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overwrought coworkers are predicting a “constitutional crisis.” Although I haven’t followed the details, I doubt that. What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
    But having come so close to extermination within living memory (I know you’re tired of hearing about it), few Armenian Americans share their compatriots’ smug sense of security. The very numerics of my own life are apocalyptic. I was born in August 1945, when the spoors of two poisonous mushrooms gave us all a cautionary foretaste of hell. Kevin himself was born during the anxious countdown to 1984—much feared, you’ll recall; though I scoffed at folks who took George Orwell’s arbitrary title to heart, those digits did usher in an era of tyranny for me. Thursday itself took place in 1999, a year widely mooted beforehand as the end of the world. And wasn’t it.
     
    Since I last wrote, I’ve been rooting around in my mental attic for my original reservations about motherhood. I do recall a tumult of fears, though all the wrong ones. Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:
    1. Hassle.
    2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)
    3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid’s insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)
    4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn’t say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)
    5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I’m a pig.)
    6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment . Not conclusion .)
    7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)
    8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend’s five-year-old in the room.)
    9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew—every woman, too, which is depressing—would take me less seriously.)
    10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter’s life is hideous, too.)
    Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I’ve tried not to contaminate their dumbfounding naïveté with what actually happened. Clearly, the reasons to remain barren—and what a devastating word—were all petty inconveniences and trifling sacrifices. They were selfish and mean and small-minded, so that anyone compiling such a catalogue who still chose to retain her tidy, airless, static, dead-end, desiccated family-free life was not only short-sighted but a terrible person.
    Yet as I contemplate that list now it strikes me that, however damning, the conventional reservations about parenthood are practical. After all, now that children don’t till your fields or take you in when you’re incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it’s amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. By contrast, love, story, content, faith in the human “thing”—the modern incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, largehearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.
    For years I’d been