I have a dirty little secret: if I found out I couldn't have kids, I'd be elated.
"You know you don't have to have kids, right?" My friend turned to me as we flicked through photos of her darlings. She regaled me with the devilish things they'd been doing recently like drawing on the walls, pooping in the shower and flinging their siblings' toys out the car window.
"But you have beautiful kids, and I'm sure you love them loads - even if it's only when they're asleep!"
"Yea...sure...They're hard work though. I love them, but right now I'm really not sure they're worth the constant stress. If I had my time over..." She stared out the hotel window, dreaming of a child-free parallel universe. "My husband promised that we could still travel even after we've had kids, but there's been sweet fuck all of that."
"Well, he gets to swan off and travel around the world for his job! That's hardly a fair or reasonable promise to make pre-kids. Also - you happen to be here in with me right now - there's some travel happening!"
"You have no idea... even a trip to the shops or the park is like preparing for an Antarctic expedition but with way more arguments, tears, and missing shoes."
I gave her a side hug as we finished doing our make up ready for a night out on the town.
"Seriously, not having kids is a completely valid option. Just think about it."
My counsellor asked me when I was 19, naive, and idealistic, to imagine that I was sitting on my porch when I'm 80, looking back on my life, and thinking about what I would regret not doing with my life, if I had not done it by then.
My answer: Living abroad, travelling, having kids.
Three beautiful kids, probably all boys knowing my luck. (...Or would all girls be worse???)
That was my plan. It’s the done thing, expected, but it seemed like a pretty winning formula to me. I’ve always been way more comfortable in the company of kids than adults - there’s less bs; they just tell it like it is. Their honesty is refreshing, and one is not left guessing what they really mean.
“You know that pasta thing you made for us last week, Lauren? Yea, I didn’t really like that.”
“The macaroni cheese? Oh. Right. Cool.”
“I like the pasta just like mummy makes it - just plain, with loads of butter.” This is a 4 year old who knows what she wants. You want me to expend even less effort in order to satisfy your whims? That is fine.
Remember that rhyme from childhood? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in the baby carriage. Most of us were created in a similar formula, probably precipitated by a couple kissing in a tree as well. That is the expected pattern, the done thing.
Peter and I spent hours of our childhood imagining out a future, carefully drawing the floor plans for the houses that we would live in, what quirks they would have, who we would marry, how many kids we would have, what their names would be, what kind of jobs we'd have. I was going to be an architect, and Peter oscillated between engineer, computer technician and philosopher - whichever resulted in the least amount of actual work having to be done.
Sure, I have a house now, but it doesn't have a dedicated trampoline room, or a waterslide connecting the top and bottom floors. Sure, I have an amazing husband now, but Peter is no longer around to buy the house next door. I'm not an architect, or an interior designer...or a teacher. I am a person. I am just me. Employed, but certainly not defined by my profession, as the English language encourages. (Although I'm very quick to point out that I am a teacher, but I work as a nanny at the moment when asked what I do - we can go down that rabbit hole another time.)
Love - check.
Marriage - check.
‘So, when are you guys planning to have kids?’
In fairness to the faceless masses that enquire after my womb, it is usually phrased as ‘Are you guys planning to have kids?’
It seems to be the next natural step on the classic life trajectory, even in our modern era.
In fact, a lot of people assume that you only get married because you want to have (legitimate?) kids. And so as autumn follows summer, people ask, and though it's really none of their business what I choose to do with my vagina, I do feel like I need to have an answer one way or the other. 1% for them, but 99% for myself.
"But all they do is poop, cry and sleep! Why would you want that?" decried Jared as I gently broached the subject of kids.
"It's not like they stay like that all the time, that's only a couple of years..."
"And think of the sleep deprivation - I can barely recover from one late night, let alone years of them." Jared is amazingly decrepit after sleep loss. This is a valid concern.
"I just don't want kids" asserts Husband, "I thought you didn't either?"
OK, he may have gotten that impression from me spending the first 3 years of our relationship hyperventilating whenever the subject of children surfaced. As if a near panic attack reaction was a concrete answer...
Do I actually not want kids? Children are a significant part of my life, and have been for nearly a decade.
I've spent the last 5 years occasionally trying to feel that cluckiness that many assured me would come in my thirties, and much like trying to successfully imagine a massage in your mind palace whilst having your wisdom teeth removed, it has not been a relaxing time.
I think I used up all my cluckiness when I was a kid, fussing over other people's babies at church, and mothering my brothers.
Part of the problem is I know too much. Most parents imagine this delightful life they'll have with their kids. I'm confronted by the brutal rowdy reality too often. A child coughed in my face yesterday - covering me in a shower of their spittle. Smile for a photo guys - this is obviously an ideal time to throw stones at me. 'Lauren, what shall we do today?' Well, you've besmirched the 5 plans I've offered so far, so how bout you tell me, buddy? And that's from the well-behaved kids...
