The best article ever.
If I met the right man who would be the perfect father of my children, then yes there is the consideration that I could, and would have, beautiful, gorgeous, intelligent, spoiled children. But seeing how I cannot get a date, and work myself to death, I think its safe to say I will never marry, nor have children, and I adore this article for all it does and does not say.
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Home > Preconception > Getting Pregnant
Life Story
Childless by choice
By Katherine Griffin
Can I live a rich, balanced life without joining the parenthood procession?
Seven years ago, soon after my grandmother died, my mother handed me a packet of faded letters, kept tied up with a pink ribbon for more than 60 years. My grandfather had written them to my grandmother during their courtship, while he was away at college during the 1920s. The night I opened the packet and began to read, I had an odd sense of being propelled both backward and forward in time. As the letters grew more intimate, with talk of Latin class and football games giving way to reminiscences of kisses that left face powder on my grandfather's coat, I could feel the seed of my existence beginning to take form, buried deep in those long-ago years. And so I began to wonder what might be taking shape in my life that would come to fruition many years in the future.
Most especially, reading the letters made me think again about my long-standing ambivalence toward having children. I lived out my own childhood against a backdrop of warmth and love and care, but I was always aware of the unceasing struggle and sacrifice required of my parents to make it that way. Since I was the only girl, I got a closer look at the trade-offs my mother had to make. College-educated and a teacher for several years before her marriage, she was one of those rare Catholic women for whom the rhythm method really did prevent pregnancy, at least for the crucial first three years of the marriage. That allowed her to continue teaching long enough to earn her lifetime credential. I came along soon after, followed during the next five years by two brothers.
Very quickly, my mother went from being an independent woman with a paycheck and career to a full-time homemaker whose days were filled with carpooling and coupon-clipping. I remember her struggles to carve out time for herself, and how refreshed and happy she seemed after she'd managed to squeeze in a class in calligraphy or guitar. I never doubted that she loved us, but the work of childrearing didn't look like a lot of fun. For as long as I can remember, the idea of having children brought images of doors closing, not opening. And when I married my husband, King, 20 years older than I and with a grown daughter, I knew that he had no great desire for a second family.
Still, if I don't have children, who will be there for me as I grow older? I think about the traditional transitions of a woman's life as she shifts from single woman to wife to mother to grandmother, and I wonder what milestones will mark the years of my life. Who will pore over the traces of my days, searching for meaning and a sense of connection? In a world where ancestors are universal, what will it mean to be a woman without descendants?
These questions have become more urgent for me in the past few years, as it's seemed that nearly everyone I know has been having children or announcing their intention to do so. My 23-year-old cousin. My 44-year-old cousin. Lesbian friends, who have approached one woman's brother about donating sperm. My 51-year-old single friend who's adopted a baby boy from Vietnam. And, of course, dozens of thirty-something friends and acquaintances. As I attend their showers and watch them unwrap tiny dresses and toys, the differences among these people blur to insignificance. All I see is that they're stepping together into another stage of life, a stage I won't share.
A friend who is infertile and chooses not to adopt said recently, "Every time I hear about someone else who is having a baby, it feels like, There goes one more person who used to be like me who isn't anymore."
When I think about not joining the parade, I get scared. Maybe the uncharted territory would seem less daunting if I liked to think of myself as a bold pioneer, happily striking out to create an unconventional life. But the truth is, I like the comfort of road maps. And in this culture, there are none for childless women. Sure, setting off without a map gives me the opportunity to find the path that suits me best. But every time I stumble over some unforeseen obstacle, there's that voice in my head saying that if I'd just taken the path that was good enough for all the other women, I wouldn't be in this fix.
In the middle of my 35th year, I still don't feel drawn to having children, but I have no idea what it will mean to create a life without them.
"Not everyone needs children"
On a warm spring evening in Las Vegas, an excited hubbub animates a crowded hotel room high above the blinking neon of the Strip. Several dozen men and women, mostly in their thirties and forties, munch canapis, sip drinks, and swap stories. Down below, the once-seedy Strip has been made family-friendly, and on the edge of town, rows of tract houses designed for nuclear families march endlessly out into the desert. But in this room, at least, everyone is childless, and you can almost hear the whoosh of hair being let down.
The gathering is part of the ChildFree Network's annual meeting, where I've come to find out more about living without children. The Network is a 2,500-member national group started in 1993 to give childless people their own sense of belonging. "I want to make this kind of life more acceptable," says founder Leslie Lafayette, a former teacher from Sacramento, California. "Not everybody needs children to have a full life."
