The American birth rate has fallen to historic lows, and Bailey Swilley isn’t helping any. Which is ironic.
“I love babies,” said the Brooklyn-based comedian/storyteller. “That’s the thing. I love babies. I like kids.”
Fair enough. I love bread, yet don’t want to be a baker.
“I don’t see myself as a parent,” she said. “I don’t see myself in that role.”
She has a lot of company. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced a fertility rate of 1.6 children per American woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1. I’d been brooding on this for a while when the email from a publicist hit my inbox, slugged, “NOV 21: Hit NYC Fringe Show in Chicago — Bailey Swilley’s “A Baby For Me? No Thank You, Please!”
Approaching random women and asking why they don’t want to have children seems a recipe for a quick trip to human resources. But here was an opportunity. About a third of young women don’t want kids. What soured Swilley on the prospect?
“I am an older sister; my brother is five years younger,” said Swilley, who grew up in Memphis. “Older enough to remember watching my parents parent him and me, and thinking, ‘I don’t think that’s for me. I just don’t see myself in this. Not what I aspire to.'”
Inherent revulsion to parenthood doesn’t usually make the traditional list of reasons people don’t want children — jittery economy, lack of suitable partners, the generally fraught future. Swilley mentioned the term “body horror” — she has a routine about a doctor hunting for part of a broken IUD — as well as the “ring of fire,” which I thought had to do with volcanic activity in the Pacific, but is also a phrase associated with the pain of childbirth.
Swilley is married — I assumed her husband is on board with her determined childlessness.
“We’re on the same page,” she said. “I bring it up a lot. I ask him. All of his friends have kids, more his friends than mine. We spend a lot of time with his friends’ kids. Afterward, I’ll check in, ‘Did you feel anything? Feel that should be something we do?’ We have those check-ins a lot, and always land at ‘no.'”
Other folks’ kids will do that. I distinctly remember the shock of being childless and visiting friends who had just had children, to find them sitting sunken-eyed in the middle of their shattered apartments, their padded coffee tables and plastic safety gates and gadgets, spattered with spit-up and splotches of green and orange baby food, smiling these serene, exhausted, souls-among-the-damned-in-hell grins and urging us to follow them over the cliff into their zombie cult.
I asked Swilley if she worries, having planted her flag so publicly against ever having children, that she may someday change her mind.
“A lot of women talk about the concept of being John Mulaney,” she said. “The comedian John Mulaney was all about ‘We never want kids. Me and my wife love our lives, child-free.’ Then all of a sudden he left his wife and got this really hot woman pregnant.”
Here she lets out a laugh.
“Oh my God, you can think you’re on the same page, and the rug gets swept out from under you. That’s something lurking in a lot of child-free women’s minds.”
Well, yes, life will yank that old rug out from under you. I don’t think either my wife or I planned on grinding away as mid-60-ish custodians maintaining a decaying 121-year-old, five-bedroom farmhouse with a formal dining room, so it’ll be available for the pleasure of children and grandchildren for a few days out of every month. Yet here we are.
Being a parent is hard work, and not for everybody. Space here is limited, and I can only touch on my conversation with Swilley. If you want to hear more, she’s at the Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave. on Nov. 21 for two shows, 7 and 9 p.m.
I asked Swilley if she worried she’d be inspiring audience members not to have children — basically responsible for children not being born into the world.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not me trying to convince anyone. This is my true belief. I believe it’s something that’s inherently in you, or not. I was just born with the feeling that it just wasn’t for me. A lot of people know deep down whether it’s for them or not.”
“Ultimately, you’re bringing a stranger into the world,” she continued. And I thought, Yeah, but they don’t stay a stranger for long … which is the joy, and the burden.