I don't want children, but sometimes I want to want them
- Growing up, I thought I would get married and have kids, because that's what everyone did.
- The more I thought about having kids, the more stress and anxiety I felt.
When I was a kid, I assumed I would grow up to marry and have a couple of kids. As far as I knew, this was the formula for adult life. I didn't see it as a choice, but as something that simply happened. The more I thought about it, the more it stirred up stress and anxiety in my young mind.
"I don't want anyone to have to be like me," I once confessed to a friend, my voice shaking with tears. I think I would have been 9 or 10.
Although I wouldn't be diagnosed with depression for several years — and I didn't know enough about autism yet to even consider the possibility — I felt something within me that I did not want to pass down to biological children.
If my hypothetical offspring were destined for isolation, loneliness, and melancholy, who was I to pluck them out of the ether and place them on Earth? There was no way I could carry the world for someone else. It would only crush us both.
Everyone told me I'd change my mind
If a child expresses hesitation about having children, the typical response is, "You'll change your mind when you're older." My mind did shift and change, but not in the direction people might have expected. With puberty and adolescence came lessons on pregnancy and childbirth. As a result, unplanned pregnancy became one of my greatest fears by the time I was a teenager. I still fear it.
Today, I can see the objective beauty in pregnancy and childbirth. They are beautiful in the way a snake unhinges its jaw to consume its prey is beautiful. Beauty exists in nature, even when nature is bloody. But I do not want firsthand experience of the beauty of pregnancy. Not any more than I would want a giant serpent wrapping its mouth around my head.
Adoption, I used to believe, was a reasonable solution. But I was wrong. Taking birth and genetics out of the equation didn't eliminate the anxiety. When I later fell in love with people who wanted children, I tried to imagine myself as a mother. My mind always stopped short while a sickly feeling stirred in my stomach. Even in daydreams, I could not conjure a patient, nurturing version of myself. She was mythical: a cryptid only captured in out-of-focus images.
I feel ashamed for not wanting children
There should be no guilt in choosing a life path without my own children, yet I still feel ashamed. I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing some vital part of womanhood because I have never felt "baby fever." At the same time, I will not let those feelings of inadequacy push me to do what would be unfair to myself and my would-be child.
I will not have kids, and I believe the decision is the right one for me, full stop. Despite my 10-year-old self's objections, plenty of disabled folks are amazing parents. I believe I could be a mother if I wanted. I just don't want to. I look at my two nieces with affection, but when I arrive home, I'm relieved there is no small human who reaches for me.
I don't simply lack the desire, I lack hope: the kind of hope that people must have to bring babies into a burning world. I am not the woman holding her infant at the end of the post-apocalyptic novel, offering optimism to the reader. My hands are already full.
That said, I want to take the sliver of hope I do have and offer it to my nieces. I want them to be anything. I want them to unhinge their jaws and devour everything they want from this life.