No-Family Day (A Hubbuddy Post)

I have always wanted to have a family. Even as a young child, it was always obvious to me that I would have a family of my own . . . eventually. It wasn't a decision or a wish, it was a given. Unavoidable, even.

I imagined my adult children and their spouses in some living room on some weekend afternoon, chatting about books they had read and movies they had watched and things they were passionate about, while I listened to them all and occasionally chimed in myself.

But that's the last step. It reminds me of what Michael Kanin said: "I don't like to write, but I love to have written."

So if I wanted a family of happy adult children, I guess that meant having younger children. Which probably meant having babies. Which probably meant that I needed a wife. Which probably meant having a serious girlfriend. Which would probably require having any girlfriend at all.

And that first step was kind of a stumbling block for longer than I really want to admit. I guess a young twenty-something guy with fantasies of an informal multi-generational book club is not quite what the average twenty-something girl has in mind.

But then I meet my Sionnach. We dated. We got serious. We got engaged. We got pregnant. We got married. We had a baby. We did it quickly and only just a little bit outside of the proper order, but it was because of one of the many things that we shared: an absolute certainty that we were going to have a family together.

It was important. We were not going to wait for a good career or a good house. We weren't going to wait for anything. My parents were 30 and 32 when I was born; I was 31 when WOI was born. It was time to start.

This seems to be a somewhat rare drive among my peers. Some of them already have children; and some of them can't have children. But an awful lot of them want to have children 'someday' . . . or very definitely not have any children at all.

And it's not just my peers. The total fertility rate in Canada is sitting stubbornly around 1.6 children per woman. To keep the population steady, we need a fertility rate of around 2.1 children per woman.

This is doing interesting things to us demographically. There are now more sixty-year-olds in Canada than there are six-year-olds.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Pyramideca2010.jpg

The baby boom faded and we settled into a predictable two-and-a-bit million new babies every five years. And then, about a decade ago, something happened. Several hundred thousand babies were never born. Several hundred thousand adults never became parents.

Having children is certainly scary. It takes time and money and attention and effort, and all of them in huge quantities. Times are not good economically, especially for younger people. The cultural expectation that people will marry and start families and start families may well be the weakest that it ever has been. A generation of children raised in non-nuclear families have spent their lives worrying about the future and the planet and overpopulation, and now that they are adults they are sitting this major life event out.

I'm not encouraging you to rush out and start a family. I'm just curious about what you personally think about families, whether you are like me and always wanted one, or you don't want one, or you are still somewhere in the middle. Let me know.