A case for reproductive futurism

bright sun through trees

Dear friend,

The entrance to our house has a window that faces into the living room, and that’s where I first spot the baby each night when I come home from work. Sometimes he’s sitting in his little recliner chair, other times he’s perched on the couch with J or playing with a toy on his mat. At 6 months, the baby is beginning to learn how to sit on his own, but is prone to wobbling over like a bobblehead. “Look who’s home!” J exclaims. And the baby will smile and gurgle, looking like the baby sun from the Teletubbies, and I’ll pick him up and dance around the living room. It’s an evening ritual, like most of parenthood, whose pleasures are impossible to explain to the uninitiated.

At 27, I’m the first of my friends to have a baby. In San Francisco, having a baby in your twenties is as unthinkable as being a teen mom is elsewhere in the country. Friends in their thirties, still childless, were baffled as to how J and I knew we were ready for the obligations: lack of sleep, the physical pain of childbirth, restricted mobility for the next 18 years, putting a tiny screaming thing’s needs ahead of your own. No more spontaneous jetsetting to Barcelona, no more staying out all night with your friends, no more absolute freedom. All of these are undoubtedly costs. On the weekend, while friends saunter off to London for a Michelin-star meal, I take the baby in his stroller to Golden Gate Park. In the modern age, having a baby marks an end to your adventures. It is the place the hero goes when his story is over.

How then best to explain why I did it? When I was younger, I never understood why the hero began his journey with the call of adventure, but somehow, ended the journey with a homecoming as a changed man. I never wanted to come home to a stale and boring life in the suburbs, a routine child-centered existence, the concept of “early to bed and early to rise.” In the Breakfast Club, the goth teen whispers, “When you grow up, your heart dies,” and until recently, I had never believed anything more fervently. “Family-friendly” read like a death sentence. All I wanted at that age was to hear the bugle horn that would beckon me into adventure. One day, I resolved, I would grow up and see the world and never come back.

So I did. I met strangers. I racked up frequent flyer miles. I went to far-flung locales. I ate supposedly fancy food. What then? After you’ve met all the people there are to meet, after you’ve eaten all the things there are to eat, after you’ve played in all the places there are to play? I don’t think for the record, that I’ve met all the people there are to meet, but I began to recognize archetypes: beautiful women and hungry bachelors and conniving eunuchs and lonely old men. Restaurant food began to taste greasy to me. At some point, you hit diminishing marginal returns on the supposedly fun things you get to do as an adult. Anything else you could do to prolong your adventure would be like attending yet another year of high school. After you’ve seen the world, the only place left to go is home — to help someone else do it again.

Isn’t that the irony? That after you have the the thing you want, you are no longer the person who wanted it. After you become an adult who can eat candy whenever he wants you find yourself no longer the kid who so craved sweets. The hero returns home because he is no longer the person he was when he departed. Mary Harrington describes three such transformations for the female heroine: from maiden to mother to matriarch. The postpartum nanny we hired after the baby was born exclusively referred to each member of the family in relation to the baby: “grandma” for my mother, “baby” for the baby, and “mama” for me. At first, this threw me for a loop — the only person “mama” could be was my mother — but eventually, I started to answer to my new moniker. It was as if we had all graduated and attained new titles: from gift-getter to gift-giver, from baby to mama, from maiden to mother to matriarch. It is possible to go from maiden to matriarch without having a baby, I suppose. Just as it is possible to grow up without being responsible for someone else, as Jordan Peterson says. But it is very hard.

I have one more defense of parenthood to offer, which is not universal, but it can be one of the best parts if you do it right. I had always heard that women should marry the person they want their son to grow up and be, and I took that advice very much to heart when I married J. I used to think it was theoretical. Only when the baby was born, did I understand the advice to be literal. The baby is very literally a cross between me and J: my forehead and his dimples. For divorced parents, I can see why the pesky reality of genetic inheritance would be a curse (“Ugh, you’re just like your father!”). For the happy couple, I find it to be a miracle: that our choices of whom to love have contributed for millennia to the collective gene pool of our species. If you do this right, it can be a beautiful thing: to take the person you love the most in the world and to make more of them.

In this way, any goodness we practice to our children can be a way to magnify our love — for our spouses and for ourselves. J never had a happy two-parent household; his parents were always fighting. My childhood was defined by scarcity: going into the toy store and looking longingly at all the shiny plastic boxes on the shelves. And now, we get a chance to make things right. The baby is lucky in those ways: that he will have two parents who love him and each other, a beautiful, spacious house to grow up in, and he’ll never have to leave a toy store empty-handed for want of money. Someday, he’ll encounter his own trials and tribulations; the world remains a relentlessly difficult place. But I’m excited for him, because I experienced such joy in it that he still has to look forward to. And he has something more than I did: he has me to pave his way.

Anti-natalists call this idea “reproductive futurism” — the twofold delusion that there is a Future we can and should make better, and that the Child is its emblem. They say it’s deranged to birth a child into a dying world. Perhaps the two ideas go hand-in-hand: now that I have the baby, I can no longer accept that the world is dying. I now have to believe — and fervently do believe — that there is a Future we must work towards, because now this Future wears the face of my baby.

Maybe that’s what you’ll really find when the hero returns home: that what looks like a homecoming is really another call of adventure, this time to be braver and stronger, as David von Drehle puts it, “as extraordinary as in their innocence your youngsters think you to be.” I feel that this call so keenly, especially at work: to be more focused, to be more disciplined, to think of struggle as a war to be won for my family rather than a prize to be won for myself. Would I say I’m ready? No, of course not. When has anyone been ready for the call of adventure? Nevertheless, when the bugle horn sounds, you answer.

Your friend,
Eva