No. 157 – They Dance Alone

Performer: Sting

Songwriter: Sting

Original Release: … Nothing Like the Sun

Year: 1987

Definitive Version: None.

Of course, Nelson Mandela died about a week ago. In the summer of 1988, he still was in prison in South Africa, when a massive benefit concert was held in his honor at Wembley Stadium in London. I think I referred to this show before, but I recall a somewhat disheveled Sting doing an excellent version of this heartbreaking song at one point.

Many years later, I played this song one night at The Thurman and succeeded in bumming out the entire Dispatch crowd. That wasn’t my intent. I love playing great songs in any situation; it doesn’t change my mood, because I just love hearing a great song. But I made sure to never play They Dance Alone at The Thurman again.

Just before Christmas a week ago, I drove to Cincinnati to take Leah to her first performance of The Nutcracker. I took her to her first baseball game, why not her first ballet, too? I’m a Renaissance man; I can do both.

Afterward, we went to Mitchell’s Fish House in Newport, Ky. In Columbus, that restaurant was known as Columbus Fish house when it opened at Easton, and I probably hadn’t been to it in more than a decade. Leah and I had a great time, yet it didn’t make me rethink the very important decision I made at about the same time as the Mandela concert: I didn’t want to have kids.

When I was with Beth, of course, I wanted to have kids after marriage. We even had a name picked out for the first son: Rory William. (We had a daughter’s name picked out, too. It also was Irish, but I don’t remember it now.) After we broke up, I’m pretty sure I still wanted to have kids, but the reality of it was put off in the distance.

Everything changed in 1988. You might not recall the name Laurie Dann. Laurie Dann went on a murderous rampage in Winnetka in May 1988 that included shooting and killing a little boy at a school before killing herself.

Now exposed to the horrors of the world, I wasn’t bothered by the actual killing. What bothered me was Steve Dahl’s reaction to it. He spoke very passionately on the Steve and Garry show about the rampage and how his oldest son was about the same age as the boy who was killed and how if she had gone to his son’s school, it could have been his son who was killed.

I started thinking about the father of that little boy and realized that the horror was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine sending my son (or daughter, for that matter) off to school and then never seeing him again. Quite simply, if that were to happen, I wouldn’t be able to go on. The only way to guarantee that that would never happen to me was if I didn’t have children.

I voiced this belief to Melanie during an epic phone call that lasted three whole hours. I’ll never forget it. I lay on the carpeted floor of my New Buffalo apartment living room as we talked and talked and talked.

I’d had phone calls with Beth while I was at Wabash that eclipsed an hour, in which we struggled to find anything to talk about besides how much we missed one another. The evidence that Melanie and I were much better paired was that our conversation went twice as long without us ever breaking a sweat; there were no lulls in the conversation.

I don’t remember exactly what she said on the subject, but I felt we were sympatico, and I loved her even more than before. In retrospect, I’m not sure that this didn’t have something to do with why we broke up. We were together another three months after, and it never came up again in conversation, but it’s possible Melanie felt that her future might be limited if we stayed together. Regardless, it’s entirely possible if not probable that had Melanie and I stayed together, I eventually would’ve changed my mind on the subject. The point soon became moot.

I suppose the fact that Debbie was 42 when we hooked up might have had a lot to do with why I was keen to pursue a romantic relationship with her. She was almost past the age where kids were out of the question, and I certainly was in no hurry to do something like adopt. Any later change of heart was rendered moot when Debbie had her tubes tied. Before she did it, she asked once more whether I was sure she wanted to do this. I said I was and asked if she did. She said she did. Neither of us regretted the decision.

Then I was free again, and along came Laurie. Laurie was 44 when we met, and she, like me, had zero interest in having children, and she, like Debbie, was at the point where if she were going to have children of her own, it had to happen pretty quickly.

In January 2005, I was babysitting Leah, and I called Laurie to chat. She remembers very distinctly—as do I—that I talked her ear off about Leah and all the cool things we did together and how cute she was when she mangled the English language and how much I loved her. I went on and on, when, as Laurie describes it, I suddenly took a big pause and said, “it’s not for me.”

Laurie couldn’t believe it. She thought for sure I was going to say I wanted kids of my own. Wow, she said, I wasn’t expecting you to say THAT.

No. I loved being a pretend father, and if, God forbid, something were to happen where suddenly I end up with custody of Leah and her brother, John, (and Jin’s daughter, Bridget), I’d embrace my newfound responsibility of raising them and being a surrogate father with all the energy I could muster.

But … I didn’t want to raise a child of my own accord. It started out as a reaction to fear but now it’s become an acceptance of selfishness. After I was with Debbie for a while, I realized that I liked having the freedom to go on vacations at the drop of a hat or go out to dinner and drop a couple hundred bucks without worrying about how it might affect, say, college savings. That sentiment continues, and that sentiment is counter to the responsibility of being a parent.

I like to think that deciding not to have children for those reasons is a responsible act, too. All too frequently, people want kids until they actually have kids. Then they discover they aren’t willing to make the sacrifices—the life changes—that raising a child properly requires. I didn’t want to make those sacrifices, so I wasn’t going to bring some poor soul into this world to suffer needlessly.

Maybe, someday, if I’m old and alone, I’ll wish I had children, so I’d have someone who could visit me once in a while if not help me out. That’s just more selfishness, isn’t it? No, I made my decision, and I have no regrets.