We bumped into each other on the street and though we were both in a rush, she called her office with some excuse and I decided to ignore my deadline. We headed to the nearest cafe for a catch-up over coffee. We were – and are – good friends but it had been an age since we had last seen each other. I told her about what I was writing, about the travels I had been on, and she told me about her work, of how much of her life now consisted of driving the kids to music lessons or to soccer training.
"That's my weekend," she said with a wry smile. "Driving across town to get them to football or clarinet on time."
She asked me what I had on for the coming Saturday, and off-handedly, not even really thinking about it, I answered, "I think I'll just stay in bed, what I really want to do is read for three solid lazy hours."
She slumped back on her chair, as if I had delivered a knockout blow.
"Ah," she said, "the life of leisure. I guess that's what it's like not having kids."
It felt like I was the one who had just been punched.
Leisure; try as I might, that word has always induced guilt in me. That guilt is only reinforced by a sense that in being childless I have somehow compounded my not being a productive member of the world I live in. It doesn't matter how much I tell myself that my work gives meaning to my life and hopefully has a use and a value outside my own individual, familial and friendship circles.
And my unease is not assuaged by the knowledge that being a biological parent was not the only way to build constructive and emotionally satisfying relationships with young people. I adore being an uncle and godfather, and I take seriously the responsibilities of mentorship and teaching.
I know too that the sting of that definition – childless – arises from being raised in a family and history where it was anathema to desire a life not predicated on heterosexual marriage and procreation. Even now, well into my middle-age, I often find it awkward bumping into acquaintances or friends of my parents who still ask: Are you married? Do you have children?
They know I am gay and they know I have a partner who I love and have lived with for years. I steer the conversation elsewhere, invariably to ask about their children and their grandchildren. I can see the relief on their faces. We are back on safe ground.
In my life, I have had opportunities that were unimaginable for my parents and their peers. To study, to transcend class and caste, to choose love over duty. But even comprehending all this, there were times when a friend would offer that being a mother was her greatest achievement or another friend would state that his being a father had finally given meaning to his life, and I had to check the unworthy feelings of envy and jealousy that crept up on me.
These emotions rushed through me, overwhelmed me, and I had to choke back the urge to retort: "You just had a f--- and got pregnant, what great achievement is that?" Or to repress a poisonous schadenfreude, if, on becoming teenagers, their children had started acting up and were now disappointing them.
I know that my being a man who is childless is a very different experience to that of a woman who is not a mother. Emotionally and politically, culturally and existentially. The perennial tensions of biology, history and society that determine sex and gender mean that there will always be women who refuse the imperative of motherhood. It is one of the great emancipations occasioned by feminism that such a choice is now possible.
I imagine there would be very few of us, whether migrant or Indigenous, born into the working-class or the bourgeoisie, who do not know of a mother, a grandmother or a great-aunt whose life was not compromised by the injunction to be a mother.
But as the fears of the biological clock and the huge investments into reproductive technology attest to, for most women the demand to be a mother, expressed often as a visceral and therefore biological need, is a reckoning they have to face at some point in their lives.
Of course, I also know men who have experienced the desire to be a father as instinctual and similarly essential. That hasn't been the case for me. When in the past I have thought of being a father, it has been the cultural meaning attached to that role that has dominated.
My being childless had very limited impact on my self-conception as a man. It was not my masculinity that was threatened by my not having children but my humanness, my sense of whether I was a contributing and productive part of the social world. I think that is why my friend's words stung so. Ah, the life of leisure. Free time. Unproductive time.
As children at primary school, we were promised that our adult lives would be full of leisure because in the near future robots and machines would make the labouring and manufacturing work that our parents did redundant. In retrospect, that prediction turned out to be as ambiguous and ominous as any proclaimed by the Delphic Oracle.
Technological advancements eradicated the jobs but the need to find occupations to replace them has revealed the simplistic utopian logic of that promise. It's true that for many of us, especially if we had the opportunity for higher education, our working lives are not as physically demanding as was the case for our parents.
We also live in a world of consumer choice – to eat out, to travel, to develop our physical and mental fitness – that was once simply unimaginable except for those who came from the most rarefied of castes, that of the leisure class. But not all of us did go on to university and college and over the last quarter-century the precariousness of permanent employment has made the indulgence in leisure seem even more unobtainable.
As my friend's velvet-gloved rebuke indicated, much of life now is experienced as grind, even for the middle-class. We feel rushed, that we don't have as much time as we would like outside the demands of our working and family lives. And time is the essential condition for leisure.
Even back at school, a demarcation was being gently insinuated regarding the difference between leisure and indolence. We were not to use all this promised free time for sleep or for daydreaming. We were meant to learn languages, further our education, pursue hobbies and productive recreations. Indolence is leisure's objectionable shadow and even in our secular world it implies sin and shame for it suggests the unproductive squandering of time. Historically, such opprobrium against indolence was used as a justification for imperial conquest and exploitation. It fuelled righteous revolutionary fury against the excesses of aristocracy. Even now, we blame the unemployed for their unproductiveness and we similarly chain nation states to a regimen of austerity in order to punish them for the iniquities of their siestas and their early retirement ages. You have to earn your leisure. Nothing in this world is free.
I too fear being indolent and it may be that anxiety that made me so quick to bristle at my friend's words. My instinct at that moment was to justify myself. No, of course I wasn't going to spend the weekend reading in bed. I was going to clean the house, do shopping, visit my family, cook dinner for my partner, spend some hours writing, of course I wasn't just going to waste my bloody time.
But instead I nodded and once more I quickly changed the conversation. For there was an undeniable truth to her words. I do have more time than my friends with children and because I have more of time, I have more of opportunity. To work on my writing, to go to the movies, to explore my city, my country or my world. I have always hated that ugly imputation that not having children is an indication of selfishness – an obscene accusation in that it ignores the sometimes accidental and sometimes tragic reasons for why people cannot be parents – but I suspect I am not alone in having wondered if there is indeed some truth to it.
My partner, Wayne, has always been clear that he didn't desire children. Like many of us, he is hungry for more time, and when he gets it, he works on our garden. A long time ago he worked as a landscape gardener but gave it up because he realised he didn't want his hobby, his joy, to be his work. In this he reminds me of my father who also found peace in the gardens he created.
My father worked his garden for his family but he also did it for his own pleasure and I know that he often retreated to it when it was the family he wished to escape. Their gardening was certainly not unproductive and I'm not sure if the word leisure can accurately contain all they experienced in their activity. It is as much creation as it is recreation, and as such, it seems more vocation than leisure. When I look out the kitchen window to Wayne pulling out weeds, pruning the fruit trees or digging the soil, I don't see any wasting of time.
Many of my friends' children are now adults. The responsibilities of the parents have not necessarily lessened but they have changed. Though the bonds of work, family, friendship, love and health remain as challenging as they ever were, many of them have expressed their relief that they have some time returned to them. And now when I recall the unease that my not having children once occasioned for me, it seems like it belongs to a man who is almost a stranger.
The role of uncle fits me perfectly and I can't imagine it being else, and if there is a residue of guilt that remains it is that I was prey to former envy. The role of an aunt or of an uncle has its own unique pleasures and quite a few of those have to do with creating the spaces in which children and teenagers can enjoy leisure and having fun. Indeed, I often encourage them to indulge in spending unproductive time. It is through daydreaming and fantasising that I learnt how to be a writer.
The incident with my friend occurred many years ago now. Her children are adults now, finding their own ways in the world, influenced by their parents' ethics and politics, as well as those of their aunts and uncles, but also developing their own opinions and their own beliefs. Recently I reminded my friend of our conversation and she was horrified that I had taken her comment so much to heart.
"Jesus, Christos, I didn't mean anything by it, I know how hard you work. I was just being envious."
She sat back in her chair, musing.
"You know," she finally said, "one of the things I treasure about my friendships with people who don't have children is how they don't think my own children are the centre of the universe. You do that. You love my children but when it comes to education or community, you always remind me of the bigger picture, you ask how all children or youth will be affected."
She took my hand.
"I am very grateful for that."
Her words are one of the loveliest of gifts I have ever received.
We continued gossiping, arguing, laughing. I asked her what she was doing for the weekend.
"I love having my weekends back," she exclaimed, "going to the movies or to a gallery or catching up with friends."
She winked.
"Or to spend the morning in bed, not even reading, just curled up in bed doing absolutely nothing."
Wasting time. The most delicious and suspect of sins.
- Christos Tsiolkas is an Australian author and commentator whose books have been turned into acclaimed films and television series.
