Childhood Be Damned

“Unless you become as one of these little children,” Jesus said to His disciples, who had notions of greatness in the world they thought the Lord would usher in, “you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I do not wish to read that verse figuratively. That is easy to do—and too easy for us now, who need desperately to be near children, for the sake of our humanity and our salvation.

But first, when I think of my own childhood and youth, it occurs to me that my happiest hours were rarely spent indoors, certainly not in school, nor even at home in front of the television with the rest of my family, though sometimes, with popcorn, we did enjoy a show or a movie together.

I am riding a sled down a long and steep hill in the park, while night falls, just before suppertime.

I am picking blueberries with my father and the family dog, a collie, whose rustling about would scare away any copperheads. It is the bald top of a mountain where the army has stationed a signal house. We pick for two hours, hardly talking, and not needing to talk.

My brother and I are shooting pool in the basement, or playing ping-pong, or playing a form of baseball with a ping-pong ball and the paddles used for bats. This was a way of being outside without being outside. Often, one or another of our cousins comes by. (I had twenty first cousins living in my small town, and we saw each other all the time.)

Two of my older cousins take me with them to the bowling alley, and we play three games, then fool around at the pinball machines or get a piece of pizza to eat before we call one of our parents to come and fetch us.

The whole family on my mother’s side—we all live nearby—go to a privately owned lake, where we spend an entire Saturday, renting a pavilion, grilling burgers and hot dogs, and drinking bottled sodas locally produced and cooled in tubs of ice bought from the icehouse. We swim, fool around on the little beach, throw horseshoes, play wiffle ball, all day long till sunset. This we do whenever we have a good Saturday in the summertime.

We are at the baseball park for a Little League game. Sometimes it’s my team that is playing, with my uncle as the coach for two years, and then my father and our next-door neighbor. I played on teams in various years with seven of my cousins. But if my team isn’t playing, I may be there to watch, with the dog tagging along.  I keep score sometimes and sit on one team’s bench then on the other, depending on who is at bat, talking about baseball or whatever. Later, I helped my father as a coach, when my kid brother was old enough to play; and then sometimes there would be a chance to work as one of the umpires, behind the plate or in the infield.

It’s the dead of winter, a cold bright day, and I am walking far into the woods with the dog, always with the dog, just to think, or to be.

If you ask me whether I would have enjoyed the far greater liberty my father and his brothers enjoyed, when they sometimes hopped on a freight train to go to the nearby city (Scranton, twelve miles away), or when they roamed all over creation with twice or three times as many children as we had in our child-rich neighborhood, I would answer yes, immediately.

I know that in any age before antibiotics, I would have died at age 15. Nor was that a one-time threat. Without antibiotics, the next lymphatic infection I am prone to would kill me. I am aware that this computer I am writing on has opened resources to me that were unimaginable just a generation ago. I freely concede that traveling is far easier than it was even sixty years ago, let alone before the invention of the automobile. And yet, I would not wish to be a child now, and as an old man I miss the constant presence of children. It is as if the skies are gray always, and if your heart rebels, that is bad, and if it does not, it is worse.

Given that we are not overtly cruel, and that famines and plagues are not a threat, I can hardly imagine a worse life than those that we give to children now. The reason seems obvious to me. We don’t like them. We don’t revel in their innocent ways. Children are inconvenient to us. They threaten to center our lives on the family and the home, and that prospect is appalling because we have been taught to be creatures of ambition and vanity, and it is hard to pretend to ambition when you are changing a diaper or preparing a nice supper or hanging out the clothes to dry as you keep one eye on the toddler trying to catch the cat, while the crawling baby tugs at your leg. I am not speaking here only of mothers, either. Given that we are not overtly cruel, and that famines and plagues are not a threat, I can hardly imagine a worse life than those that we give to children now.Tweet This

This year, for the first time in my life, I have seen political ads featuring men speaking about the “right” their daughters should enjoy to kill a grandchild in the womb. I might attribute it to the madness of political partisanship, overriding the natural desire any decent man ought to have to welcome a grandchild into his life. But I fear I am not reckoning with many years of aversion to children and childhood.  

My mother’s parents lived within a two minutes’ walk; I saw them all the time.  My father’s parents lived three miles away. I saw them every Sunday. My mother’s mother dandled on her knee every one of their 19 grandchildren, and their house was open to us all, at any time of the day. You might think of that as an unparalleled joy. That is how I think of it. But if you do not actually like children, if you are grinding your teeth as they get in the way of your desire to look big in the world or to make money, it is not joy but a burden. 

Grandchildren bind the generations in love, gratitude, and mutual duties. If you believe that your first duty is to yourself, you probably should not get married; but if you do, you will probably not be happy to be surrounded with a brood of children. And if you are finally “free” of children in the house, you may be just as happy to keep any grandchildren at some distance; and you will be the happier if you can shake off all responsibility for your own children’s financial well-being.  That may not be the case if your daughter has a child which you yourself do not really want her to have. 

What a life! What a life for children now! In day care, among people who do not love them and who will soon not remember their names; in school, that heavy gray cloud, augmented in its grayness by the bus rides to and from; in front of a screen, making their brains jittery but keeping their bodies stationary and their hearts dampened, and exposing them to constant anger, vanity, and hitherto unimagined depravity. And when they do go outdoors, who or what is there to welcome them? How many of them know the great good of having both a brother and a sister?

Ask anyone what is more important: love or money; love or creature comforts; love or prestige; love or power, and you’ll hear that love is more important, of course. Ask anyone what is more important: persons or things, and you’ll hear that persons are more important, of course. Then why are our neighborhoods so deathly silent? The Lord tells us we must become like little children. Where, then, are those little children we are to be like? Never born; if born, secluded, or penned up in irritable herds. God help us.