I
Family Romance
The decision was made before puberty
at a time when love could still fill my heart
to the brim of imagination
before overflowing down to my groin.
My mother was my bright star.
Best friend. Partner. Soul mate. Love.
She was everything I ever wanted.
But I was not all this to her.
In the back hall, one afternoon, together
we met my father returning from work,
the three of us joyous to as one,
she falling into his arms,
he enfolding her body completely,
me dancing around their joined hips
shouting, "Me too. Me too. Me too."
She laughed, looked down and smiling,
her face alight with bliss, said
simply, "Me first."
From that moment on, I did not want children.
If she would not have mine,
I would have none.
II
His Story / Her Story / Our Story
But the decision was never that simple. Decades later, yet before I married, I did fantasize about having a large family, siring kids, parenting many, fathering children, an adult among babies. Yet I have become a childless man, father of none, an adult among babies not mine.
If I had done so at the same age as my father did when he and my mother had me, I could be a grandfather by now. Whole hordes of children could have already passed through my life, my babies could have grown up and left.
But the decision was never that simple. In the beginning, charity and the advertising industry played its part by indulging my fantasy. By subliminating a dream I seldom if ever shared, never mind explored, I was able to parent myself through this complex process.
As newly married students living in low-income housing on the edge of campus, my wife and I found entertainment wherever we could afford it. We didn’t own a television. Our families lived far away. One of our only forms of daily amusement and exposure to the outside world was reading the mail. And even we got junk mail.
I don’t remember which international children’s charity she represented, but at least once a month we received a letter with Elizabeth Dass’ picture on it. Cute young ethnic waif in need, her face always accompanied a postage paid response envelope waiting to enfold our generous check. At first I laughed over the idea of having any money to send. Then as the months and what seemed like years went by with Elizabeth never aging, I began to think of her as mine. And I started asking aloud, "Where are you, Elizabeth Dass?" Where are the children I once imagined having? Where are the children we were? For each of us, parent or not, was a child once.
Economics, of course, played its part. With no job skills to speak of, little idea what we wanted, living in rural poverty during the post-Viet Nam, post-graduate school baby boom world - all food stamps and student loans - having a child felt like the embodiment of today’s caloric indulgence, a commitment to something much more dependant than our used VW bug, an extravagant extension of our own subverted upwardly mobile middle-class yearnings - all health benefits and retirement plans. No one is ever prepared.
Sure, we had friends with kids. Friends who got off the pill, got married, got pregnant and then decided to keep it, name it, baptize it and raise it. And we’ve kept in touch with a few of these friends over the years. Their eldest is now out of college, perhaps "playing house" as we once did and continue to do.
Politics also influenced us. Not that either was of us was ever very politically active. However, we did once vote for McGovern as we recently voted for Nader, another in a long line of futile yet sincere attempts to undermine the patriarchy on a national as well as a personal level. Of course we didn’t know that this was what we were trying to do at the time. But we did know about patriarchy. We did have fathers.
By the time I hit my late teens my father and I were re-enacting the Cold War on the domestic front. He was Archie Bunker. I was Meathead. A smart Meathead perhaps. A Meathead with good grades, a college scholarship, and a bright future. But Meathead nonetheless. If not for my own crude attempts to articulate a meaningful foreign policy based on the lyrics of Jagger and Richards, then for my less than effective interpersonal communication skills practiced around a dining room table laden with tasty home-made food prepared by both the women and men in my family.
For I was raised in an Italian-American household in an Italian-American neighborhood by the children of Italian-American immigrants. And if this didn’t give me enough reasons to reproduce, I went to a private Catholic high school ruled by Benedictine monks who ironically provided me with my first real glimpse of how to live a full and interesting life without children. I never ran my own private school, but I do work in schools. My children come to me. And I get paid for whatever parenting I do.
But all of this is hindsight. In the early seventies in rural Western Massachusetts, Feminism was sweeping through each undergraduate seminar and syllabus like Jonathan Edwards swept through the same region more than two centuries earlier. We were the converted. And though I wore no bra to burn, I cheered on those who did. For, breast fetish aside, it is clear to me now that Feminism was and is one of the strongest factors shaping both the men and women of my generation. I’m talking Feminism as an outgrowth of the anti-war movement which grew from the civil rights movement, and ushered in the gay rights movement, the ADA, OSHA, and The Endangered Species Act. This was a Feminism which changed the way we thought about sex, power, and people. Before Madonna there was Ms. And before Oprah, there was Gloria [Steinem] and Betty [Friedan] and Simone [de Beauvior]. The personal became political while the political is and was entertainment.
