Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed - Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

Meghan Daum

Picador

2015

288 páginas

9h 36m

ISBN-13: 9781250052933

One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis," and whether modern women could figure out a way to way to have it all-a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children-before their biological clock stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Frases que destaquei:

"mother “hates the infant for the child’s ruthless use of her." "the child can become himself only as the parent is defeated" "it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold." "I know there are unparalleled joys in having children— the deep love for another creature; the connection to a greater human purpose. But then there are the day-to-day realities. Let’s face it: children’s intellectual capacities and conversational acumen are not their best features. Boredom and intellectual atrophy are the normal conditions of daily life for the child-raising classes" "Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport" "Here we were, just emerged from the tedious constraints of a seemingly endless education, financially independent for the first time, tasting our liberties at last, and the first thing they decided to do was to enter the prison of child rearing, with all its boring routines and dreadful responsibilities." "I'm an atheist. I’m a solipsist. As far as I’m concerned, while I know intellectually that the world and its inhabitants will continue after my death, it has no real meaning for me. I am terrified of and obsessed with my own extinction, and what happens next is of little interest to me. I certainly don’t feel I owe the future anything, and that includes my genes and my offspring. I feel absolutely no sense of responsibility for the propagation of the human race. There are far too many human beings in the world as it is. I am happy to leave that task to someone else." "I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading manywomen who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity" "At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child." "To forgo motherhood was the right thing todo. But whether it was a choice I made or one that was made for me is perhaps another question" "I don’t believe I can do the things I want to do in life and also be a parent to kids, nor am I willing to find out." "Some might call my trepidation at the idea of motherhood “selfishness”—I would call it “agency”—but those people are probably either (1) dudes or (2) self-satisfied professional parents, and I’m not sure I care enough about their opinions" "There’s a near-universal assumption that women who don’t want to have children fundamentally dislike children, but that’s often not the case. I think kids are great; they’re curious about the world in a way that reminds me to be interested and open" "I decided to take the love I’d have for a child and give it to myself instead" "Every day, I try to be my own parent—the parent I never had. Every day, I learn new ways to treat myself with compassion and patience." "Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead." "What if, given the option, I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies?" "is it necessarily a bad thing when a woman gets to be all about herself?" "Nonmotherhood is forever. Making a conscious choice about something so fundamental, and so intertwined with one’s own past, with society’s expectations, and with notions of femininity and the purpose of life, takes every ounce of will you have;" "So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that they just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear.)" "The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win." "I decided to live what was left of my life in my own extreme, lop sided way and spare my child my worries and neuroses" "Virginia Woolf’s suicide note read in part: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” Every time I read that note, I’m glad that Woolf didn’t have children. (She was, like me, a doting aunt.) But I’m also relieved that I’ve never heard voices. I like to think that I have never crossed from pain to madness, though there have been times when I felt like I was losing my mind—losing its clarity and focus. And in my darkest depression, there were days—months, actually—when life seemed so dire that I understood exactly what Woolf meant when she wrote, “I can’t fight anymore.” "I’d be at risk for postpartum depression. Suicide is the leading cause of death in new mothers. I’d rather not take that chance." "I’ll venture to suggest that we childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove to ourselves a new every day that extinction does not negate meaning."