The Future Holds No Guarantees

“But who’s going to take care of you when you’re old?”

The sun burned my chest despite the chilly air in Camden Town. Feeling like I was in a punk rock Disneyland with this newfound ability to down cheap beer out in the open, I excitedly discussed Hunter S. Thompson books and 4 Past Midnight with a handsome guy with spiky blonde hair whose name was Mike. I was thousands of miles from the humid barrio of The Bronx and open container laws of New York State, but was essentially at home. Camden Town was the British distaff counterpart of St. Marks Place, and just as important of an outpost in punk history.

The year was 2004. I had left my primitive Nokia brick phone in The Bronx. My MySpace and PunkConnect accounts got nary a mention in the excited chatter with total strangers who spotted my Deadline and Agnostic Front patches after I emerged from the tube full of childlike awe despite my jet lag. The alcohol flowed freely and I had no goddamn idea what the future held.

I was just starstruck to make what I always saw as a pilgrimage to London; a trip I longed to take since childhood. I was en route to the Wasted punk festival in Morecambe but simply had to see the world city that was home to so many music and indie game legends. 2004 was a pivotal year for the 19-year-old version of me who was as hopeful as I was insecure. Most of my spectacular adventures wouldn’t come until well after I turned 30. But 30 seemed like a century away at this point in time.

The small footbridge near the Camden Town tube station began to swell just like it would on the steps of Search and Destroy back home, other punks and street people flocking to our canopy of spiked and colored hair flecked with White Lightning bottles like hummingbirds to a sugar water feeder. Most of them were around my age, but there were a few older mods, skinheads, and artist types who had so many captivating stories about London in the 1960s and how the punk scene there germinated “because we were going to have an actual revolution”.

Of the older alt folks present, a petite blonde woman with glasses named Judi stands out in my memory. On her way home from band practice, Judi stopped for a spell to have a drink with us. She spoke of her son who was around my age and a good number of the bands playing at Wasted who I was dying to check out if I hadn’t already heard them through punk comps and song trades conducted through AOL Instant Messenger with other people I met through PunkConnect.

Talking to Judi was so much cooler than the conversations I had with people her age who I knew back home. Most of them just seemed to talk down to me all my life while expecting me to have an adult understanding of the world. Somehow, our conversation drifted from bands to life in general. Judi didn’t divulge much about her personal life and I kept mine to fairly surface topics. But I spoke of my close friend back home and the guys we had crushes on, wondering if we were meant to be with them 10 months or 10 years from now if at all. My friend really wanted children. I was on the fence but figured I’d see what the future held. But I loved the idea of us starting a band and living in our dream co-op apartments down the block from each other in Woodlawn or Bedford Park, married to men who lived for punk shows like we did and would be devoted dads who’d give them mohawks in first grade.

With one hand enabling a deep drag on her cigarette and the other gently patting the bottom of the acoustic guitar on her back, Judi suddenly uttered, “Don’t have kids.”

I was initially taken aback. Judi had at least one child, to my knowledge. Why would a mother bluntly say such a thing to another woman, especially one so young?

I didn’t really know what to say to that. I honestly don’t even remember what I said. I think I told her, “I don’t know yet.” Judi repeated, “Don’t have kids.” The look in her eyes was one of reassurance, which was the oddest. It wasn’t the concern and paranoia which I associated with so many Boomer women throughout my life.

I found myself back in London in 2018 to speak at AdventureX, a narrative game conference, at a completely different place in life. When the conference ended, I decided to explore and retrace my steps as an adult with a real income. The memory of that totally innocent time came flooding back when I reached the footbridge in Camden Town, now as equally chain-choked and hyper-gentrified beyond recognition as its New York counterpart.

Whether it was due to the gentrification or freezing November wind, I was alone on the bridge this time. I wryly smiled to myself recalling that gathering of punks that seemed like it was an entirely different planet, and the conversation with Judi, hoping she and her son were doing well. In the 14 years that passed between AdventureX and that incredible summer I fluttered around the UK, I found myself doing things and going places that were beyond my wildest dreams. I straight up knew most of it would’ve been impossible if I had children and had to parse individual circumstances from mass societal failure in that realization.

