Hugo Schwyzer

There’s a rich and at times heated debate going on in the thread below this post. Most of the folks weighing in are parents, something I’m obviously not, so I’m largely staying out of the discussion. One participant, Kate, does ask:

Hugo - it sounds as if you and your wife are considering having children. How are you expecting/hoping children to change your lives?

Yes, my wife and I are considering having children, though we aren’t expecting any at the moment. Yes, we talk a great deal about having children. And yes, there’s some ambivalence on both our parts about becoming parents.

When I share that I’ve been married four times without having children with any of my ex-wives (or the half-dozen other women I lived with), some folks are a bit surprised. Statistics alone would suggest that I ought to have produced at least one or two. It’s a blessing, of course, that I never had children with any of my exes. I think all three of my ex-wives would have made fine mothers, but judging by my own emotional state at the time I was married to at least the first two, I would have been a catastrophically bad father.

I got married for the first time when I was 23; my wife was not quite 21. We were both in graduate school (she finished an M.A. degree before being old enough to drink legally). We were living on a teaching assistant’s salary ($1100 a month), and we were quite clear we weren’t ready financially and professionally to be parents. I was also “acting out” and in the full throes of my addictiveness. We divorced right around the time that our finances started to stabilize and the prospect of having children became more feasible; we both felt we needed to separate before we made a baby together.

I married for the second time at 27; the spouse this time was 26. I was already tenure-track here at the college, and eager for children. No children here either — we had planned to wait to start trying until after our first anniversary, but by that date our relationship was already irretrievably broken.

Marriage #3 came when I was 34 and spouse was 30. Wife #3 was finishing her Ph.D., and wanted — understandably — to wait until she had finished the degree and completed her “hours” for licensing as a clinical psychologist. Again, by the time the doctorate was in her hands, her doubts about me and our compatibility as life partners had grown great enough to rule out trying for a baby.

I’ve written before about getting my high school girlfriend pregnant, and going through an abortion with her. It’s entirely possible, given an extensive and colorful set of transitory relationships, that I may have gotten other women pregnant. Particularly in my “using days”, I was extraordinarily cavalier about contraception. It is not entirely impossible that I might have a child of whom I am unaware. That thought haunts me, just as the thought of the child who would have been born to my high-school girlfriend haunts me. (That baby, had we had it, would now be older than many of my students, old enough to drink legally, older than my first wife was when we got married.)

My younger brother has three children. With one exception, all of my cousins over the age of 30 in my large extended family have at least one child. Family gatherings these days are festivals of strollers and toys and discussions of how best to travel with infants. I sometimes feel quite left out — and at other times, feel immensely grateful for the freedom and the flexibility that my wife and I enjoy.

Here’s the thing: I am very much in love with she who is my final wife. Ours is a far richer, healthier, more stable relationship than any I have known. But as good as things are, neither of us feels what so many of my friends have said they felt — a sense of absence, as if a child was necessary to “complete” the family. I’m not averse to having children, and part of me very much wants to be a Dad. But I also know that I’d be happy without having kids, and that my wife (in her early thirties) would be just fine without them as well. My desire to be in a marvelous marriage (and in a house with lots of furry creatures) is very, very strong. My desire to “pass on my genes” and raise a son or daughter of my own is considerably less intense.

The sense of chronological pressure is real, however. Though my wife doesn’t hear a biological clock ticking, we’re realistic that we don’t have an eternity with which to work. Though I know I was fertile at 17, I also know that men’s fertility declines with age (and that’s without all the drug use in my youth and the intense exercise in my adulthood). I could get tested, of course, to check on my sperm count, but I feel quite reluctant to do so. And then there’s the issue of energy; my friends who are fathers in their forties or fifties are much more patient than they would have been in their twenties — but they are also, they tell me, very tired. I see it in their faces and I hear it in their voices and sometimes it worries me.

In the end, yes, I do want to have children. Life, I think, is good — and a huge part of me wants to create life so that others can share in that goodness. I also believe that my wife and I have strong values, particularly a commitment to service, that I would like to pass on. (And heck, I not-so-secretly imagine that our kids would be really good-looking. That’s always a bonus, right?)

My mother often tells me that when she was giving birth to me, she lay in the hospital thinking: “Now I’ve finally done something I can never get out of.” Marriages end, as a great many people in my family know. But the responsibility to a child never ends. And I know that though I’ve had many experiences in my forty years, and led a colorful and fairly unusual life, I’ve never ever done something that I couldn’t back out of. I know that having a child would be that one thing. That’s a terrifying thought — and an inspiring challenge as well.

I’ll keep you all posted.