Now that I’ve reached the big 3-0, maybe people will begin to see me as a childless woman, rather than a woman who simply hasn’t realized she wants kids yet.
I don’t dislike kids. I get along with most kids very well. I’ve simply decided not to raise them. But this decision has perplexed some people.
For a while, they could come up with excuses for me. At 25, I was ‘still young,’ in a new relationship, and simply hadn’t settled down enough to realize my inner, procreative desires. At 28, I was at the age where I should have come to terms with my biological urges, but somehow still hadn’t. How could a uterus-bearer not be trying to get pregnant?
It’s as though children are iPads, and if you don’t want something that trendy and fun, you’re off your rocker.
But even if children were iPads, an iPad just doesn’t fit into everyone’s life. Believe it or not, some people have different desires than other people. To those women who just can’t understand how someone with a womb could possibly not have, at the core of her very soul, a burning desire to make a baby, I say this: just because you feel a certain way does not mean that all women feel that way. We don’t share a hive mind. The whole thing seems very similar to me as a straight man saying, “I just can’t understand how a dude would want to sleep with another dude. I could never, ever want that.” Well, of course. But isn’t that’s how many a gay man would feel about sleeping with a woman?
Just because you feel a certain way doesn’t mean everyone else does.
And the fact that not everyone wants what you want doesn’t make you wrong. It makes you an individual. And that’s okay. Did you have children just to prove me wrong? No, of course not. Likewise, I did not abstain from child-rearing to prove you wrong.
I did it because I’m a free woman living in 2016, and I had the choice.
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