Another Mothers' Day reflection: does not having children = selfish?

Are people who choose not to have children selfish? Do parents have the right to judge them?

A young Melbourne woman raised this perennial issue in the opinion pages of The Age a while back when she wrote eloquently about the barrage of questions, advice and criticism she unwillingly attracts when she says that she will probably never have a baby because she’s just not interested.

It always shocks me when I hear of people judging each other in the ways she quoted in this article: ‘Do you hate kids or something? You’ll be sorry when you’re old and there’s no one to look after you. My taxes shouldn’t have to support your single lifestyle.’

My life circumstances have been different from this writer’s. I married my childhood sweetheart at 21; 35 years later we have four grown-up children. Naturally we have had our moments. There has been a bit of anguish and a ton of hard work. Most of it, however, has been great. I love our kids to bits and appreciate deeply what raising and living with them has taught me. They are among the people in the world I most enjoy spending time with.

But parenting is not not NOT for everyone. And if it’s not for you, it doesn’t mean you are any more selfish, limited or superficial than those of us who choose to reproduce.

My husband and I chose to have babies not because we were particularly noble. We just wanted them. Looking out for your kids children isn’t some great altruistic gesture; it’s more like an extension of self-interest.

There are those who would love to have children and, devastatingly, are unable to. Since the advent of safe and reliable contraception, however, many more people have a choice about what they do with their life, including whether or not to reproduce. We all make choices for reasons. What other people choose is up to them.

I wonder about these parents who are outraged at others not wanting what they’ve got. I suspect those who protest loudest and shrillest are the ones who secretly, maybe without even knowing it themselves, wonder if they made the right decision. Insecurity is usually what makes us harshest in our judgement of others.

Personally, I know a lot of childless people who live incredibly rich lives. I also know parents whose lives seem to be pretty damn miserable, insular, limited and resentful.

Then there are those whose lives revolve around their children to such an extent that when these grown children leave home, the parents go into a decline. Or the ‘kids’ stay home well into adulthood, with mum and dad looking after them as though they were five-year-olds.

There’s something skewed here. Children are wonderful, and as a parent you try to love them unconditionally. But they should never be under the impression that they are the centre of the universe. We all of us, parents included, need other things to build our lives around: community service, social justice, philanthropy, creativity, friendship, religious faith, our significant other – the list could go on.

As our youngest turned 21 last year, I revelled in the new stage of life this heralded. A dramatically lightened domestic load. A chance to throw myself into my two occupations with a little more abandon. More uninterrupted time with the father of my children. Maybe even some travel.

So, if you choose not to have children, don’t let the parent brigade get you down. You are not weird or unnatural. And maybe all of us could just get on with doing what we’ve chosen to do, and lay off other people.

Motherhood and God (as opposed to Motherhood and Apple Pie)

As another Mothers’ Day comes around, I think about what being a mother has taught me about God’s love. 

For most of my life, I had trouble believing that God isn’t at worst angry, at best disappointed in me. I found it excruciatingly difficult to accept that God loves me no matter what.

There are all sorts of reasons for this; one of them the fact that when I was growing up, God was generally referred to in metaphors that were not only male, but intimidating.

‘Lord’, ‘King’ and ‘Judge’ were three of the favourites. And even the more benign ‘Father’ wasn’t always helpful for a generation where even the good dads weren’t around much.

As a young woman who was either pregnant or breastfeeding for almost ten years solid, I was thrilled to discover some feminine images of God, even in the ancient, fiercely patriarchal Bible. You have to really go looking for these, but the fact that they are there at all is remarkable.

One of the most beautiful is Isaiah 49, verse 15. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.’ There was no way I was going to forget my kids. And God loved me, and all of us, more than this.

Among other Biblical images was this one from Acts 17, verse 28 that I dwelled upon through four pregnancies. ‘”For in God we live and move and have our being,” as even some of your own poets have said. “For we too are his offspring.”’

That description is surely that of a foetus in the womb – surrounded, protected, nurtured and supported by its mother, whether or not it knows it.

Or from Psalm 131: ‘But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.’

Then there are the words ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 23, verse 37. ‘”Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”’

One Sunday I sat in church, breastfeeding my third baby as communion was offered to me with the words, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’ I was struck by the fact that my baby was feeding on me, and in a mysterious way, I was feeding on Christ. 

In the communion service we talk of broken body and shed blood that gives life – something very familiar to any woman who has given birth.

Weaving these images of God through my life as a mother over nearly 30 years, I begin to learn, little by little, that God loves me, and everybody, better than the best parent.

This article was published in the May issue of The Melbourne Anglican

Pianoforte

Our piano tuner used to be an AFL footballer. Mostly, he lives down the coast, but works in the city a couple of days a week. ‘Clare,’ he says, ‘You would not believe the number of mothers I see who could play piano really well and haven’t touched it for years. I don’t get it,’ he says, all the while plucking cheeky tunes from the ivories. ‘When I was a kid, my parents had to drag me away from the piano so that the baby could sleep. When I walk past a piano, I just want to play it. I can’t keep away.’

