Missing Children

Yesterday I was a bit gloomy all day and it took me a little while to figure out why. In part, because its a little strange. I am missing my kids. That would be a perfectly normal emotional response if, say, I had kids. Or, say, I had always wanted kids.

In Boston it dawned on me, by meeting happily married, childless couples, that I didn't need to have kids. It was a revelation. I went out for cocktails with friends and admitted to them that maybe I didn't want kids. We toasted appletinis in the dark bar to the idea of never having kids.

At the same time as I was discovering that I didn't have to have kids, I was still planning for them. One of my major motivations for moving to Israel was to learn Hebrew in order to ensure that my kids would be native speakers, no matter where we lived. It was also to be close to my in-laws. I wanted to raise kids in a family where cousins knew their cousins' cousins. I also wanted my children to identify as Jewish. That was something that was hugely important for me, and part of that was learning what it meant to celebrate holidays and live as part of an extended Israeli family network. I even spent a long time pondering how to handle the circumcision ceremony for my non-Jewish Jewish children. Who, let me remind anyone who has forgotten, I don't actually have.

Of course it is great that I don't have children. I can't imagine putting little kids on a plane and sending them to fly alone to Israel and to spend the summer there without me. El Al has special to/from flights during summer with clowns on the plane for all the children of divorced parents being flown back and forth from Israel to the US. My heart broke when I read that. I couldn't imagine what that would be like for me to put a child on one of those planes. I can't imagine worrying about children being in Israel without me while I was reading news reports about war and Iranian nuclear bomb development. It also would have been even harder for me to leave the relationship. I couldn't have fought any harder than I did for me, but knowing me, I would have fought harder for children.

Given that I don't have kids, that I am not always sure I want kids, and that it is clearly better that I don't have kids, it was incredibly bizarre to find myself missing them today. No wonder it took me so long to figure out why I was feeling down. I miss my Jewish/non-Jewish, American/Israeli children who would have grown up surrounded by their cousins' cousins' cousins.

There are a few reasons that I started thinking about this. One, is a co-worker who is waiting to go into labor with her second child. Two, is meeting a single dad who makes raising a child, regardless of the circumstances, look like the easiest and best thing in the world. I have to remind myself that most people aren't like this. Most people don't find being an excellent parent comes naturally and there is no reason to think that I am one of those people to whom it does come naturally. That it is, in fact, a very good thing that I don't have children.

And then I see my nieces and nephews, or hear about childbirth, or see little kids playing and I find myself tearing up over the realization that the decision to have children or not is that much farther away from me. And because I miss my kids.