The Man Pays
On missing the boy who never was—and the bittersweet truth of choosing not to be a father.
My friend Meredith always had a knack for finding places where rent was somehow optional. I was on one of my early trips to New York in the summer of ’97, staying with her and another friend from college in a fourth-floor walkup on Second and 11th—and the owner had just disappeared. Nobody was paying, and the first night I was there, the rain came in right through the roof. The sun came out the next day, and I have a photo of the three of us on the street there in the East Village, my buddy Mark wearing Docs and a Beastie Boys shirt, and me in my goofy west-coast Tevas—not really the thing for roaming the streets of NYC.
Mark’s a bit ahead of us walking up the avenue. Meredith leans in and asks, “so what happened with Samantha, or Kristen, or, was it Gretchen, or—which one did you just break up with?” I watch someone roll through the intersection on a bicycle, hands off the bars, just cruising, and then turn back to her. Meredith had long, wavy red-blonde hair and green eyes, cut off jeans and the old Pentax that she carried with her everywhere those days, loaded with black and white. She felt like a sister from the start.
“You know how it goes with me,” I said, “but I’ll tell you right now, I’m gonna be married with kids by the time I’m thirty.” She gave me deadpan Detroit—“Really, Bobo?”, and I just said “Yes”—feeling convinced enough myself, in the moment. Meredith paused to consider, and then she smiled back and said, “I can see that. I can see that happening.”
She was doing her best to conjure it up for me, but I was the one trying to cast a spell. Becoming a father was something I’d absorbed as part of what it meant to be a man, but that I had no idea what it might actually mean. I didn’t even know what it felt like for my own father to be a father, how or even if he decided to do so, or whether he ever talked about it with anyone—because I’d never talked about it with him, nor with anyone else. My parents were high-school sweethearts who paired up to escape Long Island, and I was born when they were just twenty-five. As I learned later on, they didn’t have much of a conversation about having children. They just went ahead with what came naturally, and were already young parents with two kids under five at the age that I was having this conversation with my friend as we neared Union Square.
Kate and I got together twenty-odd years later. She was a fair bit younger than my forty-six, still very much in her prime childbearing years. Despite what I’d said to Meredith back in New York, things hadn’t become all that much clearer for me on the question of having children. My feeling throughout had been that if I was with the right person then I could be interested, and sometimes I did feel excited about the possibility of starting a family, but I still wasn’t clear that I wanted kids of my own accord, regardless of who I was with.
I know that some people do just know. That wasn’t me, and I felt ashamed for not knowing, for not being clear, and of the slowly-growing feeling that it just might be possible that I didn’t really want to have children all that badly, or even at all. What I heard from other men sure didn’t help. ‘You’ll never feel 100% ready,’ and “there’s no right time,” but that “everything changes,” and it’s great once you do it—none of that sounded all that compelling.
Sometime in early 2018, Kate and I were sitting in our living room one weekday morning talking about the coming year. The room around us was all strong colors—big blocky lounge chairs in royal purple, my painting of a hot-pink psychedelic Martian landscape above the nonfunctional fifties fireplace, and the bright splash of her yellow rain boots by the door. We sipped black coffee and ate toast with almond butter, starting our day together before she went to catch the ferry to work across the bay.
Kate looked up at me over her coffee and said, “I’m thinking about having my IUD removed.”
It’s not that what she said came as a surprise. There had been moments when starting a family had begun to seem possible—and many of those moments had come from my own feelings of joy and openness and wanting to expand further into love with her. Even in those moments, however, I didn’t feel enough clarity to make any movement forwards. I felt open—in those moments—but when it came to that moment, I felt a cold fear rise up in my chest and become heat as it traveled to my throat and face.
By that point in my life, I was fortunate enough to have earned some measure of the freedom that I’d been working to achieve since I started delivering papers at the age of eight or nine. Countering the lack male connection that I had felt is earlier life, I’d built an extensive network of male friends, and so I had quite a lot of experience to draw upon. I knew some men who were happy as fathers—and plenty more who were conflicted, beleaguered, beaten-down, burdened, and envious of my freedom. I had close friends who were mired in endless, vicious, expensive divorce and custody disputes, with their children caught in the middle—and others who were trapped in unhappy marriages.
Having only recently achieved some measure of stable mental health myself, I was finally free enough, but still not exactly in the clear, and I still wasn’t certain that I’d be able to handle the pressure of being a father, or that I’d want to share my relationship with my partner with children, let alone rise to the challenge of a rocky marriage, or of parenting problem children.