That message has never been popular in America. But these days, it's in danger of being drowned out entirely by the din of millions of babies. My friends are not the only ones procreating like mad. All across America, the women of the baby boom, many of whom delayed childbearing until they had educated themselves and established careers, have been rushing to make up for lost time. Each year since 1988, some 4 million babies have been born, creating a demographic spike almost as big as the boom that lasted from 1946 to 1964.
Along with the boomlet has come a new glorification of parenthood and the widespread assumption that everyone is a parent. Dewy-eyed images of children abound, advertising everything from car parts ("There's a lot riding on your tires") to perfume ("Reality," says a slinky brunette in the tub with a toddler, "is the best fantasy of all"). Politicians speak of a "middle-class" tax cut that turns out to be exclusively for people with kids. Movie after movie (Parenthood, Baby Boom, Nine Months) extols the joys of childrearing. Childless women are largely invisible, and when they do show up, it's as characters like Alex Forrest, the bunny-killing psychopath in Fatal Attraction.
America has a long tradition of pushing childless woman to the margins. University of Minnesota historian Elaine Tyler May, in her book Barren in the Promised Land, describes how for most of this country's history, women without children have been seen as deviant, pathetic, or dangerous. In colonial times, married women who didn't have children were likely to be accused of witchcraft if they did not seem properly virtuous. At the turn of this century, as immigrants were having large numbers of children, President Theodore Roosevelt chastised white women for not doing their part to create future generations of Americans. In 1903, he sternly lectured the citizenry that "willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nationa sin for which there is no atonement. No man, no woman can shirk the primary duties of lifeand retain his or her self-respect."
The old stereotypes are still going strong. At the very least, judging from stories that Network members told, childless women these days can expect frequent encounters with insensitivity. "We just bought a video camera," says 45-year-old Vicki Braun, a stocky, blue-eyed marketing representative from Dayton, Ohio. "The saleslady asked how many children we had. I said, 'None.' She looked at me and said, 'Then why would you need a video camera?'"
It was easy to see why Network members felt the need to band together. It was a relief to me, too, to be in a roomful of adults and not be the only one without children. But many of the sessions at the conference were marked by a shrill, hostile tone. One speaker proposed child-free zones in airplanes and restaurants. Others criticized mothers who breastfeed in public. Some said bluntly that the childless lifestyle was better - not just better for them, but better, period. I seemed to be seeing the flip side of the "pronatalism" so prevalent in the culture at large. It made me uneasy, not least because it fueled the stereotype that people without children just plain don't like kids. Which isn't true of me at all. I need goofiness in my life, and silly games, and startling questions that come out of nowhere - things you don't get often enough from grownups. Just because I don't have kids doesn't mean I want to stay out of the playground.
"I don't think of myself as a woman without"
My quest for childless women who were creating rich, full lives for themselves soon brought me to the doorstep of Tess Gallagher. She's a writer of poetry, fiction, and essays who lives in Port Angeles, Washington, in a whimsical, many-windowed aerie overlooking Puget Sound. I'd first come to know Tess through a beautiful and heartbreaking essay that she'd written about her life with her husband, the writer Raymond Carver.
Ray had been a boyhood friend of my husband's; the essay served as the introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall, a book of poetry that was his last work before he died of cancer in 1988. I read Tess's essay when I was struggling with the decision of whether to marry King. I never questioned my love for him, but making my life with someone so much older meant opening myself to the likelihood of early loss. Ray's death had taken Tess where I feared to tread. Reading her essay, in which their joy together so clearly outweighed even the crushing sorrow of his death, helped me to see that the only answer I could make to King was yes.
When King and I finally met Tess a couple of years after Ray's death, I filed away for future reference the fact that she had no children. Like my husband, Raymond Carver had raised a family when he was young. When he and Tess met, he had just begun to recover from alcoholism and regain his strength as a writer. Although he would have been willing to have a child with Tess, she chose against it in favor of their relationship and their work. On my 34th birthday, weepy and wrestling with my own decision, I wrote Tess a letter asking if, at 52, she now had any regrets.
"Maybe if I hadn't run into Ray," Tess wrote, "that would be the case, but I think I did exactly the right thing for both of us, and that did mean some sacrifice on my side of the ledger."
She has had the occasional pang, Tess says. But she also recognizes that not having children has allowed her great freedom to develop herself as an artist, giving her space for reading, writing, creating, dreaming. "When one, as a young woman, begins to read the lives of male artists and to notice how often they needed to get away from their family environments in order to do work," she says, "it's easy to see the handwriting on the wall. If one is mainly in charge of rearing the children, as women still tend to be, you won't be getting your thinking and your writing done."
For Tess, not having children of her own hasn't meant being cut off from younger people. She and Ray's grown son, Vance, have drawn close since Ray's death, and she has built strong connections to her nieces and nephews. "When I haven't spoken to one of the family children for a while, I call them up," she says. "When I don't like something, I let them or their parents know. I also give them a lot of encouragement and praise."