(Disclaimer: I do love my job. This week, I have been paid to play board games, go to the beach, eat ice cream, make pancakes, make blanket forts and paint with shaving foam paint. I have to answer the same question 50 million times, act as a human shield between sibling rivalry, be hated on for making them read, repeat myself 10 000 times to get things packed up etc etc etc...)
I like kids, for the first 5 hours, and after that I spend my time counting down until I get to give them back again. I know exactly how whiny they are, how incessant their questioning is, how messy they are, how difficult it is to try and get them excited about anything that is good for them like broccoli, reading, or learning about refugee camps…
The only good thing about working in a creche last year, was that I got to work with babies for a little bit, and realised that actually, as long as you're taking care of them, they're pretty chill most of the time, and not just the screaming crying pooping messes I imagined - though that's definitely part of the mix.
If our joint decision making is equal on this issue, I thought Jared sat about 30% of his 50% decision making allocation as opposed to children, like sure they're annoying, but if you really want to, then we could try.
5 years in, and after a lot more digging, he sits at about 49% of his 50% decision-making allocation. His decision: opposed to kids. There is very little room for my convincing sales pitch when he is that decided.
Because he is so decided, I feel I need to play devil’s advocate. I've been trying to convince him that it is a good idea - I love playing the antagonist. Kids are cute, and you get to teach them things, they're lovely and wonderful, and you get to experience the world renewed...and most compellingly: Idiocracy. We should have kids cos we're smart and privileged and otherwise it'll just be the 'idiots' that reproduce...Society needs more smarties.
But where do I sit with my 50% of the decision?
Then I stopped and imagined myself with 100% of the decision making power for this decision (which, let's be real, is actually probably a bit closer to the truth) and realised: it wasn't Jared I had to convince. It was myself.
There are 10 main arguments against in my view.
Too Vulnerable
See, much like Mal in Inception, an idea was planted in my mind when I was 14, that I've never successfully shifted: Motherhood makes you too vulnerable; children are a liability.
When my parents' marriage imploded, my heart made a pact that I would never put myself in a situation where I was that vulnerable to betrayal and wholly dependent on someone else for financial, social, and practical life support.
I stopped watching chick flicks, I stopped waiting for a man to complete me. I made a vow to have a career, be financially independent, and emotionally independent. I would create my own life and I would certainly not be a martyr for my family, a doormat for my husband or children to walk all over. No one would blindside me like that. (I'm quite sure I'll get blindsided by something else, don't you worry.)
The birthplace of militant feminists is when male is conflated with asshole. Unfortunately assholes come in both genders, so I have just set out to avoid assholes, and try and avoid becoming one myself.
As I was massaging out the scar tissue from that blow and starting to regain faith in the world and myself, my brother takes his own life, which leads me to my next reason.
Ill-Favoured Genetic Lottery
How do I explain that to myself, other than something has gone very wrong in
a) society at large
b) him, naturally; genetically - with whom I share a lot of DNA
c) him, nurturly; environmentally - we were nurtured in the same environment
d) it was just a freak one off accidental thing that's not related to anything else
e) him and him alone, and I shouldn't freak out about it, because I'm a completely different other separate human
In reality, it's all of those.
What if I go to all the effort of raising this wonderful human, and then they die - most gallingly, by choice? I’d be devastated - all over again. What if I spend so much of said child's life scared that they'll be depressed and suicidal that by those very thoughts I inadvertently make them depressed and suicidal?!
I don't know if that's a risk I'm willing to take. I'm not convinced the reward would outweigh the risk. I would spend every single minute of their entire lives second guessing myself, wondering if this particular thing would be the thing that would make them depressed, fuck them up for life, or want to take their own lives.
What if I carry the 'suicidal/clinical depression gene'? What if the words I speak and the way I do life creates an environment where someone doesn't feel good enough, feels like they're a failure, doesn't know how to climb out of the pit of depression, sees no hope or purpose in living? With knowledge, comes responsibility. My parents couldn’t have guessed that there was such a possibility of my brother committing suicide. They didn’t know that the remaining 3 of us would then take turns having clinical depression, suicidal ideations, anxiety, and PTSD.
If you could prevent that pain for someone else, wouldn’t you?
Even if by some miracle, I was able to entirely unlearn the low self-esteem, self-doubting, perfectionistic scripts that I've learned, would I be able to learn fast enough what to fill that gap with? Could I love them enough to outweigh the genetic and environmental risk? Could I teach them to love themselves enough? Could I counteract the difficulties in the world and make them strong enough to want to live and thrive?
I don’t have a confident yes to any of those.
Normally, I like to think that I'm not afraid of anything. I'd like to think that I do not make major life decisions based on whether or not I'm scared. I'm very much a ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ kind of woman, and I'm all about ‘lean into the discomfort’.
However, on this particular subject, I have discovered this is not as true as I would like it to be.
I usually assess risk based on the percentage likelihood of an event happening. Usually, I'm very willing to take risks, even if the odds are not in my favour, buoyed by boundless optimism and hopefulness. But in my mind, the risks are too great here.
I'm terrified of this.
Am I seriously not even going to try to have kids because of the maybe 50/50 chance of my kid being clinically depressed?
I don't have any impetus to take risks about this. At all. The stakes are too high. My risks don't impact only me, but also Jared, and mostly some currently-perfect apparition of a human who has not yet been sullied by the world, genetics, me or random chance and accident. Is it strange that I would be willing to spare my unconceived child because I believe the chance of suffering to be high?
Is that lunacy or altruism?
Depression is one thing, but then one needs to consider Jared's part in this equation - his adult son is on the autism spectrum and his life isn't easy. Autism can have it’s advantages, and there are loads of amazing people who are on the spectrum, but there’s no way to predict the severity of how it might manifest. It's highly possible that I speak of what I do not know here, and that this fear is misplaced, but there it is.
Fear of Physical Pain
Then there's the pregnancy/birth part. I have, since I was a teen, had vivid nightmares about giving birth and breastfeeding that I wake up from, shaking, sweating, sobbing. This is compounded by people telling me their birth stories, and the constant portrayal in TV shows and movies. Please. Just stop. Nothing about this is selling the experience.
I’ve never understood why a sane person would inflict that upon themselves.
I have basically no hips, and my mother had 3 out of 4 difficult births, so the likelihood of intervention being required is high.
Some people glow during pregnancy, I'm pretty sure I would just billow. I am barely accepting of my pre-pregnancy body, and it's not like there's a large track record of people's bodies improving postpartum.
I’m Only Just Keeping My Head Above Water Now
Then you have the socio-emotional aspect. I feel like I have spent the majority of my adult life managing the emotional trauma that has happened to me, increasing self-awareness, managing self-care, getting counselling, parenting myself to top up the years my parents were emotionally absent, creating self-esteem out of thin air, unlearning, relearning, figuring out who I am and what I'm about.
There is a lot of 'Well I sing, because I know it releases chemicals in my brain and it makes me happy. It's a form of therapy, and I love it'
Or 'I eat because I'm hungry, but also because it's a coping strategy',
'I exercise so I can justify the eating, and to lift my mood.'
When I get anxious and panicked, my mantra is 'Swim until it feels better.' Endorphins are my drug of choice (and coffeeeee). I write because I love it, but it is a coping strategy, a therapy; it detangles my knotted thoughts. Truth be told, it is therapy first, enjoyment second.
I'm an amazing person, yes, carefully held together by a vast web of coping strategies.
(Maybe that is just everyone.)
There must, at some point, be a shift between managing trauma, and moving towards joy. A transition between surviving and thriving, just coping and hoping, to where you are living and giving, but I do not feel like I'm finished with that journey.
Are you ever finished?
Life should be more than just a series of coping strategies, implemented for fear of regression. Besides which, I don't know that my web of coping strategies is strong enough to handle the pressures of a child. What if the stress is more than the coping mechanisms can actually cope with, and you end up messing them up in the same way you were? Or even worse, more insidious toxic ways?
The Best Case Scenario Seems Grim
What is the best case scenario to come out of this circumstance? We create a child who is so self-aware, educated and loved, that should suicidal ideation come along, they know that it’s just a siren call from their brain to give up on the struggle that is life? A child who knows how to start from below zero everyday, to build themselves up to keep going on?
If by some miracle they dodge the dyslexia, ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, bipolar, autoimmune disease, flat feet, dodgy eyes, obesity, and other plethora of things that are likely to go wrong, there’s still the financial implications of the decision.
Currently, it takes one of our incomes to pay the rent where we live. Even in NZ, with paid maternity leave, things would be tight. We would be living eternally in that tension that I’m sure is all too familiar to many parents of wanting to give our child the best life possible and simply not being able to afford it, despite between us earning two professional wages.
Environment: Our Planet Doesn’t Need More People
There is a ticking bomb that is our environment, in a world that some argue is already overpopulated. How can I justify bringing another life into this world - particularly if I'm not super-keen on having kids to start with?
I listened to a really interesting podcast about Birthstrikers, a movement where women are choosing not to have children because of the effect it will have on our planet and how it will add to the problem of climate change, because one more entitled mouth to feed is not what our society or the planet need right now. Each person born into Western society uses an average of 13 tons of carbon per year over their lifetime, whereas the average person living in China only uses 4 tons per year. The single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is not have kids, followed by not have a car, or fly.
