Dear Alma, I want a child. I want it all
Daily Comfort ZoneFrom our agony aunt’s bulging email box:
Dear Alma,
I am a successful female musician in my mid-30’s. I work hard, and have a rewarding career which flies me around the globe. I have been almost exclusively touring for the last 15 years, and retain a nice living space in a major city. Here is my problem. I want to have a child. A partner would also be great, but by now I have given up that idea and prioritized child over family. I had a short marriage during the pandemic – we were stuck together, got a dog, it almost seemed like a regular life. Then I started to tour again and he filed for divorce. I just can’t sustain any kind of relationship long enough to have a child – they always leave me – I come back to find them gone. I see other women in my situation – they have missed the window and are alone as they age.
Am I doomed?
Sincerely,
All Alone, in front of Thousands
Dear All Alone,
I too see the women of whom you speak. The beautiful, successful soloists carrying a small dog in a bag on tour. Or the amazing middle-aged women with one child, divorced, who either travel with their child and home school them on the road, or leave the child at home with relatives or a nanny. It’s a brutal truth that men can have it all, a family and a wife who will hold down the fort while they are away, and when the genders are switched, it’s about as common as seeing a unicorn wandering into a Starbucks. It happens, but just not terribly often.
You have to take a long, hard look at your life. Your whole life. And decide what you want it to include when it’s all said and done. There is no judgement on how a person lives their life, and there are infinite paths towards the same goal. All Alone, you want to have a child. You can do that. You can.
There are tons of ways of having a child. Adoption, sperm bank, friend who donates his sperm, I even had a friend who went to Alaska for 2 weeks specifically to come back with hearty, outdoorsy bun in the oven, and it worked great. Don’t wait. Do it now. Especially if you want more than 1. And after you have your baby, there are just as many ways to raise that baby as there are babies in the world. You can (and should) make as many plans as possible before you have your baby, but also be ready to change any and all of those plans as you find your new normal.
I think it’s smart to prioritize baby over relationship. A relationship is not something to be relied upon. I have friends whose husbands left them while they were pregnant, when the baby was 3 weeks old, who died after a year, or became entirely unbearable.
Do it. Do it now. Stay strong against any naysayers. You are a successful, brilliant woman. And you can have it all.
I got lucky, I guess. I managed to have kids. My husband is good. But he is a Unicorn and works at Starbucks.
Questions for Alma? Please put them in the comments section or send to DearAlmaQuery@gmail.com
Dear All Alone,
I understand well your wish after a child, and I think it is important that gifted people have children, preferably many children.
However, you have to consider a very important aspect: If you “can’t sustain any kind of relationship long enough to have a child”, as you wrote, how sure you are that you can raise a child properly?
Yours,
Pff
PFF – I think the difficulty of sustaining a relationship in this case stems from differing expectations of gender roles, not the writer’s personality. Men can have wives at home and it is difficult for women to have husbands at home. I think that is the situation here.
I know many men and women in the same work situation. The men have children and the women rarely do.
Raising a child and having a romantic partner are two completely different things. That’s like saying “If you can’t cook, how do you know you can be good at cleaning?” Just because both things happen in the house, it doesn’t make them causally linked. What’s underpinning your faulty logic is the prejudice that a romantic relationship is the benchmark for all relationships. Life is a bit more complicated than that, and there are many “loving parents” who do not treat their children correctly, and vice versa.
Who talked about a “romantic patrner”? I mean, a child needs a father.
… and a mother.
History has shown that there are many forms of family that are equally valid and successful. In fact, the model of a nuclear family that you espouse only very recently became the norm, and its disadvantages and problems have been revealed through sociological and psychological studies. Unless you can argue otherwise by showing a scholarly consensus that one “needs a father and a mother”, I think it’s best not to say such things as it is insulting to competent parents who do not fall under that category.
For the record, there is a plethora of studies that show which factors do in fact aid child development. Perhaps you could read up on this widely studied subject.
A child needs unconditional love and care, from the adults that surround it, in which formation is not so important. When it knows by experience how it feels to be loved, it learns to love, and this is a treasure enriching its entire adult life. It is a very simple formula but often difficult to practice in reality, given humans’ limitations, and undermining circumstances.
And there are also lots of children who don’t treat their parents correctly.
A very short relationship may be more than enough to get a child.
“prioritized child over family …” What? Is a child not family? If you find it impossible to maintain relationships with other adults, what does that say about you as a potential mother? Will you give up your touring career once you have a child? If not, who will look after it?
It seems that for this person (if she is real) “I want a child” has the same meaning as “I want a dog”.
Here it means prioritizing having a child over waiting for a perfect partner.
It’s not the same as wanting a dog. She desperately wants a child and is trying to find a way.
My question was, why does she want a child? Just because you want something doesn’t mean you could or should have it. I may want a dog, but my circumstances (small apartment, full-time job) make it impractical and cruel to the dog.
This hypothetical person ‘wants’ another human being, a child. Absent a partner (she has given up on that), she will be solely responsible for it. She has ‘prioritized [having a] child over family’. I would be more sympathetic if she were willing to prioritize child over career, but there is no hint of that. She doesn’t want to be alone as she ages, so she wants a child as a life-companion, whatever the child’s needs or wants might be. You are responsible for your children, you don’t own them.