Her role as aunt has not always been easy or clear, and sometimes has gotten her in trouble with her siblings. "It is definitely a pioneer enterprise," she says. "One must be ever mindful of being on borrowed territory, dependent on the graciousness and wisdom of the parents." Still, Tess says, "It's an effort I'm glad to be making. Those times with the children are precious for me."
"I often wish there were another way to put it," she adds, "instead of 'women without children.' I really don't go around thinking of myself as a woman without."
The fullness of life without children
When I read Tess's letter, it was as though a hand had reached out and hauled me up to a place where, finally, I could begin to see the outlines of a path for myself. Here was someone I admired, whose work struck a deep chord within me, saying that choosing against having children doesn't mean settling for an empty life.
And it's not just a handful of artists like Tess for whom the childless choice is rewarding, as I discovered when I started reading what researchers have learned.
Take the area of marital satisfaction. For parents, it tends to follow a U-shaped curve, starting out high, dropping when children are young, and climbing again after they are grown and gone. The marriages of the childless are less likely to experience that dip, and more likely to improve steadily over time. Of course, that's not to say that being a parent isn't rewarding, or that, for people who want children, the trade-offs aren't worth it. But it does suggest that the marriage relationship is one arena in which childless women may reap the benefits of their choice earlier than mothers.
Even in coping with the losses and difficulties of old age, childless women do just as well as mothers. True, the social networks of the childless tend to be smaller, because they have neither children nor grandchildren, but they do not report feeling more lonely and isolated than parents.
In a study of 90 childless women over age 60, anthropologist Robert L. Rubinstein, of the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, found that some women did express regret at their childless state, especially those who believed strongly that a woman's primary duty is to raise children. Even so, Rubinstein says, "We didn't find any women who said, 'Woe is me, my life is nothing because I didn't have children.' People came up with satisfying alternatives for whatever nurturing urges they had." Like Tess, many had forged strong connections with younger people: nieces and nephews, fellow church members, or longtime neighbors.
Moreover, most of the older childless women in studies like Rubinstein's had not chosen their state. It stands to reason that the childless by choice are happier than those made childless by circumstance, yet until recently, researchers had made no distinction between the two groups. When sociologists Ingrid Connidis and Julie McMullin, of the University of Western Ontario, studied nearly 700 Canadian men and women over age 55, they found that those who chose childlessness were just as happy as parents who had good relationships with their children. And they were happier than those parents who described their relationships with their children as distant.
All in all, the research added up to a pretty positive picture. Why, I wondered, didn't I know this before? For that matter, why have I felt so isolated, when in fact the number of childless women is higher now than it's been for much of this century? That's right: Among women aged 40 to 44 (assumed by demographers to be past childbearing age), the proportion who are childless rose from 9 percent in 1975 to 16 percent in 1993. The National Center for Health Statistics has projected that among the entire group of baby boom women, the figure may climb as high as 20 percent - nearly as high as the peak reached during the years of the Depression, when a full 22 percent of women remained childless.
One reason for the resounding silence may be that childless women, by their very existence, raise uncomfortable questions about womanhood. "There's an implicit threat that these women pose to traditional ideas about what women and men are supposed to be," says Mardy Ireland, a psychologist in Berkeley, California, and author of Reconceiving Womanhood: Separating Motherhood From Female Identity.
Women who don't have children, Ireland says, are assumed to be either career-crazed imitation men or sad, barren spinster types. Neither stereotype acknowledges that women - even those who have longed to be mothers - can have rich and balanced lives without children of their own.
Forty-four-year-old Jean Carter is such a woman. A soft-spoken obstetrician-gynecologist married to an English professor in Raleigh, North Carolina, she had always wanted to have children. She and her husband, Michael, began trying to conceive when she was 29, and after a year, began seeing an infertility specialist. Two years of tests later, the doctors told the couple that the problem was "unexplained infertility," a fancy way of saying "Who knows what's wrong?"
By that time, Jean's work had become a daily agony. "There was nowhere I could go to get a break from pregnant ladies," she says. She briefly considered training for a different medical specialty, then decided that, instead, she had to get off the monthly cycle of hope and despair. She and Michael thought about adopting, but concluded that the biological aspects of parenthood were more important to them than they wished they were.
Finally, one rainy November afternoon in 1983, the couple made the decision not to have children.
"We decided not to base the rest of our lives on what we couldn't have," Jean says. "I had done some reading, and the bottom line is that happiness depends not on whether you have children, but on whether you have a rich external life: friends, family, interest in the world around you. And there was a big distinction between those who were childless by choice and not. I thought, If the people who are childless by choice live happier lives, I'm going to hop over and get into that category."
