Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Holiday Traditions

With Easter and Passover upon us, it’s a time of year for gathering with family and keeping up traditions. Maybe your traditions include a huge family dinner, a sunrise service, or a mad hunt for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. But when you don’t have children, many traditions are either impossible to maintain, or simply aren’t the same. Not that there’s anything wrong with decorating eggs for your own pleasure, or mounting a one-person egg hunt, but having your photo taken on the Easter bunny’s lap could present all manner of problems.

My family didn’t attend church and so our Easter day was almost always spent hiking in the nearby countryside. That’s a tradition I’m more than happy to keep up. If I had children, I would decorate hard-boiled eggs and make bunnies out of pom-poms. An Easter egg hunt would be a tradition I’d adopt for my children, too. But I don’t have children and so I won’t be doing those things.

Many holiday traditions revolve around activities for children, so those of us without children have to start our own traditions. Today I’ll cook lamb with fresh spring vegetables, such as fava beans, English peas, and baby potatoes. I’ll uphold my family tradition of getting outdoors by taking a walk or a bike ride with my husband. I might even go to the sunrise service at the beach.

Which child-oriented holiday traditions have you abandoned and which new traditions have you created in their place?

Top Ten kid-friendly activities to do even if you don’t have kids

Here’s my Top 10 list of kid-friendly activities I still love to do even though I don’t have kids. What’s yours?

10. Play miniature golf and insist on playing by the rules

9. Go out for ice cream

8. Ride the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland

7. Play whack-a-mole

6. Build a sand castle and defend it against the sea

5. Watch Bugs Bunny cartoons

4. Do spins on a swing

3. Draw on the paper tablecloths in restaurants

2. Celebrate my birthday with cake and presents

1. Go to the midnight showing of a Harry Potter movie

Octomom and Peta: Promoting population control

I’ve already been caught by an April Fools’ prank today, so I carefully checked the dates on this news before sharing it.

In an effort to ease her numerous financial woes, “Octomom” Nadya Suleman has accepted an offer from PETA to place a sign promoting neutering and spaying on her front lawn in exchange for $5000 and month’s supply of veggie dogs (which is a 6-month supply for your average 2.4 kids family, so a lot of dogs.)

The sign will read: “Don’t let your dog or cat become an “Octomom.”

This is one of those “don’t get me started” moments, so I will let the Los Angeles Times article speak for itself, and leave you, dear readers, to make of this what you will.

No Fooling: It’s Another Baby Movie, And Another

Coming soon to a theater near you: Two new baby movies. Oh joy.

The first is The Back-up Plan, starring Jennifer Lopez as a woman who decides to have a baby alone using artificial insemination, conceives twins, and then meets Mr. Wonderful (on the day she conceives, of course.) She then drags the poor guy through the usual array of baby-related gags—throwing up on their romantic date, passing out while watching another woman give birth—and ultimately, as the movie is slated as a romantic comedy, lives happily ever happy. It’s Baby Mama meets Knocked Up, as far as I can tell, and does the world really need to see this again?

Also coming soon is Bébé(s) (Babies), a French documentary about the first year in the lives of four babies from around the world. When I first saw this, I thought how refreshing it would be to see the difference in childbirth and childrearing in various cultures. I thought what a great opportunity it would be to highlight the difference in medical care between a country that schedules births for convenience and one where no medical help is available; to show the contrast between countries where a woman might remortgage her house to have a baby of her own, and one where a woman has no access to birth control and has no choice but to keep having babies she cannot afford to feed. This is a movie that could have a lot to say. But watching the trailer, it seems that this is a movie about how cute babies are, and how siblings squabble whether they’re sitting in designer onesies or naked in the African dirt.

Ah well, I guess life would be dull if every movie was made purely to convey a message. On the other hand, do they all have to be pure sap? And how about a positive movie about a woman who decides not to have children and has a happy and fulfilling life regardless? Perhaps Hollywood thinks that too fantastic a concept.

Prisoner applies to become first man to father child behind bars

From the Daily Telegraph in the UK:

A prisoner is hoping to become the first man in Britain to father a child from behind bars after officials allowed him to enrol on an artificial insemination program. Scott Hurford is serving a 30-year sentence at HMP Wandsworth in London after he was caught with 250 amphetamine tablets in Thailand in 2005.

But since his incarceration, the 34-year-old has remained in contact with his Thai girlfriend of six years and the couple now hope to have a baby.

