Word to Your Mother
I don’t wanna get all Dolly Parton on your ass, but heck, she had it right when she said ‘Sometimes it’s Hard to Be a Woman.’ There are a lot of pressures on us, not least of which is the timeless debate over when we’re just gonna jack it all in and have kids already. It seems no matter how much progress we make, dropping a sprog is still the ultimate achievement of a woman. So, what if it just so happens that particular activity is nowhere on your agenda? Actually, I feel comfortable with you now, so I’m just gonna come out and say it: I don’t wanna have kids!
Whew! It’s actually kind of a relief to say it out loud. You’re not meant to say it, you see. It’s supposed to be a dirty little secret that you just keep to yourself. Then when you do admit it, people won’t actually let you admit it. I’ve done little experiments recently where the subject of kids has come up in conversation and I’ve dropped my revelation that I don’t actually want kids – the answer invariably comes back ‘Ahh, you’re still young, you’ll change your mind.’ Quite possibly, but I’m pretty damn sure I don’t really have all that much desire to use my uterus. I’ve seen birthing videos – I’m scarred for life.
I haven’t always felt like this, of course. I grew up in a two parent household, with an older brother and a generally great family life. I always imagined when I was older, I’d have an exact carbon copy of my family. I’d have two kids, a boy and a girl and we’d do all the cool things my parents did with us when we were kids. So I used to drop the ‘when I have kids’ nugget. Then gradually, and for no particular reason, ‘when I have kids’ turned into ‘if I have kids’ until one day I admitted to myself, you know what? That’s actually not what I want at all. We’re conditioned as young girls to think that’s what we should want, to the point we feel shamed for even thinking we shouldn’t want it.
I haven’t really been around kids. They make me kind of nervous. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do around them. I don’t have that thing where my ovaries go nuts over the sight of a baby. I just don’t go all gaga about it (I mean ‘gaga’ in the baby sense, not ‘Gaga’ in the Lady Gaga sense – going full on Lady Gaga around a baby is just cruel). That intense pressure to say every baby is the cutest thing you’ve ever seen when we all know that all newborns pretty much look the same, with a touch of Winston Churchill about them, is intense. I mean, I can appreciate cute, their little fingers and toes and those cute faces they make when they’re waking up…but then they start in with the crying and it just ruins the moment.
Some of us just aren’t meant to have kids. And that’s OK. I’m not knocking women who choose to become mothers – more power to them, continuation of the human race is important! I’m lucky, my parents have never once given me the ‘when are you gonna give us some grandkids’ talk. I’ve discussed it with my partner, we’re on the same page. It just seems to be society that has trouble accepting it. It’s 2011, I’ve grown up as part of a generation of women who were taught we could be anything we wanted. It just turned out that being a mother wasn’t one of the things I picked. I’ll just hang here with the cool aunty role. Isn’t it better I do that than have a baby I don’t really want?
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Tags: children, motherhood, womanhood
