Regrets (or not) on getting middle-aged

Last updated on: October 16, 2013 at 9:30 pm by Jane the Actuary

Regrets (or not) on getting middle-aged 2013-10-16T21:30:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So a friend posted this — an old NYT “Opinionator” piece about the Path Not Taken, and the ambivalence about alternate life paths, and the way this turns into judgment of those who have, in fact, taken the other life path.

The author is a single 42-year-old, perfectly happy not to be married or a father, and seems quite satisfied with his choice, glad not to be tied down with children and a mortgage. As he puts it,

I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see.

(Funny, I don’t like awake calculating mortgage payments, except for with optimism, being frugal and all, determining how many years we’ve shaved off by extra payments — even though with the low interest rates now, it doesn’t make as much sense to do so.)

But then he continues,

Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

But I have to say that I don’t feel this ambivalence.

Do I think it would be fun to go on vacations unconstrained by the school calendar, and to go into the city? Of course. Hey, it’s be fun to live in the city, though I’ve never been one for bars and nightlife. But I’ve reached the point where the kids are old enough to be much more self-sufficient than they used to be (though they still require quite a bit of homework-chasing), so that I know that, as long as you’re not the Duggars, the dependency of infancy and toddlerhood doesn’t last forever, and the end product, if you do it right, is usually someone you can enjoy spending time with. Besides, now that the kids don’t need my constant attention, I have begun to recognize that a significant part of what limits me in what I can get done is my own lack of initiative.

And I don’t really know anyone in the category of “childless, and living it up frivolously.” I do have a sister who never married (not intentionally; she just never found the right guy, and not due to pickiness but for other reasons) and she has actually been, at various times, disappointed about it, but at the same time is very busy in community and volunteer activities. A couple friends/acquaintances from many years ago likewise never married; we’re “facebook friends” and I don’t know their whole story but I don’t presume one way or the other as to whether it was an intentional choice, and Aunt Joyce and Uncle John never had kids, but no one in the family ever prodded them as to whether it was intentional or not.

For that matter, I find the folks who say, “I don’t want kids because they’re too much effort and would disrupt my lifestyle” to be deeply self-centered — but, you know, they’re probably right when they say that they would make awful parents for that very reason.

And part of being an adult is being able to accept that your choices have consequences, that taking one direction does close other paths, without being morose about it, and likewise recognizing that there are still plenty of options open — and, at the same time, that some paths end up closed by fate, and you don’t get to control everything about the direction your life heads.

What I do have an issue with are people who so completely foreclose the idea of having children that they feel entirely justified in having an abortion/prodding their girlfriend/wife do get one, because they simply don’t want to enter that world of People With Kids. Every time there’s a letter by someone in such a situation in Ask Amy or the other columnists I find this mind-bogglingly awful, or when commenters to abortion-related pieces unhesitatingly say, “I don’t want to have a kid right now/ever, because I’m too busy travelling/developing my career/partying. If I got pregnant, I wouldn’t hesitate to get an abortion.” Eww.

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