I am sad that I don’t want to be a mother.
As I come more and more to terms with who I am (and am not), I admit this to myself for the very first time.
Childfree women, i.e. those who are childless by choice, can come across somewhat smug, superior like they have better things to do with their lives than their procreating peers. This stereotype makes me uncomfortable on many levels. On the one hand, you need to only peek into the /r/Childfree subreddit to see the very real confirmation of it. This ‘support community for likeminded people’ is — like most of Reddit, let’s be honest — but a thin veil for unproductive, toxic discourse, the sole purpose of which is venting to the choir. On the other hand, childfree women are always forced to explain themselves to others, to prove that they are not selfish, that they don’t hate children, and that they are mentally sane, that they are not damaged… and this exhausting amount of explaining can be misconstrued as aggressive validation seeking. Because in truth, whatever the reason a woman decides not to have children, she is almost guaranteed to be largely misunderstood by her family, her community, and the society at large.
The fact that I don’t want, never wanted to be a mother fills me with profound sadness. I feel disconnected from a fundamental aspect of womanhood like there is a piece missing in my soul and I have nowhere to get a replacement part. Oh, what I’d give to marvel at the tiny feet, to devote myself fully to a life of nurturing, to experience this ‘love like no other’. Alas. I don’t enjoy the company of children and find them intensely boring. Having a highly sensitive personality type, I cannot stand shrieks and loud noises, and the trail of destruction kids leave behind is not compatible with my need for neat spaces and order, crucial to keep my anxiety at bay. All of these might sound like no-reasons, excuses, frivolities. Perhaps. Perhaps in the eyes of most people, including my own mother, I’m just one of those women who later down the line says things like, ‘Oh, I never wanted to have children, but then I had this munchkin and everything changed!..’ on social media, and moves on to being normal. But what most people fail to understand about this issue is that even though I choose not to have children, I didn’t choose to be born without maternal instinct. It’s not something I can grow out of, like a goth phase or veganism. On the same basic, intuitive, animalistic level that most women just know that they want to have children, I just know that I don’t.
So this is not a question of whether or not. This is my attempt at understanding why not. Because paradoxical as it may sound, I do firmly believe that my life would have been easier now if I wanted and had a child. I know, this is a lot coming from someone whose life can’t, in good faith, be described as ‘hard’. Still, hear me out.
Parent identity is a hell of a drug. Children provide a beautiful, clear pathway in life — for up to thirty years, if you space them out — something that people without children have to pave through on their own. Take your average [developed country] adult’s parenthood away, and what is left? And I don’t want to take this conversation into the belaboured, cynical discourse of enormous disposable incomes, Saturday morning lie-ins, and all the other frou-frou ‘freedoms’ that have nothing to do with the important things in life. What I want is for parents to set their perpetual tiredness, as well as their egos, aside and imagine a life where their children never came to be.
What fills your life with meaning and purpose? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What brings you daily joy? How do you understand the passage of time — the months and the years, the decades to come? How do you pass on your experiences onto younger generations? How do you influence the world around you? How do you define your legacy? How do you define family and how do you nurture it? What do you talk to your partner about at breakfast, and then at dinner, day after day, after day, after day? What are the projects the two of you share? How do you keep each other engaged? Is your partner around still?
If the answers pop up eagerly into your mind, then what about five years down the line, ten years, fifteen? Are those answers still relevant, or is everything getting kind of blurry? Maybe it’s a human defence mechanism against apathy, but we like to imagine the best versions of our life and ourselves when faced with exercises like this. We like to think we would use all this spare time to achieve impressive things with career, community work and volunteering; that we will always be enough for our partner, and at dinner, we will drink wine gazing into each other’s eyes instead of our iPhones; that life will indeed be all lazy mornings and romantic holidays for us. Nobody wants to think about feelings of hollowness, isolation, uselessness, guilt and other uncomfortable things like that.
The point I’m trying to make is this: having a child means a lot of existential questions are either answered for you or removed from the foreground of your mind. Not to trivialise the experience of parenthood, (which of course feels unique to everyone), but regardless of the circumstance, every child on this planet is conceived exactly the same way, goes through exactly the same biological processes inside the mother’s body, comes into this world looking and feeling more or less the same, and then proceeds to develop into an adult according to the schedule encoded into them by mother nature. Interpretations may vary, but for all parents, a child comes with a set of guidelines of how to structure your life for the foreseeable future, how to aspire to be better, how to keep going even when you don’t want to. A child is an ultimate project and the best possible legacy, it’s the most profound way you can make this world a better place. At the very least — it’s a damn good reason to get out of bed in the morning.
As for me, I have to ask myself those questions every day, but not every day I come up with a good answer to any of them. Having a lot of spare time to ponder existential matters doesn’t often improve your happiness levels. I am thirty-four, at a crossroads of my life, and I sometimes wish I could just have a baby, get absorbed into the wonder-world of motherhood, be normal. I know if I had to, I would make a good mother and raise a decent human. God knows my parents and extended family would be delighted. My kid would be beautiful, bilingual, and have a great, fun life, multiple cousins, loving aunties and uncles. My kid would have a most amazing dad. Sometimes I allow myself these fantasies, indulge in these beautiful lies where I am not quite me, but someone else, who is better and happier. But living a life that is not yours, going against your own nature, is never easy and never healthy. I would love my child, but I would hate my life.
The million-dollar question is, then, what do I spend the next thirty years doing instead?.