I have been keeping away from our piano for decades. Apart from dusting it, I never touch the thing, and, until now, despite feeling vaguely guilty about this, have never felt the compulsion to do anything about it.

Since the visit of the piano tuner, however, things have changed. Something keeps drawing me to that long-neglected instrument. My fingers itch to play.

I dig out all my old sheet music. I have Mozart’s piano sonatas bound in dull green leather, Bach’s preludes and fugues, books of charming little exercises by Bergmuller and Czerny. There are my old AMEB exam books from grade 1 to grade 6. I start working my way through them all.

I played piano from early childhood, when mum taught me, all the way through primary school – where Miss Hardy used to hit my fingers with a ruler when I made mistakes – to high school. I did piano in what we used to call matric. Every night I practised for two hours; I loved the fact that it was study for a subject but was completely different from the other four. That was the pinnacle of my musical ability, culminating with an A in my final exam, when I knew I was playing better than I ever had before and ever would again.

And then, after school, nothing. Such a wicked waste: like growing up bilingual and never using your second language. But life, work and babies took over, and piano didn’t get a look in.

Forty years after I sat my final school exams, I discover I have a surprising memory for the pieces I played as a 16-year-old. I remember learning that there are several different types of memory operating when you play a musical instrument – the brain memory, the visual memory, the memory of the fingers, and that you have to keep them all in working order, so that if one of them fails, mid performance, the others will take over.

I marvel at the skills – visual, cerebral and muscular - that allow me to play up to ten notes simultaneously. It is like reading another language, and then having the meaning travel through my eyes to my brain to be spoken out, melodiously, through my fingers.

Not that it’s so melodious to start with. I am appallingly rusty. Sometimes I practise lines and phrases and trills over and over, one hand at a time, but mostly I just stumble through these gorgeous pieces, hoping that no one is listening.

An abiding memories of my childhood was of mum at the piano, making beautiful music, and one piece I member particularly clearly is Sheep may safely graze, by JS Bach. Bach, more than any other composer I know, makes me feel that everything will come out right in the end. Other composers were tormented souls; Bach seems to be a benign and contented family man with his 20 children, his round face and avuncular wig, his systematic working through the well tempered klavier, his logical way of approaching music. Sheep may safely graze epitomised this to me with its echoes of the 23^rd Psalm: the sense of all being well, the sheep munching contentedly, all the world peaceful and bucolic and green.

I pored over all the sheet music on my shelves with no success; Mum’s copy probably fell apart, she played it so often. I downloaded it the next day, and printed out the two short pages. I played it when I got home; it was a lot easier than some of the pieces I had been attempting these last few weeks. I am determined to work it up.

It’s a lovely thing to do, play the piano. When there are twenty idle minutes of an evening, it’s a good way to spend some time. It uses a different part of my brain from reading, writing and administration. Most of all, it takes me back to childhood, and going to bed with the sound of my mother playing in the background. In the new landscape my family now inhabits, it provides a soothing, comforting oasis in my day. When I play Sheep may safely graze, it reminds me that in a world where death is suddenly breathing down our necks, creativity, music and beauty continue, mothers play their children to sleep and even in the valley of the shadow of death, goodness and mercy will follow me.

Life imitates art: what do you do when your world turns upside down?

In my first novel, which I began in 1998, the protagonist is a middle-aged woman whose husband has been diagnosed with cancer. I was in novel class, I couldn’t think of a plot; my teacher suggested I give my protagonist one of the most challenging problems I could think of and go from there. Seventeen years later, life is imitating art and this is happening to me.

What do you do when your world turns upside down? You gather your family around, and you go to church.

We received the diagnosis – multiple myeloma, which is incurable – three days before Easter. That evening our kids and partners gathered at our place; Al, a Minister, was leading Maundy Thursday worship. Nevertheless, we ate and drank, laughed, hugged and cried and waited to welcome him home – the guest of honour.

Next morning, our oldest Tess and I sat holding hands as Al led the most wonderful and devastating Good Friday worship I’ve ever attended. Parishioners who knew nothing of what had descended upon us commented on the depth of grief that filled the church as we sang and read of Jesus’ death and his feeling of abandonment by God. The only point at which Al’s voice broke momentarily was at the very end of his sermon, when he pronounced the words ‘Nothing, no-thing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus’. Unlike him, the pro, I was a sodden mess from the first chords of the opening hymn to the benediction. 

There followed a day of the most excoriating grief I have ever experienced: no denial, no anger, just raw pain. I had no idea my body held so many tears. The only words I could form were, ‘I don’t want to live without him. I have loved this man since I was 14 – I don’t know any other way to be.’  My brother-in-law dropped by and I had to retreat to my bed where I lay, floundering, drowning in a tsunami of pain that reminded me of the utter relentlessness of labour. The only appropriate response was, ‘What the f%#* do I do with this? How am I supposed to survive?’

