life?"
This is one of the questions implicitly at the heart of this book, and for many of the contributors, the answer is an implicit ...I don't. I identified a great deal with what many of the contributors said about their wishes to be free to travel, to develop deeply meaningful friendships and relationships, and simply to spend time alone. (For me, alone time is not so much a wish as it is a need. I'd go insane without copious amounts of it.) For nearly all of the writers whose work appeared in this book, these wishes are what shaped their child-free lives. As somebody who's pretty much always assumed she'd have children, that scares me—what if this means I'm not cut out for motherhood? Even scarier: what if that's okay?
A couple of things made me feel better about all this: first, I'm glad that I'm asking myself these questions sooner rather than later. In my (paltry twenty years of) experience, the more time I spend mulling over major choices, the better I feel about them in the end. Second, and somewhat in contradiction with what I just wrote, is an idea that many essays in this book touch upon—which is that, no matter what I choose, child-free or not, married or not, I am sure to accumulate a ton of regrets over the course of my Big Scary Looming Adulthood. Somehow, that's comforting.
This is one of the questions implicitly at the heart of this book, and for many of the contributors, the answer is an implicit ...I don't. I identified a great deal with what many of the contributors said about their wishes to be free to travel, to develop deeply meaningful friendships and relationships, and simply to spend time alone. (For me, alone time is not so much a wish as it is a need. I'd go insane without copious amounts of it.) For nearly all of the writers whose work appeared in this book, these wishes are what shaped their child-free lives. As somebody who's pretty much always assumed she'd have children, that scares me—what if this means I'm not cut out for motherhood? Even scarier: what if that's okay?
A couple of things made me feel better about all this: first, I'm glad that I'm asking myself these questions sooner rather than later. In my (paltry twenty years of) experience, the more time I spend mulling over major choices, the better I feel about them in the end. Second, and somewhat in contradiction with what I just wrote, is an idea that many essays in this book touch upon—which is that, no matter what I choose, child-free or not, married or not, I am sure to accumulate a ton of regrets over the course of my Big Scary Looming Adulthood. Somehow, that's comforting.