Catherine Pakaluk’s book, “Hannah’s Children,” is concerned with the phenomenon of religious women who choose to welcome five or more children. There are also non-religious people who choose to have children, some of them many. For religious people, the motives can be cultural and spiritual: Coming from an unbroken chain of people, they are adding children to the progression of a lineage of faith throughout earthly time. Religious people are often anticipating an everlasting future.
What about people without religious motivations for procreating? In some parts of the country, having one child is a countercultural step. What motivates such a decision?
I was struck by the perspective of Eric Hoel, a neuroscientist with a Substack following. In a piece entitled, “Becoming a parent made me a better person,” Hoel notes how rare it is to find a positive story of becoming a mother or father with a strong cultural amplification of stories of people who regret having children. Admittedly, I opted not to transcend the paywall and thus cannot comment on the conclusions he comes to, but his introduction is quite well written.
Hoel suggests that he was “trending toward boredom with life prior to kids.” He elaborates, “Bars started to look the same. Clubs became overly-packed, obtrusive, annoying. Eating out at restaurants blurred together. So many of the same menu items, the same delectable delights; yet even a delight becomes worn over time.” He notes that this is not a feeling he could have identified at the time but only in retrospect.
To the accusation that he could have tried more interesting pursuits, Hoel writes, “Ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets. I had tasted many scotches. I had done drugs at Burning Man. I had sat at a restaurant in Paris and watched the Seine sparkle as I read Hemingway and smoked a cloying cigarette. I could return to the city, but it would be grayer than the first time, for I would not be a young man in my twenties. Paris would be the same, but I would have changed. Over time the world ceased to surprise me. I saw its machinations, and became increasingly unimpressed. I saw my own machinations, and became equally unimpressed. I watched the talking heads on TV repeat themselves. All the human race began to look like a pack of bickering primates. One side wins. Then the other side wins. I’d turn the TV off and it’d be 9PM on a Wednesday. I could go read another novel, but I’d already read a thousand. What was the 1001st novel going to give me that I didn’t get from all the rest?”
Having a child offered an experience of true novelty for him. Hoel writes that after the birth of his son he realized, “I thought becoming jaded was a natural part of growing up. Instead, becoming un-jaded is what happened when I finally did grow up, and it has radically improved my quality of life.”
That is an interesting counterexample to the regretful parents polluting the world with their self-selected misery. But is there more?
For Hoel, there is an endless progression of sunsets, fine wines, novels, and earthly delights. As they cease to satisfy, a child becomes a new person with whom to share the garden of delights, fresh eyes through which to experience newness again. I didn’t pony up to find out what happens in the rest of the essay, so this is getting speculative. Is there another path to renewing our enthusiasm for life?
What children teach us is not just the joy of simplicity and the meaning of the sentimental. They can also remind us of a different way of being. Children revel in doing the same activities repeatedly, reading the same books again and again. Adults cannot recapture that pure delight in repetition, and it would be inadvisable for us to try. We can, however, learn to appreciate children’s ability to do again the same things with increasing delight instead of an oppressive sense of boredom.
I was struck earlier this year in rereading Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy” to discover how childlike Sheldon and his wife, Davy, were. They did not have children, but they continually delighted in enjoying the same pieces of music, the same stories, and the same places again. Through the suspended sense of timelessness in these moments, Sheldon identified what he called an “appetite for eternity,” a sense that we were not ultimately made for time.
Where Hoel writes beautifully about finding purpose and happiness in the birth and growth of a child, he might be missing the most important part. The child and his little experience of the simple delights of the world is not the end. The child is a sign of the infinite and the eternal. We don’t have to reach listlessly for the 1001st novel when we can train ourselves in habits of delight: revisiting music and stories, cultivating spiritual goods that never die.
A world with few or no children is one in which this reality is so much the more obscured, which would be an impoverishment for us all. In closing, let me call to mind the verses of William Wordsworth in “My Heart Leaps Up”:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
“The Child is the father of the Man” suggests this sense of eternity that many of us can grasp more easily in childhood. As adults, if we want to leave the jaded state of disillusionment into which we can fall, we must become again like a little child. Learning how to become like a child for most of us requires nothing less than the genuine article.
