This morning my husband told me he’d woken in the night with a terrible dread: with his death comes the end of his family name. I could relate, I said. With my death comes the end of thousands of pages of writing. There are no children to potentially read and be amused by, horrified at or indifferent to, my carefully crafted chronicles about absolutely everything, including what I ate, hour by hour, from age 19 to age 26, specifically, my thoughts about bread; how I acquired (and lost) each of my dogs; and my evolving thoughts about death (in a nutshell, I was against it and still am).
After a moment of shared sadness, I reflected on the possibility that people don’t have children solely out of a desire to perpetuate the family name or to bear witness to their parents’ journey from birth to banality via written documents and unwanted dinner monologues. Perhaps, I mused, they have children out of an unselfish desire to steward them through the world.
“After all, this isn’t the prairie days when people had children so they could help harvest the crops,” I said. “That would be like you having a child to help you navigate Photoshop.”
At which point having a child actually seemed like it would have been useful.
My husband and I are no strangers to late-night dread attacks. His usually take the form of being thrust into sudden, unforeseen poverty. In his ill-timed fantasies, we become paupers for reasons that are never clear, but are irreversible.