I was talking to an acquaintance today about someone I know whose husband has been diagnosed with a very serious illness. The acquaintance, a mother-of-three, had one pressing question: do the couple have children? On hearing they do, she said:
That’s good: at least she has SOME comfort and support…
I don’t think it’s too self-regarding to find this vexatious. How can I avoid thinking of myself, or my partner, in the same situation? By her reckoning, should I assume that we would have no “comfort and support” in that scenario? It’s hard to imagine otherwise when it’s stated thus. The implication is obvious; in fact, I find it rude.
Why doesn’t this occur to people? I would never say, to someone I know to be single or divorced, “at least X has a husband to look after her if she get’s sick“. It’s insensitive, is it not?
This inherent patina of sadness and loneliness that childlessness carries around with it has always annoyed me. For some people, it’s a given that non-parents in their 60s, 70s etc are actively grieving their ‘failure’ to have children and thus have a tragic aura about them. It’s a culturally-imposed narrative, perpetuated in literature and cinema over the years.
This sad-old-childless trope can feel unexpectedly offensive, and it annoys me in books and films as well as real life. Fine in another century, but let’s leave it there. Apparently, nearly 20% of women at age 45 in the UK don’t have children; the figure is even higher in European countries such as Spain, Italy and Austria. Lots of young people are expressing reservations about reproducing because the world is actually dying, not to mention the fact that it’s lorded over by dangerous buffoons.
Might I suggest that parents like the mother-of-three, whose first question is always do they have children?, try to look outside their suburban bubble and use some imagination to think up alternative things to say in these circumstances? It’s not that hard, we do it all the time.
Plus, are kids really such a comfort and fix-all?
Agreed!! It never ceases to surprise me how thoughtless people can be. I don’t get it. It was so hurtful when I was deep in grief. Now I alternate between anger and annoyance. Plus, so many people’s children are inconsiderate. There is no guarantee that they will provide anything resembling comfort.
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Hi Phoenix, I sometimes wonder if I’m too hard on people and if I myself go around saying blunderingly insensitive things without realizing it…. But it does seem pretty elementary to just avoid eulogizing things that you know the listener doesn’t have or can never have. And yes, I think offspring are more a distraction in a lot of cases: I hear of plenty of crap ones!
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Dammit, I thought I’d written a long response to this. In her later years, my mother used to say this sort of thing a lot, or always ask if friends of mine had “a family” which drove me crazy, as it was in no way relevant to their relationship with me. Argh.
And no – children are not always a comfort or fix-all. I’ve seen lots of examples of people alone and lonely, even when they have children either living nearby or within a couple of hours driving distance. A great-aunt and uncle of mine had three sons, but had to rely on a housekeeper and my parents to help out, as they all lived several hours flight away. Ad there’s a heartbreaking letter going around Fbk – an elderly lady asking her neighbour to be her friend, because she’s so lonely. She has two children, but they are “too bosy” for her.
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I hate that “Do they have family?” question which really means do they have children – I always answer in as obtuse a way as possible, e.g. “Well I think he has a sister..”… It’s a very common one here in Ireland. I think that people assume just the fact of having children protects you from loneliness, but I think it can sometimes make things worse – the endless waiting, the disappointment…
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