My decision to remain Childless:
the fruit I am not choosing to pick
I spent the last five years well aware that my biological clock has been ticking. More than ticking. Thumping. Then feeling as though it is on a big countdown.
I have often felt, as of late, that I struggled more with coming to the terms that I am losing my ability to procreate. Then actually not having children. That the choice is being taken away from me, much sooner than it is for men.
Perhaps that was my midlife crisis. Realizing, accepting, that I was moving out of that age category. At least where it was healthy to consider having my own kids.
While it is complicated and I still grieve, it doesn’t take away the hurt and loss, completely, I am glad that I am not raising a child with a narcissist.
But now, I realize that I am thankful that I do not have children. I am thankful that I am childless.
I also know now—at the age of 40—that I will remain childless.
I am not going to have any biological children of my own.
Yes, there were times that I wanted kiddos. So much. Times I dreamed about raising them in all the hard and wonderful, beautiful and brutal moments of that experience. These moments only came to me in my mid-thirties. I was late to the game of even considering it.
Now, however—
I realize that I can’t provide kids with the life that I would want them to have. I can’t afford it on my salary, to afford the lifestyle and education that I would want for them. I don’t have a partner or parents or community. I don’t want to have kids that have no grandparents on my side. Very limited extended family.
I don’t want to hand them a heavy hand of intergenerational trauma. Though I have done a lot of work on myself, it often feels that there is so much more to do—a never ending amount of piles of shit to wade through.
I fear what I would pass to them; it used to be genetically with depression and generalized anxiety and chemical imbalances and insomnia.
Now, however—I worry moreso about the trauma. The more I’ve read and the more I’ve learned, the more I realize that there’s a lot of that in my own lived, embodied experiences. Some directly handed to me from my family line, but then my own, simply from my own life experience. I don’t want to put that on a child.
I am learning to relax. I am taking it easy. After many years, I am finally sleeping more easily, deeply. Dreaming. Like a normal person should. I can sometimes hear my body sigh with a relief. I am finally learning to relax, to calm my parasympathetic nervous system. I know I don’t have kids, and I can’t really *know* the experience, but I know that it welcomes with it a sign up for exhaustion and sleep deprivation. My body is finally starting to learn how to be at peace again.
I also don’t want to hand over to a child this world, a planet that has entered a “global boiling era,” with anomalies off the charts of ice caps melting, temperatures rising, microplastics in our water and everywhere, the Pacific Garbage Patch ever expanding, and tropical rain forests dwindling.
I look at late stage capitalism and the wars and poverty, the middle class diminishing and I fear for the generation that already is, much less the ones to come.
The world often seems very bleak. Humanity could have done so much better, so much more.
I also realize that I don’t love American culture enough to want to hand it over to another generation or have to raise a kid in it.
Perhaps if I had grown up in a more communal, familial, pluralistic culture then I would feel differently. I quite often yearn for living in a culture that not only purports but actually lived out and embodies the “it takes a village to raise a child” idea.
I also have very little trust in the prospect of a partner who would provide and shoulder the work, that would be a team player and wouldn’t let their ego get in the way of the focus of the welfare of our kids.
Undoubtedly that speaks to my own damage and ill regard of men and trust issues, but—nevertheless, that is my experience.
I also realize that, as an adult, I am often often restless, angsty, listless. It drives my intellectual insatiability and my drive. But, it’s not conducive to child-rearing and schedules. I want to be footloose and fancy free. I like to be stimulated intellectually and I relish my hours and even days of free time to be able to travel, read, pursue my interests, venture off to a new city.
I may not have children but I know that they take everything—your time and money and that they change everything; they have no off switch and are completely dependent on you for everything.
I often still feel that I am trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, my mind often dancing in floods of possibilities. I am like Sylvia Plath, taking in the options of possible fruit to pick, then watching them rot and fall to the ground.
However, at least I know this, I am quite content to let the bearing of my own fruit, to drop. To rot, to cease to be, to not pick and eat that one.
“"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar