I am childless by choice.  I first wrote the words in my journal as a 14 or 15-year-old when in the clutches of extreme stress and depression brought about by my dysfunctional home with my parents that I didn’t think that I’d ever be up to the rigors of raising children.  I had my hands full just trying to keep my own head above water.

I married on June 21, 1973, about six weeks shy of my 18th birthday.  At that time, I thought I wanted to have a baby.  In fact, my husband and I got married under the assumption that kids would be a part of our marriage: two of them.  I even had names picked out during the year of our engagement.  If we had a boy, his name would be David Joseph.  A girl would be named Meredith Susanne.  A second boy would be named Michael Robert.  Another girl?  Maybe Ashley Clare (after my brother, Ashley, and my father’s middle name, which was Clair.)  However, we got married with nothing to our names and found it wise to wait awhile before starting a family.  Our occasional lapses in the area of birth control didn’t find us in an unplanned situation!

Shortly, I knew I needed to decide what to do with my life other than be a stay-at-home housewife and mom with a high school education.  I did, afterall, graduate in the top 5% of my high school senior class and owed it to myself and society to do something other than raise kids, clean the house, and try out new recipes from Good Housekeeping magazine.  I had more potential than that and knew it, and I do believe that a person has an obligation to use the potential he/she has been blessed with.  I also knew deep in that part of me where I’m really honest with myself that opting for the stay-at-home mom and housewife role in my late teens was a way of hiding from the self-esteem issues I needed to face.  I needed to face the world and find out what I could do out there!

The next years of this saga are quite well covered in my post, I Did Something Right.  It seemed completely justified to delay starting a family during those years when I was going to school — first Vo-Tech and then community college and then the University — and paying all the tuition out of our own incomes.

During those year, I came to realize that I felt most comfortable only having myself and a cat as  “dependents.”  I liked not having a baby entrusted to my care.  I knew that I wouldn’t be going to college and working on my own issues related to being an “adult child of a dysfunctional family”  if all my energy and resources were going into raising children.    In fact, I think that going that route may have just continued the cycle that exists in my family of people creating and raising children in dysfunctional environments.  When I mentioned to my husband that I was quite content with our childless status, he said that he was, too.  If I didn’t want kids, he was fine with it.  

We were comfortable enough with that decision that I had a tubal ligation in 1984, which was followed by a hysterectomy for endometriosis and multiple fibroids in 1987.  I’ve never regretted that decision.  I’m glad that I was born into an era where women had the power and the resources to make a choice about their childbearing function.  Honestly, I think my own mother and her mother would have been better off if they had been able to make those decisions rather than being at the mercy of their own reproductive functions and societal expectations.  The cycle of extreme dysfunction may have been broken sooner if the women in my family had been able to execute these decisions in their lifetime.

Raising children is a huge investment in virtually every area of a parent’s life: financially, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually.  I greatly admire the extent of this investment in families who are doing the best job they possibly can in raising their children.  My decision NOT to have children does not mean that I don’t recognize and appreciate the huge amount of personal resources that go into this endeavor and the great satisfaction that comes from it when people are up to that challenge.  My decision to remain childless, in reality, reflects my deeply-held opinion that parenthood is a role that deserves the best one can devote to it.  It’s the most important job a person will ever have!

My best wishes today to all you moms out there! 

 

 

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