My grandparents apocalypse, and our grandkids. - Ruben Rubens, age 40
My mum didn't tell her parents that she was pregnant with me until she was five months pregnant. She wasn't married to my dad, an Irish Catholic from a family of 8 kids, but it wasn't their unorthodox status that made her hesitate.
When she was growing up, her dad, my Opa, had always told her: 'the worst thing you can do in this world is bring a child into it.' Brutal. He had survived the holocaust, in hiding while most of his family and community died during the long, apocalyptic Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As a young, atheist schoolteacher, his cynicism about what was going on in the world made him prepared to face the reality of what was coming, and make plans accordingly.
He and his newly married partner, my Oma, made arrangements to go into hiding, but they couldn't convince many of their family members to join them. The oncoming horrors were unimaginable to all, and so, so many of them were murdered.
But my grandparents survival wasn't down to my Opa and his cold hard realism alone. My Oma, made the heartbreaking choice to go into hiding with him. Together they survived the war years, through betrayals, poverty, hopelessness, assaults, confinement, isolation, only with her interminable, determined optimism, joy, and appreciation for all the good things in life. There couldn't have been a more unlikely couple, but then for them to come out alive and on the other side was an incredibly unlikely story.
So when my Mum did eventually tell her mum and dad that she was pregnant with me, the news was met with joy from both of them, and none of the expected scornful cynicism. Until then my mother hadn't fully realised the paradox, that while her rationalist father thought it was a terrible world to bring children into, he had in fact made two of his own, and everyone involved was much better for it.
I grew up with these two stories on repeat, my grandmother's censored retelling of a holocaust experience, and my father's romanticised retelling of how he had eventually wooed my mother into having children despite her imagining her father's rejection.
Both stories definitely had a major influence on me growing up as a cynical, yet idealistic anarchist-communist kid, and my conflicted avoidance of having kids of my own. It was in my early twenties that I'd made up my mind not to. Myself and my best friend, both single at the time, discussed getting vasectomies. He became a doctor and enjoyed such gruesome discussions of biological functions and minor surgery. I was unemployed, didn't have my shit together to go to the dentist, and just never booked it in. But I was also terrified, to be honest, of giving in to my cynical, and deeply sad take on the direction of the world. The remote possibility of a world where having kids seemed like a good idea was an idea I secretly wanted to hold on to.
I kind of wished that I'd talked about it more. I didn't know of anyone who had chosen to get a vasectomy. Older friends and family members not having kids was generally thought of as a sad thing for them, which often it was.
In my twenties and thirties I had several relationships with people who probably wanted children, probably not with me, and several people who also hadn't quite made up their mind. I definitely romanticised about the idea, and avoided taking decisive action either way. Honestly, for someone who had long known, for so many reasons that I didn't want kids, not to just get it done, was pretty irresponsible. I definitely didn't and still don't have my shit together to be a parent, even just booking in an appointment at the clinic was a major life-admin challenge. Thinking about booking it in would often coincide with waves of depression and all-round hopelessness. I left most of the burden of contraception to female partners, and worse I left open these heart wrenching and drawn out conversations about children open when I could have just played my cards.
Apart from holding out for some kind of romantic miracle conception, some kind of world being solved by looking inwards to a family and how beautiful that could be, I didn't know how to say all this in a way that wasn't dissing other people. The part of me that didn't want my own children wanted to tell other people 'look around you the world is burning', but not to say 'look at you disgusting breeders you're what's wrong in the world'.
Not having children as a political choice is difficult to explain, if you don't want to be a total asshole about it. It's such a intimate, embodied, choice, whether for or against its definitely not a place for other people to decide for you. But at the same time, it is a fundamental decision that shapes society, that shapes the communities and the world we live in, and in the context of environmental collapse and climate change it can't not be political too. So thanks for reading, and thanks for this space to share my thoughts.
Despite the shadow of social shame around your so called 'climate footprint', having kids is rightfully a thing that is celebrated and that brings people together in lovely communities. Not having kids is a thing that people do on their own, either because we are lonely, or self-righteous, or just selfish. So it’s also nice to talk about it and celebrate it and break the creepy-old-man spinster-woman narrative.
When I was 36, my mum told me a new story. She turned 18 in 1966, in a time of massive social upheaval and progressive social change. Going to uni, she got swept up in the hippy trend, feminism and the anti-war movement, and she felt that she could change the world. She travelled, had a partner, became a teacher, bought a house. And when she turned 36, she came to the realisation that she was now double the age she was at 18, hadn't really changed the world, and that she should let go of that ideal goal. I was conceived 2 years later.
When I turned 18 in 2001, a whole lot had changed since 1966, so I don't really agree with her on this. Older me can admit that I enjoyed a much more open, progressive and affluent world than my mum, or grandma had. But I also witnessed the epic environmental destruction going on unabated in the city I grew up in, the clear felled forests of Victoria, in the uranium mines of Central Australia, the dangerously degraded and poisoned land everywhere I travelled. The world was heading back to war, and our massive mobilisations against it weren't going to mean shit. I was idealistic but angry, frustrated and hopelessly lost for what I could do to break the crushing inertia of planetary destruction.
I also turned 36 feeling resoundingly disappointed at my haphazard efforts to make some kind of meaningful change in the world. In the intervening years Climate Change had gone from being a real but distant threat, to one that makes me terrified of the coming summer even in July, and frames every possible imagination of the future. We fight to keep the unlikely chance to limit the effects to regular devastation and perhaps not utter destruction. I'm demoralised and not at all hopeful, I don't think I'm going to change the world, but I do try to be there to help others who keep trying where I can.
I just can't imagine the version of me that would be turning 18 in 2042. If I was nearly crushed by despair and impotence in the 2000's, how the hell could anyone cope, already in a 2 degree warmed world, with 3, 4, 5 degree future already baked in. Return-to-nature idealism unrelentingly smashed by fire, drought, flood, fire. Techno utopian dreams of luxury automated communism gone along with a few billionaires on their way to Mars. Justice and peace imploding under the weight of collapsing empires, population collapse, mass extinctions.
I think my Opa was wrong, I don't think that this is the worst worId to be bring me into. I want to be there for it all. When the shit goes down, I don't want to run for the hills, but to see what crazy possibilities might open up as capitalism crumbles, and at least find some alternative future than burning more fossil fuels to put out the fires. Maybe there will be especially awesome music. Maybe we'll build some communities full of kick ass people doing what we can to protect and warm each other.
But I'll be old and I'll clock out when I need to. My imaginary 18 year old, well I don't want to be them, and I don't want them to be there. So even if, with our exceptional efforts and inventiveness and collectivity, we somehow create a different version of the future to be a kid in... What would their young adult decision be, will they even have the choice to bring another child into the world?