It wasn't a matter of simply resigning themselves to the direction their lives were taking anyway. They wanted to actively move toward a life without children, though they didn't know exactly how. After all, there's no such thing as a no-baby shower, no ceremonies to mark the stages of life as a non-parent.
"The first step was to tell people," Jean says. "Do the things you do when you make a major life decision." Some people just didn't get it. "They would give us the names of adoption agencies."
But very quickly, new possibilities began to take shape. The room the Carters had hoped would be a nursery became a music room. Dolls they'd bought for future daughters were given to their nieces. A college fund turned into money for travel. Instead of focusing on being without, they looked to the things they could have.
When motherhood seems an increasingly unlikely prospect, says psychologist Mardy Ireland, it's crucial to make a conscious choice, rather than drifting for years in ambivalence. The result is often the freeing up of the psychic space set aside for motherhood. That, in turn, allows a new adult identity to emerge. In Ireland's study of 100 childless women, she found that making this kind of conscious decision was most important for those she identified as "transitional" - women who, like me, grew up ambivalent about having kids and can easily see the pros and cons of either choice. Such women who made the decision to be childless in their thirties often discovered a wellspring of creative energy to channel into new projects: a career change, community work, art. Those who did not come to terms with childlessness until their mid-forties found it more difficult to create new identities.
Jean Carter's choice has been marked by a renewed commitment to her work. "I give a lot of nurturing to my patients," she says. "I observe what goes on between a man and a woman when they see that baby for the first time. This is my way of connecting with something terribly important for the world."
It hasn't all been rosy, of course. "I've lost many friends to parenthood," says Carter ruefully. "But they always come back, when the kids are in grade school, and even more when they're teenagers. In the meantime, you find somebody else to pal around with."
The couple often speak before meetings of the infertility support group Resolve. When asked whether they would choose to have a child if their fertility could be restored, they say no. "That part of our lives is over," Jean says. "We like who we are now, and our plans for our lives do not include children of our own."
Learning to live with the questions
Not long ago, I sat under a tree with a circle of women at yet another baby shower, this one for my friend Taly, soon to give birth to her second child. Looking around, I saw that I was one of only three women present without children. Most of the rest of the women already had a second child or hoped to conceive again soon. Some had brought their new babies along.
As I held one of the babies and listened to the talk of pregnancy, childcare, and schools, I realized that what I had worried about had come to pass: Most of my friends are having children, and I am not. But I also realized that this was the first shower in a long time at which I didn't feel left out, or defensive, or pitied. I could enjoy the baby's soft, sleeping weight on my shoulder, without feeling that the others assumed I wished she was my baby. Because, in fact, I didn't.
Slowly and imperceptibly over the past couple of years, I've come to feel that being childless is the right choice for me. But it's not quite right to say that I've resolved all the questions that have plagued me; it's more that I'm learning to live with them.
There's no single thing I've opted to do "instead" of raising children. Mostly, being childless opens me to a sense of possibility. It gives me the feeling that my own path can take zigs and zags, that since I'm not responsible for another human being maybe I can take risks that I otherwise wouldn't. When I hear about a friend's trip to Greece and my travel bug starts buzzing, I don't have to swat it aside and think, Maybe in 20 years. And kayaking on the Rogue River last summer, playing on rapids bigger and trickier than any I'd attempted before, it was as if I'd discovered an entirely new personality - confident, daring, uninhibited. I want to give free rein to these parts of myself - and others that I don't even know about yet - in ways that would be difficult to do if I had children.
As we cleared away plates after the shower, a friend confided, "I was hoping the conversation would be a little broader." She's one of the more adventurous women I know, but lately, as the mother of a small daughter, she's had to stay closer to home. She says that having me in her life keeps her in touch with the part of herself that loves to ride rivers and travel the world. Her words bring reassurance that my friends value me for who I am, not simply the ways in which I am like them, and that there will be a place for me in my circle of friends for as long as I want to be there.
I'm realizing that I need to find other circles for myself as well. It probably won't be as simple as finding a not-mother's group to parallel the mother's groups my friends are flocking to. But I need to keep reminding myself that there are lots of other women, like Tess and Jean, who have made the choice that I'm making.
Never knowing what it's like to mother a child is a loss. But understanding that isn't enough, for me, to tip the balance toward motherhood. So I hope to create close relationships with the nieces and nephews I expect to have before too long.
I'm starting to try out the aunt role already. A few weeks after the shower, when Taly went into labor, she asked me to take care of her three-year-old, Elijah. We played bulldozer, and made funny faces, and read some books. That night, after the baby was born, we drove to the hospital together, and I got to see his awed, beautiful face as he looked at his baby sister for the first time.
