Consolations in Unplanned Non-parenthood

Writing this post at the request of a reader, I would like to being by saying that childlessness is a terrible form of poverty, and the anti-child attitude of contemporary western societies is a kind of madness. I watch the birthrate of Italians, for example, plunge ever downward, its death rate shoot ever upward, and grieve for a merry,  once famously family-minded, Catholic people.

It is a terrible irony to be a married social conservative without any children of her own. When I was an undergrad, I remember a cynical pal sneering at a married Catholic professorial couple. "So why don't they have children?" he said with a knowing smirk.

"They married late," snapped their loyal student, and the cynic shut up.

As far as I know, that's our reason: we married late. However, young couples too sometimes have trouble conceiving, for reasons known (paralysis, for example) and unknown. The young, however, have more options in terms of becoming parents: they can accumulate money so that they can pay the exorbitant fees required to adopt a baby before they turn 40, for example. (Many countries do not allow people over 40 to adopt infants, presumably for the same reason Nature shuts down women's ability to have babies about then.) Therefore, I would advise any young couple would would like to adopt a baby to start planning NOW.

Meanwhile, what are the consolations of unplanned non-parenthood for a traditional Catholic couple?   This is a tough question, but I have slept on it and come up with a list.

Before I begin, however, promise you will NOT ask me if I have heard of this or that ground-breaking natural fertility treatment. I am too old. It will not work. I am not St. Elizabeth.

FAITHFULNESS TO GOD: The major temptation contemporary society holds out to the single woman who terribly wants children is to "just go out to a bar and get pregnant." This advice was given to me when I was in my early thirties. I gently told the woman that I was a theology student minoring in Christian Ethics, so I didn't feel I could do that.

The major temptation contemporary society holds out to married couples is In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), which is not actually the most effective fertility treatment ever devised, but that is what UK doctors offer. Indeed, UK doctors offered it to me again and again until I accused one of anti-Catholic sectarianism. My, was she aggrieved. A kinder doctor told me that he hadn't known the Catholic religion forbade IVF.

So the bright side of the horror that is In Vitro Frankenstein is that fertility-challenged couples can now make the virtuous choice of saying no. Before IVF, we were all just unlucky.

CHILDREN DON'T SUFFER WHEN YOU DO: So last March my husband was suddenly diagnosed with an incredibly rare brain tumour and acute water-on-the-brain. He was hospitalised within fifteen minutes of receiving the Last Rites. He survived the operation, but spent the next seven months getting inexplicably sicker. We both suffered a lot--but nobody suffered the way children suffer when one of their parents is terribly sick and might die.

"This is why God didn't send us kids," I occasionally thought.

Of our own, I meant. God sends us other people's children with regular frequency. The night of B.A.'s incredibly dangerous, make-or-break, fifth operation, Polish Pretend Daughter and French Pretend Son-in-Law were living with me. If they hadn't been, that would have been me alone beside the telephone waiting to hear if B.A. was (A) Dead, (B) Irreparably Brain Damaged, or (C) Alive But We Won't Know Anything for 24 Hours.

OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN: Just because children feel a need to win some independence from their own parents, doesn't mean they don't still need parents occasionally. I'm not even thinking of Little League, Guides, Scouts, and all the children who rely on the para-parenthood of volunteer adults. I'm thinking of university students in housing crises, young (and not so young) foreign brides crying with homesickness, and beautiful young things who might get into trouble if nobody clears their throat (or gets drunk) and says the difficult truth.

Sometimes if you pray for children you will find yourself called upon to parent Other People's Children. And this is a great consolation because, no matter how much contemporary theologians kick around marriage, its primary purpose is to turn self-centred adults into loving mothers and fathers.

Also, of course, I am an Aunt. There is great dignity and honour in being an Aunt. I am also the Godmother of three, including an Italian Canadian, which makes this often underplayed role incredibly iconic and awesome.

ONE'S SPOUSE: Fortunately for me, Benedict Ambrose is a hospitable chap who very much likes young people. If it weren't for the cut-throat politics, he would have made an excellent career as a university lecturer. Therefore, when I ask if this suddenly homeless Pole or that travelling Canadian can stay for a few days, he gives permission. Meanwhile, he was never so drawn to the idea of being a biological father that he feels particularly oppressed by childlessness. He is reasonably sad that I am sad, but that seems to be it. He thinks that he doesn't care so much because he is a man.


FREEDOM TO BE POOR: We are buying the cheapest two-bedroom flat we could find in a poorer neighbourhood instead of a one-bedroom flat in the New Town because we both love offering hospitality. That said, we live a rather cash-strapped lifestyle (soon to become even more cash-strapped, thanks to Mr Mortgage). This is because B.A. works for a Historical House charity, and I am a writer with socially conservative views.  We both love historical houses, and I love writing. However, if we had had children, our cash-strappedness might not have been fair to them. I would be terrified that my public social conservativism would preclude my ever being gainfully employed in Scotland, which would mean my children would not grow up with the security with which I grew up with.

That said, I know families with eight children who live on the father's salary while the mother homeschools and performs miracles of household economics. But that brings me to the final, and possibly biggest consolation.

FREEDOM FROM WORRY: All (ALL) my female friends with children worry about them constantly. Constantly. The social conservatives primarily worry that their children will be eaten up and spat out by the innocence-hating world, that they will lose their Christian faith, that they will harm themselves, or allow themselves to be harmed, in all kinds of horrible ways. This is on top of worries about illness, injuries, disappearances, kidnappers, child rapists, child murderers and the state sexual education curriculum.

I don't have that worry. What I do have is the childhood memory of my father's widowed mother crying at Mass because her other child, my only uncle, had recently died.

Don't get me wrong. I cried over poor, never-existed-except-in-my-dreams Baby McLean. I'm not denying my very real pain in saying good-bye to a baby who never was and never will be. But I suspect that is not as bad as suddenly losing a real, born, known child. That is unlikely ever to happen to us. We are free from that fear.