A Letter to the Child I Am Too Selfish to Have, According to a Childless Guy Who Lives in a Golden Palace
Lessons from the Catholic Church: Expect nothing and still be disappointed.
When I was your age there were butterflies.
I did not spend most of my childhood in a rural idyll, I grew up in a suburban neighborhood that was technically part of New York City. But I saw butterflies all the time, and not just the ones that my kindergarten class raised from eggs. There were butterflies with wispy white wings and the occasional monarch darting around the flowers in my mother’s garden.
I thought I saw the butterflies less often as some kind of metaphor for the depression that sunk over me in high school, a genetic and experiential gift that you will inherit as the fucked-up genes from both sides of my family now run in your veins as well, but it wasn’t my imagination. There truly are 1.6% less butterflies each year.
There are so many signs that the world I grew up in will never be yours. Endangered animals I gathered box tops to save now disappearing forever. Once-in-a-lifetime storms multiple times a year. T-shirts on Christmas and winter coats on Easter. Our family in Croatia working harder and harder each year to squeeze out half a living from the land, even when hail damages the grapes and frost damages the olives and drought damages everything. But I keep coming back to the butterflies. Just another one of nature’s beautiful surprises that I got to see often, but you may not.
I think that was the day I realized it might be selfish to have you. When I realized that I would be bringing you into a world with fewer butterflies.
I do not know what kind of life you will have with me. I am 24 and single, financially stable in the kind of delicate calculus that would be upended with the presence of another person, a poorly-timed medical emergency, or even a chronically ill cat. I am doing alright for myself, and happy with the life I have built in Zagreb, but the unpleasant kernel of truth at the center of this move is that I did it partially because I knew I could never afford to live in the city of my birth. I think I might love to raise my child in the city I was born in, give you the same opportunities to go on cheap visits to the Met and chase pigeons through Central Park and feel the whole world at your fingertips or at the end of a subway ride. But it is not 1997 anymore. I’m not sure I see a world where this will happen for us, where I can give you the same kind of opportunities my family gave me on a (unionized) waiter’s salary.
Although life in Zagreb is fine for me, I do not know that I would bring a child into this town either. I’ve heard enough stories about childbirth in Croatian hospitals to be hesitant about wanting to be part of it. Know that I will love you no matter what and fight for you, but if you are not able-bodied, accommodations and treatment are few and far between. I’m terrified of the world of hurt you will face if you are gay, or if the person I am raising you with is also your mother, not a father. I’m terrified of the poison that will get poured into your ear, including at in-school religion classes, no matter how hard I try to teach you to respect others.
Ironically, the head of the Catholic Church claims people are too selfish to have children, yet his institution’s decades-long stranglehold on the country I love is a big factor in my calculus deciding whether or not to have children.
The Pope said it would be selfish not to have you, that too many young people such as myself are choosing to adopt pets instead. Even now, I am financially secure enough to adopt a pet if I tighten the belt a little bit, but I’m not sure that I can afford a child in the next decade. I can have a pet without worrying that going into the hospital will kill me. I can adopt a dog without worrying about what I will do about religion class when it goes to school. And cats live less than humans. I can adopt a pet without worrying on my deathbed that I have brought a being into a world that is too cruel for it.
To some extent, there is selfishness in my decision (probably) not to have children, but not in the way Pope Francis thinks. Much of my decision comes from my fear of the climate apocalypse, but so many other people have faced what felt like world-ending catastrophes before and maintained the hope (or the inability to decide otherwise) to have children. My own grandmother was born during World War Two. Indigenous people survived and raised family after genocide and robbery of their lands. There is some selfishness in the (often white) modern liberal’s fear of having children in the face of climate destruction. We are not the first people to face such complete destruction, but we are one of the first to be completely insulated from existential threats on a daily basis, maybe that is why it feels so terrifying.
But I still am not sure that I want to have children now, although I think about helping a little person walk and going to school recitals and listening to an overexcited toddler ramble about dinosaurs. Because no matter what the pope says, I would be bringing a child into the world with fewer butterflies.
And the truth is that for all of his talk about humility, Pope Francis will retreat to his gilded palace, and if I have kids I will have to scramble to find childcare (because even in Zagreb, raising a child on one salary won’t be enough).