Kate was still sitting there, her face lit by the morning sun coming in through the window. “How do you feel about that idea?” she asked—and all I could do was gulp, “terrified,” as I scanned past the view of the bay, my eyes landing on the front door. The fact is, I had already found myself thinking—and it would be more accurate to say screaming—silently, to myself—“get me out of here!” all too often in the preceding weeks, as I tried again and again to reconcile my fear and uncertainty with the real possibility of starting a family with her.
I was an angry teen, not only with my parents for their passive neglect, and for their failure to speak to me more directly, but also because of what Chris Ryan named as “the dawning realities of adulthood” and the prospect of “regimentation, meaningless work, and ever-increasing isolation”. The unspoken message that I received about the role of the father was that I would have to earn enough money to support a family to earn the right to have a family, and although it’s still hard to admit, part of my anger came from trying to imagine just how much it would cost me to have children.
Nobody ever said anything about it, but I knew the deal, even when I was just eleven years old. I asked my friend Heidi’s little sister on a date, and we walked down the hill to a place on Castro called The Sausage Factory. We sat down and ordered pepperoni, medium, and I paid, because that’s what men do on dates. The man pays—even if he’s just a boy.
Although of course I know now that it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t necessarily have had to be the sole breadwinner, at the age when all of this began to come into consciousness it seemed clear to me that everything I ever made would have to be given over to supporting a family, and that it was fifty-fifty, maybe, that I’d even be part of the family myself for all that long.
My anger faded as I grew into adulthood. My freedom became more real—and along with it came an equally real sadness at having chosen not to become a father. I did choose not to have children, and I am grateful just about every day for the freedom that this allows me—and, not every day, but often enough, if I allow myself to wander towards the small orchard that my father was planting one day outside the farmhouse where we lived when I was a small boy, I see the hole that he dug there, and that I climbed into. That hole, two feet deep by three feet across—that hole meant for an apple tree, or whatever it was that would grow in the short growing season of 44° north, ten miles inland from Camden, Maine—I feel that hole in my heart, because I know that I am missing something irreplaceable, incomparable—and that won’t be filled in my present lifetime.
I miss the boy that never was. That boy is me, and he’s also the boy that would be my son. I don’t remember if a tree ever grew in that hole in the ground. I just remember little me standing there, my hand reaching up to wave as I stood at the bottom. There’s a hole in my heart like that hole in the ground, and it’s a hole that I do have to live with. It’s part of who I am, a man who is not a father, a childless son, a single Tom, out on his own—and again, it’s been my choice, but as much as I made that choice for freedom, it’s also true that I made that choice because I wasn’t prepared, and because I was hurt and damaged, because I was afraid, because I had no one to talk to, and because I felt so protective of my very precious self.
Looking at photos of myself as a boy, I’m mostly alone. There’s nobody else in the frame with me waving from that apple-tree hole at three, nor at five as I stare into the fire I’m tending on the beach. I’m alone at eight jumping between boulders in the high Sierra, and I’m alone at ten riding my bike in the park in San Francisco. I know it must be true that I wasn’t always alone, but in those photos I see that my young boy face is held tight as I look away to the left. I see a boy who’s getting used to being by himself. As my parents separated and then divorced and my sister became more and more of a force of chaos in my teenage home, I went my own way.
The seed of family and of fatherhood was never planted in me, or it was stunted, and twisted, and only grew small. Only recently have I gained some awareness of the part of me that could have been a father, what he feels like, what he loves, who he would have been, how he might have been with his children.
We don’t get to do everything, and I’m not working up to some revelation about how I’ve finally changed my mind. I’m not trying to go back and live a different life, and I don’t meed anyone telling me that ’it’s not too late.’ I’m happy with who I am—and I’m here to tell the truth.
The truth is that sometimes I cry and cry for the boy that never was. I grieve his loss, and the pain that led me there, even while I celebrate my freedom and the person that I have become. As Warren Farrell wrote, “To be childless may be seen as freedom, but for many men it’s also seen as a failure”—and it is a failure, not so much on the part of individual men but of our culture as a whole. “…as men discover they have been deprived of their fathers, they start asking if they are also being deprived of being fathers.” and while he meant that a man can be deprived of actively fathering his own children by working outside the home to support a family back at home, it’s just as true that our same system is depriving many men of the opportunity to be fathers at all, by way of the same omissions that I experienced.
Although the model for manhood is much broader than it used to be, my experience is that it still generally includes being a father. There’s plenty of support out there for guys who are fathers, but there is little discussion of—let alone support for—childless or child-free men, even though only two thirds of American men become fathers in their lifetimes. Although just about the same proportion of women never become mothers, there is far less said about the one-third of us men who don’t ever become fathers.
