On my “selfish lifestyle choice”
Being a woman on the steady slide post 35th birthday toward 40th birthday who doesn’t want and won’t have kids is a ………..(let’s go with the word) “interesting”………experience. You really get a lot of messages about this choice that telegraph to you an enormous amount of judgement and sometimes outright criticism. You’re told crap like
“you’ll never know what real love is” or that
“you’ll probably regret your decision when it’s too late to make a different one” or
“you can’t possibly know what tired is” or the ever popular point blank
“it’s a selfish lifestyle choice.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again until I’m blue in the face, I 100% concede that I will never know what it feels like to be a parent or the specifics of a parent’s love toward a child. That’s true. I get it, I really do. But there are a couple of things that parents really need to listen to those of us who have never become parents about. Like, parents will NEVER know what a lived experience of adulthood is like WITHOUT being a parent. So maybe there are some experiences they can glean from us too, ya know?
If I might assert…the top of that list is definitely “your child is and always will be an independent person from you and not an extension of yourself.” No feelings you have about that FACT will change the FACT. I know that parents often feel (or so they tell me) that their kid is “like a part of their actual heart walking around in the world outside their bodies.”
While you may FEEL that as a parent…it simply isn’t true. And as a survivor of abuse, I can tell you that one of the most dangerous applications of the “I never knew real love until I became a parent” crowd are the folks (like my father) who really mean, “This person who I created and who is coming into the world brand new is the first person I can truly control (for a while) and I will use their dependence on me and their inherent vulnerability to attempt to extract as much ‘unconditional’ love and adoration from them as long as I possibly can and I won’t accept or respect them when they begin to articulate opinions different than mine or attempt to set boundaries.”
So let me say again: “your child is and always will be an independent person from you and not an extension of yourself.”
I hope I don’t have to clarify that I am clearly not talking about all parents. But I AM talking about the most toxic applications of these views in parents who I personally know. All parents who say judgemental statements like the ones I listed above help contribute to a culture that supports this controlling, abusive, toxic mentality that what parents say always goes. Before you comment on this post, let me underline, parents, this is actually NOT a time for you to tell me more about what your experience is like. It’s actually asking you to just absorb and listen for a second. If these toxic applications of parental love truly aren’t relevant to you, and you truly see your kids as independent people, then that’s awesome. But I am not asking for parental defensiveness at the moment. I’ve have closing in on 37 years of that communication blasted in my face, so just…NOT NOW, please.