At the same time, a small, adult part of me was saying, ‘Clare, you know you won’t feel like this for the next ten years.Tomorrow is a new day’. We rang our oldest friends, who we were going away with after Easter, as we have for the past 21 years. ‘I can’t come,’ I gasped between crying jags, ‘I’m not fit for human company’.  Wisely, they said we needed to do whatever we needed to do, but that more than anything, they wanted to be with us in this hour of darkness.

I called our son and daughter-in-law to cancel our dinner at their place that night; they said the same thing. I had a cup of tea. I had a shower. We went to dinner, and I stopped crying for a while. On Easter morning our family sat in a long row and worship held an element of hope. We went away with our friends and holed up in a beach shack watching wild weather whip waves and trees into a frenzy as we cowered together, receiving comfort and food and laughter. I felt put together again, at least for a while.

Since then there have been moments of sheer blessedness. I had heard others in times of trauma speak of the tangible sense of support, of being upheld by prayer; now I know what they mean. I had no idea how many people cared about us. I knew our kids were great, I didn’t realise how united they are, how strong a group, how sensible and realistic and funny and caring. I had no idea of the healing power of elbow grease – whether that involves getting a mailout done to a tight deadline, or scrubbing the grotty floors of a house your daughter is moving out of.

It is very early days on this new road on which we find ourselves. I know the next few years will be littered with days like Good Friday, where I could do nothing but shut myself away and howl. I am scared witless of what lies ahead: the illness, the treatment, the loneliness. I am completely realistic about this cancer – there is no cure, the average life expectancy is 5 years, with luck and good medical attention we may get a few more. I have completely changed my expectations. My father-in-law died at 74, which has always seemed so young to me; I assumed his fit, slim son, would have twenty years on that. We were just entering that lovely phase where the kids are launched and we have a bit more money and time and have rubbed the rough edges of each other and just revel in each other’s company. We looked forward, eventually, to retirement, the possibility of grand-children, maybe some travel. Now I think five years would be great, ten a dream.

But I have already discovered other things about this journey. I hadn’t realised how many people I know have survived similar and much worse trauma. I have never felt so much love – for and from my husband and kids, friends and community. I have never been so aware of God’s everlasting arms, of the solidarity of the suffering, dying Jesus with our human pain, or thankful for worship that provides such a rich vocabulary for comfort and lament. I have never felt so grateful for the forty years of companionship, laughter, passion, hard work and tenderness that has made this marriage. I have never felt more convinced that love is stronger than death.

This is where I am right now.

Good Friday and Easter

Does Easter have any relevance at all, here and now? Only, I reckon, if you don’t separate it from Good Friday. You have to have both, despite the tendency in different branches of the church to concentrate on one and underplay the other.

Good Friday, as a mate of mine once said, is where the rubber hits the road. Where God showed, in the clearest way possible, that God loves us and is willing to walk right alongside us in our messy, painful existence. God showed that God can stand anything we dish up, and that whatever we have to endure, God has been there, plumbing the depths of agony and abandonment.

The world has always been in a mess, but now, more than ever before, we are aware of exactly how dire this mess is. There have always been wars and famine, corruption and abuse and natural disasters; now global warming dwarfs all these problems and threatens to bring the whole planet to an end.

We and others we know battle illness, unemployment, depression and broken relationships. Right now we—individuals, the church and the world—are firmly placed in the long night of Good Friday, or maybe in Holy Saturday’s bewilderment, fear and confusion.

But then along comes Easter. Just as Good Friday showed the lengths to which God was willing to go to identify with us, Easter Sunday says, this is not the last word.

And, despite the gloom of the global and local situation, we know this; we see it all the time. I don’t know about magic happening; I do know that grace happens. When things are at their darkest and most bleak, the Holy Spirit creeps in and unexpected grace flows, and things we had never believed possible become real.

Did Jesus physically rise from the dead, or was the resurrection simply a symbol of the new life breathed into his followers which began after his death? Personally, I have no trouble with the concept that Jesus did physically rise from the dead; the longer I live, the more I become aware that there are more extraordinary things in this world than I will ever begin to know.

But in the resurrection of Jesus, what God is saying to us is: ‘Death is not the last word. Despite appearances, evil is not the last word. You need to know this. Do not despair.’

I have hung onto the Easter promise at times of the death of loved ones, and most of all at times of what appeared to be hopeless depression. Jesus’ cry of utter abandonment on the cross, ‘My God my God, why have you forsaken me?’ was my cry.

But then comes Easter and healing, new life, boundless possibilities restricted only by our own limited imaginations. Good Friday and Easter are God’s message that God is with us when things are as bad as they can be, but that that is not the end.

This article has just appeared in the April 2015 of The Melbourne Anglican