The Joy of the Childless Men
No is my first word when people ask if my partner, Ben, and I are planning to have children. “But,” I will continue, and Ben will steel himself for what he knows is coming, “we’re not ruling out a Punky Brewster situation.” We do not want a baby. But if a sassy preteen with her own unique fashion sense were to be abandoned in a grocery-store parking lot, as on the ’80s NBC sitcom? We’ll take that kid in, teach her some important life lessons—and along the way, maybe learn some, too. If it happens, it happens.
I don’t want kids of my own. For a long time, I assumed the desire to be a father would just blink on after a certain number of years, like a check-engine light on my emotional dashboard. But it never did. Not enough to get the wheels turning on it, to make me spend the fortune surrogacy costs or the time adoption does. Ben and I can’t accidentally have a baby, so the decision would need to be made with a high degree of intention. That intention was never there, and the only thing a kid needs less than an ambivalent father is two of them. So now we’re hovering around either end of 50, the ship long having sailed.
We’re probably never going to have children. And I’m fine with that.
So why did I add a probably to that sentence two sentences ago?
Recently, my friend John said this to me: “What you do on a Sunday is who you are.” He’s right. You’re in church if you’re religious, you’re on your bike in spandex if you’re sporty, you’re at a matinee if you’re old and have a large bag of wrapped candies you’ve been meaning to open. If you have kids, your Sundays are busy: You’re carting them from a birthday party to a soccer practice to an urgent-care facility. You’re putting other people’s needs before your own, and those people frequently vomit on you. You’re a parent. Every day and always.
John doesn’t have kids, either. We had this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, over Bloody Marys, actively avoiding any further reflection on what that made us.
Roughly 15 years ago, my friends around my age started having babies, and I started to see them less and less. When I did, they came with strollers and pacifiers and water wings from a product universe I do not interact with. Over the summer, my high school friend Neil was in town with his wife and three kids, the youngest of whom is my godson, and I had them over to the pool for the afternoon. “Can I pick up anything,” Neil texted, and I replied, “Nope, we’re pretty well stocked up.” And then I texted back, “Actually, can you grab literally anything a child would eat or drink?”
I don’t know that replacing those friends was on my mind, but around that time I did form new friendships with people a decade or so younger. People who could drop everything and go see a band with me on a Tuesday. People whose Sundays were wide open.
Now those guys have started having babies.
Recently at a dinner party, someone asked me if I had kids, and I said the Punky Brewster thing, and I was met with a blank face. “You don’t know who Punky Brewster is,” I said. A moment later, he lit up. “Wait, yes,” he said. “Teenage doctor.” This guy was a couple decades younger than me, too young to know Punky Brewster from Doogie Howser, M.D. He has three kids. I wish him the best of luck.
The conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony said, “The only honorable thing is to get married and have children, lots of children, and raise them, and if you’re not doing that, then what you’re doing is dishonorable.” This is a harsh assessment, and I take comfort in the fact that the approval of a conservative philosopher is probably not on the menu for me. But this message gets across in subtler, more familiar ways. En route to visit one of my nieces and her newborn son with my mother—now a great-grandmother—she enthused, “Oh, isn’t this fun.” And then she continued, “Can you even imagine not having children?” It wasn’t a memory lapse, exactly. It was a statement of our shared humanity: We’re good people, and good people have kids. Right?
In America there has always been a low-key dismissal of people who choose not to be parents. You’re assumed to be feckless, or selfish, or sad. When America’s Sweetheart J. D. Vance griped to Tucker Carlson about the “childless cat ladies” who evidently run America, he then described the childless as “miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
I don’t want to be a father, and I know I don’t want America to be miserable about it. But there is enough of a cultural expectation for a man to be a dad that sometimes I have to stop and think: Wait, am I miserable about it? Am I having fun, or am I just telling myself I am?
I still see my friends who are parents. But the kids from that first wave are getting to be teenagers, and soon they’ll have driver’s licenses and better things to do than hear a bunch of old people yell about Paul Westerberg. I get to see the new wave of kids, too, and discover what kinds of parents my young friends are becoming. There aren’t a ton of role models for the childless in general, and we’re in the first generation of gay men to get old en masse, period. Some days I feel like we’re pioneers, and some days it feels like we’re just lost in the woods.
And then I’ll say, “Hey, Ben, let’s get on a plane and go somewhere this weekend,” and we do. If what you do on a Sunday is who you are, then I am what I always wanted to be, which is whatever I feel like. I hope that doesn’t make you miserable.
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