It made me realize something else: 2004 wasn’t just this seemingly eternal bacchanalian of punk shows, boys, and adventures after striking out on my own. It was also the year that my grandmother had to be put into a rest home, and what I saw sealed my decision not to have children.

The blank pages said more to me than entire volumes.

It was a Saturday afternoon at the nursing home in New Jersey where my grandmother now resided.

Fresh from dropping out of college, I just moved into a cheap and shitty room in the smack center of The Bronx. Even though I was back in my ancestral home, not many of my relatives remained. Whoever didn’t die or migrate to Long Island was getting on in years, but I was glad to be in the land where I belonged and $450/month for a room and a lack of college campus life seemed like Valhalla. Even though my heart yearned to be downtown where the punks roamed and my childhood safe haven in Southbridge Towers was just a long walk from CBGB’s, sadly to be returned to the housing authority after it was deemed that my grandmother no longer had full control of her faculties.

Right around the time I moved into said shitty room, my grandmother moved into a small and shitty room of her own. It was about the same size, if not even smaller, than the dump I now called home. Although it boasted fewer roaches, the tradeoff was far more roommates.

This visit would be followed by several more just like it until her death four years later. My family would arrive and sign the guestbook in the looming foyer akin to the haunted mansion in Phantasmagoria except it was 1970s “wood age” paneling. My grandmother’s care worker would greet us in the lobby and make small talk before taking us to her room, where she often blankly stared at the wall. Her hair was in a simple plait instead of the loose pin curl style a la Marilyn Monroe that she wore all my life. She also donned pants and sneakers, which made me mad: I knew these garments were likely expedient for the care worker and my grandmother’s safety, but the woman lived in twin sets that met tzniut standards (Jewish modesty) and chunky loafers. My grandmother did wardrobe minimalism before we got a million navel-gazing articles by tech yuppies about it, she had four twin sets and two pairs of heeled loafers just like cartoon characters would never be seen in different clothes.

She would’ve been revolted to be dressed like this, despite being interned in a Jewish nursing home! My grandmother’s loss of autonomy shattered my heart like a forty of Colt just kissed the sidewalk after one of my brethren tried to wrestle it from another kid as we pre-gamed in that alley across from Knitting Factory. You spend your whole childhood being unable to dress how you want, maybe get to briefly enjoy it in your twenties before a stupid boss tells you how to dress, then you’re forced into rags you’d never wear in old age? It seemed like a raw deal to me.

But the agony at this vanquished autonomy was nothing on the fact that my grandmother had essentially vanished despite her obvious signs of life. The warm and spirited woman who was the only relative who I truly knew had loved me unconditionally, who would’ve asked me endless questions about school and if I was meeting any nice Jewish boys, no longer inhabited the body that laconically propped up the offending garments. She only seldom recalled her children’s and grandchildren’s names at random, as unrecognizable to us as we were to her now.

And every time my family would visit that funereal edifice, the large and simple guestbook would have very few names scribbled on its gaping pages. We often visited on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, and first I assumed that perhaps only less observant families like mine visited on Saturday while the shomer shabbos stayed home. But even after Sabbath had ended, the guestbook bore fewer signatures than your average freelancing contract.

Eventually, I went back to college and moved to my first real apartment near campus. I was beyond stoked that I achieved my lifelong dream of living by myself by the age of 20. My social life was in the punk scene and not moored to campus life whatsoever, so I was confused when my stepmother expressed concern about me changing schools. School was pleasant enough since I wasn’t pressured to participate beyond going to class: clubs were there if I wanted to try them, and I made one friend in my statistics class, but many of my classmates already had jobs and families so we were in the same boat. I wouldn’t trade my nontraditional college experience for anything, the lack of student debt from this choice notwithstanding.

One day, discussion among people I was working with on a group project had turned to our personal lives. Explaining subcultural participation back then was a lot like explaining freelance life and digital entrepreneurship to people who’ve been clockwatchers all their lives. So I tried to keep it surface and in terms the average person could understand. Two of my teammates talked about their children, I politely stated that I did not have any.

“I’m sure you’ll figure out the right time [to have kids] after you get a good job!” my teammate responded brightly.

Trying to refrain from looking at her like she just pasted GG Allin lyrics into our PowerPoint, I kept my cool. “Nah. I just don’t want to have kids.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I said the same thing when I was your age. You will want them, I promise!”

