Parenting

A few days ago my daughter turned 10.

It’s quite a milestone for both of us. For her, it means finally passing into “double digits”—that mysterious world that few of us ever pass out of. For me, it signals a decade of motherhood. When my Phoebe came into the world a little after 3:30 on a rainy South Carolina Thursday, it wasn’t simply the beginning of her life; it was the fundamental altering of mine.

Looking back, I can see how much motherhood has changed me, how much it has forced me to grow beyond myself. I realize now that when folks spoke of me as a “young mother,” they weren’t talking about the age of my daughter so much as about the fact that I myself was new to the game. I had a lot to learn.

Those first few years were spent learning to make the “right” choices; choices about…feeding and sleeping habits, immunizations, potty training, and pacifiers. And once I’d figured how to actually keep her alive (and not alienate all my friends and family in the process), it was time to learn how to “train her up in the way she should go.” Suddenly the questions were about when to let her to use electronics and where to send her to school.

Cynthia Pearl Maus packs a world of insight into a short space when she says: “You may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you could never be; I know someone who told stories to me” (in David Larsen’s Telling the Old, Old Story, p. 13). For reasons I cannot fully explain, those lines detonated as an existential sunburst in my soul the first time I read them. Tears welled up in my eyes; in part, I suppose, because I read them as a father who tells stories to his children. I suspect my response was also owing to the fact that my heavenly Father tells stories to me, and his stories have enriched my life beyond measure.

“Richer than I you could never be; I know someone who told stories to me.” Maus certainly means to say that stories are told to children who are loved. And that is right. But I think she is saying something more. She recognizes the singular contribution story-telling can make to the development of moral character, psychological stability, intellectual depth and similar soul-shaping inheritances. Stories provide children with roots—teaching and grounding them in transcendent realities. Stories shape souls, who steer cultures and define eras.

By creative design we are programmed to thrive on stories. Elie Wiesel is quoted on the same page in Larsen’s book as saying: “God made man because He loves stories” (emphasis mine). That statement walks just as well on its head: God made stories, because he loves man. The God of the Bible is a story-telling God who graciously roots his people in the truth, motivates them to live righteously, and comforts their hearts by means of stories.

This past week I found myself cuddling the newest member of our church—a sweet, Dreft-scented little girl named Hope. As I held her in my arms, I have to admit that I felt the ache of maternal longing well up inside me. The memories of my own children at that age and the sheer wonder at new life were almost too much. And yet, my husband and I are not presently pursuing any new members of the family. For us, as it is for many couples, the question of when and whether to have more children has been a complicated one, one that has forced us to wrestle through desire, calling, and limitation. On the other hand, for an increasing number, the question is not when or how many children to have; the question is whether to have them at all.

In August, Time magazine explored this phenomenon in their cover story entitled, “The Childfree Life: When having it all means not having children.” And then earlier in September, Emily Timbol wrote a piece for Her.meneutics, a blog of Christianity Today, explaining why she and her husband do not intend to have children (and why she’d appreciate you not judging her for it). Now, couples choosing to not have children is nothing new; but what I do find interesting is why they are choosing this. The current argument seems less rooted in the classic appeal to overpopulation or the desire to commit oneself to extreme callings or even a worry about bringing children into a terribly broken world. Instead, it seems that more and more couples are choosing to not have children in order to pursue certain lifestyles and careers unhindered. And while it’s easy to chalk this up to Millennial selfishness, (see here for a piece that rightly challenges the temptation to make Millennials the scapegoat for every societal ill), I don’t think it’s that simple. At the same time, the question of whether to have children is going to be increasingly pesky one for Millennials for a couple of reasons: