A few months ago, Bri and I released an episode of our podcast about our thoughts on motherhood. We’re both childless women in our thirties, one of us is married and the other is not.
In that episode, I was pretty clear about my thoughts on motherhood. I will be 38 this year and I don’t envision any scenario where I will have children. I don’t love the idea of being an “older” mother and I really, really love my childless life. I’m single, and I have been single for my entire adult life, aside from a few short relationships here and there. I don’t feel any compulsion to be a single mother, which means in order to become a parent, I’d need to find my forever partner. And y’all, things are just not going well in that department so it makes motherhood feel like even more of an impossibility.
After we published that episode, I had an appointment at my gynecologist’s office. Typically, my gyn appointments happen at a different office, and at that office, it’s rare for me to see pregnant women or women who have just had babies. It’s mostly just women like me going for their annual well-woman’s checkup. However, this office had ultrasound machines, so it was where I had to go to get checked for fibroids.
The first thing I saw when I stepped into the office was a young couple, planning out their next few obstetrician appointments. She was a few months pregnant, and it was pretty adorable to see how excited they were. As I took a seat in the waiting room, I saw another pregnant woman waiting with her husband.
And it was then that I started to have some complicated feelings about motherhood and pregnancy.
I grew up as an evangelical Christian, and there was an expectation for girls that we would grow up, get married young, and have babies. And, of course, those babies would be white, heterosexual, and also want to further the kingdom of God. Growing up, I always thought that was my path. I would get married to a strong Christian man and start having kids in my mid-twenties. I envisioned having three, maybe four, children. (FOUR CHILDREN CAN YOU IMAGINE.)
But that’s not how my life worked out, and I am ever so grateful for that. First, being single and childless allowed me the space to deconstruct my faith and figure out what I truly believed. Second, it allowed me to come to terms with my own sexuality and my queer identity. And third, it gave me time to discern if I really wanted children at all. Did I care about being a mother? Did I want tiny humans running my life?
As my twenties turned into my thirties, and then my early thirties turned into my mid-thirties, and then my mid-thirties had me inching closer to 38… I began to acknowledge that perhaps motherhood wasn’t to be my path. And maybe that was a good thing. I looked at my friends with kids and realized how hard their lives are. It’s a good kind of hard, and it is filled with incomparable love and affection, but it’s still hard. It’s exhausting and never-ending and sometimes boring and very, very expensive.
Was this a defense mechanism? Was my brain just trying to protect my heart from my true desire? As a woman, shouldn’t I have a biological drive to procreate? Until recently, I didn’t consider any of that. I’ve never felt the ticking of any biological clock, I never get baby fever, and I feel really awkward around most children. And do I really want to bring children into this world? Who even knows what our planet will look like in 30 years when today, it feels like we’re living in a dystopian novel with every extreme weather event that happens.
It is the ultimate womanly experience, though, isn’t it? Which is very heteronormative, I understand, but sometimes my cavewoman brain breaks free and I think in these black-and-white dichotomies. Pregnancy is something I always thought I would experience. I didn’t think I would love it, but I did want to experience it. The feeling of growing a life inside my own body and going to appointments to hear my baby’s heartbeat and creating a nursery for this new person who would rock my world. I didn’t long for the whole giving birth part of motherhood because it sounds pretty horrific and I get anxiety just thinking about leaving the hospital with a baby I’m supposed to take care of and keep alive and watch 24/7. But thinking about having this tiny human that is mine and calls me mom and that I could give the same level of safety and comfort that my own mom gives me… that feels beautiful. That feels like the purpose of life.
But maybe that is all societal conditioning. Society tells women that they are biologically designed to be mothers, that it is the most important job in the world, that to not want to have kids is weird and wrong and misguided. For my childless women out there, how many times have you been told that you just cannot understand love until you have a child? Because I’ve had people say that to me many times. (Which is truly a rude thing to say, and can be especially hurtful for women who are trying to conceive, but aren’t having success. Stop saying that!) This societal conditioning is what keeps us stuck. The idea that all women should want to have kids and if they don’t have that desire, they’re lying to themselves, is wrong.
I struggle with regret. Not regret of things I have done in the past, but anticipatory regret. I think about being 10 years older, 20 years older, 30 years older than I am right now. What will my life look like? Will I regret this decision I made in my thirties to not have kids? Will I feel like something is missing from my life? Right now, I don’t have any regrets about not having children. And I firmly believe that if I don’t regret it now, then I won’t in the future. Because if I really and truly felt that pull toward motherhood, I would find a way to make it happen. Even if I had to be a single mother, I wouldn’t let that stop me.
But the truth is that I love my childless, partner-less life. I am happy with my decision not to have kids, even though this was not the life my younger self envisioned for me. She would likely be really sad I never got married and never had those four children! I love being single and living alone. I love that my money is my own and my time is my own. I love that I can come home to a silent apartment and take naps when I want and that a whole day of doing nothing is something I get regularly. I love being a cat lady and I love being Auntie Steph and I love that I have so much free time to engage in my hobbies.
And I love that there is nobody in my life who is pressuring me to get married and have kids. On the podcast episode, I mentioned that my mom has never pressured me because she got married and had kids young, and then got trapped in an abusive marriage for more than a decade. She didn’t want me to make the same mistakes. But when I talked about this with her, she gently pushed back. “It’s more that I don’t think you have to follow the same path as everyone else. If you are happy being single and childless, then that’s all I want for you.”
It’s been weird to have these complicated feelings about motherhood, especially since I thought I had come to terms with all of this years ago. The truth of the matter is that sometimes I think about what I am missing from the human experience by not being a mother. I think about the fact that my mom doesn’t get to be a grandma to my children. I worry about getting older and not having anyone to take care of me in my old age.
I think it’s completely normal to have these complicated feelings about motherhood, even for those of us who have come to terms with our childless state and aren’t interested in changing it. Society thrusts so many expectations on women, and becoming a mother is certainly near the top of that list. (And not just being a mother, but being the best mother.) I don’t think, as women, we are designed with a biological desire for procreation. I think we are designed with a desire toward connection and love, and that can take many forms. It can come from children, but it can also come from romantic partners and best friends and family members and community groups.
As I type up this post on a rainy Tuesday night in my silent apartment, I feel so grateful for my life. I am grateful for my kitty cats (even though they are hiding right now, thanks to some scary thunder!) who let me be “mom” in a completely different way. I am grateful for the messy kitchen where I spent time tonight making a meal for myself (and no one else). I am grateful for the candle glowing on the counter and the books filling my bookshelves and the blog posts I’ve bookmarked to comment on. I am grateful that I am going to schedule this post and then Facetime with my mom, and then do my nighttime routine while listening to a podcast without headphones. I am grateful for this life, even if it looks different than the life I imagined, because it is mine and it is a good one.