A 2020 paper entitled “When Men Choose To Be Childless” echoes much of what I’ve felt about having children. These men cited both a “lack of conscious decision-making” and a conscious decision to situate themselves “outside the norm,” as well as absent fathers and a lack of an “emotionally open and frank conversation about having children.” Many of the men cited their fear of losing freedom, and also fear of the commitment required to “support their family financially.” Although they do note their subjects’ desire to “form an identity in resistance to the dominant discourse,” the authors stop short of digging deeper into that desire to resist.
I know from my own experience what it feels like to be so much “in resistance” to the environment in which I find myself so as to choose not to reproduce. Of course, there are a wide variety of reasons that any individual may or may not end up having children, but given that nearly four out of ten American men do not end up becoming fathers, and that the suicide rate for men is roughly four times that of women, the stark truth is that many men are choosing to end their family lines, one way or another.
The sadness which co-exists with my own joy and freedom is a reflection of a much broader despair amongst men. We’re resisting the dominant paradigm to the point of self-destruction. As much as men have had a hand in creating a culture which is still usually—and fairly—considered to disproportionately benefit men, that same culture is also driving us to quit our most basic biological purpose. The increasing number of men who do not fulfill their first-order biological imperative as human animals is a direct and quite literally life-ending legacy of our current culture. Even though we know that we are foregoing the single most powerful built-in mechanism for personal fulfillment, and therefore sort of asking for it in terms of day-to-day happiness and even personal health and longevity, an increasing number of men see the evidence of what it is actually like to be a father in our society as enough to convince us to refuse that path.
I’m here to say that the stereotypical fear of commitment often ascribed to men doesn’t come from some sort of lack of stick-to-itiveness that is innate to masculinity. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. It’s not that we are reluctant to commit because we are men, it’s that some of us are unwilling to commit to the untenable bargain offered by society. What Gerda Lerner called the “unwritten contract for exchange” of protection and financial support for love is a paradigm that, imperfect as it was, at least offered a workable template for family, and for fatherhood. The model of relating, and of masculinity, is largely gone now, and has yet to be replaced by a cultural framework that offers men the sense of identity, security, and support required for more of us to be want to become fathers.
Our culture still teaches us that we are not really men until we accumulate wealth, marry, and have children. We have to earn the right to call ourselves men, and so, by these same criteria, we are not yet men until we become fathers. The catch is that if I have to become a father to become a man, then I have to give up much of my still-unformed self in service to family in order to become that sort of man. While that may well be the existential reality of the cycle of human reproduction as expressed in the formation of the psyche—that we must trade away some portion of freedom in order to become fully adult—if our culture does not prepare, surround and support us in this process, then this becomes a binding conflict. If some of us won’t commit to what society has to offer, it’s for a damn good reason.
Being with Kate was the last time that I was faced with the choice of fatherhood, but certainly not the first. I’ve been almost-married twice, and almost a father far more times than that. I’ve been in plenty of relationships that could have become families, and in others where pregnancy was an exciting possibility, a threat to be avoided, a crisis to be dealt with—and sometimes all of those and more.
Despite what I’m aware of missing, I’m clear that this path is the right path for me, for this life. Although I felt ’open to the idea’ for many years, I’d already chosen by my actions many times over to not be a father, and I don’t need to continue to choose again and again. Being child-free is a great a way to be, and, it’s also true that I still feel sadness, hurt, and anger for what’s missing in not having my own children. It’s a choice for freedom, for creativity, and for light—and it’s also a dark choice that’s the result of growing up without enough truth or connection, and the shadow of an all-too-accurately unsatisfying picture of what it can mean to be a father.
My choice is both the unconscious result of my upbringing, and a protest—my refusal to participate in a system that often seems designed to destroy us. It’s the end of the line for me, as it is for many other men today, and I’m ok with that—but there is a part of me that will remain forever missing, and the boy that never was will remain my deepest wound.
An earlier version of this essay previously appeared with Bowen Dwelle’s writing at ⬇️
A lot of it has to do with timing. I swore for years that I’d never have kids. It took meeting someone I could imagine parenting with, at a time in my life when I was looking to put down roots. But I can’t resist pointing out that the boy might never have been even you did have kids! I’m thinking of friends who are fathers only to daughters (including the folk artist Greg Brown).
I appreciate hearing your perspective on this topic. Two of my brothers made that choice and I never really understood their decision until I read your article.