By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
All of a sudden, and maybe for the first and only time in my life, I’m feeling like a trendsetter! As proof, check out this article about celebrities—women and men—who have chosen to not have children.
Their reasons vary. Some I can relate to, others not so much. What I appreciate the most is that this choice is presented as a positive decision. The fact that an article about people who are childfree has even made it into the press—alongside reports of suspected baby bumps, ultralux showers, births, and mommy woes—confirms for me that we’ve made huge strides in the last few years.
This is good news!
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
Why is it we have to justify why we don’t (or can’t) have children? Men never have to justify why they don’t have kids! Of that list, the only male who openly talked about why he doesn’t want kids was George Clooney (Jay Leno’s “justifying” quote was actually from his wife Mavis, not Jay himself.) My husband and I went to one of his work functions, and a co-worker from another department asked him if we had kids. When my husband said no, the guy looked at ME, and asked, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you want kids?” I doubt if I had been there the question would have been asked at all.
Ugh!
What a rude you-know-what. People think because you don’t have children there is something wrong with you. Some guy asked me if I had kids and when I said no he said ‘don’t you like kids?’ This article is about ‘older people’ but as I have aged I feel more of a void in my life as opposed to coming to terms with it. The struggle to accept this as my reality is exhausting and I pray it will not be a struggle for the rest of my life. Oh, and did I mention that Mother’s Day is this week. I pray for some peace.
Yes, I like that the article is positive or accepting. And also that it focuses on people who are generally now older. There’s nothing that infuriates me more than an article about people who have chosen to be childfree, only to find that they haven’t interviewed anyone older than 30!
Ok, slight exaggeration. Lots of things infuriate me more … but you know what I mean!
About three years ago, I had a part-time job at the Y while I went back to school. A man came in and was trying to “chat me up”. He asked if I had children and I said No. He said “Why, couldn’t you have any?!” This is in the busy lobby of the Y with other people standing around. I looked at him point blank and said “No, my husband died which put a damper on things.” he looked shocked and said “Oh”. I ignored him until he wandered away. The next time I came back to work, I found he had left some of his poetry for me to read and his number! (He was about 70 years old, I was about 41 at the time.)
Oh, and Mother’s day is next week. UGH.
I can’t be happy about this. I don’t think it helps. Of course all those people have “amazing lives without children” – they’re effing celebrities! If I was Cameron Diaz I’d have an amazing life, but I’m not, and I just have to make my mediocre existence somehow worth the while, while not having children. Plus a guy like George Clooney is probably just going to let several women down with regards to having a family and then producing a baby at age 70 with a 25year-old new wife, parading the baby through the yellow press…. IMHO such articles don’t do anything at all to help the discussion about the problems society is creating today for normal people to have children or not: Rising economical pressure making people wait till they are “financially settled”; a major shift in the relationships between women and men making more and more men letting women wait too long because they “aren’t ready yet” while her biological clock is loudly ticking; The ambivalent aspects of feminism i.e. we women are modelling – we HAVE to – our biographies on those of men which makes becoming a mother harder, since society still doesn’t provide enough support for people of any gender to combine work and family; medical issues which remain unadressed such as increasingly bad sperm quality in modern men (which is a social issue, because medicine just isn’t prepared to find treatements for men, after all babymaking remains a feminine issue so it is our bodies which are doctored and tortured when very few ressources are used to look at the male side of it); completely wrong perceptions of what fertility medicine can do and what it can’t (none of these celebs is mentioning any kind of attempt at fertility treatement – but who says there weren’t any? Maybe Ellen de Generes and her partner just didn’t want to go down the road of IUI, or they even did and it failed. They just don’t talk about it). All in all it’s not helpful if these people are trying to set an example that childlessness is normal exactly because they are not normal people. They are exceptions, so they are far more likely to be accepted as leading the exceptional, child-free lifestyle. This is not going to take any pressure off normal men and women.
Elena,
I agree. Not only do they have the means to pick the perfect woman to give birth to their baby but they can easily find donors to create their designer babies. The rest of us work 8-5 jobs and are unable to fly to exotic places when we feel like it, or attend fabulous events to distract us from our emptiness.