The truth is, I can't know ahead of time how my choice will turn out, whether at the end of my life I'll look back wistfully at the road not traveled. But I think the same holds true for parents.
Either choice is a leap of faith. And so we leap.
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Home > Preconception > Getting Pregnant
Life Story
Childless by choice
By Katherine Griffin
Can I live a rich, balanced life without joining the parenthood procession?
Seven years ago, soon after my grandmother died, my mother handed me a packet of faded letters, kept tied up with a pink ribbon for more than 60 years. My grandfather had written them to my grandmother during their courtship, while he was away at college during the 1920s. The night I opened the packet and began to read, I had an odd sense of being propelled both backward and forward in time. As the letters grew more intimate, with talk of Latin class and football games giving way to reminiscences of kisses that left face powder on my grandfather's coat, I could feel the seed of my existence beginning to take form, buried deep in those long-ago years. And so I began to wonder what might be taking shape in my life that would come to fruition many years in the future.
Most especially, reading the letters made me think again about my long-standing ambivalence toward having children. I lived out my own childhood against a backdrop of warmth and love and care, but I was always aware of the unceasing struggle and sacrifice required of my parents to make it that way. Since I was the only girl, I got a closer look at the trade-offs my mother had to make. College-educated and a teacher for several years before her marriage, she was one of those rare Catholic women for whom the rhythm method really did prevent pregnancy, at least for the crucial first three years of the marriage. That allowed her to continue teaching long enough to earn her lifetime credential. I came along soon after, followed during the next five years by two brothers.
Very quickly, my mother went from being an independent woman with a paycheck and career to a full-time homemaker whose days were filled with carpooling and coupon-clipping. I remember her struggles to carve out time for herself, and how refreshed and happy she seemed after she'd managed to squeeze in a class in calligraphy or guitar. I never doubted that she loved us, but the work of childrearing didn't look like a lot of fun. For as long as I can remember, the idea of having children brought images of doors closing, not opening. And when I married my husband, King, 20 years older than I and with a grown daughter, I knew that he had no great desire for a second family.
Still, if I don't have children, who will be there for me as I grow older? I think about the traditional transitions of a woman's life as she shifts from single woman to wife to mother to grandmother, and I wonder what milestones will mark the years of my life. Who will pore over the traces of my days, searching for meaning and a sense of connection? In a world where ancestors are universal, what will it mean to be a woman without descendants?
These questions have become more urgent for me in the past few years, as it's seemed that nearly everyone I know has been having children or announcing their intention to do so. My 23-year-old cousin. My 44-year-old cousin. Lesbian friends, who have approached one woman's brother about donating sperm. My 51-year-old single friend who's adopted a baby boy from Vietnam. And, of course, dozens of thirty-something friends and acquaintances. As I attend their showers and watch them unwrap tiny dresses and toys, the differences among these people blur to insignificance. All I see is that they're stepping together into another stage of life, a stage I won't share.
A friend who is infertile and chooses not to adopt said recently, "Every time I hear about someone else who is having a baby, it feels like, There goes one more person who used to be like me who isn't anymore."
When I think about not joining the parade, I get scared. Maybe the uncharted territory would seem less daunting if I liked to think of myself as a bold pioneer, happily striking out to create an unconventional life. But the truth is, I like the comfort of road maps. And in this culture, there are none for childless women. Sure, setting off without a map gives me the opportunity to find the path that suits me best. But every time I stumble over some unforeseen obstacle, there's that voice in my head saying that if I'd just taken the path that was good enough for all the other women, I wouldn't be in this fix.
In the middle of my 35th year, I still don't feel drawn to having children, but I have no idea what it will mean to create a life without them.
"Not everyone needs children"
On a warm spring evening in Las Vegas, an excited hubbub animates a crowded hotel room high above the blinking neon of the Strip. Several dozen men and women, mostly in their thirties and forties, munch canapis, sip drinks, and swap stories. Down below, the once-seedy Strip has been made family-friendly, and on the edge of town, rows of tract houses designed for nuclear families march endlessly out into the desert. But in this room, at least, everyone is childless, and you can almost hear the whoosh of hair being let down.
The gathering is part of the ChildFree Network's annual meeting, where I've come to find out more about living without children. The Network is a 2,500-member national group started in 1993 to give childless people their own sense of belonging. "I want to make this kind of life more acceptable," says founder Leslie Lafayette, a former teacher from Sacramento, California. "Not everybody needs children to have a full life."
That message has never been popular in America. But these days, it's in danger of being drowned out entirely by the din of millions of babies. My friends are not the only ones procreating like mad. All across America, the women of the baby boom, many of whom delayed childbearing until they had educated themselves and established careers, have been rushing to make up for lost time. Each year since 1988, some 4 million babies have been born, creating a demographic spike almost as big as the boom that lasted from 1946 to 1964.
Along with the boomlet has come a new glorification of parenthood and the widespread assumption that everyone is a parent. Dewy-eyed images of children abound, advertising everything from car parts ("There's a lot riding on your tires") to perfume ("Reality," says a slinky brunette in the tub with a toddler, "is the best fantasy of all"). Politicians speak of a "middle-class" tax cut that turns out to be exclusively for people with kids. Movie after movie (Parenthood, Baby Boom, Nine Months) extols the joys of childrearing. Childless women are largely invisible, and when they do show up, it's as characters like Alex Forrest, the bunny-killing psychopath in Fatal Attraction.
America has a long tradition of pushing childless woman to the margins. University of Minnesota historian Elaine Tyler May, in her book Barren in the Promised Land, describes how for most of this country's history, women without children have been seen as deviant, pathetic, or dangerous. In colonial times, married women who didn't have children were likely to be accused of witchcraft if they did not seem properly virtuous. At the turn of this century, as immigrants were having large numbers of children, President Theodore Roosevelt chastised white women for not doing their part to create future generations of Americans. In 1903, he sternly lectured the citizenry that "willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nationa sin for which there is no atonement. No man, no woman can shirk the primary duties of lifeand retain his or her self-respect."
The old stereotypes are still going strong. At the very least, judging from stories that Network members told, childless women these days can expect frequent encounters with insensitivity. "We just bought a video camera," says 45-year-old Vicki Braun, a stocky, blue-eyed marketing representative from Dayton, Ohio. "The saleslady asked how many children we had. I said, 'None.' She looked at me and said, 'Then why would you need a video camera?'"
It was easy to see why Network members felt the need to band together. It was a relief to me, too, to be in a roomful of adults and not be the only one without children. But many of the sessions at the conference were marked by a shrill, hostile tone. One speaker proposed child-free zones in airplanes and restaurants. Others criticized mothers who breastfeed in public. Some said bluntly that the childless lifestyle was better - not just better for them, but better, period. I seemed to be seeing the flip side of the "pronatalism" so prevalent in the culture at large. It made me uneasy, not least because it fueled the stereotype that people without children just plain don't like kids. Which isn't true of me at all. I need goofiness in my life, and silly games, and startling questions that come out of nowhere - things you don't get often enough from grownups. Just because I don't have kids doesn't mean I want to stay out of the playground.
"I don't think of myself as a woman without"
My quest for childless women who were creating rich, full lives for themselves soon brought me to the doorstep of Tess Gallagher. She's a writer of poetry, fiction, and essays who lives in Port Angeles, Washington, in a whimsical, many-windowed aerie overlooking Puget Sound. I'd first come to know Tess through a beautiful and heartbreaking essay that she'd written about her life with her husband, the writer Raymond Carver.
Ray had been a boyhood friend of my husband's; the essay served as the introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall, a book of poetry that was his last work before he died of cancer in 1988. I read Tess's essay when I was struggling with the decision of whether to marry King. I never questioned my love for him, but making my life with someone so much older meant opening myself to the likelihood of early loss. Ray's death had taken Tess where I feared to tread. Reading her essay, in which their joy together so clearly outweighed even the crushing sorrow of his death, helped me to see that the only answer I could make to King was yes.
When King and I finally met Tess a couple of years after Ray's death, I filed away for future reference the fact that she had no children. Like my husband, Raymond Carver had raised a family when he was young. When he and Tess met, he had just begun to recover from alcoholism and regain his strength as a writer. Although he would have been willing to have a child with Tess, she chose against it in favor of their relationship and their work. On my 34th birthday, weepy and wrestling with my own decision, I wrote Tess a letter asking if, at 52, she now had any regrets.
"Maybe if I hadn't run into Ray," Tess wrote, "that would be the case, but I think I did exactly the right thing for both of us, and that did mean some sacrifice on my side of the ledger."
She has had the occasional pang, Tess says. But she also recognizes that not having children has allowed her great freedom to develop herself as an artist, giving her space for reading, writing, creating, dreaming. "When one, as a young woman, begins to read the lives of male artists and to notice how often they needed to get away from their family environments in order to do work," she says, "it's easy to see the handwriting on the wall. If one is mainly in charge of rearing the children, as women still tend to be, you won't be getting your thinking and your writing done."
For Tess, not having children of her own hasn't meant being cut off from younger people. She and Ray's grown son, Vance, have drawn close since Ray's death, and she has built strong connections to her nieces and nephews. "When I haven't spoken to one of the family children for a while, I call them up," she says. "When I don't like something, I let them or their parents know. I also give them a lot of encouragement and praise."
Her role as aunt has not always been easy or clear, and sometimes has gotten her in trouble with her siblings. "It is definitely a pioneer enterprise," she says. "One must be ever mindful of being on borrowed territory, dependent on the graciousness and wisdom of the parents." Still, Tess says, "It's an effort I'm glad to be making. Those times with the children are precious for me."
"I often wish there were another way to put it," she adds, "instead of 'women without children.' I really don't go around thinking of myself as a woman without."
The fullness of life without children
When I read Tess's letter, it was as though a hand had reached out and hauled me up to a place where, finally, I could begin to see the outlines of a path for myself. Here was someone I admired, whose work struck a deep chord within me, saying that choosing against having children doesn't mean settling for an empty life.
And it's not just a handful of artists like Tess for whom the childless choice is rewarding, as I discovered when I started reading what researchers have learned.
Take the area of marital satisfaction. For parents, it tends to follow a U-shaped curve, starting out high, dropping when children are young, and climbing again after they are grown and gone. The marriages of the childless are less likely to experience that dip, and more likely to improve steadily over time. Of course, that's not to say that being a parent isn't rewarding, or that, for people who want children, the trade-offs aren't worth it. But it does suggest that the marriage relationship is one arena in which childless women may reap the benefits of their choice earlier than mothers.
Even in coping with the losses and difficulties of old age, childless women do just as well as mothers. True, the social networks of the childless tend to be smaller, because they have neither children nor grandchildren, but they do not report feeling more lonely and isolated than parents.
In a study of 90 childless women over age 60, anthropologist Robert L. Rubinstein, of the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, found that some women did express regret at their childless state, especially those who believed strongly that a woman's primary duty is to raise children. Even so, Rubinstein says, "We didn't find any women who said, 'Woe is me, my life is nothing because I didn't have children.' People came up with satisfying alternatives for whatever nurturing urges they had." Like Tess, many had forged strong connections with younger people: nieces and nephews, fellow church members, or longtime neighbors.
Moreover, most of the older childless women in studies like Rubinstein's had not chosen their state. It stands to reason that the childless by choice are happier than those made childless by circumstance, yet until recently, researchers had made no distinction between the two groups. When sociologists Ingrid Connidis and Julie McMullin, of the University of Western Ontario, studied nearly 700 Canadian men and women over age 55, they found that those who chose childlessness were just as happy as parents who had good relationships with their children. And they were happier than those parents who described their relationships with their children as distant.
All in all, the research added up to a pretty positive picture. Why, I wondered, didn't I know this before? For that matter, why have I felt so isolated, when in fact the number of childless women is higher now than it's been for much of this century? That's right: Among women aged 40 to 44 (assumed by demographers to be past childbearing age), the proportion who are childless rose from 9 percent in 1975 to 16 percent in 1993. The National Center for Health Statistics has projected that among the entire group of baby boom women, the figure may climb as high as 20 percent - nearly as high as the peak reached during the years of the Depression, when a full 22 percent of women remained childless.
One reason for the resounding silence may be that childless women, by their very existence, raise uncomfortable questions about womanhood. "There's an implicit threat that these women pose to traditional ideas about what women and men are supposed to be," says Mardy Ireland, a psychologist in Berkeley, California, and author of Reconceiving Womanhood: Separating Motherhood From Female Identity.
Women who don't have children, Ireland says, are assumed to be either career-crazed imitation men or sad, barren spinster types. Neither stereotype acknowledges that women - even those who have longed to be mothers - can have rich and balanced lives without children of their own.
Forty-four-year-old Jean Carter is such a woman. A soft-spoken obstetrician-gynecologist married to an English professor in Raleigh, North Carolina, she had always wanted to have children. She and her husband, Michael, began trying to conceive when she was 29, and after a year, began seeing an infertility specialist. Two years of tests later, the doctors told the couple that the problem was "unexplained infertility," a fancy way of saying "Who knows what's wrong?"
By that time, Jean's work had become a daily agony. "There was nowhere I could go to get a break from pregnant ladies," she says. She briefly considered training for a different medical specialty, then decided that, instead, she had to get off the monthly cycle of hope and despair. She and Michael thought about adopting, but concluded that the biological aspects of parenthood were more important to them than they wished they were.
Finally, one rainy November afternoon in 1983, the couple made the decision not to have children.
"We decided not to base the rest of our lives on what we couldn't have," Jean says. "I had done some reading, and the bottom line is that happiness depends not on whether you have children, but on whether you have a rich external life: friends, family, interest in the world around you. And there was a big distinction between those who were childless by choice and not. I thought, If the people who are childless by choice live happier lives, I'm going to hop over and get into that category."
It wasn't a matter of simply resigning themselves to the direction their lives were taking anyway. They wanted to actively move toward a life without children, though they didn't know exactly how. After all, there's no such thing as a no-baby shower, no ceremonies to mark the stages of life as a non-parent.
