Parenthood and Time

“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.”

—   Count Olaf’s last words

“He must increase. But I must decrease.”

—   The Gospel of John, 3:30

“If we were to see how these things grow naturally from the start, we would in this way, as in other cases, get the best theoretical grasp on them. First, then, those who are incapable of existing without each other necessarily form a couple, as female and male do for the sake of procreations (they do not do so not form deliberate choice, but, like other animals and plants, because the urge to leave behind something of the same sort as themselves) . . . .”

—   Aristotle, Politics, 1.2 (trans. Reeves)

“Every actual now of consciousness, however, is subject to the law of modification. The now changes continuously from retention to retention. There results, therefore, a stable continuum such that every subsequent point is a retention for every earlier one. And every retention is already a continuum.”

—   Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, 50-51 (trans. Churchill)

For Angie, with whom I share a most exquisite dream.

My wife and I once built for ourselves an impressive collection of babies. Lately, however, the elder members of that brood have demonstrated to us that they get the final vote in how long that arrangement will last. Our oldest son, who as I write this is a few days shy of his twentieth birthday, resides in the middle of the Pacific, and by the end of this month, his next two younger siblings will leave to start lives on the far side of the ocean in the other direction. Shortly we will be on a “See you in a year or so” basis with three of our six children, and I have no doubt the younger three will attempt to outdo those precedents. I don’t begrudge them their bold leaps beyond their snug childhood in rural Kansas; as I wrote my son while he was on a thirteen-week, government-subsidized, professional development retreat in San Diego just after moving from home, “I miss you, but I love you more than I miss you, and I know this is the best thing for you.” Our kids are up to fascinating things, and I’m content to sit back and watch it unfold. I’m not one to get in the way of being surpassed.

I am struck, however, by the fact that my grown children’s lives are radically branching off from my own. They have certainly taken different paths than I did, but that’s not the point I have in mind. Rather, as they leave and go far off, what we have in common is less and less our day-to-day present, but instead our shared memory of a collective past. That history was their childhood, and hopefully it will be the shortest period of their lives, merely the overture to the virtuoso performance to follow. Our children are going off into a future that isn't really ours, and their childhood, our commonality, is becoming like a dream we all had that is never fully recalled but still colors the day. We can’t force last night’s dream into our waking hours. We never really get our hands on it, though we can’t shake it either. Dreams leave us with that sense of having been somewhere (or maybe somewhen) else, but of course in the light of day that’s not where we are anymore. It seems we were all together once, but that moment has passed. One can hope to recollect, and the present is pregnant with reminders - though those hints are beyond our control. They come in their own time.

I write this on the occasion of my mother’s death, and now both my parents have become wholly memories to me. The process of differentiating our futures has crossed the final threshold. I cannot help but to notice now that I too am becoming more of a memory to my children with each passing day. Their futures are becoming their own (at least not mine), and the unfolding of these events is no longer predicated on my presence. This is all right and good, and eventually I, like my father before me, will be entirely a memory to my children. I do not find that thought horrifying, though it is uncanny. It imbues my experience of the sense of being-in-between. That, however, is the fundamental fact our existence. Our being is between past and future; mediating between the parents we have replaced and our children who will replace us. Our lot is time. Whatever our final destiny might be, in this life temporality will have its way with us, and the attempt to resist is hubris and folly. You will lose the present by trying to deny the future and clinging to the past. What we have now is real, but it is on the way from something else and to something else. As the scales in my life now tip in favor of recollection instead of anticipation, I guard myself against resenting the temporality of our existence. Failure in that regard would be to deny my children the right to their future, which undermines the point of parenthood. I won’t render our decades long project absurd. My parents became memories so that I might have a present and future of my own, and now it is my turn to decrease so that my children might increase. To complain is infantility. Anyone who told you that you are the point of the process was sorely mistaken.

Famously, young adults (and not so young adults) in the West are avoiding parenthood altogether at an unprecedented rate. Much can be said about that critically, e.g, the selfish refusal to take responsibility for the continuation of the civilization that bore you, but there are reasons given to explain the phenomenon more charitably, e.g., environmental concerns or the supposed novel financial difficulties facing this generation, etc. Be that as it may, I have another worry about the anti-natal tendency currently abroad. Parenthood is the most concrete manifestation of the fundamental temporal character of our existence, the most in-between of our in-between-ness. To deny parenthood is to put oneself at odds with the utmost riddle we encounter: the odd constitution of our present by a movement from the past and toward the future, neither of which are ever all the way here. The uncanniness of our temporal makeup prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously, and its refusal is an adolescent denial of mortality. Childlessness is a doomed attempt to opt out of time and its humbling mysteries; a bit of befuddled and self-indulgent theatre that keeps our concern in a contrived holding pattern over the “current” generation, as though we contemporaries were the point of the whole show all along. Living in the now is all well and good, but let’s not be so confused as to think that the present makes any sense at all without being juxtaposed to the past and the future. The coherence and maturity of our lives hinge on the sober pedagogy of temporality, and parenthood is the primary teacher nature has provided for this cardinal lesson. There are, of course other ways of learning these lessons and some people will not be so blessed as to have a family. I am, however, grateful to my children for teaching me in this regard