Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Have Your Say…Quietly

Since this blog officially launched about a month ago, there have been some great conversations happening, and I’ve been pleased to hear people say how glad they are to have a place to come and talk with like-minded women. But behind the scenes something

interesting has been going on. I’ve had lots of e-mails and “off-blog” contact with readers who’ve shared some really thought-provoking comments. With each one I’ve thought, “Oh, I wish you’d posted that in the comments.”

Finally, a couple of readers admitted that they were afraid to post their opinions in public.

Afraid? I thought. Why?

But after snooping around some other blogs and websites, I can see why. Out there in the blogosphere, I found plenty of radical thinkers of all factions, from child-haters who despise “breeders,” to mothers of 12 (or 19) who firmly believe it’s Gods will that they continue to produce baby after baby. And they’re all pretty vocal about their points-of-view. Getting into those discussions can be intimidating.

The biggest danger in putting your opinion out in public is that someone’s always going to disagree with you. But by the same token there will be plenty more people who’ll read what you have to say, and think, “Yes!! That’s what I’ve been feeling. Thank you!”

So, I urge you: Speak up, Sisters. We childless women are not to be pitied, or sneered at, and, most of all, we don’t need fixing! For every time someone has told you you’re selfish or you’ll regret not having children, or suggested you just adopt, there is another woman out there who has actually walked a mile in your shoes. Even when our dearest friends and family aren’t hearing us, there’s always someone else out there that gets it. So speak up and be heard. Please.

And for those of you who are still a little stage shy, look in the top right hand corner of this page and you’ll see a new button called, “Suggest Topics”; click on that and you can send your comments and opinions directly to me via e-mail. I’ll take them and weave them into a post (without using your name, of course,) so that you can still be heard, even if you’re only whispering. 😉

Whiny Wednesday

I’m sitting in a quiet cafe with a pot of Jasmine tea brewing and a gentle breeze blowing down the valley and in the back door behind me, and I’m trying to write my Whiny Wednesday post. There’s no rush; I have plenty of time. I have no one to collect from school and no baseball practice to shuttle to and from. Nobody’s counting on me provide nourishment or even junk food snacks. Nobody needs me to change a diaper or resolve a dispute over a remote control. Right now, this minute, no one is relying on me, and right now, this minute, I’m glad for that.

So, let’s turn Whiny Wednesday upside down this week. Tell me: What are you grateful for today?

Do We Have a Responsibility to Reproduce?

I’m sure if you’ve ever told anyone of your intentions regarding motherhood, you’ve heard a response something along the lines of: “Oh, but you’d be such a great mother,” or “The world needs people like you to reproduce.” It comes with the suggestion that if you’re intelligent, law-abiding, relatively sane, and wouldn’t be seen dead on Jerry Springer, you have some kind of obligation to society to contribute your genes to the world. But what is your obligation really?

As women of the 21st century, we still fight the battles our mothers and grandmothers fought. We may not be fighting for the right to vote or for women’s liberation, but we’re still fighting for equality in pay, for the right to marry who we want, and to have full control over what we do to our own bodies. And we still tussle with the wife/mother roles we’ve had passed down to us. Many of us still take on the majority of the household chores and make sure all the family birthday cards go out on time. And yet we’re striving to succeed on our own terms, trying to make a difference, and trying not to be labeled simply Wife/Mother/Grandmother.

But the fact remains that there can never really be equality in motherhood. Women bear children. We feed them. We are naturally the nurturers. Motherhood isn’t a task we can trade with a male partner: “I’ll install the new sprinkler system if you birth the babies.”

So as women, do we have a responsibility to reproduce? The world is overpopulated, polluted, and crowded, but if we all stop reproducing, the human race can’t go on? So what is our responsibility to the continuation of mankind. Tell us your thoughts on this subject.

Top 10 Birth Control Alternatives Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About

Not all birth control is pharmaceutical; sometimes the world around us is deterrent enough. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek look at some alternative birth control options that you won’t hear about from your doctor.

10. A week on a Disney Family Cruise

9. Water cooler talk about stretch marks, sleepless night, mucus plugs, sagging boobs, leaky bladders, and expanded feet

8. A cross-country flight sandwiched in the window seat next to a barfy, colicky, whiny, wriggly baby and his clueless mother

7. Diapers and their accompanying aromas

6. Finding $700 a month to put away for college tuition—for each kid

5. Your friend’s “Meet the baby and watch my birth video” party

4. The invention of musical toys

3. Your neighbor’s manipulative, destructive, tantrum-throwing, bad mannered, cat-terrorizing grandchildren

2. Lizzie Borden

1. Kate Gosselin

That’s my top ten. What’s on your list of things that make you thankful you don’t have children, or put you you off ever having them? If you’re a mom reader sneaking in, what’s the biggest surprise that no one warned you about?

The Decision

I was not one of those women who never wanted children–quite the opposite. For as long as I can remember I had a vision of a family that included children—four to begin with, but as time went on I adjusted that number based on various opinions on population growth, financial considerations, and the practical implications of trying to lug around four kids. Regardless, a family with children was always in the picture of my future.

My primary reason for not having children back then was that I just didn’t meet anyone I really wanted to go through that with. Even in my 20’s I think I had the foresight to look at the long-term consequences of breeding with each prospective partner and decide that the cons would eventually outweigh the pros. So I was in my mid-30s before I finally met someone I knew would be a reliable, committed, and fun father. Not long after that is when I discovered I couldn’t have children of my own without some serious medical intervention—something I wasn’t prepared to do.

So, my decision to not have children was a long time coming. It came out of weighing the pros and cons of continuing what had become a mad quest for children, biological or adopted, and finally deciding that most important thing for me was a loving relationship with my husband, one built from mutual respect for one another’s needs and wants, and realizing that a family of two was all we really needed. Once the decision was made, we were both happy with it.

But now, comes another decision: At 40, I am still within the window of conceiving naturally, and even though it would be virtually impossible because of my condition, I’m at an age where hormones do funny things. What if I got pregnant now? It’s an odd situation to be in, having hoped for so long for a baby, but I’ve made a decision that not having children would be the best thing for us now. So, my dilemma is this: after dealing with infertility for so long and finally being told I will never have children, do I now need to start using birth control again to make sure it doesn’t happen? The irony is too ridiculous, so for now, I’m doing something I never did in my younger years; I’m taking my chances that it could never happen to me.

Meet the GINK

Meet Lisa Hymas. She’s the senior editor at Grist, the online environmental salon, and a self-proclaimed GINK: green inclinations, no kids. Hymas makes a strong case for child-free living, including reducing the impact of over-population on the environment. But even though her manifesto is environmentally-driven, she makes a strong statement about how we childless and child-free women often side-step the conversation about kids. Hymas says:

Parents talk all the time about the delights and challenges of raising kids, to other parents and to all the rest of us, and I don’t begrudge them that. We childfree people rarely discuss in public the upsides and downsides of life without kids—and that’s what needs to change.

I couldn’t agree more. For too long, being childless has been something that shouldn’t be discussed, something we should be embarrassed about, or something that isn’t a topic for polite conversation. We’re sending a message to young women that living child-free isn’t an acceptable option. And we all know that it is.

You can read Lisa Hymas’ GINK manifesto here. Tell us what you think.

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?

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.