By Bowen Dwelle
My friend Meredith always had a knack for finding places where rent was optional. I was on one of my early trips to New York City, summer of ’97 I think, staying with her and another friend from college in a fourth-floor walk-up on Second Avenue near Eleventh—and the owner had just disappeared. Not quite a squat, like the occupied warehouses that I knew of in San Francisco and also in Italy—andiamo al centro sociale!—but nobody was paying, and when it rained it came in right through the roof. I have a photo of the three of us on a sunny spring day there in the East Village—my buddy Mark has got on a pair of Doc Martens and a T-shirt from the Beastie Boys’ first tour, and, sorry to say, I’m wearing my goofy West Coast Teva sandals on the streets of NYC.
Mark is a bit ahead of us walking up the avenue. Meredith, sweet friend that she was, turns and asks me, “So what happened with Samantha, or Kristen, or was it Gretchen, or—which one did you just break up with?” I watch someone roll through the intersection on a bicycle, hands off the bars, just cruising, and then turn back to her. Meredith had long, wavy, red-blonde hair and green eyes, cutoff jeans, and the old Pentax SLR that she carried with her everywhere those days, loaded with black-and-white. She might have been the first woman in my life who was a sister from the start. “You know how it goes with me,” I said, “but I’ll tell you right now, I’m gonna be married with kids by the time I’m thirty.” She gave me deadpan Detroit—“Really, Bobo?” and I just said, “Yes”—feeling convinced enough myself, in the moment. She smiled back at me and said, “I can see that. I can see that happening,” and I think she was doing her best to conjure it up for me as we carried on, north toward Union Square.
We were both the same age, but to me she had a maturity that I longed for, and I looked up to her like an older sibling. In telling her that I would soon be married with children, I was the one trying to cast a bit of a spell. Becoming a father was something I’d absorbed as part of what it meant to be a man, but I had no idea what it might actually mean. I had no idea what it felt like for my own father to be a father, how or even if he decided to do so, or whether he ever talked about it with anyone—because I’d never talked about it with him, nor with anyone else. My parents were high school sweethearts who paired up to escape Long Island—and I was born not all that long afterward, when they were just twenty-five. I know now because I’ve asked since that they didn’t have much of a conversation about it. Once they’d found a place on the West Coast, they didn’t get in the way of what came naturally, and they were young parents with two kids under five at the age that I was having this conversation with my friend from college.
Kate and I got together twenty-odd years later when I was forty-six, and she was younger enough to still be very much in her years of prime fertility. We did have some conversations about our intentions as we got together, but we left the question of children mostly aside to begin with. Things hadn’t become all that much clearer for me since my sidewalk talk with my old college friend. My feeling along the way had been and remained that if I was with the right person, then I could be interested in having kids. I no longer felt not ready, and sometimes I did in fact feel excited about the possibility of starting a family, but I didn’t feel clear that I wanted kids of my own accord, regardless of whom I was with.
I guess that some people do just know. That wasn’t me, and I felt ashamed for not knowing, for not being clear, and of the slowly growing feeling that it just might be possible that I didn’t really want to have children at all. What little I heard from other men didn’t help much—mostly that “you’ll never feel 100 percent ready,” and that “there’s no right time” but that “everything changes” once you do have kids. That potential loss of control, that an experience would take over my direction and feeling in life—I have to say, that never sounded at all encouraging or interesting to me.
In early 2018, Kate and I had been away in Japan and then returned to San Francisco for the holidays, and we were sitting in the living room one weekday morning talking about the coming year. The room around us was all strong colors—big, blocky lounge chairs in royal purple, my painting of a hot-pink, psychedelic Martian landscape above the nonfunctional fifties fireplace, and the bright splash of her yellow rain boots by the door. We sipped black coffee and ate toast with almond butter, starting our day together before she went to catch the ferry to work across the bay. Kate looked up at me over her coffee and said, “I’m thinking about having my IUD removed.”
It’s not that what she said came as a surprise. We’d been talking more about starting a family, or, at least, there had been moments when it had begun to seem possible—and many of those moments had come from my own feelings of joy and openness and wanting to expand further into love with her. Even in those moments, however, I didn’t have enough clarity of my own feelings to make any movement forward. I felt open—in those moments—but when it came to thismoment, I felt a cold fear rise up in my chest and become heat as it traveled to my throat and face.
By that point in my life, I was fortunate enough to have earned some measure of the freedom that I’d been working to achieve since I was just a kid myself. I knew some men who were happy as fathers—and plenty of others who were conflicted, beleaguered, beaten down, burdened, and envious of my freedom. I had close friends who were mired in endless, vicious, expensive divorce and custody disputes, with their children caught in the middle. Free enough but still not in the clear, I had only very recently achieved some measure of stable mental health, and I still wasn’t certain that I’d be able to handle the pressure of being a father, or that I’d want to share my relationship with my partner with children.
