Like It Is

Someone said to me once that I was missing out on “what life is all about” because I didn’t have kids. Italics mine. I remember that I felt quite offended and irritated that someone who knew hardly anything about me thought they could make such a broad pronouncement about my life. In her view, she felt quite qualified in making this statement – after all she had children, which mysteriously seems to make some think they are suddenly experts on what life’s all about.

If life was all about having children then it would be a very restricted and narrow life.Understand this. I like children (some of them anyway). I just cannot imagine my life being defined by children. If your life is your children, and your children are your life that’s fine. For you. I know that many parents realise themselves through their children and for them they cannot imagine their lives as not defined by their children. I’m not so sure that’s necessarily a good thing, but I wouldn’t try to convince them otherwise. I have chosen to define my own life, yet still have to endure those who insist that having children is the only way for a woman to be truly fulfilled and as such having children is goal to be pursued at all costs.

But why assume it must be that way for everyone, or get upset when childfree people don’t share your world view? Why get offended when childfree people don’t think your children aren’t as wonderful as you think they are, or we don’t buy in to the baby or child scene at all, or prefer to find our fulfilment elsewhere, or worse, don’t even think about whether or not we are fulfilled. I personally never wonder about whether I am fulfilled or not. I don’t have a gaping hole in my life that needs to be filled. Neither do I feel there is something missing that I need to account for. Mothers (and some mothers in waiting) assume that because they find fulfilment in their children, everyone must find fulfilment in children too. This view is as short sighted as it is stupid.

Please. There are countless ways to be fulfilled apart from having children. Childfree women and men are living fulfilled lives each and every day. Learning, working, volunteering, running businesses, travelling, taking up new hobbies, reading, writing, making connections, making new friends, taking up a new skill, setting goals and reaching them, the list is endless. You name it, we’re doing it. And we’re doing it on our won terms despite the societal pressure to conform.

The truth is that the many people have children to fulfil a need in themselves, whether this is to (supposedly) seal a relationship or feel part of mainstream society which of course fully supports them. Many women trying to have children say that among other things, they will feel unfulfilled as a woman unless they have a child. They don’t wish to adopt, They want to have their own children and the lack of fulfilment comes, at least in part, from the fact that they aren’t able to conceive and bear children. Because they are unable to understand why anyone wouldn’t want to have children it makes being around them something I avoid.

But to say that a childfree woman must be unfulfilled because she hasn’t had/doesn’t want to have children is rather like someone who loves sailing saying to someone who doesn’t that they must be unfulfilled because they don’t know the joys of sailing. Or a musician saying non musicians are unfulfilled because they aren’t musicians. Doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? Each person’s idea of fulfilment is different. I find that drawing these analogies sometimes helps answer the critics.

For those who believe that a woman’s sole reason for being is to have children, and say that without them she can’t be fulfilled I know many childfree people who not only disagree with that, but who are daily proving the opposite. I know that those who suggest that childfree people are unfulfilled usually aren’t interested in hearing all the wonderful things I am able to do because I am not tied down by children, because it does little to support their world view of childfree people having big holes in their lives that would be filled “if only they had a child.” Wrong.

What I find fulfilling is probably very different from the next person. Certainly different from a woman whose life revolves around her children. If I am able to accept that is her choice, I wonder why they (childed people) find it so difficult to accept that I have made an alternative choice that I am happy with. And just stop trying to convince childfree people that only by having children can we be “fulfilled.” Believe me, your energy is best spent on more worthwhile endeavours.

Life is exactly what you make it.