Science played played its part. Birth control pills were thought benign. Sex did not mean children. The winning sperm did not need a name. STD’s were treated with antibiotics. And antibiotics worked.
Of course, it would be disingenuous, though perhaps still popular, to blame it all on the sixties. In many ways, my own upbringing, not to mention my wife’s, greatly influenced our decision not to have children. As an only child I did not have much contact with babies when I was young. And as a boy I was not particularly encouraged to show much interest in those other babies of my youth: cousins, neighbors, friends. I was a big kid, a smart kid, and a shy kid. Physically slow, if not actually awkward, I don’t think the adults in my family every truly trusted me to hold or play with their precious newborns. And I grew up feeling somewhat afraid of babies. They were delicate, unpredictable, inarticulate and valuable. I looked on from distance and wondered what all the fuss was about.
By the time my wife, not only a girl but also the eldest of six, went off to college at seventeen, she had already experienced close to fifteen years of child rearing. Her mother worked. Her father worked or went to school. And she took care of the family. When we married at the age of twenty, her youngest sibling was three. Up until then, she had spent her almost her whole life surrounded by children. And for much of the time, she was responsible for them. To hear her tell it, she did almost everything but conceive, carry and deliver them. And although she could not articulate it at the time, at twenty she was, I believe, ready to live her own life.
Biology also played its part. After our initial enthrallment with the Pill, we used other forms of contraception - diaphragms, condoms - always knowing that all worked only if we used them. Yet sometime during our late twenties/early thirties we used them less and less. Our biological clocks were ticking. Although never actually trying, for many years there was an unspoken agreement between us that if she did get pregnant, we would welcome the addition. But she didn’t. And our curiosity finally got the best of us. I got tested and discovered my sperm count was low. "Not impossible," the doctor informed me, "but highly unlikely."
With modern medicine being as resourceful as it is, there were, of course, procedures we could have taken to increase our chances. But after more than a decade of child-free life, when faced with actually making a decision to at least try, we didn’t. Individually and collectively, we agreed. Having a child of our own was not a priority.
Society played its part. At the time, we were living in San Francisco. My wife sold real estate. I worked as a waiter. Our best friends were mostly gay men and immigrant food service employees. Some had families, but all worked nights. And San Francisco was almost an island, surrounded by cold water, wet air, and unstable tectonic plates. We didn’t know many children. We didn’t have a backyard. Our days off together were Thursdays and Fridays. We went to a lot of movies.
Again, politics played a part. Two of my wife’s clients were foster parents. And we reasoned, "Well, if we’re not going to have kids of our own, let’s at least try to take care of other people’s kids, the ones who need care, the ones already here." We went to the meetings, looked at the forms, but we never filled them out. Or more accurately, I never filled them out. If children had scared me when I was young, parenthood scared me now. And my wife was too smart to take this on alone. She had the experience. I did not. Together, both our lives led us to this.
Not that fear or avoidance have ever been the strongest motivations in my life. Underneath the fear has always lurked desire. If not for a family, then at least for offspring. If not the cats, then at least my poems. Each one a literary heir in its way, each one with a life of its own. Each a child I have sired, each a babe in my arms.
For I am a father of poems, not children. Words, not flesh and blood. Reversing that wonderfully evocative image from the Gospel of John, "And the Word was made flesh," I have given my own flesh to them, my own breath to their making, my days and weeks and years to this ever elusive, ever seductive art. I am a Gepetto of verse.
Although my children are rejected more than accepted, my babies rest silent and still on my desk as I write this - obedient, loyal, and loved despite whatever faults they may have, because of whatever faults they may have. I love them as I imagine my mother loved me when at around the age of five I asked, "Mom, why don’t you have more babies?" And though she admitted always wanting a big family herself, she then said when she first saw my inquisative infant face, she knew I would be enough. "I love you enough for six kids," she said. And I believed her. I always have.
III
Never Better than This
What should I say to the woman in tears
over being rejected for the third time
by the scholarship committee at the community college
where she goes to school and I work?
Should I speak of the years devoted to art,
the hundreds of poems rejected, the
letters beginning, "We regret to inform you...,"
the money wasted on contests?
"I will not," she pouts, "let money stop me.
As long as I am in school, I will
keep the three part-time jobs
I currently must have to live."
Should I speak of working for twenty-two years
while trying to write at home? Shall I
mention the children I have never regretted not having
because I had poetry?
She is young enough to be my daughter.
I am old enough to let this fact pass.
We stand in silence facing a view
into which both our lives shrink.
An egret unfolds its wings.
She admits to feeling somewhat better.
I do not say it may never get better than this.
I do not say it. And neither does she.
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