Sitting there in the morning sun, beautiful in her hopeful openness, she asked, “How do you feel about that idea?” and all I could do was gulp, “Terrified,” as I scanned right, past the view of the bay, my eyes landing on the front door. The fact is, I had already found myself thinking—and it would be more accurate to say something like screaming—silently, of course, inside, to myself, “Get me out of here!” all too often in the preceding weeks, as I tried again, and again, and again to reconcile my fear and uncertainty with the fact that I was happy with many aspects of our relationship. Comfortable and content, and also in a stone-cold panic—I’m sure you know the feeling, one way or another.
I know more now about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, the feeling of discomfort—pain, really—caused by acting or behaving, that is, being in a way that isn’t aligned with how I actually feel, but at the time I still wasn’t often able to see that as it was happening. I’d been living in that dissonant state for so long, in so many ways, that I’d gotten used to feeling disconnected and in conflict with myself, and not quite knowing why. I know now that this is what confusion feels like, and I know now that I had let confusion in at many times in the past, and that it was almost always in relationships, although it’s also true that I let confusion in in a much broader way from the time I started drinking and using drugs in my teens.
Each time I pushed closer to the possibility of having children, I was running an experiment on myself, trying to find out how I actually felt by trying it on a bit more. Let’s see how this feels is a perfectly reasonable strategy, but it sure helps if you’re able to take note of how it actually does feel, and so I’d often get myself into situations and then discover that I didn’t quite want to be there, without really processing my feelings and integrating them into my sense of self.
So many times I had felt that something was off, and yet didn’t have the courage or the clarity to ask myself what that something was, or to act upon it, and so I couldn’t understand how I could be experiencing all the good feelings of togetherness and also, at the very same time, feeling like I should run straight through the front door. Confused, and mostly blind to my own internal state, I kept running the experiment over and over and over.
Just as Chris Ryan describes himself in Civilized to Death, “I was an angry teen,” not only with my parents for their passive neglect, and with my father for his failure to speak to me more directly, but also because of “the dawning realities of adulthood”[1]—of “regimentation, meaningless work, and ever-increasing isolation.” And, it’s still hard to admit, but part of my anger was with the idea of having kids. The unspoken message that I received about the role of the father was the traditional picture of the man as provider, meaning that I would have to earn enough money to support a family to earn the right to have a family.
I already knew this on my first date—the man pays, even if the man is still a boy. Although of course I know now that it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t have necessarily had to be the full provider, at the age when all of this began to come into consciousness, it seemed clear to me that everything I ever made would be given over to having a family, and that would take precedence over anything else.
This whole idea of having to give up whatever I managed to carve out for myself made me angry from early on, and although I became less angry over the years, I also became less and less interested in giving up my freedom. What came along with that was an increasing awareness of the sadness that comes from having chosen not to become a father, even though that is the choice I have made.
I have chosen not to have children, and I am grateful every day for the freedom that this allows me—and, not every day, but often enough, if I allow myself to wander toward the small orchard that my father was planting one day outside the farmhouse where we lived when I was a small boy, I see the hole that he dug there, and that I climbed into. That hole, two feet deep by three feet across—that hole meant for an apple tree, or whatever it was that would grow in the short growing season of 44° north, ten miles inland from Camden, Maine—I feel that hole in my heart, because I know that I am missing something irreplaceable, incomparable—and not irreparable, but that won’t be filled in my present lifetime.
I miss the boy who never was. That boy is me, and he’s also the boy who would be my son. That hole in the ground—I don’t remember if a tree ever grew there. I just remember a boy—little me—standing there, waving out from the bottom. There’s a hole in my heart like that hole in the ground, and it’s a hole that I do have to live with. It’s part of who I am, a man who is not a father, a childless son, a single Tom, out on his own—and again, it felt like my choice, but as much as I made that choice for freedom, it’s also true that I have made that choice because I wasn’t prepared, and because I was hurt and damaged, because I didn’t know how to love, because I was afraid, because I had no one to talk to, and because I felt that I had to protect my precious self.
Looking at photos of myself as a boy, I’m mostly alone. There’s nobody else in the frame with me waving from that apple-tree hole at three, nor at five staring into the fire I’m tending on the beach. I’m alone at eight jumping between boulders in the high Sierra, and I’m alone at ten riding my bike in the park in San Francisco. I know that I wasn’t always alone, but in those photos I see that my young boy face is held tight as I look away to the left. I see a boy who’s getting used to being by himself. As my parents separated and then divorced and my sister became more and more of a force of chaos in my teenage home, I just left—and really, starting then, I gave up on the whole idea of family.
The seed of fatherhood was never planted in me, or it was stunted, and twisted, and only grew small. Only recently have I gained some awareness of the part of me that could or would be a father, what he feels like, what he loves, who he would have been.
We don’t get to do everything in life, and I’m not working up to a revelation about how I’ve finally changed my mind. I’m not trying to go back and live a different life, and I don’t want anyone telling me that it’s not too late. I’m happy where and who I am—and I’m here to tell the truth. Sometimes I cry and cry for the boy who never was. I grieve his loss, and the pain that led me there, just as I celebrate my freedom and the person who I have become.
“To be childless may be seen as freedom, but for many men it’s also seen as a failure”[2]—and it is a failure, not so much on the part of individual men but of our culture as a whole. As Warren Farrell has written, “…as men discover they have been deprived of their fathers, they start asking if they are also being deprived of being fathers,”[3] and while he meant that a man can be deprived of actively fathering his own children by working outside the home to support a family back at home, it’s just as true that the same patriarchal system is depriving many men of the opportunity to be fathers at all, by way of the same omissions that I experienced.
Although the model for manhood is much broader than it used to be, my experience is that it still generally includes being a husband and a father. While there is plenty of support out there for fathers, there is little discussion of—let alone support for—childless or child-free men, even though—and this may surprise you as much as it did me—only 60 percent of American men become fathers[4] in their lifetimes. Sixty percent is not that much more than half—and although just about the same proportion of women never become mothers,[5] there is far less conversation and awareness about men who don’t ever become fathers.
A 2020 paper entitled “When Men Choose to Be Childless”[6] echoes much of what I’ve felt about having children. The men who were the subjects of the study cited both a “lack of conscious decision-making” and a conscious decision to situate themselves “outside the norm,” as well as absent fathers and a lack of an “emotionally open and frank conversation about having children.” Many of the men cited their fear of losing freedom, and also fear of the commitment to “support their family financially.” Although they do note their subjects’ desire to “form an identity in resistance to the dominant discourse,” the authors stop short of attempting an analysis of the root cause of that desire to resist.
I know from my own experience what it feels like to be so much “in resistance” to the environment in which I find myself so as to choose not to reproduce. Of course, there are a wide variety of reasons that any individual may or may not end up having children, but given that fully four out of ten American men do not end up becoming fathers,[7] and that the suicide rate for men is roughly four times that of women,[8] the stark truth is that many men are choosing to end their family lines, one way or another.
We’re resisting the dominant discourse because we have created a world that is trying to destroy us. As much as men have had a hand in creating a culture which is still usually—and fairly—considered to disproportionately benefit men, that culture is also driving us to quit our most basic biological purpose. The increasing number of men who do not fulfill their first-order biological imperative as human animals is a direct and quite literally life-ending legacy of our patriarchal culture. Even though we know that we are foregoing the single most powerful built-in mechanism for personal fulfillment, and therefore, in a way, sort of asking for it in terms of lifelong happiness and even personal health,[9] an increasing number of men see the evidence of what it is actually like to be a father in our society as enough to convince us to refuse that path.
The stereotypical fear of commitment often ascribed to men doesn’t come so much from some sort of lack of stick-to-itiveness that is innate to masculinity. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s not that we are reluctant to commit because we are men; it’s that some of us are unwilling to commit to the untenable bargain offered by patriarchal society. As Gerda Lerner called it, the “unwritten contract for exchange”[10] of protection and financial support for love is a deal that, if it ever did serve us, served a past that is now long gone. In today’s world, this paradigm is finally starting to break down, but it has yet to be replaced by a cultural framework that offers men the identity, security, support, and knowledge of self required for more of us to want to become fathers.
Patriarchy taught us that we are not really men until we accumulate wealth, marry, and have children. We have to earn the right to call ourselves men, and so, by these same criteria, we are not yet men until we become fathers. The catch is that if I have to become a father to become a man, then I have to give up much of my still-unformed self in service to family in order to become that sort of man. While that may well be the existential reality of the cycle of human reproduction as expressed in the formation of the psyche—that we must trade away some portion of freedom in order to become fully adult—if our culture does not prepare, surround, and support us in this process, then it can become a binding conflict. If some of us won’t commit to what patriarchy has to offer, it’s for a damn good reason.
