Why the childfree seek support & community
“You’re annoying as f — with this childfree nonsense.”
That was a comment spit at me virtually by a former Facebook “friend.”
He was responding to a link I’d shared, a short piece written to help the childed better understand the childfree.
His response in full:
You’re annoying as fuck with this childfree nonsense. You don’t want children, don’t have children. Why spending [sic] your whole life bitching about not wanting to have children? Lol
Haha lol! Indeed.
His aggression was handled first with a polite reply on Facebook, and then passively with this happy meme —
But I have to admit that when I initially read what he wrote, it took some breathing and silent counting before touching the keyboard to not be equally vile, doubly profane. It shouldn’t have affected me so viscerally, but it did.
What I expect and want to feel as a 45-year-old woman (one well past her reasonable/responsible childbearing years) when hit with that kind of venom is nothing. I want to shrug inwardly, and I want to mean it.
At the most, I wanted to feel pity for the poor man who left the comment. After all, what could he have been expressing but repressed envy? He revealed as much in later comments in the same thread:
What’s the point of bragging every single day about not having children?
are you capable of enjoying your child-free life without bragging about it?
A quick aside: Interestingly, you have, on one hand, people saying to the childfree (women, in particular), “Aren’t you worried you’ll change your mind?” | “Aren’t you afraid you’ll regret it?” | “I just don’t want you to make the wrong choice.” But show them you’re perfectly happy, thank you, and you’re “bragging” or “flaunting” or “in-their-face.”
“Bragging” is a telling word, and it should have been enough to convince me to brush off his nastiness, but I still remember far too easily the pressure of the expectation that I’d become a mother. In my just-twenties, married for the first time, it sickened me spiritually to envision the rest of my life and see parenthood in it. Anticipating that possible (and, I thought, unavoidable) lifestyle, one that would wrap itself around every single moment I’d experience until the day I stopped breathing, dulled the colors of my days and made me a defensive, irritable, and generally unpleasant young wife (sorry, Husband #1).
But I was lucky. I grew up in a non-traditional household with no religious or other conservative-values indoctrination. The motherhood expectation that had been with me since I was little hadn’t come from family, but from magazines, TV shows, movies, and articles that all established, and still establish, motherhood as a path as inevitable as death.
Other women, those who grew up in homes with parents who demand grandchildren, or girls who are now being raised in environments where church leaders, extended family members, governments, or oppressive cultures dictate that women reproduce, have it much harder.
It doesn’t help that even some childfree women are dismissive of other childfree women. Childfree Medium writer Meghan Daum, for example, sounds a little like Facebook Man in her declaration, “I published a book about choosing not to have kids. But I’m not gloating and neither should you.” (From Next Person to Say They’re ‘Childfree’ Gets a Time-Out.)
Gloating.
Not “celebrating” — as parents do when they share pictures of their children wrist deep in pumpkin pulp, bucketing sand on family vacations, or posing before their first school bus ride — but “gloating.”
When a woman recognized as a voice of the childfree minimizes other childfree women by suggesting their outspokenness is either 1. gloating or 2. an effort to capitalize on a trend (pot/kettle), how are women just beginning — in some cases, very bravely — to explore the possibility of saying “no” to parenthood supposed to feel?
When the pressure is on to enter into a wholly undesirable life, when undue judgment even from other childfree people is inescapable, what’s a woman who simply wants the freedom of a choice to do?
Well, she’ll want to find others like her. She’ll want to talk about it. She’ll want support from others who’ve had the guts, when guts are needed, to live their lives in a way that makes them happy. She’ll want to find childfree groups/blogs/podcasts/web series…es.
Daum, Facebook Man, and others may not understand the value of spreading the good news, but childfree life coach Isabel Firecracker does:
I am Colombian. […] I can tell you with certainty that most countries in Latin America are very similar: they are nuclear family-centered and deeply rooted in religion (Catholicism, mainly). The value of a woman is seldom measured by her intellectual achievements but instead by her mothering skills. Women are defined by how their children are raised, and they are judged by how their kids behave. The suffocating societal pressure to have children starts with your closest circle of family and friends, and even among these people who love you, it doesn’t matter what your dreams are, how high you can climb on the corporate ladder, or how many scientific awards you receive — if you are not a mother, you are never “woman enough.” […] Imagine that’s the best anyone expects of you, the only thing they see in you: someone’s future wife, someone’s future mother. […] Identifying as “childfree” has become paramount in my life. So much so that when I started doing it, I felt liberated. But I also felt alone.— What Makes You Think We’re Gloating?
