I grinned as I re-read that delightful sentence from my childhood best friend with whom I recently reconnected after at least twenty years (Facebook may have unforgivably cost us the election, but damn it's great for connecting with people). Aside from marrying young, J. and I followed similar life paths, including shedding our faith (god I love talking with fellow ex-pats from religious fundamentalism; when you run into someone who comes from the same strange subculture as you did, you can swap stories without having to translate anything, which is refreshing), and not having children.
It wasn't the outcome I expected (and as people never tire of reminding me, kids could still happen); since very early childhood I have always dreamed of love and marriage and children--ambitions which eclipsed all others. I planned to marry right out of college and devote myself full-time to my husband and our three or four children. While I reserved small dreams to myself--I always intended on writing--I never planned seriously for any career; employment, to my college-aged mind, would serve merely as a placeholder until I could meet Mr. Right and settle down to my real life of wife- and motherhood.
Thank gawd none of that came to pass.
Looking back on that cultural brainwashing infuriates me. I have clawed my way up to an amazing career, but it took me until my mid-thirties to even really get started. Everything that came before this was haphazard and accidental; if my talents and ambitions had been fostered, if I'd been taught that my goals for what I wanted with my own life as a sovereign human being should always come first, if I'd been encouraged to plan for a future that holds no guarantee of domestic partnership, if I'd been told, as men are told, that it was imperative to plan for my career because a profession is both necessary and fulfilling, it might not have taken me as long to get here.
And that enculturation runs deep. Long after I gave up my faith, I maintained the assumption that what I wanted most was love and family. It led to many years of lonely grief as my short-lived relationships all failed one after the other, and the years of singleness overwhelmed the scale. It's only been within the last few months that I've started to question whether family is something I really want. Love and marriage--yes, I still want those. Not as badly as I once did, because I'm realizing with increasing clarity what a gift this time is that I have all to myself, and what a glorious life I am capable of building on my own. But someday, once I'm established, once I've built a foundation that limerence cannot shake, once I've met someone who is truly what I want, I would like a life companion.
Kids though. I cannot decide where I land when it comes to kids. I have moments where I wish I could kiss a sweaty, tangled little forehead goodnight, plan a magical Christmas, watch a little person become a bigger person, help someone find their way in a big daunting exciting world. I have moments when it hurts me to realize that the likelihood of any of that happening is decreasing every day. I always thought I'd be a good mom, and it's weird to think that such a lifelong assumption will most likely go unproven.
But then I think about all the things I don't have to deal with. Diapers. Teething. Fevers. Tantrums. The noise and the mess. Giving up prioritizing your own schedule and wellbeing pretty much forever. The sharp drop in marital happiness and personal fulfillment that nearly all parents experience. All that sleeplessness. The horrors of pregnancy and labor and post-partum depression. Homework and sports. Endless complications. Middle school. Constant financial crisis. The weird culty mentality that most parents I've met subscribe to the instant they have kids.
Yeah, I'm really glad I haven't had to experience any of that.
So when I read J.'s "we definitely don't want kids" statement (from the tone it sounds like she's had to defend her decision to far too many people with zero actual stakes in but plenty of opinions regarding her life) my response was...interesting, to me. I wanted to give her a giddy high five.
Maybe I don't want kids. (Hahaha since the window is gradually closing I'm thinking that's maybe a happier conclusion to reach than "I wish I'd had them when I was twenty-five.") I'm cool with that, if that's the case.
Of course, when you reach your mid-thirties and are thinking about the possibility of dating again sometime in the next 15 years, you have to weigh whether you'd take a partner with pre-existing kids. I've dated guys with kids before; it was enough to make me realize real quick that I wasn't in any hurry to go popping little people out of my own vagina. Parts of it were great; I had a really strong bond with one child in particular, and I loved the little routines we built together, the songs he liked me to sing to him at bedtime, the books he liked me to read--and the milestones we reached together, like teaching him to shower and get his own breakfast--and the goals we set together, like helping him deal with his extreme emotions. But a lot of it sucked, including the stark reality that my relationship with my significant other would never come first, and the realization that I had to set myself aside for the sake of children that I hadn't signed up for. And even though the kids were the reason I stayed in that relationship so long, I emerged from it realizing a lot more than I had before about exactly what having kids entails, and it gave me serious pause.
Would I date a guy with kids again (or a woman with kids)? I guess that would depend on the guy (or woman)--and the kids. It wouldn't be my first choice. Sort of like having kids at all. But I could be persuaded, I think, with the right person (the right people).
Just not right this second. People my age now have mostly younger kids, and younger kids aren't my jam. Since I'm not really seeing myself taking up dating again in the immediately foreseeable future, there's not a whole lot of worry on that score. I have shit to do right now, and dating doesn't really fit in with my plans, so kids are a moot consideration at the moment in any case (I will consider fostering, farrrrr down the road, when I'm established; but I'll be damned if I take up single parenting that starts at the kid's infancy. Nope nope nope).
One long rambling blog post later...in short, I'm not 100% solid on the kids conclusion, but I'm definitely over 80% on not wanting kids. That last 20% is confusing; I hate that I can't really tell how much of my residual possible desire for kids is an internalized cultural expectation, and how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is simply a willingness to be open to the best life as it comes. I tend to know myself very, very well ("Know Thyself" is sort of my life's pursuit), and not knowing this drives me fucking nuts.
It doesn't help that underlying this margin of uncertainty is a suspicion that some dude could come along and try to talk me into something I don't really want and I might give in because women are also trained from birth never to trust ourselves. I'm tired of men telling me what I want, tired of female uncertainty being interpreted as an invitation (or a need) for male direction/interjection/interference. Uncertainty is not the absence of agency, thank you very much. And then there's the highly enculturated neurosis of the "ticking biological clock" (which intellectually I reject; I have genes that would benefit the human gene pool to pass on like intelligence and resilience, but also genes that I'm just as happy not to inflict on a child like crippling depression; further, there's no inherent merit in having biological children, and arguably there's quite a bit of non-merit in insisting on producing biological children on a frighteningly overpopulated planet with shrinking resources and millions of orphaned, homeless, and unwanted children in need of a good home). A number of people who advocate for having kids put forth the bullshit argument that you're never really ready anyway and parenthood is something you can't possibly plan for emotionally until you just do it, which is both absurdly egotistical and ludicrously self-righteous, not to mention founded on laughably specious logic. (Like, no one says that about getting a pet. You know you'll have to spend money and time caring for a dependent living being, which factors heavily into a responsible person's decision whether or not to adopt one. "You can't know until you commit irrevocably to it by doing it" is the same nonsense put forth by the Catholic Church regarding the Eucharist; I converted to Catholicism before jumping the religious ship altogether and confirmed that the Eucharist is exactly what you make of it, which is what I thought to begin with.) My uncertainty is plagued by nefarious cultural factors that I don't trust at all, and which make me narrow my eyes a bit at the remaining 20% of myself that whispers that I might want kids. Do I? Do I really?
I suppose where I'm really landing is my own agency. I'm not entirely certain what I want, and that's perfectly okay; there's no hurry to figure it out, and there's certainly no need to have someone else around to help me decide. In the meantime, I'm deeply happy that I have kicked off my thirty-sixth year in my present circumstances. This isn't the life I had envisioned. But in more ways than one, it's so much better than anything I even knew to wish for myself. And that includes (for the time being, at least) being single, and child-free.
No comments:
Post a Comment