I chose to take my road without children. It doesn’t make me shallow or immature, it makes me realistic. If I had children it would be to satisfy other people, not me. I am a lover, daughter, sister, writer and friend. I don’t need the label of mother to make me more. I am enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article since Marlena posted a link to it, because it is so often my own experience (except that I never moved to the West Coast and most of my friends are right here, in the tri-state area, and still I see them about as often as she sees hers). That said, I know that having children is a lot like a new relationship in the way it can completely occupy someone, becoming their sole focus for a while. But I also know they come back; maybe they don’t come back as the same person they once were, but they do. Older, wiser, fatter, perhaps.
For me there’s been a simultaneous self-occupation, in my writing, which is a kind of trade-off. My friends with children understand that my writing occupies my mind and my time better than anyone else. But what bothers me about women “disappearing” into having children is when they expect the rest of us to want to, or otherwise to think that everyone cares about the details of what their kids did. I mean, I know I bore people because I have gender on the brain. I don’t assume spending eight months writing a book is a universal experience.
Most of the women I know certainly know that child-rearing isn’t either, but other parts of our culture do assume that. For us childfree types, it becomes kind of tedious, explaining that we don’t want children or don’t feel incomplete or that – god forbid – we are completely oblivious to any biological clock that’s supposed to be ticking so loudly in our heads.
You’d think, what with overpopulation, those of us who choose not to have children would be encouraged – but we’re not.
Often what I hear from parents is something along the lines of “It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” as if my life is without meaning because I don’t have children. My standard response these days is, “Well apparently you’ve never written a book.” Smug Street can go both ways, after all.