At 45 I rarely get pestered about having children (minus Facebook Man’s delightful contribution), but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important to me that I and others do what we can to help assure other women that regardless of what they’ve been taught to believe, children are a choice, not a foregone conclusion.
“As a child, I didn’t want to grow up to become a mother,” says childfree journal creator LeNora Faye. “I didn’t realize I had a choice until I was 22.”
LeNora writes in a 2018 Medium post, Why Not Having Children Is Important to Me,
I asked myself what it was that I really wanted to say to my fellow man. “You don’t need to procreate to have a rewarding life” was my reply. […] Perhaps some of my peers aren’t so enthusiastic about me spreading my message of childfree hope to their young, impressionable kids. I get that. But I know I would have benefited from having someone say, even in passing — “LeNora, you don’t have to be a mother.”
YES. THAT.
That’s why, when I was approached by Isabel and LeNora to be part of a web series that would cater to the childfree (or child-uncertain) community, there was no hesitation. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
And it’s obvious that even though the word “childfree” has gone somewhat mainstream, there’s still a real need for compassionate and supportive childfree voices. Just look at the numbers flocking to the childfree Reddit, or to Instagram pages like Childfree Doodles (5,774 followers as I write this), Childfree Is Not a Dirty Word (4,676 followers), Childfree Squad (2,485 followers), Childfreeness (1,964 followers), or our new Instagram page, ChildfreeGirls, which has drawn 689 followers in just over two months.
Our nascent web series ChildfreeGirls, in which we discuss topics of interest to the childfree community and periodically invite guests to join us, already has over 100 subscribers. (The trailer below is best with sound.)
But numbers — followers, subscribers, “likes,” etc. — aren’t the goal. Like many others who have put in time and effort to create a unique neighborhood within the larger childfree community, Isabel, LeNora, and I aren’t interested in gathering numbers for numbers’ sake. We, like the others, want to be there for people like this woman, who emailed us at ChildfreeGirls a couple of weeks after we went online:
I cannot express just how happy I feel having come across your page and the YouTube channel. I identify as childfree, and I have no intentions whatsoever of having kids in my life, but I am in the worst place to have the audacity to make that choice. I have always felt that kids weren’t something I wanted in my future, but being in _____, where patriarchy is still a huge thing and women are still seen as only useful for reproduction, I always thought I was weird and maybe one day it would change and I could compromise for societal sake. As I get older, though, and more self aware, I am realizing that my dreams are too important to me to compromise my life plan to fit into the ideal of what a womb carrying person should be.
I always felt I was alone and that there is no one out there who identifies as I do, but with your channel I am encouraged to be bold in my choices and liberated in my beliefs of what I want in my life.
Thank you for helping me feel less out of place. You are encouraging so many of us and making us feel less out of place in our lives.
This is why most of us talk about this “childfree nonsense.” It’s why we share how happy we are without children — which isn’t the same as bragging, gloating, flaunting, or any other word commonly used by people whose motives are questionable (how many times have gay people been told they’re “flaunting” their sexuality by simply holding hands in public?).
We talk about this “nonsense” because there are so many problems in the world, already, and if we can ease someone’s heart even just a little, or make their life a little bit easier, by simply being there or saying, “It’s perfectly normal, healthy, and not-weird to not want kids!”, why wouldn’t we?
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Kristen Tsetsi is a 1/3 founding non-mother of the web series ChildfreeGirls. She is also the author of the novel The Age of the Child: When a pro-life Constitutional amendment leads to a birth control ban — life sentences for abortion, police investigations of “suspicious” miscarriages — politicians start finding babies abandoned on their doorsteps. That’s just the beginning. “It’s rare to find a novel that portrays childfree women at all and, if they do, they are often assigned very stereotypical characteristics. This is not the case in The Age of the Child.” — Brittany Brolley, RinkyDINK Life | “The Age of the Child is an exciting drama that illuminates the hypocrisies of our time without flinching.” — Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative
