Antisocial Baby Notes
By Suzanne Ostro

"Evolutionary biology keeps reminding us that we are animals, designed by natural selection, not for discovering deep truths of nature, but for breeding."       - John Horgan

Everybody makes such a big deal about it. If I ever thought about having children, it was like the weather. It might rain or it might not, but I wasn't going to waste my time obsessing about it. Of course, I didn't go out of my way to get pregnant. I used contraceptives most of the time--except occasionally, when I thought I was madly in love with someone completely unsuitable. The responsible types never crossed my mind.

Once, when I was married and in Paris, my inlaws tried bribery and told my husband that if we'd have a child, they'd make us an allowance. (God knows, they could afford it, but why they wanted to reproduce my husband was beyond me.) I said if they could guarantee the baby would be born with a live-in governess, I'd consider it. Then, for a couple of months I thought well, I'll get pregnant. But I never did, and then it seems to have slipped my mind.

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I suppose in somebody else's terms I wasn't properly "socialized." Evolutionary biology seems to have made a wrong turn here; nobody ever propagandized me to be fruitful and multiply. The only pressure I ever really got was to go to medical school. My father was a doctor, as was his older sister, Sophie, her husband, and various other relatives. It was what you did in my family.

Sophie was my role model. She'd come from Russia at 23, studied English with a tutor for a year and a half, and then had gone on to medical school. She graduated in 1912, the only woman in her class. She never had children; it certainly would never have occurred to me to ask why.

When I finally told my father at seventeen that I really didn't want to be a doctor, he said something that was pretty amazing for the 1940s, when the ideal young woman aimed for a husband early on, had 2.5 children (I imagine they divided the halves among themselves so they'd come out even), wore aprons, smiled cheerily, and used pressure cookers. He said, "Well, you better decide what you want to do with your life, or you'll spend it washing some man's floors."

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It was a generation where most of my female friends spent their teens talking about getting married like they were competitors in a race. Which I suppose they were--I know every one of them was married before they were twenty, many disastrously, and had children right away to nail themselves in place. I was surrounded by perky housewives with shinier than shiny floors, whiter than white laundry, Norman Rockwell children, always smiling, smiling. Much later I thought wistfully what a pleasure it would have been to grow up instead with Cagney and Lacey. I probably would have been a cop.

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Once I was actually sorry I wasn't pregnant. I was having a long affair with someone I thought I was in love with. He couldn't deal with any kind of commitment, so he spent most of his time out of town, and I spent that time living with a warm, nice man with whom I was good friends. Both of them knew about each other, since I didn't waste any energy lying about it.

I'd spend Monday through Friday with the one who lived in, and then he'd split for a friend's apartment while the other came in for the weekend. On Sunday night I'd ride the subway down to Penn Station to see him off and then keep going downtown to pick up the one who spent the week. I must say they were both very good about not asking questions about each other.

One month I was about two weeks late with my period. I was convinced I was pregnant and told them both. The nice guy I was living with was delighted, said he'd always wanted a kid, and that he'd marry me but he wouldn't get a job and support me (us). This was the Beat Generation and he'd never had a job. The one who couldn't commit announced frostily that he certainly wouldn't marry me but that he'd pay 50% child support since those were the odds of his being the father.When I finally got my period, I confess to being disappointed--the situation was so intriguing. A child with two half-fathers making a whole (well, let's not go that far)--think of the possibilities!

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When I was much older--going through menopause, as a matter of fact--I asked my very smart gynecologist why he thought I'd never gotten pregnant when I hadn't used contraceptives. He said that since I'd had fibroid tumors all my life, I'd probably been pregnant any number of times but that the fetus had had trouble attaching and had miscarried. Like mother, like child...

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Once or twice I wondered what it was like to be pregnant, and I thought it must be an enormous strangeness and probably pretty awful to have your body so deformed, blowing up like a balloon, and even worse, to have a parasite growing inside.

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My mother was too self-absorbed to be a model for anything, except she was a good cook and she played the piano well. All the information I received from her about having children was that she'd gotten pregnant three weeks after getting married "because I was stupid enough to think douches worked..." Family legend had it that she didn't talk to my father for another three weeks after she found out about the fallacy of douches.

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There's this myth that all normal women want children, but nobody tells you what they mean by "normal." What it means is having been socialized to breed. To continue the species. To ensure the survival of the race. The problem I see is that we have no real predators. I get cold chills when I think of us, having wrecked one planet, blasting off into space to spread like a virus through the universe.

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In my early twenties I had a very sharp analyst who made two comments that stayed with me. One was that if everyone had children for the right reasons, the population would drop by 80%. The second was the day I said half-heartedly, "Maybe I should have a baby," and he responded solicitously, "Why don't you go home and write a poem."

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Once I went to Greece with a man who had left his wife and six--count 'em, six--children. Every time we went to see another member of his family, he was always asked ritually, "How many children do you have?" And when he answered proudly: "Six. All sons!" everybody would stand up and applaud. It didn't seem to matter that he was there with his girlfriend, nobody asked what exactly was happening with his wife and the six children. The simple reason for applause was that he had spawned six male children.

The truth of the matter was that every time the marriage got worse, his wife got pregnant. When he finally walked out for the penultimate time, she said "But I thought this child [Number 5? 6?] would keep you." I imagine this does not come under the heading of Children for the Right Reasons.

Relax, dear Reader, he went back to them after his family convinced him that if you're going to have that many, you'd better stay put and help with the shopping.

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My paternal Russian grandfather, twice widowered, was married three times and had six children. Cyril died at sixteen of some childhood disease. Boris went mad in his late teens and was hospitalized. Emmanuel was gassed in WWI. Sophie, as I said, became a doctor. Sara got married in her late forties to a widower with four children, whom she left after a year and a half. Then there was Marcus, my father. And I'm the only descendent--that family ends with me, which is a strange thought. Like Greek fate. Or, more likely, a Russian novel.