Proudly Childfree

As I often say, “I’m proudly childfree.”

I’m so truly grateful that I listened to my gut all throughout my 20s when people said such fucked up things to me as “If you want them at all, do it now! While you’re young! It’s so much easier than being almost 40 and picking up a kid w/ a bad back! There’s never a good time so just do it now!!!”

I’m so grateful for my own innate wisdom that knew so clearly, even young: thinking you may “someday” want kids is NOT the same thing as actually wanting kids.

So I waited and I waited. And waited again. That “someday” never came for me.

The more mature I got, the more I understood that I love kids but I deeply, deeply desire to NEVER give birth or raise kids. At all.

I arrived firmly at this decision when I was probably 31 ish and it’s only gotten stronger since.

Now that I’m in my late 30s, I’m experiencing a tidal wave of my peers/friends whose biological clocks went off hard. That combined w/ having 5 niblings all 9 or younger, I get little glimpses into all kinds of pregnancy and parenting experiences. I’m certain, beyond any doubt, that is no way that I could have had any shape of the life I want and love if I had kids.

Now, sometimes people hear all this and they think I’m saying things I’m not. Firstly and plainly: I’m definitely not saying that my truth is anyone else’s.

Aaaand sometimes people hear all of this as me saying I don’t respect or admire parents generally or mothers specifically. Or that I look down on parents and see them as lesser just because their choices are different than my own. Again I have to shut that down. I have no interest in acting like my feelings and choices should be universal. People who do parent MUST be supported in this. And really it is precisely because I comprehend (on some level at least) how hard parenting is when I say I couldn’t do it, that I’m holding enormous respect for parents. I’ll go to bat for them literally however I can. I am so oriented at supporting more families having good lives and making parenting more accessible for those who want it.

But I am saying that if you feel in your gut at any age that you don’t want kids then it’s ok to acknowledge that and shut out terrible advice about your theoretical future old self. No one (not your friend, not your own mom) should be making you feel like you need to have kids before you want them. It’s really not OK.