I’m very sorry that this man was locked up for dealing drugs to pay off his gambling debt. It’s unfortunate he chose Thailand with it’s stiff drug laws and ended up serving 30 years (although not in a Thai prison, luckily for him.) Maybe this was his first and last offense. Maybe he’s seen the error of his criminal ways. Maybe he’ll rehabilitate and get out in 2035  and be a model father to his 25 year-old offspring.

Then again, maybe he won’t.

If some people really didn’t ought to bring children into the world, I think that this couple qualifies hands down. What do you think?

Blindsided

Not long after we decided that we wouldn’t have children together, my husband and I needed a nice relaxing evening out and headed for the movies. We decided to see Up.

For those of you who missed it, Up is a light, funny Disney/Pixar movie about an old man and a boy scout who tie balloons to a house and float away to find paradise—at least according to the trailers. So, there’s no reason that two grown people should ball like a couple of babies through the entire thing, but that’s what my husband and I did. For those of you who have seen the movie, I’m sure you understand. Turns out this “kid’s” movie is much deeper than that. It’s all about lost opportunities, misunderstandings, and what constitutes a life of adventure.

It’s also about a couple who were never able to have children together. We were blindsided. At that time we were far more vulnerable than we realized having just been through five years of infertility and we just weren’t ready to have our lives paraded in front of us in the form of animated characters.

Sometimes, movies turn a mirror on our lives; sometimes they make us face our demons; and sometimes they show us a life we’re glad we passed up. That year, we chose to see Knocked Up and left feeling resentful. We opted not to see Juno or the ludicrous Baby Mama. Reading books like Jodi Picoult’s 19 Minutes  makes me realize what a dicey game raising children can be and reconfirmed that I made a good decision. But Up caught me off guard and for a while it made me think that I could have had a different life and maybe it would have been good.

Which movies or books have made you question or reaffirm your decision to not have children? Leave a comment or hop onto a forum and let us know.

Top 10 Best Things About Not Having Children

Every week I’ll be posting a Top Ten list, sometimes based on member polls, sometimes my own Top Ten, and sometimes a Letterman-like silly Top Ten, just for fun.

This week, I’m posting my Top 10 best things about not having children. Please hop over to the forums and add your own.

Top 10 best things about not having children:

10. Being able to fit the weekly groceries into two bags as opposed to two grocery carts.

9. Going to bed at 10:00 p.m. and sleep like the dead until morning, without anyone saying, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, there’s a monster under my bed.”

8. Not being able to name one single character from High School Musical, Cars, or Blue’s Clues.

7. Being able to have sex in my own bed without the risk of having to explain to anyone why daddy is giving mommy a funny massage.

6. Having a purse that contains only a cell phone, wallet and Chapstick—no snacks, wet wipes, scissors, diapers, Band-Aids, action figures, pacifiers, or half chewed candies.

5. Having an urge on Saturday night to go to some experimental theatre in LA and not having to worry about finding a babysitter, or rushing home because of a sudden fever.

4. Two weeks away from my 40th birthday and having only one grey hair.

3. Having a lifelong dream of hiking to Mt. Everest Base Camp and knowing that it still has a chance of coming true

2. Understanding that cheese, olives, and a really good bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is a perfectly acceptable dinner

1. Not having to worry about sending a human being out into the world and worrying if they’ll come back in one piece, or if they’ll grow up to be a serial killer, because genes only go so far. 

What’s your top ten? Tell us.

Dear Prudence: Mind your own business

After my gripe on this week’s Whiny Wednesday, I came across this post on the excellent Childless By Choice Project blog. It chronicled the backlash of criticism after Slate’s Dear Prudence suggested to a newly married couple that they rethink their decision to not have chidren rather than suggesting how to deal with the people who keep hounding them about their choice.

Say what?

When I recently told my OB/GYN that we had decided not to pursue fertility treatments and to remain childless instead, she told me that it wasn’t too late for me and that her friend had just had a baby at 45. Do people really not hear us when we tell them about the decisions we’ve agonized over? Do they not give us credit for having weighed the options and made the right decision for us, not them, not the future of the human race?

One reader, who has three children said:

Having said all that, people should (or should not) have children because it’s what they want to do, not because of the expectations of others.

People who choose not to have children have just as much right to that choice and the right not to be harassed by anyone, including parents and grandparents.

Amen! But another reader had this to say:

We are past that age where people are expecting us to have children. However, we still get people who think we will regret our decision, so at any age the decision to remain childfree is challenged or not seen as viable.

If we can’t change people’s point-of-view, or their need to express their opinions on how we choose to live our lives, maybe all we can do is go out into the world armed with an arsenal of snarky comebacks. It’s just a suggestion.