Richard J. Severson

My wife and I have been married for 45 years. It’s a long time, and yet it often doesn’t seem that way. I don’t know if that is an indication of connubial bliss, or a sign of something less perfect. One of the distinctive features of our marriage is that we never had children. I’m often asked why not, usually prefaced with a hesitancy that means “You don’t have to answer if the question is too personal.”

As a topic, it never felt too personal or uncomfortable; I have enjoyed revisiting the issue as the decades of our lives together accumulated and passed by.

There are at least four reasons why we never had children, not counting the most obvious one of all—that we never really desired to have them. Why on earth not?

First, my wife was diagnosed with lupus shortly after we were married. Her rheumatologist at the University of Minnesota advised her to hold off on getting pregnant for at least a few years so that they could get a sense for the severity of her illness. How it manifests in the first few years is often an indication of the overall prognosis for a lupus patient. Fortunately, as it turned out, she ended up having a mild case of the disease. Her biggest challenges were chronic joint pain and fatigue.

Second, both my wife and I were “late bloomers.” Neither one of us had a clear career path when we first got married. We floundered around, like most liberal arts majors do, trying this and that before finally landing on our feet in serendipitous jobs that seemed to fit our specific personalities and ambitions. Both of us ended up working in higher education, which is notorious for postponing adolescent daydreams at least until the age of thirty-five. For my wife, the career that she settled upon was in student services (her final job title was Associate Dean of Student Services at a large urban community college). In my case, it was even more roundabout as I finally ended up being a college library director after giving up on the unlikely dream of becoming a philosophy and religion professor. (More sobering news from the University of Minnesota to report: when I enquired about their PhD program in philosophy, the department chair sent me a letter advising me to pursue something else because the job market for philosophy PhDs was abysmal. I always thought that was remarkably kind of him, and probably inappropriate. Perhaps I could have provided the school with decades of cheap labor as a terminal ABD who suffered from writer’s block!) In short, we were too preoccupied with ourselves to be having children.

Third, both of us shared similar family histories that somehow stunted any natural desires to start our own family. My wife lost her own mother at an early age, and that loss seems to have interrupted and displaced her maternal instincts. For instance, she felt a sense of parental responsibility for her younger siblings after her mother died. She still feels that way, as if the burdens of parenting had already been experienced first-hand before she had even reached puberty. The natural order of things had somehow become cockeyed and crooked. I, too, experienced that sense of substitute parentage for a younger sibling when my parents both died in a car accident while I was a college student. (No wonder I never wanted to leave college: it was my safe place at a time of intolerable grief.) When my wife’s dad remarried, his new bride did nothing to enkindle a yearning to become a mom herself. Likewise, I had lost most of my admiration for my father by the time I reached high school due to his abusive tendencies. Up until about the age of 40, my biggest worry was that I would turn out to be just like him. That proved not to be the case, but it did contribute to my hesitancy to join the ranks of fatherhood. I didn’t want to perpetuate any bad seed.

Lastly, we didn’t want to bring children into a world that had become environmentally despoiled and overpopulated by human beings. The hegemony of human civilization on this planet is breathtaking in its pervasiveness (and, perhaps, its hubris). Take the acidification of the oceans, for instance. Nobody set out to kill marine mammals and fish by lowering the pH of the water. But that’s what is happening as excessive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere produce more and more carbonic acid after being absorbed in the ocean. Or consider the growing likelihood that the “Anthropocene,” as our geological epoch is sometimes called, is causing a mass extinction event to rival the asteroid strike that ended the reign of dinosaurs. As we know from geology, the surface of the earth is made of 15 tectonic plates that float on a sea of magma. These basalt plates (topped with granite) can drift up to two inches per year, creating isolated continents that remain separated from one another for millions of years, which is a virtual eternity in the evolution of life. Different species of plants, animals, and archaea evolve on the continents, along with the parasites that evolve in competition with them. When North American tourists travel to Africa, for instance, the microorganisms that are endemic to African ecology and foods enter their digestive systems and return home with them to North America. With no natural immunity to African parasites that enter our water systems as sewage, amphibians in the Americas are going extinct at alarming rates. Such events seem to defy our capacity to make moral judgments. Who is responsible for the unintended, yet lethal, consequences of an entire species that is simply going about its daily activities?