Reflections On Deciding To Be Child Free
Written by Ida Summervelt Saturday, 02 August 2008 21:56
Since I’m fast approaching the age of becoming a certified card-carrying senior citizen (65), I felt this was as good of a time as any to look back on my life to date and reflect on some of the major life decisions I’ve made, consider why I made those decisions, and decide if I would do anything differently if I had it to do over again.
One of my major life decisions concerned having children. I decided very early in life at age three that I simply did not want them. I recall the day I made that decision very clearly. We’d gone to my maternal grand parent’s home for a visit and, on arriving, found a gaggle of excited ladies gathered around the sofa. My mother rushed to join the group, dragging me along. In the middle of this group of crazed women there was a baby, my brand-new cousin, Jean. I took one look and decided to get out of there fast. But escape was impossible. My aunt grabbed me and asked “Do you want to hold her?” I very clearly said “No.” Then my mother got involved and I was told, in no uncertain terms, that of course I wanted to hold the baby and I was ordered to sit down and had the baby plopped in my lap. Then came all the comments from the gaggle of women: Look at the good little mother; She’s probably looking forward to having her own babies someday; and so on. All I wanted was to get away from the smelly, noisy, wriggling thing I was being forced to hold.
Needless to say, I did not like playing with dolls. I had a lot of them, plus all the requisite doll and happy homemaker stuff that went along with being a female child in the 1940's but playing with these items simply held no interest for me. I much preferred playing with my toy animals, guns, rocking horse, and tool set or doing things like climbing trees, doing puzzles, or reading.
There were other factors in my early years also. One was having an aunt and uncle who were child free. Whether they were child free by choice or not, I do not know but the fact was that they did not have children and seemed to be perfectly happy and have an interesting life without them. Another factor was that my mother had a friend who wanted a child badly but had trouble having one and miscarried a couple of times before finally having a baby. I loved going with my mother to visit this friend before the baby came along as she had an interesting collection of dog figurines and would let me play with them. After the baby came along, the dog figurines were put away and when we visited, I was expected to play with and watch the baby instead. What was once an enjoyable afternoon visit became something I dreaded.
When I hit the ripe old age of 11, my mother decided that I was old enough to babysit so she booked a sitting job for me. I tried to tell her that I didn’t want to be around babies or small children, didn’t enjoy being around them and had no idea of what to do with them or for them. She said they’d be in bed and sleeping and all I had to do was sit there and watch tv and look in on them occasionally to see that all was well. Except they were not sleeping and got up quietly and made a horrible mess of things. That bought me three more years before mother again decided I should babysit. Not that I knew anymore about babies and small kids than before and not that I liked being around them any better but mother insisted. “Good training for when you have your own kids” she said. “I’m not having kids,” I said. “Oh, you’ll change your mind,” she said.
About the same time, I got hit with puberty and with puberty came unrelenting migraines. Since I’d never had headaches at all before, it was as plain as day to me what the cause was. I was miserable for three weeks out of every four because of the headaches. I was sent to the doctor who did a full work up including tests for a brain tumor and nothing showed up on the tests and the doctor’s diagnosis was that it was all in my head. Still, as miserable as I felt I had to keep up with school and all the babysitting jobs my mother booked for me. After school, all I wanted to do was lay down in a dark, quiet room but if I didn’t have to babysit, all the neighborhood kids would be out playing right under my bedroom window and the noise factor was just horrible.
Then came sex education in high school. This consisted of a couple of movies about puberty (long after everyone in the class had already been there and done that), STD’s and the miracle of pregnancy and child birth. While the information given was so minimal as to be laughable, it was enough to make me realize that I never wanted to go through that process. The film on pregnancy and childbirth inspired me to start asking for a hysterectomy when I was only 16. Needless to say, the responses I got to that request were not, to my mind, positive.
I did rethink my child free position once I married my first husband but there were just so many things against deciding to have a child that I could not get past. One was the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Just seeing a pregnant woman made me cringe and I could simply not imagine why anyone would go through that only to be stuck with having a child. Another major factor was having migraines. I could barely cope with work and keeping the house up so how could I ever manage with a child added to the mix. Yet, my doctor kept telling me that the migraines would be “cured” if I would just go ahead and have a baby. What if I would have taken his advice and still had the headaches? Who would have taken care of the child when I couldn’t? The doctor? I think not. The marriage did not last so if I had a child, I would have wound up a single mom and would have to maintain at least minimal ties to my ex “for the sake of the child.” This would have altered the course of the rest of my life drastically as I may not have been allowed to move out of state, perhaps not even out of the county, and certainly would never have met my current husband or lived in Europe.
I rethought my position a few more times over the years. One brief period of reconsideration was triggered by someone asking if I wanted a boy or a girl. While my immediate response was that what I really wanted was an Afghan Hound and didn’t care what sex it was, the question made me think about which sex I would prefer should my birth control fail. I considered a boy: what if he liked sports and wanted to be on sports teams? Team sports not only bore me to death but they are so loud an noisy that I just could not cope with both migraines and a sports loving boy. So...a little girl might be nice...provided she wasn’t a girley-girl who wanted frilly clothes and liked to play with dolls...both things that simply do not understand. Realizing that I’d have to accept any child I had no matter what their likes, dislikes, sex, or personality was, I decided the whole thing was just too much of a crap shoot. At this point, abortion being illegal in this country, I started keeping two credit cards free and clear in case I needed to make a fast trip to either Sweden or Japan.
The one time I did not reconsider having children was at age 40 when I finally found a doctor who would give me a hysterectomy. While he still insisted that my migraines had nothing to do with my reproductive system, he did agree to take the ovaries too and what a blessing that was. I’ve been migraine free ever since. Giving up the ability to reproduce, something I never wanted to do anyway, to be headache free was the best trade off I ever made.
The man I’m married to now has four children from a prior marriage and did not want more children. Not one of his children ever lived with us and the one who was a minor when we married didn’t want “visitation” forced on him and we respected his position. So I was never cast in the role of step-mommy for a couple of weekends a month. I do get some of the overflow drama from my husband’s adult children but have found that I can often give him a different perspective on his children than he, as their parent, can see simply because he sees them as children and I see them as adults capable of making their own decisions and being in control of their own lives.
Looking back, I have no regrets about not having children of my own. There are, after all no guarantees that a child will be born healthy and remain so even with the best of prenatal and pediatric care. There are no guarantees that a parent and child will have compatible personalities or that a parent and child will even like each other. There are no guarantees that your child will be there for you in your old age. However, there is a guarantee that having a child to raise will be expensive, time consuming, and stressful. Some people are cut out for parenting and do the job happily and well. I’m not one of them. Thankfully I realized this early in life and was able to avoid the baby trap.
Discussion of this article is taking place in The Childfree Life Forums.
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