Parenting is a religion — but is it a good one?
How deciding whether or not to have kids actually points to a more complicated question
“We all need religion, provided we use the definition of religion in a very general sense, namely a system of orientation and object of devotion, regardless of what the specific contents are.” - Erich Fromm
There is a version of my life that I’ve imagined since I got pregnant at age 24 and decided to stay that way. In this idea, I’m in my 40s, still young by any decent person’s standards, my kid is a grown adult, and I’m thriving. We’re meeting up in Tokyo. I’m spending all summer on a beach in France, working on a novel. I have lovers, or a spouse I love deeply, or both. My life is enriched beyond comprehension both by the existence of my son and the fact that I had him young enough to enjoy the best years of my life after the grueling years of his childhood. In this version of my life, I have it all; have always had it all. I found a way to not have to choose either the sublime experience of nurturing a human life or the equally sublime freedom of being unencumbered in my youth, but to have both. Having a baby at 25 might’ve looked like a premature surrender of my freedom to all of my friends, but to me, it was the first play in a brilliant longer game.
This is why I never planned on having more kids. And largely why still am unsure if I want to.
Despite never thinking I would be in a position of having to choose between spending my 40s and 50s with kids still at home and spending those years with my parenting role switched to maintenance mode, there was one variable I didn’t consider when I made this plan in my 20s: my body’s raging demands for a baby in my 30s.
I honestly never gave much consideration to the concept of a “biological clock” nor did I foresee that it would spring to life inside of me when I was 34-ish and start gnawing away at my beautiful, clean life plans. My son was creeping up on 10, meaning the most tiring (although not the most stressful) days of parenting were already behind me—why would I even consider jumping back to the starting line? The answer points to two things that 25-year-old me could never have anticipated:
I’d found the entirety of my kid’s life, even the hard parts, to be the most intensely joyful thing I’ve ever participated in. Parents are not lying when they say that watching their kid every day feels like nothing short of being front row to behold actual, literal magic. It’s like staring into the face of god every day. It’s like watching the big bang. I had no idea how much I was going to like being a parent, enough that starting at the beginning didn’t just seem like maybe not a bad idea—it seemed like I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything more than that.
Hormones are just extremely powerful and suddenly, for the first time in my life, there was one week every month when I would become so fertile and voraciously horny that I would throw my own mother in front of a train for the chance to have someone nut inside me. I simply did not see that coming!
So thus, I end up staring down the question in my mid-30s that I thought I was so cleverly dodging by having my one (and only!) kid in my 20s: do I want to have a baby now and spend an extra 10 years with a kid at home?
After 18 months of actively trying to get pregnant, and several early pregnancy losses, the issue of whether or not my best life includes more kids, I realize now, unavoidably begs a bigger question: what are we actually here for? As in, here, on earth, living. What is the most meaningful way to fill our time between being born, which we didn’t ask for, and dying, which we can’t avoid?
More to the point: What would be the most fulfilling, purposeful, enjoyable way to spend the next roughly 2 decades of my life: being immersed in the work of parenting a child, or living for myself on the other side of childrearing?
I take no pleasure in how big and existential my unexpected 30-something urge to procreate has become, but of course, it has. I’m literally talking about creating a human life and, in deciding whether or not to do that, reckoning with the limited number of years I have in my own life and the unbearable tension of knowing that it’s impossible to live all the versions of this life that appeal to me. It’s life’s ancient desire for itself springing to the surface in my modern life, butting up against all the stories I’ve got in my head about what that life can and should look like. It’s all honestly quite noisy and annoying most of the time.
None of this is to say that you can’t “have it all”. Obviously, plenty of people have jobs, kids, a social life, creative projects, and maybe even a few minutes to sit and do nothing from time to time. The question for me was never about choosing one thing to the exclusion of all other things because I don’t think that’s typically necessary. But I do think it’s necessary to prioritize. You can have as many things in your life as you want, but I’m pretty sure the only way to not lose your mind in the process is to be clear about the hierarchy of concerns. The debate over whether to prioritize raising kids versus the pursuit of professional and financial accomplishment versus social and creative abundance—it’s ultimately a question of which of these things is the most important. What’s going in the center of your life, and what other things will merely be in orbit around it?
For me, the clearest way to hold this question in my mind is to think of it as choosing my religion. Stick with me—this really does hold up.
If you have an actual religion that you believe in and mold your life in service to, then great, I love that for you. Most religions come with a built-in code of values that, if you believe it’s a good thing to adhere to, will tell you what to prioritize most of the time. For anyone who doesn’t ascribe to any pre-formed religion, and as such, hasn’t been given a prescribed hierarchy of priorities for a purposefully lived life, my argument is that we need to create this for ourselves or else languish in messiness and indecision (which, I’ll admit, there is also a fair argument to be made in defense of).
In the absence of religion to orient oneself around, we still find that we need something like religion; that is, we need:
a framework for understanding our existence
a reference point for ourselves
an object of devotion to ground us
a shared understanding of these things to tie us socially to other people.
Determining what pursuits in life could function well as a religion first requires clearly articulating the role that religion needs to play in our life, and as best I can tell, these are the jobs. Religion is a sort of external container that makes us feel less disoriented about life.
For a lot of people, perhaps including me, work is a suitable substitute for religion (or if not suitable, at least available and usually compulsory). And it almost fits the essential need of religion. Work provides both a frame of reference for our existence and an object of devotion; it is laden with rituals, but it lacks certain qualities that make religion transcendent—it does a poor job of lifting us out of our ground-floor, human misery in the way any good religion should. Work feels something more like a weight around our ankles. For one, our modern construction of work fails to ground us in our essential animal nature. It’s like playacting at religion: we go through the motions and perform the rituals, but unlike work in its original incarnation (that is, work borne from individual and collective necessity), modern work merely keeps on the tracks a machine that perpetuates our distance from each other, from our connection to the earth, and ultimately benefits a very small number of people, throwing more and more resources upstairs to them so they can accumulate enough stuff to more effectively believe that death won’t come for them and amass enough power to feel in control of their existence.
Work also fails to deliver a spiritually fulfilling role in our lives because our modern types of work are entirely stripped of a sense of purpose in any way that’s recognizable to our brains and bodies as we do them. Work originally was a fundamental part of the activity of people alive, whereas now it is more like an artifact of life-sustaining activity. The most recent evolutions in the broad realm of work, the kinds of jobs that pepper the forefront of the modern economy, assign occupations to most people that not only don’t directly contribute to their individual life nor the life of a collective society that other people are also putting work into for everyone to be supported by. And in exchange for these deeply alienating assignments, they’re rewarded with barely any leftover time with which to pursue activities that might put them in touch with their existence in a way that their job doesn’t, and usually with not enough money to buy back into that same alienating system for the material things that will keep them physically alive. The way we’ve conceived work now is a spiritual and physical death sentence to almost everyone who participates in it — and we’re taught that the solution, of course, is just to do more of it.
The real bummer is that we ultimately do this work that makes workers feel so alienated all for the sake of helping a few people at the top feel more capable of evading death. The gaping disproportion at which wealth and resources are distributed in our current world isn’t just damning to anyone who isn’t rich from a material standpoint — insomuch as you can call “material” things like “being able to not die of treatable diseases” and “being regarded as a full human being” — it also keeps the overwhelming majority of people far away from what it really means to be alive. Work used to be a type of busyness that tied us to the reality of our existence; now it’s a type of busyness that distracts us from it.
Social psychologist and author Erich Fromm gave a lecture in 1953, published in his book The Pathology of Normalcy, which I love and return to often, that touched on the idea of work as religion: “This is one line of the development of work: work as a meaningful fulfillment of human purposes, work as compulsion and duty, work essentially for profit, and work you might say, as an act of worship to the altar of the machine, which has a value and a meaning itself.” (This whole lecture is very worth reading. It goes on to connect mental health with the deterioration of the broad availability of meaningful work and how people have been largely forced to swap out any real sense of religion and social functioning for being dehumanized components in larger capital-generating machines, and that’s why we all feel so insane and awful all the time. Which, yes, of course, is accurate, but the way he speaks about it is great.)
