I jokingly tell students all the time: “Don’t get married; don’t have babies.” I don’t really mean it quite so starkly (mostly), but I do mean, because I’m saying this to young writers, don’t be in a hurry to do it. In the place where I work, getting married within months of graduation (or—yikes—before) is not uncommon.
I don’t expect anyone to follow my advice any better than I’ve followed advice: we cannot help loving the things we love, and we go to what nourishes, or even saves us. But children? Adam Gopnik in this essay for the BBC tries to figure out why we love our children and sacrifice so much for them for so little in return.
What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon – if we live long enough – of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.
He follows various possibilities—free labor, selfish genes, cultural trends—but ends up somewhere in the middle of infinity’s mystery.
The parental emotion is as simple as a learning to count and as strange as discovering that the series of numbers, the counting, never ends. Our children seem, at least, to travel for light years. We think their suitcases contain the cosmos. Though our story is ending, their story, we choose to think – we can’t think otherwise – will go on forever.
I saw Billy Collins at Kent State University recently, where he read this poem which touches upon this very assymetry, but from the child’s perspective. I reasoned that he earns about $500 for every poem read.