"The first step was to tell people," Jean says. "Do the things you do when you make a major life decision." Some people just didn't get it. "They would give us the names of adoption agencies."
But very quickly, new possibilities began to take shape. The room the Carters had hoped would be a nursery became a music room. Dolls they'd bought for future daughters were given to their nieces. A college fund turned into money for travel. Instead of focusing on being without, they looked to the things they could have.
When motherhood seems an increasingly unlikely prospect, says psychologist Mardy Ireland, it's crucial to make a conscious choice, rather than drifting for years in ambivalence. The result is often the freeing up of the psychic space set aside for motherhood. That, in turn, allows a new adult identity to emerge. In Ireland's study of 100 childless women, she found that making this kind of conscious decision was most important for those she identified as "transitional" - women who, like me, grew up ambivalent about having kids and can easily see the pros and cons of either choice. Such women who made the decision to be childless in their thirties often discovered a wellspring of creative energy to channel into new projects: a career change, community work, art. Those who did not come to terms with childlessness until their mid-forties found it more difficult to create new identities.
Jean Carter's choice has been marked by a renewed commitment to her work. "I give a lot of nurturing to my patients," she says. "I observe what goes on between a man and a woman when they see that baby for the first time. This is my way of connecting with something terribly important for the world."
It hasn't all been rosy, of course. "I've lost many friends to parenthood," says Carter ruefully. "But they always come back, when the kids are in grade school, and even more when they're teenagers. In the meantime, you find somebody else to pal around with."
The couple often speak before meetings of the infertility support group Resolve. When asked whether they would choose to have a child if their fertility could be restored, they say no. "That part of our lives is over," Jean says. "We like who we are now, and our plans for our lives do not include children of our own."
Learning to live with the questions
Not long ago, I sat under a tree with a circle of women at yet another baby shower, this one for my friend Taly, soon to give birth to her second child. Looking around, I saw that I was one of only three women present without children. Most of the rest of the women already had a second child or hoped to conceive again soon. Some had brought their new babies along.
As I held one of the babies and listened to the talk of pregnancy, childcare, and schools, I realized that what I had worried about had come to pass: Most of my friends are having children, and I am not. But I also realized that this was the first shower in a long time at which I didn't feel left out, or defensive, or pitied. I could enjoy the baby's soft, sleeping weight on my shoulder, without feeling that the others assumed I wished she was my baby. Because, in fact, I didn't.
Slowly and imperceptibly over the past couple of years, I've come to feel that being childless is the right choice for me. But it's not quite right to say that I've resolved all the questions that have plagued me; it's more that I'm learning to live with them.
There's no single thing I've opted to do "instead" of raising children. Mostly, being childless opens me to a sense of possibility. It gives me the feeling that my own path can take zigs and zags, that since I'm not responsible for another human being maybe I can take risks that I otherwise wouldn't. When I hear about a friend's trip to Greece and my travel bug starts buzzing, I don't have to swat it aside and think, Maybe in 20 years. And kayaking on the Rogue River last summer, playing on rapids bigger and trickier than any I'd attempted before, it was as if I'd discovered an entirely new personality - confident, daring, uninhibited. I want to give free rein to these parts of myself - and others that I don't even know about yet - in ways that would be difficult to do if I had children.
As we cleared away plates after the shower, a friend confided, "I was hoping the conversation would be a little broader." She's one of the more adventurous women I know, but lately, as the mother of a small daughter, she's had to stay closer to home. She says that having me in her life keeps her in touch with the part of herself that loves to ride rivers and travel the world. Her words bring reassurance that my friends value me for who I am, not simply the ways in which I am like them, and that there will be a place for me in my circle of friends for as long as I want to be there.
I'm realizing that I need to find other circles for myself as well. It probably won't be as simple as finding a not-mother's group to parallel the mother's groups my friends are flocking to. But I need to keep reminding myself that there are lots of other women, like Tess and Jean, who have made the choice that I'm making.
Never knowing what it's like to mother a child is a loss. But understanding that isn't enough, for me, to tip the balance toward motherhood. So I hope to create close relationships with the nieces and nephews I expect to have before too long.
I'm starting to try out the aunt role already. A few weeks after the shower, when Taly went into labor, she asked me to take care of her three-year-old, Elijah. We played bulldozer, and made funny faces, and read some books. That night, after the baby was born, we drove to the hospital together, and I got to see his awed, beautiful face as he looked at his baby sister for the first time.
The truth is, I can't know ahead of time how my choice will turn out, whether at the end of my life I'll look back wistfully at the road not traveled. But I think the same holds true for parents.
Either choice is a leap of faith. And so we leap.