July 23
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with me, if I am lacking some very fundamental level of humanity that most other people seem to have.  I am speaking of course, of having children.  I have friends with kids.  The older I get, the more friends I have with kids.  I see how their lives are, the choices they've made.  I talk to them about the love they are willing and happy to give to this other little person, and I am astonished.  My astonishment makes me sort of take stock of my life and this all leads back to the very simple fact that there is almost nothing in the world that might happen that would make me want a child.  Because I have friends with children, I find myself walking a very delicate line between coming off as a child-bashing "Ah! You have no right to bring your kids out in public! Keep them locked in a box and beat them with a stick if they dare cry or spill in front of me!" freak, and "Aww, look at little cutie be cute and do cute things!!" because really, neither adequately explain how I feel.

I consider myself to be a loving person.  I look at the newborns of friends, couples who are just beginning a totally uncharted phase in their lives and I try and imagine myself in their shoes.  What if it was me who was being induced?  What if I had to think of the name of the child I'd created?  What if I had it and I didn't love it enough?  What if that thing that's supposed to happen--the nurses place my baby into my arms and I fall in love at first sight, with Nick standing proudly behind me--what if that didn't happen? I think of that often.  People tell me that as soon as the baby is in your arms, you have this overwhelming sense of fit, of belonging.   That that's the direction your life has been pointing for all this time and finally, arrival.  I look to these couples who have to have a momentary, at bare minimum,  optimism, about their lives together and this important thing they want to make.   I watch couples, out of love and miserable and silent, boastful and smug, happy and middle classed, poor and bitter, all of them bound together by this one important thing, whether it be for now or for always.

I do not want the thing.  I think about it often, though.  I see these couples, bickering or holding hands, laughing or sharing moments--I see them in the market, and I am not even momentarily jealous of this life I know nothing and everything about.  When I was a child, I'd always--for as long as I remember--told people when they asked (and people DO ask little girls) me how many babies I wanted to have--I always told them that I wanted to adopt.  For a while, that was true.  It seems to me that a baby is a baby, and I was never committed to needing to make one of my own.  Nick and I both have strangeness and sorrow in our families.  A little Dana running around doesn't impress me all that much, does't fill my heart with whatever it is that it SHOULD be filling with.

At night, I sometimes try and imagine what Nicks and my life would be, say, if we had a little boy, and this little boy--who'd be 6 if we'd started right away-- would he stand out in the yard with Nick, watching him chop wood?  Would he want a puppy?  Would Nick be a patient father?  Would I be a kind mother?  Would I make the time to listen, even if I was annoyed about something else or hung over or sad?  Do I have it within myself to look beyond myself to do this?  The question to answer that question is "Do I HAVE to?"  I don't think that I do.  You have.  My friends have.  People want to.  There will always be someone out there who wants to have a kid.  It doesn't really have to be me.

This doesn't at all answer why I sometimes feel like a bad person for not wanting them.  I feel like I'm breaking some unwritten good person law.  As though no shitty people have kids for selfish reasons.  As though no two people ever got together and had a kid and then realized that they had nothing together, no kind of relationship, but loved the kid, and didn't know how to work around that.  As though no two people had a baby, and fell out of love.  As though if Nick and I chose to have children, it would make us better people or make us love one another more or less.  As though my not being a mom says something about the kind of person I am or am capable of being.

There are movements out there--childfree movements.  I'm not even going to link them, I'm sure if you seek, ye shall find.  I never felt akin to them. I know and have spoken with people who can not cope with the very mention of children, and that seems wrong.  I love my friend's kids, and I love my neices and nephews.  I am childfree because...
 

Huh.  Now that's the thing.  This is all sounding very confused and open ended, but I think that's because that is exactly how it is for me.  I do not want children because I do not want them.  It's as simple and as complicated as that. I do not want them.  I have never felt a stir in my womb or the ticking of some clock.  I do not, in all honesty, consider parenting a fair trade, and I know that this is where people with children might butt heads with me, and of course, I don't really know.  I think I know, though.  I think I know that even if people consider it a fair trade, I never would, and I don't believe I'd ever be able to get past a great unspeakable secret feeling of "this was a huge mistake for me, and you, child, have taken a part of my life I will never get back" and living with that knowledge and still having child, to me, is far worse than not being honest with myself and being self aware enough to say to the world: "I am not the kind of person who wants to be a mother, and moreover,  I think I'm a better person for knowing it."
 
 

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