Maybe the answer is go and raise my kids in China?
Obviously, the middle ground is have kids, but do it in an environmentally friendly way, but increasingly, environmentally friendly options are the purview of the wealthy, and the rest are left to grab cheap disposable things or archaic technology, because they don't have the capital saved to invest in things like electric vehicles, or they don't have the luxury of having a parent stay at home and raise the kids and washing the cloth diapers, or the spare time to learn about another whole way of doing life, or simply the spare fucks to give about such things.
We currently are in the privileged category of being able to invest in environmentally friendly options - €12 for alternative toothpaste, €9 for deodorant from health shops, cleaning products that are twice the price.
If we had to then fund a child, income would decrease for awhile at least, and also costs would rise putting us from ‘well-to-do professionals’ to ‘working poor’ category.
I’m Simply Not Excited About It
I would typify myself as a realistic optimist. The likelihood of us creating amazing functional accomplished humans probably is in our favour, and we probably are well equipped to deal with any of those eventualities, but it seems like the chances of it going wrong are too higher than most.
I want to Marie Kondo this idea of children out of my life, because there is nothing about it that brings me joy. If I found out today that I was pregnant, I would despair, not celebrate. The overwhelming emotion would be fear, not excitement. I would be filled with dread about the genetic lottery that this kid is up against, let alone the world that they are coming into.
I guess that’s what the 40 weeks are for. I suppose one is never ‘ready’ for children.
If not, then is your journey basically paused while you have kids, and you're left to parent them with this half-baked life strategy that is dependent upon some coping mechanisms that may or may not withstand children?
What if you think you’re all good, and you’ve got a sound life strategy, and you’ve got a leash on your demons, but then they rear their ugly heads and actually, it turns out you were just happily deluded, and now there’s another whole human in the mix that has to deal with your demons too?
I thought that moving to Laos was the first step on this amazing international career that would take me all around the world, but I had unfinished business at home that needed to be attended to. It turns out I was just mostly running away from that. I left New Zealand because I wanted to be anywhere but there, creating a new better story. I thought I was going towards this glorious future. However, I discovered that I needed to be in New Zealand. My previous story wasn't finished yet.
A decade on, I live in Ireland, and this time I feel like I am going towards a future, rather than running away from my past.
So if in Ireland, I'm moving towards joy, and looking at a future, not through the fog of trauma, or the lens of fear, or a web of coping strategies. Instead, moving towards things I value, things I want, finding purpose, then I still don't know if parenthood is something I want to work towards.
When would I write all the books and blog posts floating around in my head?
Whose Wants Win?
Even if I did want kids, whose wants win?
If Jared is 49% out of his 50% decided that he's opposed to having kids because he's already ‘too old’ and he would then be forced to continue working until at least age 65, probably more like 70, in order to support them, then do I want children badly enough to ask that of him? (My editor assures me my husband will stick around, no matter what.)
Would I want it badly enough to be a sole parent, if it came to it?
Obviously, I’d do it. We’d do it. Well. To the best of our abilities. If that was what we chose.
If children were thrust upon us, I think we'd be quite good parents. But having to consciously make the choice whether or not to have them? I don't think I can choose actively, affirmatively, joyously to bring another life into the world.
At the moment, the choice is a resounding ‘No!’.
I Cannot Find A Why
If we're simply looking at wants, the want is not there. Only the hollow knocking of social obligation, which reverberates strongly in my eldest child mind.
I have racked my brain to try and come up with a compelling narrative as to why I ‘should’, and why the ‘should’ should outweigh the fear. If you are having a child because you ‘should’, I do not think that is fair on the child, or yourself.
The best I’ve got is FOMO - it might be better than I think - marriage is, after all.
That is quickly countered by a deluge of doubts and fear. I cannot fathom a moment where the regret of not would outweigh the paralysing fear of proceeding.
I do not think ‘should’ or ‘FOMO’ are enough of a reason to create a new life.
Not Wanting Should Be Enough.
So for the sake of my marriage, for the planet, and for the sake my would-be child, I don't think that we are good candidates for parents. That's the rational, logical decision. And my heart breathes a sigh of relief with coming to it.
If, dear reader, there is a compelling argument for children, by all means present me with it. I haven’t found one yet.
The conclusion is basically this: Jared doesn’t want children. I don't want children, badly enough.
We don’t want children.
That should be enough, in and of itself.
And yet I still dread having to answer the question.
Extra Reading:
Entire series of articles about the Childfree choices, and reasons why.
Guardian article about how addict is not having kids so as to not pass on genes.
This craziness that happens in your house/life with kids
Study finding that having children actually makes men happier, and women less happy, and people who never had children are happier overall.
Ted Talk about someone who knew from a really young age she didn't want kids
