To baby or not to baby
After becoming pregnant, as it often happens when we become aware of or focused on a “new” facet of existence, I started seeing articles, posts, and comments everywhere about a person’s choice not to have children, often coinciding with a veil of tension between themselves (the childfree) and the rest of the world (presumably baby-loving). Sometimes this argument or complaint is articulate, fair, and clearly reasoned. Sometimes it’s reduced to the same defensiveness and poor logic that incited the writing in the first place, which is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but the one I am specifically writing about now is the reinforcement of “us vs. them”. I’ve seen discussions ping-pong back and forth between one preemptively judgmental group throwing shade on another and so on with little hope for empathy or mutual respect.
In the last 4 years I have worked a great deal at trying to determine whether or not I wanted to be a parent. Before that I felt pretty firmly that I did not. Why? All the usual reasons: concerns about money, career, freedom, the environment, being unable to afford adoption, general instability, and uncertainty that given my personality and health issues I’d be fit to parent. Being an introvert and a parent can’t be easy, after all. I like quiet and frankly I’m not high energy. Have you met a toddler? I have. They’re confoundedly always sticky, needy little fleshy energy bombs.
I have also always had a knee-jerk reaction against a lot of the narrative associated with motherhood. You supposedly trade in your clitoris for a baby and the self-sacrifice from there never ends. You are only a good mother if you completely abandon any interests or desires beyond your children. You’re expected to silently accept being condescended to in popular media because, after all, your body is super gross. Meanwhile our culture is quick to assert the importance of Family and “family values” while offering very little actual support to families.
So having been entrenched in the debate from multiple positions over the last several years and now finding myself gestating a tiny human, please consider when I say, my dear comrades, whether or not we choose to have children there is no way to win. You cannot escape. You cannot pass go, you cannot collect two hundred dollars, you go straight to jail.
If you choose not to have children, many loud and boundary-ignoring individuals as well as society at large will not accept your position. They will smugly suggest you’re just going through a phase. They’ll suggest that you simply haven’t found the right partner yet, or that you’re too picky. Clearly you’re too selfish. Or, you poor thing, you just don’t have the confidence to create a family.
Nevermind the mountains of garbage created by diapers or the fact that many people who have children appear to have put more thought into purchasing a winter coat than whether or not they should create and take responsibility for the development of a sentient being. There’s no reasoning with people like that because your life is not complete unless you’ve had children. (And to be clear, they always mean biologically.) The tone suggests they feel like they’re steering you clear of a major catastrophe, but ultimately they’re just condemning you to unhappiness and flagrantly ignoring your ability to make choices for yourself.
These same people will also insert themselves into the lives of people who choose to have children. I see it in movies, magazines, television shows, and echoed in comments from strangers and family. If you are not a parent in a certain type of way, according to mostly arbitrary rules, you are doing it wrong. You are not represented or even acknowledged except perhaps as comedic relief. These obnoxious individuals will pop up out of the woodwork like B-team magical house mice to use the presence of a poor, defenseless, delicate little child to concern troll every detail of your life from choosing to drink coffee during pregnancy to questioning the fact that your little boy is wearing purple (which as everyone knows is only one step away from PINK). There’s even a term for endless sanctimonious squabbling within the ranks of parents themselves: “mommy wars”. The mommy wars, though infantilized and therefore dismissed in name, are real and potent as a force in the lives of parents.
It just gets worse the more you drift from the mainstream cultural idea of what a family is supposed to be, which includes the offense of choosing “odd” names, the presence of disability, adoption, mixed race couples, non-traditional romantic relationships, families of color, nomadism, and so on.
None of us are what a family is supposed to be because there is not one type of family. There is not one type of fulfilling life or love.
If we measure ourselves against each other according to broad external pressures and expectations, we are still defining ourselves according to those terms regardless of the choice we’ve made. It does nothing for us to try to outmaneuver them according to their rules and values except to create an endless cycle of frustration, defeat, and isolation. We have to step out into our own unknown territory and we have to support and trust each other to pursue our own awareness of this terrain.
