Do You Want To Have Kids?
The question that changed my life
Amid infinite moments of nonbeing that just sweep by unnoticed, there will be a handful that is powerful enough to alter the course of life, leaving an impact deep enough to cause tectonic shifts.
I had one when Kevin* asked me, “Do you have kids?” (*name changed to protect privacy)
“No,” I replied.
“Are you married?”
“Yes”
I was new in the US and wasn’t yet culturally integrated. I had just started my first job in which Kevin was my colleague. The order of questions had shaken me a bit. Were people that casual about having kids before marriage?
I learned months later how he was vehemently opposed to the institution of marriage, and years later learned how he got married himself. But back then, he was unmarried and was brought up by a single mom.
Even more than that, his next question kept me spinning for days and months that followed.
“Do you want to have kids?”
No one had asked me that question before. Was that even a choice?
Sabarish and I got married when I was 24.
In the culture I had grown up, women got married before they were 25. Anything older seemed to make them stale goods. They had a kid within the next two years and another within the next four. Any lapse in any of these protocols invited nosy questions from aunties.
There were rarely questions on whether the guy had problems, at least not one I’m aware of. Perhaps none could tolerate questioning anyone’s masculinity. They either asked if the couple had problems, or if the woman had some. Isn’t she pregnant yet? Does she have any problems? Perhaps PCOS? Or did she check her Thyroid? Is she undergoing any treatment?
People I knew, never paused to consider if they wanted kids.
Married at the ripe age of 24, we were on track to meet all the milestones set by the nosy aunties. When Sabarish & I got married, we didn’t quite explicitly ask if either of us wanted kids. But kids were in our discussions.
Since Indira Gandhi’s family planning campaign of the 1970s — Hum do, Hamare do (we’re two, we’ll have two) — most people we knew had two kids in their household. Each of us had a sibling. Sabarish’s brother had two kids. All of my close friends had two. And our inexplicit discussions also involved two kids.
So when Kevin asked me that question, it unrolled a spinning top that never stopped. I thought about it for a couple of days. I did find kids cute, but so did I find red pandas. That didn’t mean I wanted one with me permanently.
“Do you want to have kids?” I passed Kevin’s question to Sabarish a couple of days later.
His eyes lit up skeptically, “Why do you ask? Don’t you want one?”
“I’ve been wondering. I don’t know”
“I thought you wanted one. I’m not too keen on kids.”
The more we thought about it, the more we realized neither of us wanted one emotionally. We didn’t have an inherent urge for parenting. But what about rationally, pragmatically, futuristically?
In a communalistic India, kids were one’s social security. Kids took care of their parents in their old age, government offered no such support. There was no old age pension or reliable health insurance. Kids filled those gaps. And people made kids on autopilot.
Even when children became employed adults, they commonly continued staying with their parents. Instead of focusing on staying fit or becoming independent, people spent their money and energy on making their kids successful. Their identity revolved solely around parenting.
I don’t mean to say every act of procreation was a premeditated futuristic planning. But it was ingrained in the culture.
The few childless couples I knew seemed to treat themselves, and society was more than happy to echo their self-inflicted misery, as less than complete; as if their lives were purposeless. They moved heaven and earth to have one.
But without knowing a single childfree couple, I couldn’t even visualize what a life in which you chose not to have kids would look like.
Well-meaning friends of our age advised how my ‘maternal hormones’ would kick in once I hit 30, after which all I would want would be kids. Monica in FRIENDS came to mind. But here I am, at 36, still solidly unmaternal.
Wise old farts reminded us how my biological clock was ticking, and how it would be too late to change our minds. So their advice was to just have a kid, as a contingency plan. But if I still didn’t want one after I had the kid, I couldn’t stuff it back into the oven, could I?
Then there were the crazy-in-betweens with their advice — Every kid is a unique combination of its parents’ genes and deserves to be born. To this loonytown-talk, I didn’t even want to offer a response.
Perhaps all of them were right. I was growing older and wouldn’t be able to bear a child afterward. We wouldn’t have someone to take care of us when we were older. But life didn’t have a playbook and it made no sense to bear a child in anticipation of an inexistent desire.
After being around a sea of humanity in India, I was disgusted with the mindless spawning. There are 153 million orphans on earth. Wouldn’t it be better to adopt one if we desired a kid later, I asked.
If anything, future generations deserve to be left on a livable planet, which means we have to limit our carbon footprint. With as much as 2 tonnes in India or 14.2 tonnes in the US of per capita CO2 emissions, an additional human being only burnt the planet a little more.
However, all my statistical analyses on population and emissions only indicated that I wasn’t at all emotionally invested in parenting. I was looking for data to justify my decision. But even without all that, we both knew we didn’t want one. The certainty always popped out when my period was delayed by a few days.
Yet, we asked each other every few years, “Do you want to have kids?” We were prepared to accommodate the other’s desire if there was one. It’s been 11 years since Kevin asked me that question, changing our lives irreversibly. I’m thankful for the question, and for making me realize that it’s a choice. Every procreation has to be a mindful act.
We are bringing a new human being into this world; someone who could become an Abraham Lincoln or an Adolf Hitler. Unless we can spend time and energy unconditionally on that kid, why bring them into this world?
The kid isn’t one’s social security. The kid isn’t the savior for one’s failed ambitions. But when we bring a kid into this world, we bear an enormous responsibility to make them a civilized and respectful human being worthy of this world.
There’s certainly an evolutionary aspect to it. We are all wired to procreate and survive as a species. Our parental urges could be linked to it. However, we are also evolutionarily drawn to sugar. But we urge people to eat right and fight the cravings. So what makes reproductive urges any different? If anything, shouldn't it require more caution?
My uterus must have appeared a dried apricot to the nosy aunties when I turned 30 without a child on my hip. People no longer ask me often enough to explain why I’m childless. But when they do, I sometimes ask — why did you choose to have a child? Why do we take such a decision so lightly?
With confidence bordering on arrogance, I know Sabarish and I would have been great parents. Although, I think he would be a better mother than I with his infinite patience. As my best friend constantly chides me, I relinquished my responsibility to make the world a better place by raising an informed human being. But the world already has 8 billion humans, informed or otherwise. I don’t need to pile onto our litter.
However, what remains to be seen is how emotionally starved and needy we’d be when we are an old and frail couple. I can’t be sure there won’t be regrets. But as Dalai Lama says, “It’s still there. But even though that feeling of regret is still there, it isn’t associated with a feeling of heaviness or a quality of pulling me back.”
As long as I don’t let it pull me back, I’ll be fine. Life doesn’t have a playbook, and we just deal with it one step at a time.
A decade later, I think back on my conversation with Kevin. He wasn’t even my friend. I worked with him for less than a year. Yet, I’ve felt he entered my life just to ask that important question that altered the course of it.
I’m grateful that his gentle unconscious nudge made me realize that having a child is a choice that must not be taken lightly. Do you want to have kids?