Being with Kate was the last time that I was faced with the choice of fatherhood, but certainly not the first. I’ve been almost married twice, and almost a father quite a few more times than that. Like most men, I’ve been in relationships that could have become families, and in others where pregnancy was an exciting possibility, a threat to be avoided, or a crisis to be dealt with—all of those and more. A couple of years beforehand, already in my mid-forties, I had gotten involved with a woman roughly my own age, someone who was both charming in her creative freedom and also rather wildly—and attractively—disconnected from the everyday world. The subject of birth control never came up, and the unfortunate result was that she did get pregnant.
We were already headed in different directions by then and only seeing each other occasionally. On hearing the news I was struck with concern and flew across the country to be with her. At first I was excited by the possibility, conflicted. and then terrified—and then, just a short while later, I found myself certain that while by that point in life I was as prepared as I ever would be to become a father, it was also clear that it hadn’t been a priority for me, and that an unplanned pregnancy was neither what I wanted, nor a sane thing to proceed with. A few days later, and without further discussion, she took matters into her own hands. By then, my brief heartbreak had already passed. Hers isn’t my story to tell. What matters most for me is that, yet again, through my actions and with very few words, I chose not to become a father.
Despite what I’m aware of missing, I’m clear that this path is the right path for this life. Although I was “open” for so long, I’ve already chosen by my actions many times over to not be a father, and I don’t need to continue to choose again and again. Being child-free is a great way to be, and it’s also true that I feel the sadness, hurt, and anger—and the missing of not having my own children. It’s a choice for freedom, for creativity, and for light—and it’s also a dark choice that’s the result of growing up without enough truth or connection, and of the shadow of our culture, which paints an all-too-accurate, unsatisfying picture of what it can mean to be a father.
Not having kids is not just succumbing to the fate handed down by patriarchy—it’s also a protest. It’s the end of the line for me, as it is for many other men today. It was in part my lack of a sense of self that led me to this path, and even though I can say now, and with commitment, that I’ve healed that missing self, there is still a part of me that remains missing, and that boy who never was will remain my deepest wound.[11]
Bowen Dwelle, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, has been published in Good Men Project, Kiteworld Magazine, and Candy Magazine. His poetry is included in the anthology Side-Eye On The Apocalypse (Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective, 2021). Mr. Bowen now works as a writer.
References
Curtin, Sally C. and Holly Hedegaard. “Suicide Rates for Females and Males by Race/Ethnicity: United States: 1999 and 2014.” CDC; National Center for Health Statistics, June 19, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm.
Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex. Berkley trade paperback edition. 1982. Reprint, New York: Berkley Books, 1994.
Kilmer, Val. I’m Your Huckleberry: A Memoir. Illustrated edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. Paperback 1987. Women and History / Gerda Lerner 1. 1986. Reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. https://www.scribd.com/document/268507687/Lerner-Gerda-The-Creation-of-Patriarchy-Women-History-1987.
Monte, Lindsay M. and Renee R. Ellis. “Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012.” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, July 2014. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/demo/p20-575.pdf.
Monte, Lindsay M. and Brian Knop. “Men’s Fertility and Fatherhood: 2014.” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, June 2019, 70–162.
Myers, Justin. “It’s Hard to Be a Man Who Can’t, or Won’t, Have Children.” GQ UK, February 13, 2019. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/men-without-children.
Ryan, Christopher. Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Smith, Imogene, Tess Knight, Richard Fletcher, and Jacqui A. Macdonald. “When Men Choose to Be Childless: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 37, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 325–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519864444.
[1] Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020), 149.
[2] Justin Myers, “It’s Hard to Be a Man Who Can’t, or Won’t, Have Children,” GQ UK, February 13, 2019, https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/men-without-children.
[3] Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex, Berkley trade paperback edition (1982; repr., New York: Berkley Books, 1994), 364.
[4] Lindsay M. Monte and Brian Knop, “Men’s Fertility and Fatherhood: 2014,” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, June 2019, 70–162.
[5] Lindsay M. Monte and Renee R. Ellis, “Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012,” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, July 2014, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/demo/p20-575.pdf.
[6] Imogene Smith et al., “When Men Choose to Be Childless: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 37, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 325–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519864444.
[7] Monte and Knop, “Men’s Fertility and Fatherhood: 2014.”
[8] Sally C. Curtin and Holly Hedegaard, “Suicide Rates for Females and Males by Race/Ethnicity: United States: 1999 and 2014,” (CDC; National Center for Health Statistics, June 19, 2019), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm.
[9] Smith et al., “When Men Choose to Be Childless.”
[10] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, paperback 1987, Women and History / Gerda Lerner 1 (1986; repr., New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 218, https://www.scribd.com/document/268507687/Lerner-Gerda-The-Creation-of-Patriarchy-Women-History-1987.
[11] Val Kilmer, I’m Your Huckleberry: A Memoir, Illustrated edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 258.