Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Single

Last updated on: June 30, 2015 at 7:23 pm by Max Lindenman

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Single 2015-06-30T19:23:07-06:00 Max Lindenman

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With the vague idea that human souls enjoyed some kind of eternal existence, I have, lately, tortured myself imagining that God had assigned those originally earmarked for my kids, to Muslims. My Tancred, Guy, and Clothilde are now – I thought – embodied as Momo, Cherif, and Leila. Instead of taking top honors at Georgetown, they’re skulking around Belleville in hoodies, glowering at documentary filmmakers and making demographers jittery.

Well, friends assure me that God creates a brand-new soul for each child as it’s conceived. At least on that score, I have nothing with which to reproach myself. Thank goodness for small favors. Since the failure of the project that carried me all the way to Turkey, the Last Chance at Marriage, I have been indicting myself nonstop. To file any new charges would, at this point, be overkill.

Not long ago, Msgr. Charles Pope denied that God calls anyone to be permanently single. (Naturally, he makes exceptions for priests, religious, and consecrated laypeople, e.g. Memores Domini.) Pope’s a monsignor, so I’ll take him at his word, but the implications are horrifying. If he’s right, then throughout my adult life, God has been calling me to be a husband and father, to be fruitful and multiply – only I wasn’t listening.

Granted, for nearly all of that life, the concept of vocation had no meaning for me. By the time I entered the Church, at the ripe-to-bursting age of 36, I had made a lot of decisions regarding my career and personal finances that couldn’t, easily, be unmade. Without going into excessive detail, I’ll just say that after bombing the LSATs and dropping out of a journalism grad program, I blew off going for an MBA in finance, a field I’d learned to hate. Instead, I decided to teach myself to write, figuring I’d break into punditry through the back door. For someone content to be single, this seemed reasonable enough. For someone under a divine imperative to prepare himself to support a naturally planned family, it was dereliction of duty, plain and simple.

The punditry? Well, that didn’t really happen, either.

There is one point I want to make in my defense: I was never a player – never really wanted to be one. Back before I deserted the cursus honorum, I was very open to the idea of settling down, but mostly, I think, for the wrong reasons. Since leaving my room at the age of 18, I have found the world to be an incomprehensible, fundamentally hostile, place. I wanted someone to huddle in my bunker with me. Every once in a while, I’d find a willing mark. Sometimes she’d turn out to be as uptight and crabbed as I was, proving that we should be careful what we wish for if we’re wishing for a soul mate. Or, worse, she wouldn’t, which would leave both of us feeling baited and switched.

For whatever it’s worth, I did, instinctively, grasp the concept of self-giving. The only problem was that I had nothing of any value to give. With no natural talent for laying tile, locating studs, working miracles with duct tape or the like, I was, I maintain, laboring under something of a handicap. I could barely drive a car, much less fix one. (Hank Hill would have pronounced me “not right.”) From time to time, the thought did float through my mind that overcoming this handicap was a necessary condition for winning and holding a woman’s confidence. Every time, I squashed it – it was too unfair to be true. All along, God was speaking to me – through sighs and rolling eyes, in crossed arms and flat affects. As usual, my ears were plugged.

I was quite aware that the possibility of my spending life alone was real, and, in fact, growing. But I believed with serene confidence that worse fates existed. There was divorce, for one. It seemed to me that even if Tennyson had been right about it being better to have loved and lost, blah-blah, his formula did not extend to marriage, especially marriages that produced kids. This thought crystallized on those occasions when I drove my friend and fellow loan officer back to the Buckeye Street jail, where he was staying, on a work-furlough basis, until he could make enough in commission splits to pay $30,000 in back child support.

By these habits of thought, then, I’m extraordinarily well adapted to the life I haven’t been called to. In a way, that’s good – I won’t feel too lonely as I live out my natural span. (The family name, if anyone’s curious, has already been safely deposited in the newer generations by others.) But Catholic parents should read mine as a cautionary tale. Sell the vocation of matrimony to your kids, gang. The skills to live with and be useful to a spouse do not seep in through the umbilical cord; they have to be taught. To make sure they take, use whatever black-hat tactics you can find. Nag, manipulate, withhold love, invent urban legends about crazy cat ladies and gentlemen. Your kids will thank you someday.

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