The Nurture Assumption

A Woman Borrow A Baby To Test Her Theory That Some People Don't Want To Have Children, The Way Others Don't Want To Hear Michael Bolton

By Jennifer Kahn
March 1999

I have developed an affinity for this comparison because it is one that APs (Avid Procreators) seem to understand best. That APs often don't understand is evident in their questions, which are typically "Never?" and "Why not?" The latter is an odd question, I think -- like asking someone why she doesn't like peas or flowered wallpaper or the music of Michael Bolton. There are complex answers to be given, but the most immediate response is a visceral one: It's just not appealing.

A friend has observed that the decision to bear children is unusual in that it is an intimate topic about which everybody feels free to opine. Parents of adult children (though not mine) can be positively proselytizing about the virtues of grandchildren. Acquaintances send photos (always the same -- the "angelic" baby asleep or else smiling vacuously, eyes crossed as though medicated) and ask not so subtly when they can expect word of your own foray into fecundity. At dinner parties, women one has only just met rush to share their stories: the doubts and misgivings, the putting on hold of the career, the financial worries and the body-change vanity, the difficulties of raising a child in an Increasingly Dangerous World -- always ending with the happy assessment that the "rewards made it all worthwhile" -- all to better direct the wayward down the road to multiplication.

One might expect such propaganda to persist in more traditional parts of the country, but the pro-procreative view pervades even the quintessentially liberal city where I live. Here, I've found, one can be openly gay, socialist, Buddhist, Scientologist, naturist or anarchist without incurring looks of either disapproval or consternation, and without being subject to the tacit assumption that it's "just a phase." Strangely, though, these are the very responses that greet the admission that one does not intend to have children. There is a moment of disbelief, during which the AP's mouth actually falls open, followed by an almost visible dredging of possible explanations. "She just means not yet," the AP concludes first, relieved. Assured that this is not the case, the perplexed pro-natalist is then forced to consider a less pleasant possibility: that of physical defect. As the mind races over the possibilities -- Hodgkin's disease? scarred ovaries? insanity in the family? -- the boggle morphs gradually into a softer, more pitying expression. The idea that a person simply may not want children, the way some men do not want to have sex with other men, or the way some women do not like flowered wallpaper, rarely occurs. Hence the horse.

"If someone suggested that you buy a horse," this simple-minded comparison begins, "and told you that you'd have to feed it and brush it and exercise it every day (thereby cramping your schedule radically and forcing you to miss out on a good number of other things that you might like to do), have to spend nights sleeping on the stall floor when the horse gets sick, pay for vets and farriers and blankets and bridles (which aren't cheap), and moreover have to continue to live this way for roughly the next 20 years -- you might be reluctant."

Granted, there are good things about horses. Horses can be ridden and petted. One can feed them treats, braid their manes and buy them particularly snuggly sheepskin blankets. Moreover, much as parents take pleasure in a wide variety of otherwise unappealing tasks -- changing diapers, feeding, bathing, dressing -- so horse people enjoy grooming, polishing tack, cleaning hooves and forking hay. The difference being that while there's a lot to dislike about both these endeavors, if you're not a "horse person" you will decide very quickly that the so-called advantages of equine parenting are outweighed rather dramatically by the constraints put on your otherwise carefree life. If you are not a "child person," however, chances are that you will decide nothing quickly, but rather will obsess, doubt your femininity or your sanity, reconsider, worry, feel bad and, often as not, decide just to go along with the wishes of your more reproductively inclined mate.

Having trotted out this particular comparison more than once, I know that it typically raises objections. "Tut tut!" one of these goes. "Owning a horse is not the same thing as raising a child. A child grows, questions, argues, learns and ultimately becomes a functioning (with luck), moral, intelligent (again, with luck) adult." This is true. Children are more rewarding than horses, assuming you find children rewarding at all. If you don't, I venture that the two are not so dissimilar.

Today, I am a mother. I have secured a baby on loan, and I have even been granted permission to take it out of the house. It is a pretty child, 5 months old, with downy blond hair and brown eyes. We have spent the first part of the hour indoors, eating lunch (a jar of apple-plum purie consumed via a small plastic spoon) and lolling about on the floor amid toys. Baby cannot yet crawl and so tries to drag itself forward commando-style, stomach down and legs bent. After some minutes of this, it gets frustrated and begins to cry, and then one must turn it over and place a pacifier (or, in this case, the nipple-shaped beak of a small rubber duck) in its mouth. This continues for some time and, as it is not exactly absorbing, gives me ample opportunity to observe Baby.

Among the things I note: Baby is soft. Its stomach is soft, its legs are soft, the bottoms of its as yet unwalked-on feet are soft, even its skull is soft. Although I can't squeeze as hard as one would in the interest of science, I conclude that the faintly veined cranium has the consistency of an unripe grapefruit: firm, fleshy, pliable.

Note No. 2: Baby drools copiously, even alarmingly. This is saliva on a Rio Grande scale, a constant overflowing of the gums. Although I know babies drool, I worry that they are not supposed to drool quite so much and that perhaps Baby, lying on its stomach and wriggling cutely, is in fact suffocating or, more accurately, drowning. I sit Baby up and put the duck in its mouth, but the drool just keeps coming.

Note No. 3: Baby's motor skills are poor, though not as poor as you might think, and seem to work perfectly when moving objects from fist to mouth. Leaves, paper towels, cat fur, sand, everything moves briskly in the direction of the digestive tract. I come to believe that if Baby cannot yet walk, it is only because all neural function has been concentrated on perfecting this single motion of consumption.

This last becomes most obvious at the park, where I have chosen to take Baby for a change of scenery. The park is an unfamiliar place. There are mothers galore and nannies, all seated on benches around the edge of a circular sand pit. In the pit are the children, toddlers mostly, who, like Baby, have round, dark eyes that are too large for their heads, which in turn are too large for their bodies. Unstable on their feet, these over-craniated creatures lurch heedlessly from swings to slide to fireman's pole, dig voraciously in the sand and the dirt, run, fall, shriek, throw their plastic shovels and occasionally fall asleep under the swings.

Mothers and nannies alike watch this spectacle unperturbed. I fret. Baby is not mine, after all, and I worry about returning it scratched or dented in a way that will upset the original owner. Nor is this an idle concern. Baby keeps trying to eat the plastic candy wrappers that other children have left scattered on the grass, and more than once I have to pry such material out from between its well-lubricated gums. And then there's the weather. It's hot in the park but also windy, and I worry that Baby is either overheated or chilled. There is an ominous passage in Mark Twain's autobiography, in which he confesses to having let the blankets blow off his infant daughter during a sleigh ride. Although it's unclear whether his daughter's subsequent death from pneumonia was the result of the blankets slipping, the account is a grim reminder. I bundle up Baby but good anytime the wind picks up.

Oh dear. I see now that the preceding description is all very cute, and I suspect that I have begun to sound like one of those women who protests too much: the ones who explain (wearing a suitably pained expression) that they just don't think they could be a good enough mother. It is, embarrassingly enough, an excuse that I've hidden behind before. "There are enough bad parents out there already," I would say woefully to my AP friends, who would cluck in sympathetic agreement. It was a very neat way of turning the tables. Women who say they don't want children are invariably perceived as somewhat selfish, or at least immature. By confessing to the other extreme -- admitting how very seriously indeed I took the responsibility of raising a child -- I put myself, if not on the moral high ground, at least on a legitimate footing. How can a woman be criticized for caring too much about her adequacy as a mother -- even if, ironically, that prevents her from having a child at all?