One recent night around 2:00 AM, my daughter’s distressed voice, calling for me, jolted me out of deep sleep. Barely awake herself, she was looking for her stuffed doll (named Dolly, obviously), the one without which she cannot sleep, because without clutching it in a very precise way, she cannot suck her thumb. And without sucking her thumb, she cannot get back to sleep. This vicious cycle makes perfect sense in her six-year-old mind, even if it might not in yours. Thence the cry of alarm at 2:00 AM.
We located Dolly in the recesses of her bed. All was well again, and we both got back to sleep. End of the story in one sense. And yet, it is deeply telling of something obvious that perhaps we don’t consider sufficiently: Moments like this are deeply inconvenient. Let’s face it. No one wants to be awakened in so rude a fashion and for such a trivial cause, especially when a full day of various responsibilities looms ahead. And yet most parents, faced with such an inconvenience, will get up and assist the distraught child, will find the dolly, and will tuck the child back into bed with a kiss.
Such is the daily work of parenting and any other caregiving—the work of doing things that might be inconvenient for us and doing them patiently out of love for another person who might not be able to do these things for herself, whether temporarily or ever. Of course, as parents we also train our children to learn to do more themselves—starting with such simple tasks as toasting bagels, spreading butter on them (and, for crying out loud, not licking the knife before re-dipping into the communal butter dish—why is this so hard to learn?), pouring juice into glasses, and putting dishes away into the dishwasher when done with a meal, instead of leaving them along with the meal’s unfortunate crumbly detritus behind on (and under, and around) the table as some sort of low-brow Renaissance-style nature morte.
The truth we often would rather not voice aloud is: We are desperately afraid of inconveniencing others—and at the same time, we are no less desperately annoyed when others inconvenience us. The two are connected. But you know who will rarely inconvenience you? Inanimate objects that operate the way they ought. Machines generally behave exactly as programmed—operating around the clock without needing rest, not making errors of judgment because of fatigue, not crying when overwhelmed with some sort of inconvenient emotion, and most definitely never re-dipping the knife into the communal butter dish after licking it (that is, if a machine were ever to butter a bagel). The one exception to this rule, it goes without saying, is printers. Printers never behave as they should. They’re such unreliable machines, they might as well be human.
In contrast to machines (other than printers, of course), people come into this world pre-programmed with infinitely creative ways of inconveniencing others. Long before a person is even born, pregnancy—the process by which human life begins—is terribly inconvenient to the mother. Who wants to feel sick quite possibly for nine whole months, uncomfortable with her changing body, all to await painful labor that will begin at the most unexpected and inconvenient moment possible? There is nothing convenient or comfortable to self or others about the entire process through which new life comes into existence. And then, nothing is convenient about the work of caring for newborns. They are helpless to an extreme degree, unable even to hold up their own heads. But mothers are not machines. And so, mothers lovingly carry the infants within, then love them unconditionally upon arrival into the world outside the womb.
None of this makes sense in our modern increasingly mechanized world. All of this is just so, well, inefficient. Wouldn’t it make more sense to gestate humans in eggs à la dinosaurs, or maybe embrace the modern technology that, some hope, will soon allow us just to use really nice artificial wombs or machine incubators as Aldous Huxley envisioned almost a century ago in Brave New World?
At least the degree to which children inconvenience us will diminish over time, in most cases, as children grow older. Furthermore, as a general rule, healthy people are less bothersome to their family members than the sick. And yet, the inconvenient truth is that all relationships that are genuine and deep will inconvenience us at least sometimes and, in turn, will make us inconvenient for others. That is the one guarantee of all relationships we have with other people. Why? Because dwelling in communion with others will at times require us to be a burden or, conversely, to do something we would have preferred to skip. Who loves doing laundry? Making multiple meals a day? Sweeping the floor all the time? Caring for a sick person, whether child or adult? Consoling someone who is upset? Losing sleep because other people wake you up to find Dolly?
But then, as Christians, we can also ask: Who would go to the cross? Who would die not just to self, as the overused (but oh-so-beautiful!) phrase goes, but would willingly die a torturous death not for any personal guilt but for the sins of others? As Paul put it, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die” (Romans 5:7). This is no less true today than it was in antiquity. Selfishness comes naturally to us all, and it is ironically a sign of our selfish pride when we are wary of inconveniencing others, of sharing our weak moments with anyone we actually know—but paying an expert we don’t know to listen to us unburden our innermost sorrows.
One thing about marriage and parenting is that they are a school in these virtues, in this dying to self that can look like middle-of-the-night dolly search parties, as opposed to the much more glamorous other sorts of parties. The extreme decline in birth rates in the U.S. and worldwide suggests that the choice for increasingly more people is to bypass having kids—the decision to avoid ever experiencing the inconveniences that such a life of daily service to another person requires. The fruit of such choices speaks for itself.
A recent secular book that attempts to help those ambivalent about children to make a decision either way—Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For?—only makes one important point even clearer: Without a Christian anthropology, without an understanding of who people are in God’s eyes, rather than in our selfish and narrow vision of humanity, not having kids makes a lot more sense than having them, because there is no framework for either valuing people or thinking that any of that “dying to self” business ever needs to happen. Who came up with that anyway?
God did, on the cross. But long before that, on the sixth day of creation, God created the first people: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26). This doctrine—the incredible truth that God made human beings in His own image!—is what separates Judeo-Christian anthropology from any other.
This doctrine of the imago Dei is a game-changer for how we view all people—beginning with mothers and children, as I argue in my recent book. God delights in us, including in our weakness, imperfection, and finitude. He loves us simply because we are, not because of anything we have done or might do. It is easy, at the height of an adult life of health, to imagine oneself as a self-sufficient individual who is not an inconvenience upon anyone and would prefer not to be inconvenienced by others. And yet, if we are blessed to live long enough, all of us are guaranteed to become burdens for others in our old age, if not before.
The math is simple. We begin our lives with two decades of significant dependence on others—ideally, on our parents, who feed us, guide us, care for us when sick, help us make better decisions than our brains with their undeveloped frontal lobes would allow. And then, if we are blessed to live into old age, we may end our lives with two decades of growing dependence on others—perhaps, ideally, our kids or other loved ones. In those twilight years, they will also feed us, help us put on socks and shoes when trembling hands no longer allow, drive us when we no longer can do so safely ourselves, and will do all of this while reminding us of their love. There is such sorrow mingled with a reciprocated love in this process. We need to embrace the dignity of dependence, argues Leah Libresco Sargeant in her forthcoming book.
Years ago, a lovely elderly saint at the church I was attending at the time resolutely turned down a meal train that the other women wanted to set up for the aftermath of her forthcoming surgery. Another lady confronted her: “You are depriving us of a chance to serve you.” She relented. I still think about this exchange, over a decade later. When we love others the way God calls us to love them, tasks that may objectively seem inconveniences become cherished joys.
