Not Having Children Does Not Arrest Your Development
I lost my temper (a little bit)
The Cut ran a series this week titled Oh, Baby! “exploring how we made the choice — and whether we regret it.” And a few lines in one of the pieces made me lose my temper in a way that rarely happens.
It wasn’t the subject matter. If there was ever an evergreen topic, women and babies is it. You can go back over a century and find similar essay essays in countless women’s magazines; every generation comes to it anew, and generates their own discourse over it. Sometimes with a slightly different twist, sometimes not.
Maybe the only thing that really changes is the readership. I rarely pay attention to these sorts of essays any more. And not just because I, myself, wrote some version of them a decade ago, and then wrote an entire book (which is, I’m happy to say, still making the rounds). I’m through this phase of my life. I’m on to thinking, and struggling, and enjoying, other things. (The thing I did not fully consider when I first set out to write memoir was that I was freezing a version of myself on the page for people to interact with, when I myself kept going.)
In any case, one of these pieces, ‘I Regret Having Children,’ came across my radar and I clicked.
This is an impossible subject to tackle accurately, in my opinion. Of course, I hear versions of this in real life all the time. The reality of not having kids, at least for me, is people are often more comfortable telling you the dark, complicated stuff because they feel there is less of a chance of being judged. But distilling it down to a black and white argument the way headlines do is sort of useless.
For one, I think it’s next to impossible to regret a person. Babies are people, and the second they appear, whether or not they are yours, it’s immediately impossible to conceive of a world in which they were not there.
It’s probably more accurate to say people regret the lives they think they might have had, or could have, if they didn’t have children. Which… is very human.
And even this regret is often circumstantial. One difficult child may make you regret parenthood more than another. A partner may be the real regret (the amount of people I know not regretting their marriages at this point in my life is an increasingly small number). People in the deep end of small children often hate much about their lives, and for good reason! Small children are exhausting and relentless. Teenagers are assholes. Etc., etc. I’m not suggesting that women don’t ever truly regret their kids. I know they do. Just that the binary framing leaves out so much.
Still, any hint at maternal regret is incredibly loaded. We do not allow much space for the reality that motherhood is not a ‘happily ever after’ solution to women’s lives. You’re allowed to struggle, yes, but regret? That’s still unforgivable. If I told people I regretted not having children, it would be greeted with a chorus of OBVIOUSLY. When a mother expresses regret, they are a monster. (For the record: I do not regret not having children. The opposite, in fact. Which does not mean I don’t sometimes wonder what my life would have looked like with children.) (I also wonder what it would look like with fully subsidized health care and apartment ownership; two things I very much want, all day, every day.)
But we do not love grey areas, particularly in our storytelling. I don’t believe I ever said in NOTYT that I didn’t want children. I said, I understood that I would be okay if I did not have children, and did not want them enough to go to the lengths I recognized it would take for me to have them. But that did not stop many people from asking me why I didn’t like kids.
In the case of this particular piece, they interviewed three women, all with small children. I think any conversation that brings nuance to women’s lives and makes them feel less alone is great, even if I think it might have been useful and interesting to hear from some older women, or women with grown children.
Anyway! This is not what made me angry.
It was the framing of the piece that had me seeing red…