Modern work is a religion pointing directly away from anything that could possibly feel divine, but because it is the religion that most completely pervades our culture and the minds of all of us reared within that culture, when it comes to the problem of feeling alienated by the daily routine and empty rituals that make up our occupation-religion, our most common fix is to do more of it, or to think we just aren’t doing it well enough, when really the problem is that what’s become of work is that it’s being performed entirely wrong and for all the wrong reasons.
Parenthood, on the other hand, is a fantastic religion from a definitional standpoint. It checks all the boxes. It is routinely transcendent. It keeps you busy, which keeps you from spending too much time considering your existence, which is objectively good for cultivating an overall lower level of anxiety and a higher level of contentment. And the type of busy you are as a parent is a busy that, unlike most jobs, feels plainly purposeful and thus fulfilling. It’s a constantly evolving project that always has new challenges and requirements, and as such, perpetually illuminates new strengths and weaknesses within you along with a motivating sense of urgency to rise to the task of growing where you need to grow. It’s some real "forged in fire” shit.
Parenthood easily fulfills the job of seating its participants within a community of people who share this religion. On this point, we could go down the rabbit hole of questioning what kind of community you get thrust into as a parent, whether or not I’ve enjoyed being a part of parenting communities, and whether or not modern American culture even has a grip on what “community” can or should be for parents (the answer is no), but I’m not getting into all of that here. That is another post entirely, and I’m definitely going to write it soon.
The fact that I’m mostly talking about parenting and work as two examples of non-religion religions we can choose doesn’t mean I think they’re the only ones. I absolutely do not think that. There’s a strong argument to be made on behalf of not spending your one wild, precious life being forged in fire of any kind, professional or parental; of forgoing hard-earned character development in favor of, in a word, vibing. You could argue (I would) that vibing your way through life isn’t at odds with character development or growth at all. You could also argue that aiming for lightness in life is just as valuable a pursuit. I think the idea of pleasure has a big place in any worthwhile religion or existential framework. You can certainly get pleasure from parenting and work, but usually only for the cost of effort, and there’s a respectable life path that involves maximizing pleasure for minimal effort. All of which is to say there are priority hierarchies and personal ideologies for living a meaningful life that don’t center the raising of children or working in the middle of everything. The fact that most people frame the question of whether or not to have kids as a “kids or career” thing is, unto itself, a product of being culturally conditioned to think that these are the only two things important enough to exalt as the highest concern in life, and they certainly are not.
This all sounds nice, but in the end, being aware of the countless valid ways to orient yourself in this life and all the pleasures and struggles there are to be found down every road, does very little to help choose one. The only thing I know I don’t want to do with my life is spend too much time questioning what to do with it, which is so easy to do. My gut feeling is that the thing about any religion is that your best experience of it comes when you decide to really commit and give yourself over to it completely.
At this moment, there’s no way for me to know what I think about what is ultimately the best way to spend these next two decades, which objectively seem to be the best two decades humans get in this life, at least not until I’m already on the other side of them. And that’s the whole raw deal, right? We can’t know what we should’ve done, or should not have done, until the doing is past and can not be undone or redone. In a perfect world, I would be able to choose to rewind the clock on my son’s life and live it over and over again, these first wonderful 10 years, until I was ready to move on and live whatever comes next. In a more perfect world, I could live all possible versions simultaneously. Maybe I already am. Maybe what feels like indecision is really me hearing echoes of my sister selves in other dimensions, living all the lives I can’t choose between. Maybe I won’t be able to decide honestly. Maybe I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other and watch time and circumstance materialize around me, in part as the result of my own doing and partially as the result of the future’s tendency to reliably unfold itself in spite of us and the stories we tell ourselves about why we’re here and what we’re meant to be doing.
Needed this as I stare down the barrel of pursuing parenthood.
This is SO good.