I just finished reading a novel about bone-chilling fear. The protagonist is facing his deepest and most dreaded fears. As he puts it, “Gradually I lost the ability to distinguish between my original dread and my dread of my dread. My anxiety reflected back on itself, like an object trapped between two mirrors.”
What’s he so scared of? Snakes on planes? Killer clowns? Islamic terorrists? No, babies.
The novel, The Catastrophist by Lawrence Douglas, traces the building anxiety of Deniel Wellington, a thirtysomething assistant professor as he faces his wife’s pregnancy. The dread of being a father is a situation the professor calls “kinderphobia.”
In the novel, Wellington fears the prospect that his child might have some “defect,” and then finds himself secretly longing for such a possibility. “I start thinking about how much easier it would be to have a sweet little child with Down Syndrome who would grow up to bag groceries at Stop and Shop, and would be spared learning what a fraudulent and mentally ill loser his father is,” Wellington reflects. “Doesn’t that sound completely sick?”
At the base of his fear of being a dad is the strangeness of it, at least in Wellington’s academic world. He notes how “remarkably few professors had successfully procreated” since the tenure process “took most of the women on the faculty out of the childbearing years.” The men around the young prof seem similarly distant from parenthood.
As this dark and depressing novel makes its path toward the end, there’s never that much more there: kinderphobia makes a man do all kinds of strange and anti-social things. But he still gets tenure.
At the same time that I finished this book, I heard from a Christian friend who related to me the joys of travelling with his six children through airport security and on board a plane toward a family vacation. He mentioned the barely disguised eye-rolling of the Yuppies behind him in line, pointing and gawking at what must be ignorant hillbillies who, after all, “don’t know what causes this.”
Part of the strangeness of the Christian message in the coming generation will no doubt be the welcoming of children. Already stay-at-home mothers and large families are seen as retrograde, if not reactionary. But, at the heart of all of this, the hostility toward children probably isn’t hatred. It’s fear. It’s the same kind of fear this novel reveals: a fear of giving up some things for someone. It’s a fear of love.
The gospel liberates us from all kinds of enslavements and anxieties. One of the most joyous fruits of gospel preaching in the years to come may be to see men and women freed from kinderphobia. One of the great adventures of counter-cultural Christianity may be to show how the cross frees us to love the Christ, and the kindergarten too.
