.png)
15 hours ago
4
If you feel there are not enough people in your life making bizarre pronouncements on your character, might I suggest deciding to be childless. At the age of 34, and having felt for my entire adult life that I do not want to procreate, I have heard most of them, from the infuriatingly condescending – “don’t worry, you will one day!” – to the vaguely hostile – “so you don’t like children?”
My own family have mostly resigned themselves to the knowledge that I have self-selected to be the future strange uncle, who plays a vital role in my niece and nephew’s lives by recommending cool records during adolescence (can’t wait to force a teenager to listen to Metal Machine Music in full.) But a dizzying number of people ask me about my plans for children, from strangers to friends. Making my decision to be childless caused me no stress. But it does, for some reason, cause stress to others.
A way of responding to this stress in those around me was given to me recently, in the form of the low-hanging branch of a tree, over which noisy miners kept flurrying. I was up the coast with my partner, and we would spend much of our time there stretched out on a blanket in the yard, reading. It was while we reclined in the sun that we noticed an unusual amount of bird activity taking place above us. There, worryingly far out on the branch, sat a bird’s nest.
Care must be taken not to disturb Australia’s native birdlife, particularly during high stress periods such as mating and hatching season. But from a naturally occurring high point, we could see that there were three eggs nestled together at the bottom of the collection of twigs. For much of the day, the mother sat on her eggs, while her host of suitors came to check in on the little ones.
We are novice birdwatchers – or we were, before our bird children came into our lives. Parenthood is a beautiful, brutal entrance into a new way of living, slicing open the way things were, ushering in the way things are, and requiring much research and study. We read articles, so that we might learn what to expect, and discovered a great deal about the strange, endearingly gossipy world of the miner (everyone’s always twittering about someone else behind their back).
We also came to realise that life for our children would not be easy. Noisy miner bird packs only allow one female – if any of our three offspring were girls, they would be driven out of comfort, forced to make a life for themselves. And who knew if they would survive to hatching, let alone past the juvenile stage?
But part of a parent’s job is letting go. And so we let go. We turned away from expectation, and we embraced the terrible, wonderful mystery of it all, checking each day, and sometimes hourly, how they were going. From afar. Which is something that all parents must do eventually, too – take their distance.
I am happy to report that our children are hatched and alive. My partner and I have returned to our jobs in Sydney, so are not as close to the three little ones as we’d like to be. But we have people checking on them, and reporting back to us. It takes a village, after all.
To a certain kind of person, forgoing biological children can be seen as a complicated spurning of life itself. Kind people ask me whether I might feel regret, missing out on what it means to raise a creature. Rude people ask me if there’s something wrong with me – never outright, but in that unspoken manner which will be familiar to the childless, searching to see if I am fundamentally cruel or harsh.
And always that question, when you tell someone you don’t want kids: why? Before this last holiday, I never really knew how to answer. But now I understand. The life of the childless can be characterised as fundamentally missing something – in particular, missing the joys of protecting, guiding. But not having children does not mean living in a world entirely without children, or without the act of shepherding.
The beauty of our lives – all of our lives, whether we have children or not – is that they are filled with so many unplanned opportunities to exhibit care. The relentless barrage of requests to nourish and sustain can even be exhausting. But I think it’s what we were put here to do. I know now that even without a biological brood, my life will be filled with small, tender things that ask for my help. I also know that I will gain so very much each time I will say, “yes, I will help you”. The little ones hanging on a nest in a tree, suspended over empty space, taught me that: what living looks like. As children are wont to do.
