The Childless Questions

If you are someone who experiences great joy in being a parent of course you want others to share this joy, in the same way a person wants to share the experience of a trip to a new place. “You should go! It’s amazing!” Or like someone who’s gone skydiving and now you want everyone to skydive with you. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before! You have to do it!”

Or maybe you want to share the parts of parenting that aren’t a joy. “You have no idea how hard it is.” “I never get a second to myself.” Or you simply want to have a shared experience with your dear friend or family member. “But it would be so fun to raise our kids together.”

So maybe you’ve asked someone this question, “Why don’t you have kids?” Or said, “You don’t know what you’re missing!.” Or perhaps leaned in close, after watching your friend play with your child, and said, “But you’d be such a great mom!” Meaning it as a compliment. Maybe you’ve said, when a friend has expressed sadness about not having children, “Just borrow mine. I need a break.”

Many women, childless by circumstance or infertility or by choice, have a deep sense of what they are missing. As I explore in my memoir, This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story, even when childlessness is a choice it is often complicated. And it is a often decision (or circumstance) that has been weighed, with more consideration than the choice to have a child is weighed.

I take being told that I would be a great mom as a compliment. I agree. I likely would have been a great mom. But that’s not what circumstances, and my own choosing, led to. On the other hand, there is an implication in the complement that what I have chosen isn’t quite enough. That, but, in the compliment. The ache in, would have been. These imply that, in choosing not to be a parent, something is wrong with the chooser. That somehow I am not quite enough. The not enoughness in these questions echos old words, words like spinster and barren. It is held in words like selfish and odd and lonely. Even though these words don’t feel true to us, we hear them and try to shield ourself from their sharp edges.

Living an entire life without being a parent is an experience utterly different than parenting. Even though you can remember a time before you had children, this is not a life of being childless or childfree. In the same way, “we can never know what it is like,” neither can you. Let’s stop saying the obvious and become curious.

Consider your questions, or better yet ask your chilldless and childfree friends about the things in their lives that they ARE doing, rather than what they are NOT doing. And perhaps begin to read some fabulous new books about being childless, such as Kate Kauffman’s Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No. Or Rachel Chrastil’s book, How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children.

Want to read more about how to think about women who are childless or childfree? Check out a list of resources here.

*(photo credit to Muzammil Soorma)