Today's Article (23/6/2025)
Creature of the Late Afternoon
My family is still the one I was born into: mother, father, and brother, all of them alive and well — the ultimate luck. Many friends have already lost their parents or slipped into sandwich-generation duties, raising their kids while scrambling for elder care. Others of us have traded reproduction for something like filial piety. I can think of quite a few childless friends who have moved to be near a parent or had a parent move in with them. Midlife for them — and for me — is an open-faced sandwich. The defining event of my adulthood will not be birth or adoption, but the deaths of my parents, especially my mom.
Now they were 70ish, and I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could. I was growing obsessed with their statistical nearness to death.
Here are some of her answers, though, to this mother of all questions [on not reproducing]: “The planet is unable to sustain more first-world people”; “I really wanted to write books”; “I am very good at birth control.”