There's been a maelstrom surrounding children lately on a few of the blogs I read: Pandagon and Feministe, mostly. I highly suggest you go read both linked-to posts before you read this, but if you're just not willing to read the posts and the very many comments they inspired, that's fine; though if this doesn't make sense, refer back to those posts.
I think I've discussed on this blog my reticence to have children. Meaning, I simply don't feel any maternal drive, and can't imagine having a child in my life. Recently, I tried to imagine how I would feel after nine months of pregnancy, holding my baby, and the only thing I could come up with was: miserably depressed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking that's not the way you're supposed to feel. Oh, sure, I know people experience postpartum depression, but I highly doubt they go into pregnancy thinking, "I'll sure be depressed when this baby is born."
I simply don't want children. I can't give you one solid reason, except to say that I don't feel any sort of emotion or tenderness towards them (blanket statement though that may be), and I never have. It can be called selfish, as some of my reasons for not wanting a child undoubtedly are. However, it's also a form of self-preservation and unselfishness, because I don't think it's fair for me to bring a child into a home that's ambivalent about her arrival. All the reasons I can ever think of to have a child are the wrong ones: my mom would be such a great grandma or I don't want to lose S (which I very well might, if I decide I absolutely don't want children and he decides he really does). Those aren't reasons to have a baby. Very simply.
To say that I don't experience pressure about this would be completely untrue. Whenever I say that I don't want kids, or that I have no maternal instinct, I'm bombarded with "Of course you do!" and that all-knowing, "You'll change your mind." The first is obviously a ridiculous thing to say to someone. And the second, well, it may come to pass that I do change my mind. But I may not. There's no way around that basic fact. Since the age of 16, I've felt that I wasn't the kind of person who should be a mother, and that hasn't changed. Not for any period of time.
I can't say why people seem so offended by the idea of a woman not having children. I don't know what they think in their heads when they tell me that I'm essentially wrong, and that I do want children. I suspect it has something to do with the assumption that all women want to be mommies, and furthermore, that all women should be mommies. Either way, I don't want to be a mommy, and I don't feel as if I have some duty to be one. Plenty of women are having children. We're not in danger of underpopulation, I'm pretty sure.
This doesn't mean that I'm anti-child, or anti-family. It doesn't mean that I hate kids, or that I hate parents. Like all people, I prefer not to have a child behind me on an airplane that will kick my seat every five minutes, and I prefer to sit through dinner without having to listening to a screaming child. It doesn't happen very often--and I once had a lovely experience on a packed airplane sitting next to a woman with a child young enough to not require his own seat. But everyone has those bad experiences--on Saturday night, we went to dinner and a couple of kids near us wouldn't stay in their seats. Just wouldn't stay put--and this is in a restaurant with extremely limited floorspace, and a long wait for a table. These kids (somewhere around 6-8 in age, I think) actually complained that they didn't like mommy and daddy's table, and got their own. In a restaurant, I might add, with a 20-30 min wait for a table. So a family of four ended up taking up a table of four and a table of two. You can't help but be a little huffy in that situation--though absolutely none of that is aimed at children, mind you, but parents.
Regardless, no other woman should rip me down for feeling this way. I love Lauren, at feministe, and was deeply sad to see her go, but resented the impression she gave--that without children, we none of us could be as good a person as with them. Whether or not she meant it quite that way, it was obviously percieved that way, by others and by me. And whether it's her or not, quite a lot of people feel exactly that way--that if you don't have children, you're in some manner deviant and deficient. It's insulting, and I especially believe that women should be damn careful of putting down other women in this way.
Amanda Marcotte, I believe, was right, in that childbirth and -rearing can be seen as a weapon in the war to oppress women. It's not always that way, and I'm not suggesting that women can't freely choose to have children. But when women--feminists, really--imply that real women do have to have children to be real women, well, we've got a problem. No matter how many disclaimers you stick on a statement about having children, you better be damn sure what you're saying is that not having children doesn't make you less of a person, or less of a woman. We need to be fighting for that, right alongside our fight to support mothers better, right alongside the fight to secure equal pay, and so on.
It's not simple, not any of it. But I would say that one of the most sexist, commonly held assumptions about women is still that they must have children to be fulfilled. That only children can fulfill them. I think it cuts across politics and class, and race and even gender, and that many people who are feminists still believe it. And it's got to go away. It's just got to stop. You shouldn't always do something just because you can.
Anyway, I hope that wasn't too ranty, and I hope it made some sense. I'm sure someone will come along and point out how I misread someone, or some comment, and I know, okay. I know. But these are my impressions of the whole thing.
More later, possibly.
I guess I think the world would be a much happier place if people who wanted children were the ones who felt pressure to articulate their reasons, rather than the way it is now.
Posted by: frog | August 15, 2006 at 01:15 PM