There Are No Children Here

In Ann Patchett’s new book, “These Precious Days,” there is an essay entitled, “There Are No Children Here.” The essay is a series of 23 vignettes, episodes in her life where the topic of her not having children has come up. Everything written here in quotation marks is part of her essay.

She has heard all the clichés, she can’t really know what love is, she can’t be a writer, she is selfish, etc. She has been asked if she felt she was forced to choose between being a writer and having children. She has been told she should have one even if she doesn’t want one. She has been asked if she regrets it. She doesn’t.

Ann Patchett and I are about the same age. I don’t regret it either. When Patchett was asked by an interviewer, “Chances are you’ll be alone at the end of your life. Don’t you worry about that?” “I bought long-term care insurance,” she responded.

“People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated…Does my choice not to have children mean I judge your choices, your children? That I think my life is in some way superior? It does not. What it means is that I don’t want children.”

Though I have never seriously wavered in my decision (and sometimes I don’t really see it as a decision, more as something that just didn’t happen, but that would have happened had I really wanted it to), I have wondered why I feel this way. Perhaps the key is here:

“The uncertainty, the complete lack of autonomy or control, leaving places you never wanted to leave to go to places you never wanted to go, the fear, the bullying, the helplessness, the awkwardness, the disappointments and shame, the betrayal by your own body. To have a child required the willful forgetting of what childhood was actually like; it required you to turn away from the very real chance that you would do to the person you loved most in the world the exact same thing that was done to you. No. No, thank you.”

I think this essay helped me understand the decisions I have made. And also, I need to remember to get long-term care insurance or an appropriate alternative.