Ah, the modern delusion to “have it all” and hence defy nature’s very own strictures. We see this phenomenon most clearly with the achievements of modern technology, which purports to eliminate all limits and give us all the advantages without any of the inconveniences. We want to experience intimacy without however having to work at it, most likely via a computer; we want to be able to enjoy rich foods without gaining any weight, as these foods have been somehow modified; and we think we can somehow master incredibly difficult skills by using secret shortcuts and magic bullets, without allowing time itself to do its important work.
Alas, this rarely turns out the way it was intended to. Even though we have incredible tools for communication, rarely have we been so alienated from one another; and although we have an incredible wealth of knowledge and culture at our disposal, great artists, writers, composers are becoming more and more scarce and tend to belong to a different era. That’s because this illusion of an exhaustive and expedient way to achieve our ends is indeed a delusion, because nothing meaningful can be gained without a trade-off and without the unavoidable friction that we will inevitably encounter in our endeavors.
Making choices, especially important and decisive ones, usually involves relinquishing other competing choices, because each choice we make involves its own demand that must be respected and cared for. As much as this idea will repel some, we are actually limited in how much we can achieve, and even more so if we want to achieve something well. Can one have a child, a solo career, and a successful relationship? Perhaps in some rare cases, but I do wonder how well, given the fact that one can only be in one place at any given time and that time and mental energy are limited resources. The real issue, however, is whether one should want all of these things to happen at the same time to begin with, and whether one seriously believes one can genuinely do justice to all of them.
Hilary has 2 kids and a stay at home husband. Mutter has kids. And has had several husband along the way. It’s possible but tricky to accomplish.
Janine doesn’t have children. Maybe that’s why she has been going towards teaching. She is trying to find a way.
So many successful women soloists don’t have kids. And their equal male colleagues do. It’s just a fact.
Yes – but have the kid first – time is running out. And as Alma says, the decisions will become clear after the baby is born.
Why does she want a child? Mid-30s broodiness? A companion as she gets older? She should examine her motives and think about the child and its needs as well as her own. Does she really understand the responsibilities and sacrifices of a parent, a single parent at that?
An excellent summing-up of modernity.
Every achievement has its price.
The reason that, for instance, artistic greatness has become so rare, is due to exactly the process described in this comment. Climbing the mountain and overcoming the inevitable obstacles, inside and outside, requires enormous investments of effort and time, and will excoude all kinds of other options. Who in his/her/its right mind would even begin to contemplate this?
“When the genders are switched, it’s about as common as seeing a unicorn wandering into a Starbucks.”
Any husband content to stay at home with the kids while his wife “has it all” will earn nothing but her contempt.
And if it is reversed? A wife staying home while her husband has it all? Also contempt?
Greg – can you see what your sentence would sound like if you reversed the genders? And after you see how you feel, think about the world and what it is like for a highly trained woman to live her life?
Really? Can’t men be supportive of a successful woman?
Greg, please speak for yourself, or better still, not speak at all. You make us men look bad, and frankly, it’s really annoying and inconvenient for us. A lot of us men are actually genuinely good people who only want to see our partners happy and succeed. You, on the other hand, make it sound like we’re just a bunch of narcissistic, insecure sociopaths who do not understand what love means. Good for you, if that works for you, but please stay out of other people’s lives and do not speak on behalf of us, thanks.
Get a grip. The simple truth is that just as most men pick partners based on looks, most women pick partners based on earning potential. Who would read “50 Shades of Grey” if Christian Grey worked in a warehouse? A newly-unemployed man will see the chance his wife will divorce him in the first year increase dramatically.
And no matter what this Alma creature says, most men don’t “have it all” either. The vast majority of men live lives of unrewarding work, paying for others and getting nothing in return, disappointment, shattered dreams, lack of support, and, for blue-collar guys, chronic physical pain. They die on the job at 13 times the rate that women do.
And before we have any penny-in-the-slot carping, I’ve been happily married for 30 years to one of the top dog breeders in the country. She might be on the road for a month at a time at shows but she knows when she comes home, I will have taken care of the dogs here, kept the house clean, mowed the lawn, cooked food, washed the dishes and done all the laundry.
“The simple truth is that just as most men pick partners based on looks, most women pick partners based on earning potential.”
With all due respect, but this really a most terrible klischee, and only correct – to some extent – for very underdeveloped people, and empty Hollywood types.
“A relationship is not something to be relied upon. I have friends whose husbands left them while they were pregnant, when the baby was 3 weeks old, who died after a year, or became entirely unbearable.”
But what if *the mother* who has the child dies after a year? As there is no husband/wife/partner around to care for the infant, presumably it should just be left on a doorstep somewhere.
I love how Alma basically says ignore the naysayers and take on this life-long commitment, despite All Alone’s inability to make it work with a fully functioning adult. Duping out-of-state men for their rugged, outdoorsy sperm (their parental rights be damned) is the perfect icing for this half-baked advice.
Anyone else question the wisdom of having a baby just because you’re afraid of growing old alone? Is that a good enough reason to bring a child into this (dying) world? It feels pretty selfish to me.
I also wanted it all and look how I ended-up here.
Sally