I was utterly aghast and dying to go back to discussing Worldcom’s grand defalcation for our project, and about to change to subject when my other teammate piped up, “So who’s going to take care of you when you’re old?”

I deadpanned, “The squirrels in the park if I haven’t completely lost my shit by then.”

I didn’t have the time, or the heart, to tell them about how much my grandmother’s final residence only further cemented my reproductive choice.

My savta was high up in the pecking order despite her diminished cognizance because her children and grandchildren visited so often. But when we passed one empty room after another, the image of the mostly-blank guestbook pages firmly stamped in the recesses of my brain, it imbued this numbness that made me unable to cry at the sight or thought of it.

People like my classmates didn’t realize that they had a higher likelihood of ending up in a place like this than having their own progeny wait on them. And this particular rest home was one of the nicer places, no less.

Having already had my fill of institutional living when I was 14, the bliss of solo living sprung to the forefront of my mind. “There is no goddamn way I’m going to live like this when I’m old,” I thought to myself. “Don’t social workers and visiting nurse services exist if I’m still cognizant?” Looking at my grandmother in her wheelchair, unable to tell if we were at a seafood restaurant instead of the drab and uninviting rest home cafeteria that made Long John Silver’s look like a Zagat feature, I figured a concerned neighbor or younger friend would probably have me sent to a place like this. Suddenly, my thought cloud was pierced by shrieks of “Stop it! You’re trying to kill me!”

A terrified old woman down the hall screamed from her room. A small phalanx of middle-aged women bedecked in scrubs darted down the hallway, where the cries of attempted murder accusations continued. I do not know if this woman was paranoid or perhaps facing genuine elder abuse. I was only 22 then and already experienced plenty of dismissal and gaslighting from medical professionals, so I wouldn’t be shocked in the least if this poor woman was being harmed. In contrast, my grandmother sat in the cafeteria, lost in her tacit world.

First it was my classmate who harped about how I’m going to so lonely in old age, but here were people who dropped their infirm parents at this place because they had careers and families of their own. Strangers on the Internet and random dalliances in life would echo this sentiment. I went back to The Bronx the next day ready for another Monday full of classes, longing to just graduate and move on with my life. Having already lost untold years, I knew I didn’t want to give up any more to having children for the sole purpose of getting a caregiver decades later. I’d already met plenty of people in the punk scene who had no relationship with their parents because of abuse, neglect, addiction, and other issues, and my own abusive mother would’ve squarely fell into this category if she hadn’t died when I was 15. If they weren’t disowned as children, they did the disowning as adults.

So why the insistence that you must have children in order to ensure you get through old age?

The only way to truly guarantee you’re not lonely when you’re old and got people to look out for you is to be able to invest more in your friendships in your prime years, which capitalism in America makes unnecessarily difficult even if you DON’T have a family. If we had a society that made people more reliant on their communities instead of corporations, without such a huge emphasis on the nuclear family, perhaps we wouldn’t be insisting upon these ways and asking these questions.

Because life is too full of uncertainty, for weal or woe:

I never thought I’d live through a devastating recession just to be followed up by a pandemic. I never thought I’d have a stepfamily, or that my mother would die when I was that young. I didn’t think I’d spend so goddamn long in school just to wind up rarely working normal jobs anyway, and ended up building the kind of entrepreneurial and creative career I always wanted. I didn’t think I’d still be single at this age! I never thought I’d be making plans to leave NYC — which for me specifically, is a must if I want to combat the whole loneliness part. And who would’ve guessed that the Internet would’ve reshaped our lives the way it did — both for better and worse?

When Judi in London told me all those years ago not to have kids despite being a mother, I hadn’t realized how many taboos she’d broken right then. But I realize at the dawn of my 35th year why she did so: to help me determine if such a life-altering decision was right for me. Or maybe she just knocked back a few too many and said what so many women were afraid to say, that it’s fucking hard and some people should just skip out on it. It’s the right decision in my case.

Because nothing in life is guaranteed. We can’t realistically plan for more than a few years at a time, let alone old age. Rather than castigating people who are foregoing children, we should look at our society and think about how we can make it better for all kinds of families and age groups.